What actually is brain fog?

The Rest Room

Like many people living with chronic illness and chronic pain, brain fog is a normal (but bloody annoying) part of my daily life. Whilst I can talk about it subjectively, I never spent much time thinking about what brain fog actually is.

I’m not particularly adept at using visual and descriptive imagery to explain things, so I loved when my friend said that brain fog to her is “like trying to load Netflix on dial up internet on a windows 98 computer.”

In today’s episode, I’m joined by Dr Sabina Brennan, a neuroscientist, health psychologist, and author of the book Beating Brain Fog, who also lives with brain fog herself.

Sabina shares some of the fascinating science behind what brain fog is, why people experience brain fog, and all the different ways brain fog can impact us. We’ll also explore what we can do to help.

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Turns out, it’s a lot more interesting and complex than I thought, and I now understand some of my own symptoms (and how I interact with the world) better than I did before.

So, if you struggle with brain fog (whatever that means to you), I think you’ll learn a lot from this episode. I certainly did!

To listen, you can just click play at the top of this email, or you can listen on Apple, Spotify, Amazon and Google. If you’d rather read the transcript of the episode, I’ve made that available on my blog.

To learn about pacing more with chronic illness, check out this episode of The Rest Room Podcast.

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Catch up on my latest issue about growing up in a body that seemingly falls apart at random, and my multi-year quest to learn to feel safer in my body and movement.

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