BRAIN FOG in Barcelona/ BRAIN FOG + what to do about it/ BRAIN FOG + how to reverse it
If you want to enjoy life, your brain has to be healthy.
Short term stress can be good for us (making us more resilient).
But stress that doesn’t let up can change how the brain is wired and make it harder to think clearly.
A lot of us are living with stressed brains right now, which can lead to brain fog:
● Indecisive
● Distracted
● Poor memory
● Moody and irritable
● Low motivation
(Here’s a 6 min. TED talk on how stress changes your brain)
https://www.ted.com/talks/madhumita_murgia_how_stress_affects_your_brain?language=en#t-233692
Back in 2006 I moved to Barcelona to start a practice, and saw how stress could lead to brain fog.
In a very short time, I had to:
● Build a business
● Learn a language
● Find friends
● Figure out rules of a new culture
● Etc!
Super fun, and also really stressful.
Learning Spanish took longer than I thought it would, and I noticed something interesting. If I hadn’t been sleeping well
or was overdoing it in life, things became harder.
I’d stumble over words, forget things I already knew, and there was zero flow to getting my thoughts out. My early
clients were very gracious, but it was embarrassing and bugged me a lot.
In these times, It felt like my brain wasn’t running on all cylinders. Things were dull and out of focus. I could see the
direct connection between stress and how I was learning. Definitely a motivator for me to de-stress and not live on the
adrenaline of that exciting time.
If you’ve got brain fog, it’s most efficient to first find and address some of the triggers in your life.
But if it’s caused by things out of your control, there’s still hope. Under stress, the more primitive hind brain takes over (if you touch the back of your skull where your neck starts, it’s here).
You can activate the part of your brain that turns off stress (touch the top of your forehead, right inside there are the
frontal lobes which can help do that).
Activate the frontal lobes through:
● Meditation
● Light exercise (intense exercise while stressed causes more stress)
● Learn something new (right now I’m learning braille along with my mom who has macular degeneration)
● Gratitude
● Breathing
● Many, many other ways!
This can help flip your brain’s stress switch back off.
Currently, a sign that I may need to de-stress is when I catch myself walking around the house holding my phone, obsessively checking it for… I don’t know what.
I have to notice that, and then not feed it. Then when that impulse is gone, I know my brain isn’t locked into that
stressed state in the same way.
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Stay healthy,
Dr. Laura