What is brain fog syndrome? Brain fog is characterized by confusion, forgetfulness, and a lack of focus and mental clarity. This can be caused by overworking, lack of sleep, stress, and spending too much time on the computer.
No matter your age, persistent symptoms of brain fog should be taken seriously. If you're struggling with your thinking or memory, now is the time to seek an evaluation. Finding the root cause of your cognitive problems can help you find the right treatment plan.
Vitamin B12
This results in poor oxygen flow to your body's organs and tissues, leading to brain fog-related symptoms like weakness and fatigue, along with much more serious neurological problems. Even if you don't develop anemia, B12 deficiency can cause confusion, memory troubles and depression.
Magnesium. If you aren't eating enough greens, nuts, seeds, beans, and whole grains, your magnesium tank could be drained, which could be linked to brain fog, given that magnesium deficiencies have been associated with increased susceptibility to stress (19), as well as mild cognitive impairment and dementia (20).
B Vitamins For Brain Fog
Sufficient levels of vitamin B12 are necessary to optimize nerve function, memory, and quick thinking. If you don't eat adequate amounts of shellfish, poultry, and dairy products, vitamin B12 supplements can help improve cognitive decline, poor memory, as well as muddled thinking.
While spacing out can simply be a sign that you are sleep deprived, stressed, or distracted, it can also be due to a transient ischemic attack, seizure, hypotension, hypoglycemia, migraine, transient global amnesia, fatigue, narcolepsy, or drug misuse.
Brain fog and dementia are different
The cloudy thinking you get with brain fog is also very different from cognitive problems associated with dementia or Alzheimer's disease. The key difference is that diseases like dementia and Alzheimer's disease affect more than memory.
Brain fog can be a symptom of many illnesses, such as COVID-19 and autoimmune diseases like celiac disease, chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia, and multiple sclerosis. However, it also occurs due to lifestyle factors, such as stress, burnout, lack of sleep, and hormonal changes during pregnancy and menopause.
Symptoms can vary based on the cause, but common symptoms of brain fog include: Difficulty with concentration: Your brain may feel fuzzy, and it may be hard to think clearly. Memory loss: This can affect your short-term memory, so you might feel forgetful or be unable to remember what you were doing a moment ago.
Brain fog in itself is not a mental health issue. However, it is very closely related to mental health as it can be both a symptom of common mental health conditions such as depression or stress, and a cause for others such as anxiety.
People usually recover from brain fog. You may get similar symptoms after other infections, a minor head injury or during the menopause. Brain fog is also common if you have depression, anxiety or stress.
In general, brain fog lingers between several days and several weeks. You can do things to reduce the duration of brain fog. How long brain fog lasts depends largely on things that are under your control. This means, of course, that you can reduce the symptoms of brain fog and shorten their duration.
What is brain fog? Brain fog is the term used to describe the effects on the brain and nervous system that can occur with long COVID. Brain fog can last for weeks, months or longer after a person recovers from COVID-19 illness. It can linger when other symptoms have stopped.
Brain fog in elderly people is not a medical disorder or disease. The best way to describe the condition is a lack of focus, reduced ability to concentrate, and a feeling of being spaced out or cloudiness in your brain. Some people call it a slower mental processing speed.
Depersonalization symptoms
Symptoms of depersonalization include: Feelings that you're an outside observer of your thoughts, feelings, your body or parts of your body — for example, as if you were floating in air above yourself. Feeling like a robot or that you're not in control of your speech or movements.
Brain fog can come with stress, poor sleep, and overexertion, but if yours is persistent, gets in the way of your day-to-day life, or negatively affects your mental health, you should talk with a healthcare provider.
Losing just 2 percent of the water in your body (mild dehydration), can impair your cognitive performance, attentiveness, short-term memory and may affect decision-making ability. These symptoms, which affect your ability to think, are often collectively described as “brain fog”, a non-medical, colloquial term.
"If you actually ask women who have iron deficiency what their symptoms are, fatigue and tiredness is there but right at the top of the list is brain fog and that's what women described — it's the inability to think clearly," says Professor Toby Richards.
While too little vitamin D can cause brain fog, weakness, and frequent infections, taking too much in supplement form (overdosing on vitamins from food is unlikely) can cause dangerous adverse effects, including kidney failure, she explained.