Brainfog

Maybe you've heard of brainfog. Perhaps you suffer from brainfog. If not, you may be wondering what brainfog refers to. Well, let me try to explain.

When I developed ME, Myalgic Encephalomyelitis, apart from the devastating and surprising refusal of my body to do the things it could previously do, my sleep suffered dreadfully. I believe this had a lot to do with the brainfog which I then started to suffer. Without proper sleep anyone's brain starts to misfire but added to the neural damage of ME it's a sure fire way of not being able to function normally.

My sleep at that time was severely affected. Sometimes this meant being awake all night and, obviously, tired all day. Sometimes I did sleep at night, though the sleep was not like real sleep at all. I would become unconscious, switch off you might say, but wake suddenly in the morning without any sense of having slept. No drowsiness, no dreams, and I hadn't moved at all during the night. I don't know what kind of sleep that describes, not being an expert, but it isn't normal and it isn't refreshing or healing.

It would appear that, although I went to sleep, it was only into stage 1 light sleep; I never entered REM sleep in which dreams occur, or reached deep or slow wave/delta wave, sleep. During the deep stages of non REM sleep, the body repairs and regenerates tissues, builds bone and muscle, and appears to strengthen the immune system. So without that it's hardly surprising that ME sufferers are very ill.

I still have disturbed nights and reversed inner time clock issues, though when I do sleep now I do tend to sleep "properly". I have dreams, and often feel that warm drowsiness on waking, though not always.

However, when this lack of proper sleep goes on for months or years, it's no wonder the brain starts to give up.  The inability to concentrate is the most obvious symptom. Reading, a favourite pastime, became such hard work. After a very short time my brain would feel "full". And, worse, I would read the same sentence over and over again before it made any sense. Watching tv game shows used to be fun, but now I found that by the time the presenter had got to the end of a question I'd forgotten the start of it. My short term memory was shot.

Losing words, in the way a stroke victim does, is also a problem. Everyone has this problem at times of course, especially as we get older, but with brainfog it's constant. Searching for the word you want is so frustrating, but in time I learned to stop trying and just either find another word that means the same, or just describe the thing I meant. I find now that just changing the subject in my mind, looking away as it were, makes it easier. When I stop trying, the word I wanted will sometimes just pop into my mind.

Personally I also lost the ability to type. I had been touch typing for many years but suddenly I found that, although I knew what I wanted to type, my fingers weren't getting the messages from the brain. I would type with the correct fingers but on the wrong hand, or the letters came out in the wrong order, and my thumbs developed a mind of their own and stuck spaces in wherever they felt like it. It's like a kind of dyslexia in reverse. There may be a name for it but I don't that.

This is all very irritating of course. I still tend to spend more time correcting my typos than actually typing, thought it's not as bad as it used to be. At my worst I simply couldn't remember the alphabet. And at my age that's not funny. Well, not very funny.

Brainfog, therefore, is a way of describing the brain's inability to think, to concentrate, to work things out. Pretty much as it sounds really.  I have to say that I have improved to some extent. I put it down to the handfuls of supplements, recommended by Dr Myhill, an ME specialist; in particular the brain feeding ones, which made a huge difference to my ability to sleep. Fish oils or other foods containing EPA and DHA for instance. The brain is something like 60% fatty tissue, so feeding this is important. However the thing that made the biggest change for me was PhosphatidylSerine, sometimes written as two words, an amino acid vital for neural function. Although normally the body can create it from foods it is being looked at now as a supplement for Alzheimer's patients.

I've seen various articles saying that PS helps, or it doesn't help, or it may help. All I know is that within a few days of taking it I started to sleep normally and over time my brainfog has improved. One quote says:
 "Because PS is necessary for effective neurotransmission, PS deficiency is linked to mental impairment, including Alzheimer's and non-Alzheimer's dementia, depression and Parkinson's disease among middle-aged and elderly people."

www.naturalnews.com

So whatever the nay-sayers may claim I know it did wonders for me. I don't have shares in any company whatsoever, so don't imagine I have anything to gain from this statement. I simply want to explain how I have improved my cognitive functions. Mind you, I've had ME for 28 years, being mostly housebound for the last few years so it may be possible that this has helped with some degree of recovery. However, the fact that this supplement worked within days, literally, to improve my ability to sleep, dream, and feel more normal, suggests to me that it isn't coincidence. It is, however, purely circumstantial evidence which counts for nothing with most scientists.

To have a brain that is akin to an elderly person with dementia, while you are still young, or fairly young, is very frustrating. We call it brainfog. It occurs in people with Fibromyalgia I understand, and quite possibly in other long term disabilities. My own experience is that it can be improved, if not entirely cured. I hope something I have shared here makes sense to others. I still have some problems myself, after all.