Clouding of consciousness

You're noticing you're getting a little bit more irritable or things that used to feel very manageable now are starting to feel overwhelming.

You might notice brain fog or losing your words, right? And that's one of those things that can really get people feeling unsettled.

One of the ones with some of the athletes I work with that they notice is pain, right? They start noticing achiness in their joints.

They're not recovering after their exercises.

Then we can get a lot more control over, well, what can we do in our body to support things like our sleep cycle, to support our perception of stress, and to make it so we're better positioned to meet those external stressors that are happening.

And I think that's really important, too, because I see a lot of women, even in my practice, that come to me and they may not quite be in perimenopause.

And stress is a huge factor in terms of their, you know, all symptoms, their gut health, digestion, their sleep, their walking around kind of in a brain fog all day, ability to lose belly fat, all very similar symptoms, obviously, to perimenopause.

But managing those stressors is really important as well too, right? And I know sometimes it can really overlap in a lot of situations with women as well.

Not fuzzy, not I just can't think all the way, but completely blank.

If your brain fog seems to get worse exactly when your calendar fills up, when the season gets busier, and the to-do list gets longer, that is not a coincidence.

And it's not you losing your mind.

Today I want to explain exactly why that happens.

Is it food? Is it a gift? Is it for the house? And before giving up, I've just wandered through the store hoping that seeing it will jog my memory.

Have you ever done that and then ended up buying half of what you actually needed, forgetting the rest, and then having to come back afterward another time because you didn't get everything you needed? You know, it's not, sometimes we struggle to think, why is this going on? Why am I struggling so much? And I will say that I have learned to connect how much my brain has already been asked to do that week.

What else am I juggling with today? Am I experiencing brain fog? So do you have a week full of appointments, deadlines, a decision every five minutes? All of that is pulling from the same limited pool or resources that your brain has.

And when you realize that, you can realize, okay, that blank or that complete memory loss wasn't a failure.

you know, good binders, things like, you know, your zeolite, your fulvic acid, your humic acids, things like that to really support that gut microbiome while it's taking that hit and afterwards.

And so one of the things with Lyme is, you know, you got the brain fog.

You also have a lot of neurological conditions.

And, you know, how much can that be connected to what's actually going on in the gut?

The gut is where your body, converts amino acids into the neurotransmitters to help you feel good, that regulate your immunes and your emotions.

So I think about when you don't have good gut function, your body can't break down protein, your body can't make neurotransmitters, your brain can't work right.

But then we also know like lime, mold, these opportunistic infections, they also... cause the brain fog, the anxiety, the depression, those things as well.

I think it can be really hard at times for a patient or practitioner to sometimes isolate which one is causing the primary symptoms.

Just because we're experiencing brain fog and perimenopause does not mean that we are at an increased risk for dementia.

These changes are, they almost always get better.

It's almost like your brain is recalibrating.

It's adapting to the hormonal shifts.

And once we navigate through this transition, a lot of times the brain fog lifts.

Welcome to the Empowered Midlife Podcast, where real talk and sisterhood meet to help you thrive through your 40s, 50s, and beyond.

We're your hosts, Dr. Nick and Nat.

Have you ever walked into a room and completely forgot why you went in that room in the first place? Or you see someone and you know you should know their name and it's just not coming to you? Or you're talking about something and you lose your train of thought mid-sentence? or read the same email over and over and over again, and you can't actually compute what you actually read, you're not alone.

It might not completely get rid of, you know, the leaky gut, but your moods will feel better and your thinking will be better.

You'll have clearer, you know, the brain fog will be lifted basically.

When you stick to anti-inflammatory foods, that brain fog is just going to lift and it's going to be a difference of night and day when you start really getting into it.

That's from my own personal experience.

Anytime I went back to like, In and out or, you know, restaurant food.

Dear Throne Team, I always figured drink when you're thirsty was the whole system.

But I get random afternoon headaches and brain fog.

And a coworker said, have you tried just drinking water? And annoyingly, it worked.

Have I been dehydrated this whole time? And I just didn't know.

Yeah.

So that's where the brain fog and the word finding issues and the emotional up and downs, they're real.

One word that I always forget almost every single month during my cycle when my estrogen drops is the word spoon.

Like I can look at a spoon and I cannot for the life of me think what the word is.