468. The psychology of brain fog

Brain fog is so much more than just feeling tired. It's that frustrating feeling of knowing what you want to say or do, but your brain simply won't cooperate. And whilst it's incredibly common, we're only just beginning to understand what actually causes it. Watch on Netflix: HERE https://netflix.com/thepsychologyofyour20s In today's episode, we're breaking down the fascinating new research behind brain fog, including: The three main causes of brain fog, from physical depletion to cognitive overload and neurological disruption Why chronic stress, anxiety and mental load can leave your brain feeling exhausted The surprising links between brain fog, inflammation, long COVID and gut health Why women may be more susceptible to brain fog The science of sleep, nutrition and the brain's natural cleaning system What actually helps clear brain fog, beyond just drinking more water and getting more rest Extra links: Brain fog and trauma: HERE https://open.spotify.com/episode/5b6iqJLaaf6EF9PL5smTGg?si=97e8dca19bc547e7 Brain fog and ADHD: HERE https://open.spotify.com/episode/0uUql8R4jrh3wIAtcUXO1b?si=5ae070c902bc4e61 Brain fog and food: HERE https://open.spotify.com/episode/2XbO4j44dBta1a5h2be952?si=197197df56ba4e8d The Psychology of your 20s is not a substitute for professional mental health help. If you are struggling, distressed or require personalised advice, please reach out to your doctor or a licensed psychologist. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.

• 0:04Jemma Sbeg?

  This episode is sponsored by Gymshark. Gymshark has spent over 14 years obsessing over gym clothing and the people who wear it. And let me just say, I think we all know, they are very, very good at what they do. No, seriously, their stuff is so good. Their everyday seamless collection is light, it's soft, it's stretchy. All of their stuff just looks good on and it's made for people who love to exercise, whatever exercise that is, lifting, cardio, Pilates, running around campus, maybe just doing errands. Discover Gymshark and find your new favorite gym clothing at gymshark.com.

• 0:41Jemma Sbeg?

  These days, there are more people than ever telling you how to manage your health. Your social media feed is packed with wellness trends telling you to cold plunge, protein max, and so much more. But what's actually real? What's exaggerated? What's just wrong? Health versus hype from the American Medical Association breaks it all down. Emmy nominated host Trace Dominguez talks to health influencers, real people, and most importantly, doctors, to separate fact from fiction. Because when it comes to your health, who you listen to really matters. Listen to Health versus Hype wherever you get your podcasts. No one's journey is the same. That's why Delta Sky Miles moves with you. Whether it's earning

• 1:26Jemma Sbeg?

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• 2:11Jemma Sbeg?

  new to this, no worries. Every student gets a dedicated academic advisor. And here's the best part, there's no set class times. So school actually fits your life. Ready to get started? Visit SNHU.edu/psych. That's SNHU.edu/psych. You know that feeling when your skin just needs a tall drink of water? That's what Clinique Moisture Surge 100 Hour Moisturizer is for. Moisture Surge 100 Hour Moisturizer absorbs instantly and hydrates for 100 hours for plump, glowing skin. That's right, 100 hours. It is a lightweight,

• 2:53Jemma Sbeg?

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• 3:26Jemma Sbeg?

  Hello, everybody. I'm Jemma Sbeg and welcome back to the Psychology of Your 20s, the podcast where we talk through the biggest changes, moments, and transitions of our 20s, and what they mean for our psychology.

• 3:46Jemma Sbeg?

  Hello, everybody. Welcome back to the show. Welcome back to the podcast. It is so great to have you here back for another episode as we, of course, break down the psychology of your 20s and beyond. Today, let's turn our research lens onto brain fog. That's what I want to talk about today. Brain fog seems like the name does not properly describe how incredibly debilitating it can be. It is like a big cloud that goes over your mind. And as much as you want to be able to concentrate, want to be able to get stuff done, want to be able to string an intelligent

• 4:25Jemma Sbeg?

  sentence together, you can't. It can last a few hours, it can last months, years, and it is so common. It is a term we have all heard before. And yet, we still know, surprisingly, very little about what actually causes it. When you actually go looking through the research, you will notice this very interesting pattern, which is that for years and years and years, there was no research on it. And then suddenly, there has been this explosion of research on brain fog. And the link between gut inflammation, neuroinflammation, neurological disruption, brain fog is receiving a massive increase in research interest because of COVID and because

• 5:09Jemma Sbeg?

  of long COVID. And that research has ended up benefiting all these other people who are experiencing brain fog for reasons that had nothing to do, nothing to do with the virus, and everything to do with so many other factors. So today, I want to explain those factors, what actually causes brain fog as we know of right now. There is new research developing every single second, the history of our understanding and knowledge of brain fog, and what to actually do about it. If you have brain fog, I'm sure you've heard the regular things of exercise, you drink more water, meditate, stop drinking alcohol. We are only just beginning to see that

• 5:49Jemma Sbeg?

  that is only the beginning. There is so much more that can be done and so many more, I guess, interventions that really get to the root cause of this issue. So I know it is something that affects a lot of you guys for various different reasons. I get so many requests to just do an episode on brain fog, people who say, I've never experienced this before, and suddenly, I literally cannot concentrate. It feels like my brain is mush. Today, we are finally doing it. Without further ado, let's get into the psychology of brain fog.

