Brain Fog Part 2: Movement
Brain Fog Part 2: Physical Stress & Inflammatory Exercise
Walking
Lifting
Leaping
Lunging
Rolling
Tumbling
Twerking
Twisting
Falling
Bruising
Bouncing
Climbing
Cartwheels
Burpees
Burping
Biking
Squatting
Stretching
Slithering...
Movement characterizes all forms of life. From the beat of a crows wing, the pounce of a cat, or a string of marching ants shuffling food back to the nest, the world is rich with activity. Yet, movement out of context can break down our tissues, tendons, muscles, and our vital organs when implemented inappropriately. This highly inflamed state eventually leads to brain fog.
Intense exercise in our modern world checks off a psychological box: humans like doing difficult things. A sense of achievement and pride follows the moments we push our bodies to their edges, whether it’s climbing a monstrous rock, winning a muddy race, or learning how to throw a massive tire. (Our ancestors would’ve likely laughed if they peeped into our gyms, snickering as we heaved weighted balls around without any food-procurement in the process). The more difficult the task, the more dopamine and cortisol course throughout our blood, the more endorphins flow, and we feel GREAT (at first…).
As some fitness enthusiasts like to say with a sense of pride, we can literally “shred” ourselves. Shredding is not a word I want to associate with how I care for my body. Shredding is something I save for carrots and deposited checks.
The dose truly determines the poison when it comes to physical causes of inflammation triggering brain fog. As much as movement allows for the flourishing of life, even a moderate workout in specific contexts can push a body into the realm of catabolism and toxicity.
Without proper neural, muscular, and metabolic recovery, your tissues fail to repair. This failure encompasses the precious networks that comprise the BRAIN.
“Generally, a person’s body will give them the feedback that it’s time to put traditional exercise methods on hold for a time. Decreased tolerance to stress or exercise, slowed recovery, accelerated time to fatigue, chronic aches, sleep problems, low libido, and poor digestion are endocrine warnings indicating that changes need to be made.” -Rob Turner, Functional Performance Systems
TYPE MATTERS:
All forms of movement and impact interact with the metabolic terrain contextually. The case-by-case conversation shifts from moment to moment. Certain movements fill up the “stress bucket” in one moment, while emptying it out the next. The status of your brain function reveals the true impact of the stress.
The result: FOG. FATIGUE. Low-level brain damage. Poisoning from the inside out.
Depending on the level of your current bucket of stressors and your overall nutritional debt, the interaction is largely determined by the intensity, duration, and recovery time of your physical endeavors.
The appropriate dose will boost your endorphins, help balance your hormones, improve your insulin sensitivity, and even promote a fuller ability to relax and sleep deeply. This appropriate dose serves as eustress, allowing for greater stress resiliency and hopefully stronger muscles and bones as an adaptive result.
In terms of viral infections like the common flu, herpes, warts, or even COVID-19, moderate exercise could be favored as a way to boost your immune system, increasing the activity of your T-cell proliferation and Natural Killer cell activity. It keeps your immune system sturdy and able to meet any invaders with ease. Each challenge provides a mini-upgrade to the system.
Yet, in a highly stressed state, less intense exercise might bear more fruits of function, sparing your fertility and actually amplifying your metabolic rate. When a system is already taxed, adding another blanket of stress compromises the cellular orchestra beyond its capacity: the delicate strings of the harp start to pop and fray. By moving less or less intensely, one could avoid unnecessary inflammation and cell damage. The result of wisely doing less (and choosing to rest) preserves your brain power as an added benefit.
METABOLIC DAMAGE:
Overtraining can quickly turn into a systemic stressor as your body fails to adapt, or worse, down-regulates metabolism in order to adapt.
“Every stress leaves an indelible scar, and the organism pays for its survival after a stressful situation by becoming a little older.” -Hans Selye
Imagine you’re swimming in caloric deprivation and extreme marital stress. You follow a lentil & tofu-based diet, have chronic lyme disease, type II diabetes, just had a recent hysterectomy following your 4th child. Your partner has a slipped disc, your cat just lost its eye in a fight, and you just finished a 60-hour work week under fluorescent lighting. In this scenario, a high intensity workout no longer provides nourishment to your neurons, muscles, or metabolic rate. In fact, such intense movement might dangerously increase your cortisol and adrenaline levels which do not need stoking at the moment.
With any chronic rise and sustainment of stress hormones, inflammation blossoms like mint plants in an overgrown garden; they take over with wild-peppermint abandon.
YOUR BODY SPEAKS:
Brain fog and fatigue is your body communicating to you directly and clearly: The levels of inflammation and the chemical terrain associated with tissue swelling, calcification, fibrosis, and cell death as a result of too much movement and too little recovery has grown to horrendous levels!
