Brain fog: Why so many feel it and why it may pass
“If your brain feels foggy and you’re tired all the time, you’re not alone,” said Rhitu Chatterjee in NPR.org. Mental health–care providers across the U.S. report that they’re hearing such complaints from many people who were never infected with Covid-19, and very few of those experts are surprised. “This kind of mental fog is real.” And though it can be traced to an array of causes, “at the root of it are the stress and trauma of the past year.” You didn’t need to contract the virus to have spent months at a time gripped with anxiety, and that state of mind takes a toll. Anxiety is a fight-orflight response that triggers the release of the hormone cortisol, which elevates heart rate, tires us out, and has been shown to impair attention, concentration, and memory. Brain fog, in other words, is “a normal response to an abnormal year.”
Boredom alone may explain some people’s fogginess, said Moya Sarner in TheGuardian.com. “The brain is stimulated by the new, the different,” and it’s effectively engineered to shut down when nothing changes. In a scenario in which there is “a blending of one day into the next, with no commute, no change of scene, no change of cast,” the mind is also robbed of context that helps it to encode and store memories. Any break in such a repetitive routine will help in restoring normal cognitive function, says neuroscientist Catherine Loveday, but returning to socializing as Covid restrictions are lifted will be especially important. “Our brains wake up in the presence of other people,” Loveday says. Jon Simons, another British neuroscientist, agrees. “Simons’ advice to us all is to get out into the world, to have as rich and varied experiences and interactions as we can.”
It’s not crazy to wonder if we will ever be the same, said Ellen Cushing in TheAtlantic.com. Personally, “I feel like I have spent the past year being pushed through a pasta extruder,” and by the tail end of winter, I was forgetting names, forgetting words, even forgetting why I walked into my kitchen. “The sunniest optimist would point out that all this forgetting is evidence of the resilience of our species,” that humans forget many things surprisingly quickly, and we will quickly forget this trying past year too. I know of the counterevidence, that survivors of major catastrophes show elevated rates of mental-health problems long after the event. But I aspire to escape that fate. “Some Saturday not too long from now, I will go to a party or a bar or even a wedding. I’ll kiss my friends and try their drinks. My synapses will be made plastic by the complicated, strange, utterly novel experience of being alive again, human again. I can’t wait.”