• 6:26Jemma Sbeg?

  So here's the interesting thing about brain fog. There's many interesting things. Here's the first interesting thing. You would think, you would, for such a widely-used term and widely experienced symptom, that we would have a clear definition. We do not. It is not a formal medical condition. Instead, the term came from people living with chronic fatigue syndrome, CFS, which has been understudied and under-recognized for decades. And the only kind of help and support people with CFS or chronic fatigue syndrome could get was from each other. And it was this big network of people who were passing on information, helping one another,

• 7:08Jemma Sbeg?

  and they also created their own language of terms to kind of validate their experiences that were being dismissed by medical professionals, one of which was brain fog. For decades, people thought brain fog was just psychological. In other words, slash psychological in this situation, being code for made up. People would say, it's just an excuse for laziness, for poor concentration, for bad diet. However, modern research, including FMRI scans, that can track where blood, or where the brain is sending blood, has since, basically all that proven that what patients have been saying for decades, that something weird is happening in my brain, it's not psychological,

• 7:49Jemma Sbeg?

  even if you can't see it, something is going on. We finally realized that there is this physical component. We now know it's not just associated with chronic fatigue and the chronic fatigue community. Many people in their lifetime will experience this weird kind of fog that descends almost very quickly. And it's very annoying. It's annoying at best, actually. It's distressing and kind of life destroying at worst. And it is so much more than feeling tired. Tiredness is caused by a lack of energy. Brain fog, we now know, is caused by a decline in cognitive capacity, which is why people lose their train of thought halfway through a sentence. They genuinely cannot pay attention. They feel confused. They feel forgetful. They struggle

• 8:34Jemma Sbeg?

  to put sentences together, even though, you know, there's this part of us that I know what I want to say. I know that I, I know how to think. I know that I want to think. My brain, I just like, cannot get it to do its job. There is, as we would say, a desire. There is a want to get your brain and your cognition to work. It just simply won't. So what causes this? This is the big question. I mentioned its association with chronic fatigue. I also mentioned its association with long COVID, but there is a whole list, autoimmune conditions, metabolic conditions, ADHD. That doesn't really explain what causes it. It just explains that it's, it makes up a cluster of symptoms. The reason I'm kind of cagey about this is because researchers have so many

• 9:19Jemma Sbeg?

  explanations that there is really not one good one. So I'm just going to talk about them all one by one, noting that Some of these are more like textbook answers than others. And the research is still developing, but we can summarize the causes or the contributing factors of brain fog into three major categories. The first is physiological depletion due to lifestyle. So your body, i- it's depleted. There's something that your body isn't getting, therefore your brain can't perform optimally. That's a physiological explanation. The second is the cognitive overload explanation, which is essentially saying too many mental resources are being used elsewhere.

• 10:02Jemma Sbeg?

  And then the third I would kind of categorize as like biolog- biological, maybe like disease-based disruption. So there's an illness, an injury, an infection that has caused some damage to an underlying neurological process. So those are our three categories. First explanation is probably the most straightforward and the one you'll hear most regularly. Sometimes the brain simply does not have the physical resources it needs to function at its best. And when I say physical resources, I mean sleep, nutrition, hydration. All of those play a role in maintaining attention, maintaining your memory, maintaining executive functioning. Research from M I T, for example, has found that sleep is one of the most critical things here.

• 10:47Jemma Sbeg?

  When people are sleep deprived, their lapses in attention control coincide with physiological changes in the brain, including a disruption to the waves of cerebrospinal fluid that flows through your brain. So cerebrospinal fluid, it's this clear liquid and it washes your brain basically during sleep. And it cleans out all the junk and all the worn out proteins and the byproducts that come about from you thinking and doing and being alive. If you're not getting enough sleep, the brain kind of has to make a decision to either delay sending out that wave of cerebrospinal fluid until you are asleep, whenever that will be, or to just be like, we don't have any time, let's send it out while they're awake.

• 11:31Jemma Sbeg?

  It's kind of like sending in a cleaning crew before the movie is done to make sure that the cinema is clean for the next person, but the movie is still on and it's kind of disruptive. We really want the cleaning to take place behind the scenes. We wanna wake up with a fresh brain and not really know what happened to get us there. But sometimes because we are depriving ourselves of sleep or our environment is depriving us of sleep, we're not giving our brain that, I guess, bump in time, that organizational period that it needs. And so this activity of washing our brain intrudes into our waking hours and it feels really odd and that might be a reason for brain fog. We see something similar when the body is deprived of adequate food and adequate water.

