Brain Fog Part 1: Emotions
The Triggers of Brain Fog and How to Reclaim Your Sanity Pt. 1
Cloudy, mushy, thoughts, as if you’ve stepped into an allergy medicine commercial, your vision hazy, your focus scattered and twitchy.
Mashed potato brains in a room with a strobe light, mixed up with memories, to-dos, conversations, music, garbage trucks, work, desires, and goals, but without the focus, mental stability or clarity to direct your attention to what matters to you.
For years, I didn’t know I was even experiencing brain fog because it had overtaken the lens through which I perceived the world. Hazy, each and every day. Like a goldfish swimming in a glass bowl, unable to see past its immediate environment, I thought everyone felt the way I did: foggy, fatigued, and fretting around.
Like the intricacy of the onion and its root system, the cause of brain fog is likely multi-layered and highly inter-woven. The triggers have twisting roots and densely woven tangles that interact to create even more brain fog or prevent the evaporation of the cloudy mental weather.
You might pull out a clump of roots thinking triumphantly that you’ve found the source, only to find it covered in soil, bugs, and wrapping around your neural cucumber plants in the adjacent planter.
Most people can relate to the feeling of not having slept well and the ennui it brings. Or, having worked too-many long days in a row and they now feel tired, a bit spacey, achey, eagerly anticipating their next day off to sleep-in and make pancakes, unrushed. In this scenario, the brain fog is likely to lift after getting some proper sleep and time to unwind. (That phrase alone carries so much weight, as it literally points to the importance of relaxing our muscles in order to welcome proper circulation, oxygenation, and cellular clean-up.)
For those individuals already doing their absolute best to turn down the intensity of their stressors, eat nutrient-dense (liver! Egg yolks!) and easily digestible foods (honey! mango!) while avoiding others, taking pristine care of their bodies throughout the day and still face the fury of the fog, they most likely have a more complicated picture of health than the average Jessica.
In almost every case of brain fog, an overactive immune response, inflammation, and the dramatic shift towards stress hormones is the culprit. Furthermore, most cases of inflammation begins and proliferates in the gut, radiating to every other system within. Over 70% of our immune system lives within our GI tracts, so it is no coincidence that mayhem within the gut directly triggers the brain. Acting as a canary in a coal mine, the brain reacts to the swelling and reactions in the gut lining.
Messy guts=messy brain.
The root cause of such inflammation, likely originating in the gut-associated immune system, stems from unique triggers for every individuals.
From the most severe to the simplest cases, pulling out each root and weighing the impact seems to reap the most replenishing rewards.
Whatever the trigger, the body releases inflammatory cells (leukocytes: macrophages, neutrophils, and lymphocytes) and circulates hormones that mimic the patterns when presented with a real threat (e.g. a virus, mold, fungus, bacteria, or lion), even if that threat is just perceived.
These pro-inflammatory cells are released in an attempt to modulate the immune response and eventually, bring it back to homeostasis.
The body is wise. The body is trying to help us.
According to a review on the inflammatory mediators in inflammation:
“[The] mechanism of inflammation represents a chain of organized, dynamic responses including both cellular and vascular events with specific humoral secretions.”
While acute stressors allow the body to bounce back robustly, chronic or catastrophic stressors imprint on the body differently. Trauma literally rewires our brains to respond to stressors as if they are perpetual and everywhere. Bessel van der Kolk, a leading trauma researcher, discusses how the body keeps the score:
“We have learned that trauma is not just an event that took place sometime in the past; it is also the imprint left by that experience on mind, brain, and body. This imprint has ongoing consequences for how the human organism manages to survive in the present. Trauma results in a fundamental reorganization of the way mind and brain manage perceptions. It changes not only how we think and what we think about, but also our very capacity to think.”
Stressors fill up the bucket of stress until it eventually spills over. Trauma complicates the shape and carrying capacity of that bucket, leading to what might feel like perpetual spilling over and leaking.
In this chronically stressed state, the body has shifted towards reactivity to even the benign or harmless, like a mango, a piece of chicken, or a bouquet of flowers. The resting chemical cocktail of the body now colored by stress becomes hyper-reactive. Perpetual alarm gets encoded into the new homeostasis.
This low-level immune activation triggers the continual release of free fatty acids, histamine, cortisol, adrenalin, and serotonin. It stimulates inflammatory cells to stay busy and clean up the mess, while down-regulating tissue repair, blood flow, thyroid conversion, sex hormone production, calming neurotransmitters, and other processes that rely on a certain level of relaxation to function, enabling only more inflammation in the process. Running long enough, these cascades can directly hinder the functioning of the brain; the fog thickens.
By first acknowledging the triggers, looking more closely at these onions, we can then unwind the roots and calm down the inflammation and its presentation as neuro-inflammation or brain fog.
The following posts will include a series of triggers for brain fog and how to flip them back, starting with the most profound cause: your thoughts.
Yes, YOUR THOUGHTS.
Without meaning to place the blame on you, peering into the story that your internal narrative writes as you go about your life gives insight into the most overlooked cause of disease, the stress your brain creates. Mental stress is the factor most easily brushed aside, yet it’s possibly one of the largest influencers in the brain fog playing field. The brain can be such a tool when directed intentionally, but it can be equally dangerous when maladaptive thoughts play out uninterrupted.
Emotional stress created by our partial or warped perception sets off a cascade of inflammatory cycles on the cellular level. If your thoughts haven’t been redirected and reformed intentionally, targeting the other factors contributing to brain fog is like trying to clean a smoking hot cast-iron while someone is still cooking with it.
Feeling the urgency to rush, dissatisfaction with how things are, focusing on how you wish you had more of this, less of that, clinging to dreams and stories, possessions, fighting with your partner, fighting with yourself, fighting with your broken laundry rack: these scenarios all send your cells into states of alarm.
“Your mind is in every cell of your body” -Candace Pert
Yet, it’s a bidirectional street. Your thoughts directly reflect the functioning and health of your gut, largely influenced by the level of inflammation and the neurotransmitter production in your GI tract. Depression and psychiatric diseases might be less about a chemical imbalance or “low serotonin” and much more a product of excessive inflammatory signaling, a leaking gut, bacterial translocation (SIBO), parasites, and the absorption of unhelpful molecules through the loose gut junctions that send the brain into spasms.
Solution:
Developing a resting mindset in the midst of chaos speaks directly to your cells, “you are safe, you have resources, you have time, continue business as usual, no need to inflame.”
The placebo effect, as observed with fake operations and sham drugs works because of the power of thought. When drenched in thoughts of gratitude, the body is flooded with inspiring and calming neurotransmitters, like dopamine and oxytocin. The body follows the brain. The chemicals leading to brain fog and immune dysfunction can be altered by your thoughts. The pharmaceutical company would like us to think we need a drug to fix a chemical imbalance, but what if it were simpler? What if it were about training the brain to think more peaceful, more constructive, more accepting thoughts, regardless of the external circumstances, knowing that it could change our biology, brain function, and future reactions to events?
Perspective matters to our cells: choose wisely.
