Hormonal changes during your menstrual cycle: In the luteal phase of your menstrual cycle, you have higher levels of alertness and cognitive performance compared to the follicular phase (menstruation happens during this phase). Brain fog from COVID could be caused by the illness itself or from problems it causes - like sleep loss. COVID-19: You may feel mentally slow both while ill with COVID-19 and after you’ve recovered from the initial illness if you suffer from long COVID, which you’re more at risk of developing if you’re female, have breathing problems, or ended up in intensive care with COVID. Even the common cold can impair your cognitive function. Being sick: You won’t feel great when you’re sick and your body will be focusing on healing itself, rather than performing at its best. Stress can also easily cause sleep loss, making brain fog even worse. Stress: Chronic stress can reduce your mental performance, especially your memory and judgment. Even mild dehydration can cause fatigue, poor mood, and impaired cognitive functioning. For example, if you eat gluten and have celiac disease. Your lunch may be the reason for brain fog in the afternoon, and you might also experience brain fog if you have food sensitivities. Poor diet: Eating processed foods, having nutritional or vitamin deficiencies in things like omega-3 fatty acids, vitamin B12, or vitamin D, experiencing regular blood sugar crashes and imbalances, or drinking too much alcohol can lead to low energy and reduced mental performance. Your attention, information processing, and visual-motor performance take a hit, and you’ll be increasing your risk of everything from obesity to depression. When you’re out of sync with your circadian rhythm, you might feel low on energy, have trouble concentrating, and feel more irritable. You might be out of sync with it if you’re a shift worker, you’re living at odds with your chronotype (you might be a night owl living in an early bird world), or you have social jet lag - such as when you go to sleep later on the weekends than during the week. Not living in sync with your circadian rhythm: Your circadian rhythm is your body’s roughly 24-hour biological clock. It leaves us feeling sleepy and impairs our mental performance first thing and can last about 90 minutes, or even up to four hours in some people. Sleep inertia is the name for that groggy feeling you get right after waking up. Sleep inertia: There is one form of short-term brain fog that hits us all each morning: sleep inertia. We cover ways to feel more energetic after an all-nighter here. When you’ve been awake for about 18 to 20 hours, you’ll have the same level of cognitive impairment as if you had a blood alcohol concentration of 0.1%, which is higher than the legal driving limit. 
The “recycle rate” of the brain is about 16 hours, meaning staying awake for longer than this can cause your mental performance to start taking a hit.
Staying up late or pulling an all-nighter: You don’t need high sleep debt to build up over time for a lack of sleep to cause brain fog, however.
Sleep debt from sleep disorders like sleep apnea can also cause brain fog symptoms. Insufficient sleep can even cause symptoms that look a lot like concussion. If your sleep debt is higher, this might be behind your brain fog as sleep deprivation can cause lapses in attention, a decline in cognitive abilities, memory loss, and fatigue. We recommend keeping sleep debt below five hours to maximize your energy and mental performance.
The RISE app can work out your individual sleep need and how much sleep debt you’re carrying. High sleep debt: Sleep debt is the running total of how much sleep you owe your body compared to your sleep need - the genetically determined number of hours of sleep you need.
0 kommentar(er)