• 12:15Jemma Sbeg?

  There is a very famous study, it's called the Minnesota Starvation Study. And it found that prolonged semi-starvation was accompanied by these really huge um psychological and cognitive changes. I feel like this is, we kind of know this if you've skipped a meal by accident, like your memory decision-making, your concentration, your attitude gets worse. If you're not consuming enough calories, your brain will experience cognitive decline. Your brain is the largest energy user in your whole body. What's more, the, our entire existence is basically based on how to get the brain, the glucose, fat and energy that it needs.

• 12:56Jemma Sbeg?

  That is literally like, everything in your body is almost streamlined to get your brain the energy that it wants. And so when you're not consuming that energy, things are gonna go wrong. Dehydration combines with that and is one of the reasons for brain fog on a biological level. Your brain needs glucose, it needs fat, it needs energy, we know that. You cannot access those things without water. And so when your body has less water, just less fluid, this lowers your blood pressure. It means that your body can't convert food into energy. It means your brain receives less blood, less glucose, and your thinking becomes sluggish and this can happen really, really quickly. I also read this uh really interesting paper from two thousand and fourteen.

• 13:41Jemma Sbeg?

  It was published in the Journal of Cerebral Blood Flow and Metabolism, there's a journal for everything these days. And it spoke about how in this experiment, they dehydrated mice and that reduced the ability of their neurons to literally transmit electrical impulses. Their brains, just with a little bit less water, the neurons were trying to communicate. They didn't have the fluid, they didn't have the, what it, what they needed, didn't have the, the necessary resources to do so. As I said, this is all about physiological depletion. If you don't put in your brain what it needs, your brain can't put out what you want.

• 14:20Jemma Sbeg?

  And the kind of brain fog that you're going to experience in these situations is what we would call episodic rather than chronic. So when you get enough sleep, when you drink enough water, when you have a really nice meal, the brain fog will typically disappear in these episodic moments. The same cannot be said for the cognitive overload theory of brain fog. So cognitive overload theory actually began as a theory about memory. And it began as this theory as to why some people learn things really quickly and some people have a harder time learning stuff. Learning certain concepts, learning full stop. It was developed in the nineteen eighties by a man named John Sweller, who is, he's Australian by the way, so we get to claim him.

• 15:05Jemma Sbeg?

  And he has all these brilliant theories, this is the one he is most well known for. And he essentially conceptualized the mind as an information processing system that had a limited working memory or, let's say, storage card. Basically, we don't have enough room in the storage space as the things we wanna put in the storage space. Working memory allows us to temporarily hold information, manipulate information, think about information, decide whether we wanna put it into long-term or short-term memory before we actually move it into those areas. It is the thing that is, that is working, right? That holds things very, not, not for a long time, but for a good time.

• 15:50Jemma Sbeg?

  It, it's like, it's, it's like our brain's workspace. If there is a lot operating in your mind, if you have a lot that you're trying to pay attention to, even if you don't realize it, that is going to leave you with not much storage space left. What could be filling up that working memory store? So many things. The stress of work, the stress of your job, the stress of job hunting, the stress of the future, the stress of your relationship, like all things that are pretty much constant in our twenties. Family issues, friendship tension, trauma, just like the general, like mental load of being a human

• 16:31Jemma Sbeg?

  is so exceedingly demanding and oppressive sometimes that your brain literally, even if you're not consciously thinking about it, it doesn't have room for all the other stuff. If you are constantly in this busy space where you're like, okay, yes, I'm at work, but after work I need to go to dinner at six fifteen and if I'm gonna be there at six fifteen, I have to leave at five forty-five, but I need to bring something, so I need to go to the grocery store at five thirty. That means that this needs to be done here and if I'm gonna get there at six fifteen, I wanna leave at nine and that means I should actually drive instead of catching the bus because you see where I'm going with this. That is the mental or cognitive overload theory. One interesting thing to note, women are significantly more likely to develop brain fog.

• 17:17Jemma Sbeg?

  Maybe the cognitive overload theory points to that. There was a paper published in two thousand and twenty-four in the Journal of Health Psychology. It said, that's one explanation. And then there's also the hormonal fluctuations that women are more likely to experience. Women are more likely to be dismissed or misdiagnosed by doctors, especially when it comes to other conditions that may trigger brain fog. Like, maybe those aren't getting picked up. And then again, that mental load of theory, women just deal with more of the stress and more of the labor of monitoring, planning and regulating the lives and the emotions of, of those around them. That means less cognitive space for themselves. I don't think it's just women though, I think it appears to be worse for a certain category of people.

• 18:01Jemma Sbeg?

