You sit to concentrate and they won’t come. You enter a room and can’t remember what you are doing there – again. Can’t retain a paragraph after reading it 3 times. Your mind feels like you’re wearing a gauze bandage and you just can’t get a drink of coffee in.The feeling of your mind being wrapped around like a band-aid and no amount of coffee will do.
Brain fog is the name that most people know of for that experience.
But what most people don’t know, brain fog does not refer to one thing. It’s not one thing that can be fixed with one solution. It’s a signal. Again, what it is signaling will be different for nearly everyone who has ever felt it.
When you’re having a difficult time thinking clearly, looking deeper at the real-life habits that may be putting a fog over your head is a worthwhile exercise before telling yourself that your troubles are just stress or age. In many cases the patterns that lead to brain fog are obvious, right under your nose – in your routine, your diet, your surroundings, and your sleep.
This post discusses 5 of the most common patterns that obscure thinking – and how a more root-cause approach to brain fog support really looks.
What Brain Fog Actually Is (and Isn’t)
Brain fog is not a disease. It’s a condition that is characterized by a group of experiences: slow thinking, difficulty focusing, trouble finding words, forgetfulness, and overall feeling that your mind isn’t as sharp as it used to be.
Don’t think it’s a sign of a lack of intelligence. This isn’t ‘old age’ either. It’s rarely ever just one thing.
Brain fog is frustrating because conventional testing may yield normal results. Your labs are within normal limits. You get adequate sleep – at least you believe so. You have a fairly healthy diet. But still, the fog remains. Day after day.
Brain fog is a normal state and its patterns can be subtle and hard to notice, and are often related to many interdependent factors that affect the body as a whole rather than just one.
Pattern 1: Your Gut Is Out of Balance
This one is a surprise to most people, but there is one link in whole body wellness that is solid as a rock, and it’s the gut balance & mental clarity relationship.
The gut and the brain are constantly communicating with each other, via nerves, hormones and signaling pathways. That all-important communication is lost when the gut is out of balance – due to poor food choices, continuous stress or disrupted digestion in the past. This leads to a sense of bloating or discomfort as well as fogginess, low mood, difficulty concentrating, and sluggish thinking.
A low-grade, chronic burden of harmful organisms in the gut or an increased gut permeability can trigger an actual, low-level burden that the brain feels directly. People who pay special attention to their gut balance often notice one of the first and largest changes is the mental shift – the lifting of the fog.
If you have suffered from brain fog for a long time and in addition have a sensitivity to certain foods, irregular digestion and bloating, the first place to look is to your gut.
What to try: Keep a food journal and see if there are any trends in the days that follow after consuming certain foods. Focus more on patterns, rather than isolated incidents.
Pattern 2: Dehydration Is Affecting Your Brain Before You Feel Thirsty
Your brain is about 75% water. It’s one of the most water dependent organs in the body and it tells you long before you even feel thirsty that you’re not drinking enough water.
Mild, chronic dehydration – what most people are experiencing every day without realizing it – can slow thinking, difficulty concentrating, and cause a mild fogginess that folks mistakenly think is from other sources.
The difficult part is that most people will be chronically mild dehydrated without realizing they are. When chronic dehydration happens, most people feel a little slow, a little flat, and a little foggy but not realizing that is all due to a lack of water. They will ingest caffeine as a way to reduce their thirst, but over time it can worsen the entire situation by being a mild diuretic.
It’s also a very easy thing to change and one of the most understated of lifestyle habits that cause brain fog every day.
What to try: If you haven’t noticed any improvement, try a large glass of water before having another cup of coffee, and see if the clarity improves in 15-20 minutes. Monitor how the urine changes throughout the day as an easy indicator of hydration status.
Pattern 3: Your Sleep Schedule Is Inconsistent (Not Just Short)
It is a common realization among most that sleep deprivation impacts thinking. Too few people know that a lack of regularity in both the timing of their sleep (sleeping at different times on various days) and waking (not waking at the same time every day) can just as disrupt their clarity as not sleeping enough hours.
When one is in deep sleep, the brain cleans up internally too. While awake, wastes are flushed, neural pathways are cemented, and systems promoting memory and concentration are replenished. This process is disrupted by irregular or broken sleep, though it seems there’s been enough hours sleeping.
What ends up happening is a lack of drama each day to become a lack of awareness in the longer term. When you start your day, you feel like you are not tired, you are okay. The fog is there.
Poor sleep also has a negative effect on the gut, thus completing the loop of Pattern 1. The two systems are intricately linked; poor sleep leads to poor balance in the gut and poor gut balance leads to poor sleep. Brain fog can be the most apparent symptom when both are turned off.
What to try: Sleeping at the same time each day may be more important than the amount of sleep. Set the same time as the wake time each day (including the weekend) for 2 weeks and see if there is an increase in clarity.
Pattern 4: Your Environment May Be Playing a Hidden Role
This is the one pattern that people rarely think about – and it’s actually the most common cause of brain fog for some.
One of the most overlooked causes of chronic brain fog is the effects of mold exposure. In the presence of mould in a living or working space, it creates compounds that impact on the functioning of the body on a day-to-day basis, such as mental clarity. But numerous people who live or work in a space with mold feel ongoing fatigue, have trouble with concentration and have a foggy or slow feeling mind, but never make the connection with the mold in the building.
The reason this is not noticed for so long is because of its gradual effect. You don’t suddenly become ill. Simply, you are getting less sharp day by day. Sometimes, labs return without any abnormalities. Typical strategies do not appear to be effective. The fog continues to prevail no matter what you eat, or how much you sleep – it’s in the air you breathe, not in what you had to eat.