The fog is your body's attempt to communicate the burden of chemicals like lactic acid, sulfite, ammonia, hydrogen sulfide, histamine, serotonin, pro-inflammatory prostaglandins, and other oxygen and nitrogen-derived free-radicals. Your liver needs energy reserves to clean this mess up. Repairing muscles in your bicep is no longer a priority when your liver is swimming in toxic sludge and requires all liver-hands on deck.
The longer these compounds circulate, the greater the tissue damage. In order to successfully process the burden, the body requires rest, adequate liver function, a robust metabolic rate, and access to ample protein, glucose, and key minerals like magnesium, potassium, and sodium.
SLOW DOWN and REST or I’ll take away your brain function, your body seems to say.
Anytime the body lacks the appropriate resources to meet the task at hand, the stress response is triggered to free glycogen from the muscles and liver. Dreading or forcing exercise (thus creating psychological stress) pushes the alarm buttons within the system. Referring back to Brain Fog Part 1 of this series, mental resistance compounds the stressor of the actual exercise. If dread, hate, or boredom floods your system as you exercise, it is likely time to shift gears before doing extra damage to your cellular health status. This self-created stress suggests that exercise for the sake of exercise could be counter-productive, versus moving in ways that feel pleasurable or playful and actually lower the cumulative stress load.
Treat every moment of movement as an opportunity to celebrate a functional body: move in ways that feel good to you and your cells.
LEAKY GUT:
When it comes to inflammation from within, exercise changes the permeability of the intestines.
As a response to changes in stress hormones, namely cortisol, which catabolizes tissues to free-up glucose to fuel a given exercise, the junctions within the gut grow wider. When anything escapes through these gut junctions, it has direct access to your blood-stream and can cross the blood-brain barrier. If it’s a toxin like ammonia, hydrogen peroxide, hydrogen sulfide, nitrous oxide, alcohol, mold spores from your peanut butter chocolate ball, histamine from leftover takeout, or endotoxin produced from the bacteria within your colon, that molecule suddenly has free-access to the delicate tissues comprising your brain.
Movement opens up neural pathways to beauty and muscular routes of growth, but intense exercise can poke through your gut and completely derail your metabolic balance. Even in healthy volunteers, running induced a significant increase in intestinal permeability, and a significant rise in endotoxin. Endotoxin absorption poisons you from the inside out, crossing the blood-brain barrier and releasing proinflammatory cycles of alarm.
Even with a healthy gut, running can open up the junctions that serve as the barrier between you and the outside world. With an already sensitive gut, too much endurance exercise places excessive burden on your intestines and as severity of the leakiness progresses, your brain declines with it.
“Incidental stresses, such as strenuous exercise combined with fasting (e.g., running or working before eating breakfast) not only directly trigger the production of lactate and ammonia, they also are likely to increase the absorption of bacterial endotoxin from the intestine. Endotoxin is a ubiquitous and chronic stressor. It increases lactate and nitric oxide, poisoning mitochondrial respiration, precipitating the secretion of the adaptive stress hormones, which don’t always fully repair the cellular damage.” - Ray Peat PhD
Another study demonstrated how even an hour after exercise, intestinal permeability was significantly elevated from baseline levels. In these hyper-permeable states, it is no surprise that undigested food particles, toxic metabolites, viruses, and bacterial by-products ooze right into the bloodstream.
THYROID FUNCTION:
Overtraining can lead to excessive production of nitric oxide, lactic acid, and a chronic rise in cortisol and adrenaline, all of which impair the ever-important thyroid function and relatedly, tax your liver.
Researchers and exercise specialists alike acknowledge that aerobic exercise, especially in women, hinders the conversion of thyroid hormone and leads to a lower pulse, temperature, and compromised metabolic rate over time. In a follow-up study 2 years later, some of the women’s thyroid function returned to normal over time, suggesting they adapted to the stressor at hand. However, even falling within the range of normal could mask the reality of an under-functioning thyroid gland.
In the same study, others did not adapt: thyroid function plummeted and did not recover.
In another study, female athletes underwent an intense training regimen of running, rowing and weight lifting for five months. Thyroid hormone levels remained stable in seven of the women, while significantly dropping in the other ten. The highly celebrated “runners pulse” might actually point to a system that has been run down (literally) into dysfunction and hypothyroidism.
NUTRITION:
Researchers found that adequate nutrients can influence thyroid hormone levels and the resultant effect of intense exercise on the thyroid. Their findings underscore the complex nature of stress-induced metabolic issues in the context of exercise with pre-existing stressors such as nutritional deficiencies. Again, the appropriate dose for one might be poison for another.