  Another interesting thing I found was that city dwellers also experience more brain fog. There is this paper published in the Harvard Medical Review called The City and the Brain. And it essentially uncovers how city life impairs basic mental processes. So your attention, your memory, even spending simply a few minutes on a busy street.

• 18:23Jemma Sbeg?

  All of those are affected. Your brain's ability to focus and to control itself and its memory and everything and its attention is depleted by living in a city. So in this study, they had participants in two conditions. They had some of them like walk through a beautiful park and kind of stroll. And then they had people walk or navigate a busy street. And then they took them out of those conditions and made them do a bunch of psychological tests. Being in the city environment significantly increased the cognitive symptoms of brain fog. This one researcher on the paper, her name is Dr. Sarah Lazar, she essentially said that when you're in a city, it's adaptive to have a shorter attention span. If you are too fixated on something, if you're too concentrated, you miss a car, you miss

• 19:08Jemma Sbeg?

  the person walking around the corner, you miss all the environmental cues you need to be paying attention to. So you naturally develop a shorter attention span. That doesn't, like, that lingers, though. That lingers. And so when you need your attention span for other things, it's not always at the, it's not always as, as long or as, it's not always as, I guess, strong as it could be. Do you know what I mean? There's, there's not always, it can't plan, it can't execute the same functions after it's been in those environments for too long. There's one more massive contributor here that fits into the cognitive load theory, and that is chronic pain.

• 19:49Jemma Sbeg?

  And I think it's the best example of why brain fog often accompanies conditions that don't necessarily have a neurological component, right? It doesn't necessarily need to be of the brain to create brain fog. There was a 2018 meta-analysis that found people with fibromyalgia, for example, performed worse than control groups across several different cognitive domains, including memory, executive functioning, processing speed. And their explanation was the persistent pain that these people are experiencing continuously competes for limited attentional resources. Because there is a hierarchy in your brain.

• 20:31Jemma Sbeg?

  And the first thing your brain is going to want to pay attention to is pain. That is going to take up so much of the attentional pie. That is, there is little room for other things. And so your brain, if you're experiencing this pain, if you're experiencing this chronic conditions, is operating at a lower percentage because it's being taken up by this big alarm that our brain wants to pay attention to. There was another theory that I read that was like anxiety might work in a similar way as well. So, um, if you're constantly in a state of high alert, you experience brain fog for everything else because basically half of your brain is offline, looking for threat, looking for something that could go wrong.

• 21:15Jemma Sbeg?

  And it also comes from this, uh, this hyper vigilance that you may be experiencing. The continual monitoring of threats, the continual sense that things are going to come crashing down around you means that paying attention to anything else, wanting your brain to work for anything else, doesn't feel as important. And so our mind takes resources away from what we are doing in the present to theorizing and trying to figure out what could go wrong in the future. So these are the first two explanations for brain fog. There is the cognitive overload or cognitive tax explanation. And then there is the physiological explanation.

• 22:00Jemma Sbeg?

  I want to talk about the final one, and I think this is the one that most people relate to. And I also want to talk about why some of the advice we get about brain fog is helpful, but is probably incomplete and what might actually work. And we're going to talk about it and so much more after this short break.

• 22:21Jemma Sbeg?

  This episode is sponsored by Gymshark. Gymshark has spent over 14 years obsessing over gym clothing and the people who wear it. And let me just say, I think we all know they are very, very good at what they do. No, seriously, their stuff is so good. Their everyday seamless collection is light, it's soft, it's stretchy. All of their stuff just looks good on and it's made for people who love to exercise, whatever exercise that is, lifting, cardio, Pilates, running around campus, maybe just doing errands. Discover Gymshark and find your new favorite gym clothing at gymshark.com.

• 22:58Jemma Sbeg?

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• 23:39Jemma Sbeg?

  people, and most importantly, doctors, to separate fact from fiction. Because when it comes to your health, who you listen to matters. Listen to Health vs. Hype on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 23:58Jemma Sbeg?

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• 25:57Jemma Sbeg?

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• 26:42Jemma Sbeg?

  So the final pathway to brain fog is what we would call disease-based. And like I said in the beginning, it is the people who have experienced this path that we have to really like give credit to for the term brain fog. The term brain fog came from them. Before brain fog, before we had the word for it, these symptoms that we're explaining of like, I can't really pay attention, I feel confused. You would be given the label of delirium. You would be like, it was really seen as mental, seen as psychological, seen as like a sign that you were crazy. Now we know that's not the case and the pandemic and the experiences of long COVID, as I mentioned, were a big catalyst for this.

• 27:25Jemma Sbeg?

