BRAIN FOG: Why your mind feels misty

What's My Age Again?

Dr. Nicola Conlon explores the biological mechanisms behind 'brain fog,' defining it as a collection of symptoms rather than a single medica

Key takeaways

• The brain accounts for only 2% of body weight but consumes approximately 20% of the body's energy.
• Chronic stress releases cortisol and adrenaline, which can interfere with the prefrontal cortex's ability to manage attention and memory.

Main topics

• Biological causes of brain fog
• Impact of stress on the prefrontal cortex

Notable quotes

Brain fog isn't actually a medical condition. It's a term that we kind of generally use to describe a collection of symptoms.

Conclusion

By identifying the physiological drivers of cognitive fatigue, individ

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:00) A Rao Original Podcast. I'm Katherine Ryan. Welcome to another bonus episode of What's My Age Again, where we put wellness under the microscope, poke it with a pipette, and ask resident scientist Dr. Nicola Conlon what's actually going on inside our bodies. Coming up, we're making sense of the latest science, and we'll answer your questions. This week, Dr. Nic is talking about brain fog and what you can do to clear it. Speaker 3 (0:28) Dr. Nicola's Second Opinion. Speaker 1 (0:31) Hello and welcome back to Second Opinion. I'm Dr Nicola Conlon and today we are going to talk about something that I think nearly all of us have experienced at some point and that is brain fog. You know that kind of feeling where you maybe walk into a room or you go to the supermarket and you completely forget why you're there or maybe you might feel like sometimes you lose your train of thought halfway through a sentence or That time when you kind of know the words that you want to say, but your brain just refuses to give it to you. Well, that's kind of what we would describe as brain fog. And I think the first important thing to say is that brain fog isn't actually a medical condition. It's a term that we kind of generally use to describe a collection of symptoms. So things like... poor concentration, slower thinking, forgetfulness, difficulty finding the words, as I've just said, and that feeling that your brain just isn't quite firing on all cylinders. And although the name might sound a little vague, the biology that's actually behind it is actually very real. So if you think about our brains, they're actually incredibly energy-hungry organs. In fact, the brain accounts for only 2 % of our body weight, but it takes up about 20 % of our energy. So it needs a constant supply of oxygen and glucose to do that, because that is how we make our energy. And it's very sensitive to things like our hormones, inflammation, and it also relies heavily on good quality sleep and repair to reset it. So brain fog can be a sign that one or more of those systems is slightly out of balance. And one of the big culprits when it comes to brain fog is actually stress. So let's unpick this a little bit. When you are under stress, your body will release hormones like cortisol and adrenaline. And in the short term, they can actually sharpen your thinking and help you respond quickly and switch your brain on even more. But when stress becomes chronic, those same signals can start interfering with the parts of the brain that are involved in things like your attention, your work and memory and how fast you can make decisions. And I think this explains why so many of us will say, my brain just stops working when I've got so much going on. It's not necessarily that your memory has suddenly deteriorated, but your brain may simply be trying to process too many things at once. And modern life that we live now is very good at creating these situations where we've got so much going on. We're answering emails, we're checking our phones, we're thinking about work whilst trying to sort the family out and constantly switching our attention between different tasks. And our brains were never really designed to hold on to all of this information at the same time. Now sleep is another huge thing that can result in brain fog or lack of sleep or lack of quality sleep. And this is because sleep isn't just the period when your brain switches off, it's actually an incredibly active time for brain maintenance. And during sleep what happens is your brain will process and it will organize information from the day. So it will strengthen some of the connections that are involved in learning and memory, and it'll help to file away the things you want to keep. So you can almost think of sleep as your brain organizing itself a bit like a filing cabinet. And if you don't get enough time to do that, then everything can feel slightly more scattered in the following day. And