A lot of problems occur which do not come under the category of diseases. These problems occur because of problems such as memory, lack of clarity and inability to focus. Brain fog is a cognitive condition which affects your daily routine and functions. It can cause mental fatigue and can make daily life difficult as it may interfere with your lifestyle, work schedule hell. People usually do not know about this cognitive condition and get them diagnose for different mental health diseases which does not give them any solution. Today we will have a look at condition of brain fog and try to discuss it in detail.
What is Brain Fog?
We spoke to Dr. Tanu Chowdhury, Clinical Psychologist from Healthcare Clinic, Lucknow, to know about this condition in detail. She told that brain fog occurs because of variety of condition and affects your cognitive ability as well. It involves affects a person’s memory, makes them more forgetful. Then it also increases confusion in people mind about small things which make it worse for the person to take decisions. Brain fog also results to poor concentration and inability to focus on necessary things. You may have a lot of deviation from work during this phase which may affect your mental strength.
Brain fog could also lead you to mental fatigue. This is a condition in which the person loses his ability to judge and think properly for a particular period of time. It interferes with your regular routine work and makes it hard for the person to fix problems.
What are symptoms of Brain Fog?
Since it is not a disease, hence there are no particular symptoms which can be assumed. However people do feel a number of problems which can be in account as symptoms of brain fog, here are the following-
- Focusing on a random thought
- Recalling things often
- Multitasking
- Following conversations
- Paying attention to your surroundings
- Causes of Brain fog
According to our expert there are 6 major reasons of having brain fog. It depends on the severity of the case and how deep the brain fog has affected the person. As the name suggests it creates a layer of fog (referring to inability or improper function) inside your brain about different things.
What Causes Brain Fog?
1. Stress
Stress especially chronic stress could result to blood pressure problem and result to brain fog. Stress also weakens your immune system and triggers depression. Stress could be very problematic and can result to fatigue. This affects your cognitive ability and your brain may get exhausted. Once your brain is exhausted then it makes it harder for you to think, focus and take decisions.
2. Lack of Sleep
Lack of sleep is a cause of concern for many problems related to brain. Lack of sleep affects the functioning of brain and the nervous system; it slows down body response and hence results to brain fog. Lack of sleep could be a cause of brain fog as sleeping too little leads to poor concentration and cloudy thoughts. Hence this could be a possible reason for having brain fog.
3. Hormonal changes
Hormonal changes are also one of the factors that affect a person and trigger brain fog. This is because there are number of hormones which increase of decrease during a particular time. For example progesterone and estrogen levels keep increasing when a women is pregnant. During pregnancy it creates an impact on the cognitive skill or the person and also results to cognitive impairment. However drop in these estrogens during menopause could cause forgetfulness, poor concentration and cloudy thinking.
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4. Chance in diet
Diet is an important factor which affects functioning of your brain. Even though you may not realize much, but diet is an important factor in determining this condition. Brain fog can especially happen if you have vitamin-B12 deficiency because it is related to cognitive functioning of the body.
Food allergies can particularly affect brain fog, here are certain food products that may cause food allergies and later brain fog-
- Dairy
- Peanuts
- Aspartame
- Removing food triggers could actually improve symptoms and affect your health in a positive way.
5. Medicines
A medicine in majority of cases slows down your cognitive functions so that recovery can be acted on quickly. Brain fog can lower down the functioning and may cause brain fog if the medication goes on a long period of time. This usually happens in the case where long term drugs like for cancer or thyroid; diabetes, etc are given to the patient. Sometimes excess of dosage could also cause brain for which should be improve by lowering the dosage of the medicine.
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6. Diseases and conditions
There are various disease that results to inflammation of the brain. In certain medical conditions, it causes fatigue, inflammation, and changes in glucose levels which could cause chronic fatigue syndrome. This condition can particularly affect your mental health and result to persistent brain fog for over six months or so. Conditions such as brain fog can be very problematic and needs to be cured by diagnosing the cause behind it.
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