  There is so much research that has only just taken place in the last six years because of the pandemic. There was a twenty twenty six systematic review that examined forty seven studies involving, I think it was like twenty five thousand people with long COVID. Brain fog was the, I think it was the highest symptom. Thirty percent of people were like, yeah, I've got that. And I only got it when I had COVID. That is incredibly high. If some people are saying this is something that I am experiencing for the first time, people pay attention to it. And the proposed mechanism or the reason why they think this is happening is because of something called neuroinflammation. Neuroinflammation, remember this term, it's very important.

• 28:06Jemma Sbeg?

  When we get sick, our body has, you guys know this, but it has a bunch of tactics to kill whatever is making us sick. The biggest one is inflammation. Basically, send everything we have at the sick, injured, diseased area. Specifically, send as many white blood cells as we can to the sick, injured or diseased area. And we have this little like army battalion of things that are gonna take care of it. And that is why if you get a splinter, you know, your finger swells up, it gets, you get hot. That's inflammation, that's your body doing the correct thing, it's saying something's wrong, we're gonna fix that. Now, if that doesn't work, if the thing is still there, it hasn't been killed by the inflammation, our body calls in the backup cells to like, say the, the special operatives to take care of it, they're called the glial cells.

• 28:50Jemma Sbeg?

  These are cells that are found in the central nervous system, so around um your spinal cord and in the brain. When these are activated, this is neuroinflammation. As opposed to basic inflammation, neuro meaning of the brain and of the spinal cord. This doesn't happen in all cases of long COVID or any disease or infection, but if it does, and if neuroinflammation persists, this can have a significant impact on everything that makes up part of the system and part of who we are. It impacts our stomach, that's also linked to the brain, it impacts motor control, and it impacts cognitive processes because basically the neural highway that your brain uses is, there's a lot of traffic, it's overextended.

• 29:34Jemma Sbeg?

  For example, there was another pilot study from, all of these are pilot studies basically I should say, but there was another pilot study from twenty twenty five that found people with brain fog associated with long COVID. They actually had lower nerve, nerve growth, they had impaired neuroplasticity. Something was going wrong in how their brain was regenerating or experiencing new growth or new connections. This also helps us explain why brain fog is associated with MS, brain fog is associated with Parkinson's. Even depression, depression might belong in the same category. There was a paper published in two thousand and nineteen from researchers in Italy that identified there is this big subgroup of people with depression who

• 30:16Jemma Sbeg?

  experience substantial cognitive impairment and cognitive decline alongside low mood. And a lot of people were initially saying, well, that's just because people don't feel motivated, they don't feel like they have meaning. That's why their cognitive impairment is occurring. Researchers are now saying this seems to be a neurological decline on a cellular level. You know, the other thing researchers are now linking this to is mold, all of which impacts your, our neural pathways. There was a massive twenty twenty three study published in the Journal of Behavioral Brain Research. And it looked at exposure to toxic versus non-toxic mold on brain inflammation, neuroinflammation, and cognitive performance. And it found that exposure to something that we called mycotoxins.

• 31:01Jemma Sbeg?

  These things can cross the blood brain barrier. Literally change how your brain function if you are exposed to them. Mold and its influence on cognitive performance used to be a bit conspiratorial. People would be like, you are being way too dramatic about something that is essentially nature and it's a plan and now, just now, are we really seeing the scientific evidence? We have spent about seventy percent of this episode investigating the who, what, where of brain fog and why it happens. That was deliberate because there is so much research on this that you probably wouldn't know if you just Googled it, if you were like, I have brain fog. You would be like, well, are you drinking enough water? And that probably doesn't cover why you have brain fog.

• 31:43Jemma Sbeg?

  There are so many explanations. Now I wanna move into the how, specifically the how of how we're gonna go about fixing it. Let me give you kind of like a little bullet point list of things that I would do based on what I've been reading. The basics are movement, water, water intake and rest, I would say. And then the other thing that I think is important is getting your food intolerance tested. And I know that's the first time that we've mentioned the diet pathway, but it could be one of the easiest things to cut out or change if what's causing your brain fog is low-grade gut inflammation, specifically from gluten or dairy. I've read a bunch of papers on this. We know that ninety percent of our body's serotonin is produced in the gut, the gut is the second brain, we have a whole episode on it.

• 32:28Jemma Sbeg?

  If something is disturbing that second brain, your actual brain is gonna hear about it. And it's gonna get foggy. You can buy food intolerance tests for like forty bucks, by the way. Or you can go to your doctor. I know sometimes, like, I'm always cagey about doing, like giving advice of like, go get your bloods done or go to the doctor or get a food intolerance test because I know not everybody has free healthcare, but that is a critical starting point. I also think, I know I just said get your bloods done, but get your bloods done. Like if your brain fog is debilitating, the more information that you have about what's internally going on is so crucial. If there is just an imbalance of some kind of vitamin or some kind of nutrient or there's a deficiency, that is something you can fix really, really quickly.

• 33:13Jemma Sbeg?

