9 THINGS YOUR BRAIN FOG IS TRYING TO TELL YOU
By prevention.com - Sarah Klein
It starts with something you can brush off:
the standard Where in this enormous mall parking lot did I leave the damn car?!
Happens to everyone, no big deal, a
brain fart. Until you realize it wasn't
just today at the mall; you've somehow spent most of your week feeling as if
you've made major decisions behind a smokescreen. As if those brain farts were fogging up the
place.
"Brain fog is an inability to really
punch through," says Mady Hornig, MD, associate professor of epidemiology
at Columbia University Medical Center in New York City. "It's a vague sense of what you're trying
to retrieve, but you can't focus in on it," she says, "and the effort
to harness the thought can be as draining as physical activity."
Remember how impossibly exhausting it was
to run your board meeting the last time you came to work sick? (Please, please
stop doing that, by the way.) Brain fog
is a lot like that, except it persists. A
fog can linger for several days, sometimes even weeks.
Its impermanence is the big difference
between what we know as brain fog and actual dementia, says rheumatologist
Robert Lahita, MD, PhD, chairman of medicine at Newark Beth Israel Medical
Center and professor of medicine at Rutgers University in New Jersey. Brain fog might cause you to forget where you
parked that car at the mall, but dementia might make it impossible to get there
in the first place, he says.
There's not a lot of scientific evidence to
explain what's going on when the clouds roll in. Researchers haven't really
found a way to measure or test for brain fog like they have dementia.
"Everybody knows what it is," Lahita says, "but at the same
time, it is so unknown."
If you're sure you've been getting enough
sleep—because who isn't in a daze when sleep deprived; in fact, check out these
10 things that happen to your body when you don't get enough sleep—it's
probably a good idea to bring up brain fog with your doctor if you start to
feel seriously off. "If you're not
feeling like your normal self, that might suggest something's going on,"
says neuropsychologist Kelly Ryan, PhD, clinical assistant professor of
psychiatry at the University of Michigan, especially if it lasts for a week or
two, Lahita says. At the very least,
your doctor can perform tests to reassure you it's not dementia.
People facing a wide variety of diagnoses
describe foggy days, as do people who don't seem to have anything physically
wrong. Here are a few things brain fog might be telling you:
You won't be tampon shopping for long.
And here you thought only your hormones
would change! A series of hazy days in the mental forecast could be a sign
menopause is near. Midlife brain fog is
very real: A University of Rochester and University of Illinois study showed
that women between the ages of 40 and 60 have trouble staying focused on tricky
tasks and stumble with something called working memory, which helps you do
things like adding up a bunch of numbers in your head. (Check out The Natural Menopause Solution to
beat other menopause symptoms.)
Hormones shape the brain, Lahita says, so
it would make sense for vascillating estrogen levels to cause shifts in
cognition, too. Which likely sounds
familiar to anyone who not-so-fondly recalls "pregnancy brain." In
one small study, researchers found that having a bun in the oven makes what's
called spatial memory—which helps you do things like remember where your
glasses are (hint: probably on your head)—a challenge, possibly because high
levels of hormones impact neurons in the memory-focused part of the brain
called the hippocampus.
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