Other environmental risk factors, including some chemical exposures, air quality and any number of environmental stressors, can also affect your daily level of mental clarity.
What to try: Watch for patterns at location. Are you clearer when you spend time with others outside or away from home? Is there a particular building that makes the fog worse? The following patterns are significant and should be explored.
Pattern 5: Blood Sugar Swings Are Running in the Background
Glucose (a stable, continuous source) is the only fuel that the brain requires. These blood sugar swings are felt by the brain as it rises rapidly after food and then drops very quickly. The crash leaves one feeling lost, behind the eyes, as though they have slowed down in their thinking, and that weird dullness that comes on about an hour or two after eating.
It is very common, and frequently mistaken for being full, being tired, or a slow afternoon. However, one of the most common daily patterns that constantly leads to brain fog is food, clarity, crash, fog, sugar or caffeine hit, repeat.
Refined carbohydrates, sugary beverages, heavily processed snacks and meals that are high in carbohydrate and low in protein and fiber are foods that are most likely to fall into these patterns. It is also triggered by not eating at all; the brain realizes that it is losing fuel and the thinking slows down.
What to try: Track your thinking after various foods at regular time intervals. If you know that you feel better after eating a protein, vegetable based meal, versus a meal that is high in carbohydrates, you may be influenced by blood sugar patterns.
When It’s More Than Just Patterns
If you think about it, the six above patterns account for much of the brain fog that people experience daily. For some, however, the fog that obscures them remains even after they improve their sleep, diet, hydration and stress – which is the cue to dig deeper.
If the brain fog persists and doesn’t improve with lifestyle modifications, it is likely due to a condition that should be properly evaluated on an individual basis. Exposure to the environment, such as mold, will require attention. Dietary changes might not be enough to correct gut imbalances. There may be some foods that have not been identified that are causing the cycle of reactivity to continue. Hormonal patterns might be playing a role and not being readily apparent on the outside.
This is what functional wellness coaching should be able to manage. Instead of just trying to imagine what is going on, it is a comprehensive assessment of your past, your behaviors, your surroundings, and your life choices – and then creating a truly unique plan for the future.
Fatigue and Brain Fog Support is one of the areas we come across most often – and most effectively – in HealthfullyU. If you have cognitive cloudiness that hasn’t cleared up with the typical treatments, a virtual wellness consultation is the next step.
Frequently Asked Questions: Brain Fog
Q: How do I know if what I'm experiencing is actually brain fog, or just normal tiredness?
In most cases, rest will help ease tiredness. Brain fog lasts longer – even after a good night’s sleep, it doesn’t always go away with a cup of coffee, and it can impact specific areas such as word retrieval, concentration and memory that fatigue does not. Brain fog typically feels like your thinking is constantly slower, cloudier, and less reliable than it was formerly, and experiencing a good night’s sleep doesn’t seem to help.
Q: Can brain fog come and go, or is it always constant?
It’s nearly always there and gone. Most people are aware that it’s worse at certain times of the day (usually late morning or mid-afternoon) after certain meals, in certain places, or when they’re under more stress. This variation can actually be a useful piece of information – it is the information that will tell you what triggers and patterns are most relevant to you.
Q: I've already improved my diet and sleep and still have brain fog. What else could be causing it?
One of the most common reasons for chronic brain fog, which does not improve with the usual interventions, is environmental factors, especially mold. Diet changes are not always enough, and there can be unknown food sensitivities, hormonal factors and environmental factors that have built up over time that are worth examining. This is where a root cause wellness approach comes into play – root cause analysis considers the whole picture, not one factor at a time.
Q: Is brain fog related to gut health?
Yes – significantly. There’s a constant dialogue between the gut and the brain, and when the gut is not balanced, the brain is one of the first places that the imbalance is felt. In addition, digestive symptoms are common with chronic brain fog that people haven’t ever linked to their thinking. By improving gut health, one of the biggest lifestyle changes that people make when trying to clear up cognitive cloudiness is often improving it.
Q: Could mold in my home be causing my brain fog?
This is more likely than you think. The symptoms of exposure to mold are continuous – people often experience ongoing fatigue, inability to concentrate, and mental cloudiness that can be confused with other causes of mental cloudiness. The link many people make is by observing that their fog has really improved after they are away from their normal surroundings for a long period of time. When the main thing you are complaining about is brain fog and none of the above seems to fit, environmental assessment is a must.
Q: How does functional wellness coaching help with brain fog?
Rather than focusing on a single symptom (brain fog) to manage, functional wellness coaching focuses on all the patterns in your life that may be contributing – sleep patterns, food patterns, stress load, environment, gut health and daily patterns. The aim is to find the true underlying causes of your hazy thinking and focus on these directly, providing you with practical and individual guidance, and working with you over time. It is often this whole person approach that is the first step for individuals who have failed to find meaningful relief with more generic approaches.
Q: How long does it take to clear brain fog through lifestyle changes?
This depends on its cause. If dehydration, sleep disturbances or blood sugar fluctuations are the main cause of fog, meaningful changes can be experienced in days to a few weeks. If the fog is caused by gut imbalances, the environment, or more fundamental lifestyle, the process is longer – usually several months of regular, guided efforts. This is why a more planned approach, such as the 6-month HealthfullyU’s Wellness Program, works better than short fixes.
HealthfullyU offers functional wellness coaching, wellness education, and lifestyle guidance. Services are non-medical, non-chiropractic, and complementary in nature. Always consult a licensed healthcare provider for medical concerns.