  There was this fantastic twenty twenty six paper titled The Nutritional Approaches to Managing Brain Fog, and they emphasized iron, they emphasized B twelve, and they also said focus on fibre, omega three fatty acids and micronutrients to ensure a healthy gut microbiome. What they're essentially saying is like the new frontier of brain fog is the gut and is the stomach. Because if we rule out diseases, we rule out neuroinflammation, if we rule out sleep or whatever, like that is the next kind of thing that we're going to have to focus on. If something is not going right in your stomach, if you are eating foods that your body is genuinely like, I don't like this, I don't like this. It is going to tax you physically, it's gonna tax you

• 33:57Jemma Sbeg?

  mentally, and that means that your cognitive performance is also going to decline. Also, when we think about the um chronic pain point as well, maybe your stomach issues to you might not might not meet the criteria for chronic pain, but chronic inflammation and it is a chronic distraction for your brain. It's something that it needs to pay attention to, meaning again, it pulls resources away from everything else. Third, this one's easy, get mold in your home dealt with, please. Get your landlord to deal with it, you need to deal with it. That is like the least thing, like, we know the research now, it's not good. Number four, I know I said rest in that first list, I'm gonna double down on this and I'm gonna list

• 34:42Jemma Sbeg?

  sleep as its own unique point. Protect your sleep like it is your one and only asset. There is nothing else in your day that you are disciplined about and you have brain fog. That's fine as long as you are disciplined about your sleep. This is advice I actually got from Dr. Mike Dow's book on brain fog. It's, but it's repeated nearly everywhere. And it's essentially like, regardless of the causes of your brain fog, a byproduct of brain fog or any of these conditions is going to be built up excess brain waste. Now, is sleep gonna improve that alone? Like, is it gonna be the miracle cure for your brain fog? No, but if you have eight to nine hours, you are going to activate a better

• 35:27Jemma Sbeg?

  what we call glymphatic system. This is the one that flushes out the leftover proteins in your brain or the leftover protein casings. You know, sleep isn't gonna leave you any worse off, it's only gonna help. I used to be so ambivalent about this, I used to literally not care if I got five, six, nine, ten hours of sleep. I would just deal with tiredness as a side effect. I think since getting diagnosed with intracranial hypertension last year, last year, a year or so back, I got so serious about my sleep and I got so I just got very serious about it, about protecting my sleep and seeing that as a pathway to really helping myself cognitively. Aside from the things that we all know, which is phone away, no caffeine before bed, sleep schedule, blah, blah, blah.

• 36:12Jemma Sbeg?

  Some strategies that have worked for me as I've gotten more serious about it are magnesium supplements, a lavender spray, I know that sounds silly, but it does actually work as a cognitive cue to put your brain in a, we are going to sleep now state. And this one's gonna sound strange, until I tried it, I didn't think it worked, but I put my legs up like on my wall for ten minutes before bed and it has revolutionized my sleep. I'm gonna give my friend Grace full credit for this. I think there's a name for it, it's called the Viparita Kurani pose in yoga, if you wanna look it up. And when she told me, I was like, that sounds a bit strange. I tried it, I had the best night's sleep I've ever had.

• 36:55Jemma Sbeg?

  Literally putting my legs up on the wall for ten minutes before bed. So I did some digging, I found some research. Specifically, I found this article that said this exact pose promotes circulation. It stimulates the hypothalamus and the pituitary gland, which form the link between our nervous system and our endocrine system, so our hormones. And what it does is essentially contribute to something known as parasympathetic dominance. The parasympathetic nervous system sits in juxtaposition to the sympathetic nervous system. Sympathetic nervous system is all about fight, flight, we all know the rest. The parasympathetic nervous system is about rest, repair, recuperate.

• 37:39Jemma Sbeg?

  We want more of that system. The more you can put your brain into a state of rest and repair, the better you are going to be and the better your brain fog symptoms are gonna be as well.

• 37:56Jemma Sbeg?

  This episode is sponsored by Gymshark. Gymshark has spent over 14 years obsessing over gym clothing and the people who wear it. And let me just say, I think we all know they are very, very good at what they do. No, seriously, their stuff is so good. Their everyday seamless collection is light, it's soft, it's stretchy. All of their stuff just looks good on and it's made for people who love to exercise, whatever exercise that is, lifting, cardio, Pilates, running around campus, maybe just doing errands. Discover Gymshark and find your new favorite gym clothing at gymshark.com.

• 38:33Jemma Sbeg?