Something as simple as zinc, which is critical for thyroid function, seems to also play a pivotal role in preventing the gut junctions from loosening. Zinc carnosine, for instance, is thought to be critical for the assembly of the tight junctions between adjacent cells and keep our gut functioning like a fine tea strainer instead of a worn down loose net. Just two weeks of zinc carnosine supplementation improved exercise-induced gut permeability by 70%. In a crossover study, researchers demonstrated that 7 days of glutamine supplementation completely prevented exercise-induced gut permeability.
[Bone broth provides a hefty dose of glutamine, as do the cheaper, more gelatinous cuts of meat. A wonderful source of zinc might take shape as a few oysters, a serving of beef stew, or if you’re lucky, a nice plump crab cake. Pass on the pumpkin seeds, which are overly abundant in polyunsaturated fats and could hinder thyroid function]
In the context of pre-existing hormonal issues, additional exercise stress heavily influences one’s ability to recover. In a study comparing women with amenorrhea to those eumenorrhea, the women without periods show a heightened cortisol spike in response to exercise.
“Women with functional hypothalamic amenorrhea appear to be more reactive at the endocrine level to the metabolic demand of exercise.” Whereas menstruating women returned to baseline following the exercise, “the heightened cortisol response to exercise in women with functional hypothalamic amenorrhea was associated with a decline in blood glucose level that was not observed in women with eumenorrhea.”
While exercise might act as stress reduction in one context, it easily whips up the mayhem of excessive stress hormones in others.
According to Strength and Fitness Professional Rob Turner:
“This mobilization of supplemental energy is highlighted by the release of stored sugar (glycogen), the release of stored fat, and the conversion of protein-rich tissues into glucose with the help of the liver. Drawing on emergency resources too often compromises immunity: harms parasympathetic functions like sleep, digestion, and sexual function; and drains energy and hormone reserves needed for adaptation to future stresses.”
TIMING:
The same could result from improper timing of certain movements. Take for example a 5am Boot Camp class, so popular among the offerings at gyms these days! High intensity exercise in a fasted state revs up stress hormones to release fuel (glucose!) from your tissues from the meal you didn’t eat. On top of that, the lack of sleep adds to the debt and potential damaging effects of adding more stress into your day when your body is ill equipped to meet the demand.
The same class taken at 5pm, after an appropriate glucose-rich snack, would interact quite differently with your cellular terrain. Your body could easily provide the necessary glycogen to propel you into beast-mode, without drawing on your precious reserves. In the afternoon, humans are likely more stress-resistant, given a more robust metabolic rate indicated by a higher resting pulse and higher temperature.
When it comes to exercise of any variety, the level of one’s current stress-bucket must always be considered.
SOLUTION:
Tune into your body and assess where your rubber ducky floats atop your bucket of stressors. How is your sleep quality? How is your mood? Are you well-fueled? What is the state of your gut? What is your viral load? How do your joints feel? Have you had daily bowel movements, consistently?
When you feel balanced and bubbly, how do you LIKE to move your body?
Being aware of your stressors and physiological demands and understanding your nutritional and hormonal context marks the starting place for choosing movement patterns that assist you towards revealing greater health and avoiding exercise-induced brain fog.
The cookie-cutter 60-minute workout class must be pushed aside for the sake of your health. The “exercise makes you healthy” approach doesn’t acknowledge the impact of stress, nutrition, and gut health on recovery time, nor does it consider what actually might create more stress and oxidative damage in someone’s body.
Move because you feel good. Move because it feels inspiring. MOVE BECAUSE YOU HAVE A BODY TO CARE FOR.
Choose movement patterns that feel stimulating, appropriately challenging, relaxing, and reveal a version of you that is more relaxed and more functional than beforehand. Your metabolic rate (pulse and temperature) should not be lower the rest of the day following exercise. In this case, you have dipped into your reserves and likely need more time to recover.
With an already compromised gut, lean towards shorter, strength-based movement sessions with extra time for recovery and ample opportunity to refuel with adequate carbohydrates and key nutrients like zinc, and anti-inflammatory amino acids like glutamine and glycine.
Extremely sore muscles can indicate having over-trained, likely requiring rest, repair, and extra attention to nutrition to avoid the impact of systemic inflammation in your brain. If and when brain fog has entered the picture, it might be time to stop, drop, and take a nap instead of hitting the gym or that bike ride you had planned.
Like most things in life, following what works for you and your precious meat-suit will reap the greatest returns.
Your cells are talking, are you listening?
