If I started to get brain fog again, this is what I would do...

If you are a professional who needs to use your brain to do good work, then you know that brain fog days are no joke. And many of you who are professionals have more than one brain fog day every once in a while. I know there are many professionals who suffer from recurring and chronic brain fog symptoms. These can be debilitating and can put you into professional survival mode instead of the high-performance work you want to contribute.

• What does a professional with brain fog look like?
• Poor motivation (often gets labeled as burnout )
• Low mood that can include depression and anxiety symptoms (also often labeled as burnout or a mood disorder)
• Inability to switch attention between tasks and pick back up where you left off
• Having to have a complicated sticky note or email system that helps things not fall through the cracks
• Forgetting parts of conversations that you are later reminded of in meetings or personal communications
• Having problems finding words to communicate, sometimes right in the middle of a presentation in front of coworkers
• Making excuses or stories to cover up what you know is your declining performance
• Avoiding the networking you know you should do because social interactions leave you feeling tired or you are overwhelmed during interactions.

When this started to happen to me, I did what everyone does. I increased my caffeine intake. I started trying different herbs and nootropics. I ate more sugar, trying to get that buzz of sugar energy that I could use to perform better.?

What I would do differently is I would switch my focus from performing at all costs to my brain health. Because once you do that, your performance is no longer an issue. You absolutely THRIVE.?

On the job in your performance. Socially with friends and colleagues. And in your personal relationships.

Here is the thing. No amount of motivational speeches, extra training, stimulants, or even nootropics will address brain fog symptoms in a real way that optimizes your brain function. I have news for you. Inability to focus, poor memory, and brain fatigue is NOT normal aging. So don't let people tell you that, and more importantly, don't tell yourself that. That's dangerous. That makes you think it is inevitable, and it keeps you from taking the steps you need to take to bring back and keep the optimal brain functioning.

You can have a better brain at 60 than you had at 20.?

Recurrent and chronic brain fog symptoms are a sign that you have neuroinflammation or a neurodegenerative process happening.?

There are three things you need to do to stop that process and get your high-performance functioning back in your work. These are serious performance hacks that will upgrade your quality of life and the quality of your work. Really, when you have a truly well-functioning brain, you are unstoppable.?

Right now, your bar is too low. Your goal might be to get through the day. Your hope for the day is not to be overwhelmed. And to keep in check the anxiety you have that you may get in trouble for something falling through the cracks. And while that might be the best you can do right now (I totally get it), that is not who you are or what you are capable of professionally.?

I want to see you thrive and jump into every opportunity that comes up that brings you joy, passion, and satisfaction.?

And you?need?an optimized brain to do that.?

So what are the steps?

Rescue brain energy (not with stimulants), personalize your supplementation with nutrigenomics, and find and eradicate any root causes that are causing residual brain fog symptoms. ?

You need to switch fuel sources in your brain

In our environment of highly processed foods and higher carbohydrate diets, parts of the brain begin to be unable to use glucose as fuel as efficiently as they used to. This is called brain hypometabolism. You can develop brain hypometabolism in one or more structures of the brain. And then you experience brain fog symptoms. There are treatments in the field of metabolic psychiatry that switch fuel sources away from glucose to fuel that comes from fatty acids that supercharge the brain. These fuels are able to bypass the broken machinery that impedes the use of glucose in the brain.?

Reestablishing brain energy is the first necessary step to recovering from brain fog and having optimal cognitive functioning. You cannot bypass this step. The brain cannot do its regular repair functions, create neurotransmitters, or grow new connections without adequate brain energy. Nothing else you do for your brain fog will be as powerful an intervention as this first step.?

Personalized Supplementation

The next step is to take a look at your 23andme or your AncestryDNA and see what your genes say about what you need. There is a lot of talk about individualized nutrition and not a lot of help or guidance about what that means exactly. It means you may not convert some food substances into bioavailable forms that you can use. This can mean that you eat a decent diet, but you are not converting beta-carotene into bioavailable Vitamin A. You could have genetic SNPs that make it so you need to take higher levels of Vitamin D. You may not be able to convert plant-based fatty acids into usable forms your brain desperately needs. Or perhaps you do not make choline, and you have to get it from your diet or supplements. And I assure you that without these things given to you in bioavailable forms that you can use, you will not have optimal brain function.

I am not interested in you just getting by in your day at work.?

I am interested in watching you optimize.?

And hopefully, you are, too.

Residual Symptoms

After steps one and step two, brains are usually optimized, and people are thriving. But sometimes, there are some residual brain fog symptoms, and we can't let that slide. Untreated brain fog symptoms mean there is still a neurodegenerative process that needs to be addressed. Those don't get better on their own.

So that is when we bring in functional health coaching. We need to rule out any underlying cause that is creating neuroinflammation or getting in the way of enzyme function. Maybe you have a heavy metal burden that has built up over your lifetime and is disrupting hormones and enzyme production. Maybe you have a parasite or an occult bacterial infection that steps one and two couldn't quite clear up. There are a lot of different possibilities. But let me assure you. Functional medicine testing and investigation are 1000 times easier and less expensive once you have done steps one and two. So many chronic health problems resolve just after steps one and two because brain health is directly related to body health, including gut health, adrenal health, and immune health.

If you want to understand better these three steps, I encourage you to sign up for one of my live Brain Fog Recovery webinars here .

It is really important to know that nootropics and stimulants are not going to rescue brain energy or fix underlying micronutrient insufficiencies that can be worsening or even the underlying cause of recurrent and chronic brain fog. They can, in fact, make problems worse.

Anyone who has relied on stimulant medication, nootropics, or just lots of coffee knows that after a time, these do not work any longer. They do not address the root cause of the dysfunction. And if you want to be a high performing professional, switching your perspective on dealing with brain fog and what it means for your performance, earning potential, and quality of life can be a game changer for all you want to accomplish and become.

If this was helpful, I encourage you to apply to my application-only program, The Brain Fog Recovery Program (where I help professionals just like you go from foggy to brain optimized so they can reach their performance goals and thrive) today:

You can apply here .

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