  These days, there are more people than ever telling you how to manage your health. And we've all gone down an internet rabbit hole exploring the latest health trends. Your social media feed is packed with wellness advice, telling you to cold plunge, protein max, detox, track your sleep. But what's actually real? What's exaggerated? What's just wrong? That's exactly what Health vs. Hype from the American Medical Association and iHeartMedia's Ruby Studio is here to find out. Each episode, Emmy nominated science communicator Trace Dominguez, who's racked up billions of views across PBS, Discovery Channel and YouTube, talks to health influencers, real

• 39:14Jemma Sbeg?

  people, and most importantly, doctors, to separate fact from fiction. Because when it comes to your health, who you listen to matters. Listen to Health vs. Hype on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Growth isn't linear. There's no magic timeline or secret template. And no one understands that quite like Southern New Hampshire University, because SNHU has online degree programs built for whatever path you are on. Tried college before? Transfer up to 90 credits. And if you're new to this, no worries. Every student gets a dedicated academic advisor. And here's the best part, there's no set class times.

• 39:58Jemma Sbeg?

  So school actually fits your life. Ready to get started? Visit SNHU.edu/psych. That's SNHU.edu/psych. Something that really frustrates me is when wellness brands greenwash their products to make them seem more clean or better for the environment, when they are actually not. When you look into it, they are kind of just like the rest of them. Nature's Sunshine, however, doesn't just talk about the planet. They do something about it. They sustainably source ingredients. They craft their supplements with 100% solar powered manufacturing and their products are incredible. I don't drink coffee and so Nature's Sunshine Brain Edge gives me that kick I sometimes

• 40:43Jemma Sbeg?

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• 41:25Jemma Sbeg?

  That's code PSYCH for 20% off your first order at naturessunshine.com. I've been approaching my health really differently this year. I used to be really focused on maximizing and doing more. And now I'm just realizing that if I listen to what my body needs, I perform way better. And that's why I am obsessed with my Whoop. Truly, you guys, you know, I'm such a data and information driven person and I love opening my Whoop app and seeing how my sleep, my stress, my strain is correlating with my mood, with my running performance, with how I'm just feeling day to day. I'm not an elite athlete by any means, but I do really benefit.

• 42:07Jemma Sbeg?

  And I also just really enjoy knowing more about my body. And Whoop also gives me these actionable personalized insights that have made me more intentional and meant that I make smarter decisions day to day about what I need, rather than just putting my foot on the gas and just going, going, going, going. New members can try Whoop with a 30 day free trial before committing to a membership. That's join.whoop.com/psychology for your free month of Whoop. The thing is, as I said, like you can protect your sleep, you can drink your water, you can eat your whole foods, you can really concentrate on nutrition and low alcohol, and you can still have brain fog. And you're probably sick of people telling you to do those things because it's not always

• 42:52Jemma Sbeg?

  a lifestyle side effect. It is a genuine medical concern. So my fifth thing that I think you should do is just really be so strict with yourself about advocating for yourself in medical spaces and in your doctor's office. No, it is not just anxiety. No, it is not just because you are tired. This is impacting your life. This is impacting your ability to function. You need to investigate it further and you need to make sure that you are strong and, and really that you impress on a medical, any medical professional that you're sitting in front of, that this is important to me. This is a psychology podcast, so I can't not mention the psychological impact of feeling ignored in the medical space or feeling like your brain fog is unexplainable, feeling

• 43:37Jemma Sbeg?

  like this is just your life. That itself is majorly taxing and it's majorly exhausting on your already exhausted self and mind. It's really important to rule out something underlying that you could get proper care for and proper instruction on. Then, like, or at the same time, implement the lifestyle changes that are best. Instead of just randomly cutting out every single thing that you might enjoy from your life, cutting out sugar, cutting out alcohol, cutting out caffeine, cutting out food, and still feeling like I did all this, I did everything that everybody told me to, I drank two liters of water a day and I feel like crap. Brain fog is often a messenger.

• 44:20Jemma Sbeg?

  And I just want to remind you, it's not normal to feel weird or bad in your body. Like that is not normal. If you actually can't concentrate and if you can't pay attention and you aren't functioning, something is off. You should not feel like your mind is only 50% online all of the time. The same way you shouldn't feel a lingering pain all the time, the same way you would go to a doctor if your stomach was hurting all the time or you had a headache all the time. You know, there is only so much I can mention in a 30 minute episode on this. I'm going to leave some more resources below, but from this research, what I'm really learning is the intersection between brain fog and feeling ignored and brain fog and feeling

• 45:02Jemma Sbeg?

  like, and all these other conditions that get ignored and ignored and ignored until they get really, really severe or very, or there's no more ignoring that we can do. As I said, we're in this massive moment where this is, this condition, this like feeling is getting so much attention. I don't know if you've noticed, but like every single study that I mentioned is like 2024, 2025, 2026. And so I really do think we're on this path to figuring out that neural link, figuring out that cognitive link, perhaps the link between brain fog and neurons in the stomach or cells in the stomach, all the way up to your brain.

• 45:44Jemma Sbeg?

  So if you have been dealing with brain fog and you're like, is this going to go away? Perhaps it's chronic rather than episodic. I just want to say there is so much hope and so much research coming out of this space. I can seriously imagine doing an episode on this next year and having entirely new things to say. So there is something to be optimistic about. I'm going to leave some more links in the description, particularly for a more longer episode on the nutrition behind brain fog, the link between brain fog and ADHD. And there's another one that I can't remember, but there was another episode I listened to that was really informative around the psychological mechanisms that influence brain fog that I'll put in the description. And if you're struggling with this, I would really, really recommend that you check it

• 46:29Jemma Sbeg?

  out. Once you go diving in this research, you will be swimming around for a long time. So I hope that I provided you with a little bit of a summary of the current state of psychology and psychological research on this. Yeah, I hope you find answers for yourself. I hope some of these tips were important or helpful. I want to thank our researcher, Erin, for assisting with this episode. If you have any tips for brain fog, if you are a sufferer, leave them in the comments below for other people to gain important information from, especially if you're listening on Spotify, there's a comment section that you can drop all of your best ideas and feedback in. I'd love to see them. Remember, you can watch episodes of The Psychology of Your 20s on Netflix now. So if you haven't, you can check out an episode over there.

• 47:13Jemma Sbeg?

  We also have a Substack, we have an Instagram. And on our Instagram, we often post smaller summary versions of the podcast. So if you don't have time to listen to the full thing, you can find those over there as well. So I'd highly recommend giving us a follow and a five star review as well, if you've got anything from this episode, or if you just feel called to do so. I think that's all we have time for, but I really enjoy looking into this. I love episodes where you can just get into the nitty gritty of an emerging research field. So it was such a fascinating one. Maybe I'll have to do a part two later on. But until next time, be safe, be kind, be gentle to yourself. We will talk very, very soon.

• 47:57Jemma Sbeg?

  This episode is sponsored by Gymshark. Gymshark has spent over 14 years obsessing over gym clothing and the people who wear it. And let me just say, I think we all know they are very, very good at what they do. No, seriously, their stuff is so good. Their everyday seamless collection is light, it's soft, it's stretchy. All of their stuff just looks good on and it's made for people who love to exercise, whatever exercise that is, lifting, cardio, Pilates, running around campus, maybe just doing errands. Discover Gymshark and find your new favourite gym clothing at gymshark.com.

• 48:34Jemma Sbeg?

  I've been approaching my health really differently this year. I used to be really focused on maximising and doing more. And now I'm just realising that if I listen to what my body needs, I perform way better. And that's why I am obsessed with my Whoop. Truly, you guys, you know I'm such a data and information driven person and I love opening my Whoop app and seeing how my sleep, my stress, my strain is correlating with my mood, with my running performance, with how I'm just feeling day to day. I'm not an elite athlete by any means, but I do really benefit and I also just really enjoy knowing more about my body. And Whoop also gives me these actionable personalised insights that have made me more

• 49:19Jemma Sbeg?

  intentional and meant that I make smarter decisions day to day about what I need rather than just putting my foot on the gas and just going, going, going, going. New members can try Whoop with a 30 day free trial before committing to a membership. That's join.whoop.com/psychology for your free month of Whoop. Hi, this is Jemma Sbeg. Taking care of yourself doesn't have to mean completely changing your routine. Naturewise Vitamin D3 is an easy way to support immune, bone and muscle health every single day. And because quality matters, Naturewise has one of the first NSF certified Vitamin D3 currently on the market.

• 50:02Jemma Sbeg?

  Plus, it's non-GMO, gluten free and third party tested. Visit naturewise.com to explore their Vitamin D3 options and find the one that's right for you, naturewise.com. You know that feeling when your skin just needs a tall drink of water? That's what Clinique Moisture Surge 100 Hour Moisturizer is for. Moisture Surge 100 Hour Moisturizer absorbs instantly and hydrates for 100 hours for plump, glowing skin. That's right, 100 hours. It is a lightweight, oil-free gel cream, safe for sensitive skin. It's allergy tested and fragrance free. I use this all the time.

• 50:43Jemma Sbeg?

  It makes my skin feel so fresh and plump and glowy. Even under makeup, I still see an amazing difference. It never leaves my skin oily or tacky. Try Clinique Moisture Surge 100 Hour today at clinique.com. Feels like moisture surge. Growth isn't linear. There's no magic timeline or secret template and no one understands that quite like Southern New Hampshire University because SNHU has online degree programmes built for whatever path you are on. Tried college before? Transfer up to 90 credits. And if you're new to this, no worries. Every student gets a dedicated academic advisor.

• 51:27Jemma Sbeg?

  And here's the best part, there's no set class times, so school actually fits your life. Ready to get started? Visit snhu.edu/psych. That's snhu.edu/psych.

• 51:42Speaker 00

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.