Strategies to Reduce Brain Fog and Improve Clear Thinking
thriveglobal.in
thriveglobal.in
The solutions I've found are get to enough sleep, try not to fill my day with mentally taxing work or meeting and, in a pinch, drink coffee or take paracetamol.
The first sentence of the article is "mess creates stress". I don't see a contradiction. It could be that article is wrong, but I have heard many people express that sentiment. If you have evidence that it's not true, I would like to see it.
Everybody is different. Some people enjoy working in a messy room. I guess everybody is crazy in a different way.
There have been observational studies (vs plain declarative opinion pieces like this one) that correlate clutter with intelligence, creativity, and productivity.
The mechanism probably doesn't work the same way for everyone, and so clutter probably isn't good for everyone, but that also means it isn't wrong for everyone either. So much for that.
The article is essentially garbage.
EDIT: Interesting discussion in child comments, certainly news to me!
Sometimes we just want to stop feeling pain.
Sometimes we feel the need to try and stop the cause of it.
I looked and you are correct, I did not realize that acetaminophen was not considered an anti-inflammatory. It certainly is antipyretic, and it appears to have some selective COX-2 activity and some potentially mysterious endocannabinoid activity, which I'd personally consider to be anti-inflammatory in one way. That's truly puzzling, I felt I knew that space decently well due to looking into the inflammatory pathways due to MCAS, I stand corrected on the generally public perception of acetaminophen.
Hopefully endocannabinoid-class drugs and supplements will enter the mainstream/be developed in a generic, OTC fashion with the easing of perception and laws in cannabinoids. I legitimately wonder how much OTC medication has been held back by analog similarities to the (currently and previously) federally illicit substances in those plants.
All good stuff around, I stand corrected and my apologies for any curtness. Have a good one!
Dental pain is awful. I'm so sorry. I had a hospital-and-hydrocodone-worthy case of oral thrush a few years back and beyond losing the ability to speak...well, at all, for a time, I found myself slamming the counters with my fist so the new pain in my bruised arms took away from the roaring, unending pain in my mouth.
I can't imagine having that kind of pain for more than a day or two before being in a dangerous mental state with respect to my own personal safety.
I've always had a high pain-threshold, but recently I've been 'beside myself' with pain (and a ringing in the ears, driving me mad at night, at times). Cannabinoids have been hugely helpful.
Thankfully, I have managed to get an appointment with the dentist next week. But I've had to wait longer than I wanted for it.
Years ago, I snapped my leg in half. Tibia and Fibula cleanly snapped. Had Titanium plates put in. That was easier to deal with than dental pain. ;)
There's even some interesting research on exactly /why/ it isn't - but like many drugs there's not really consensus on how exactly it works (a summary is available: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1460-9592.... )
I've seen lots of people confuse paracetamol and ibuprofen - maybe that's what's happened here?
I'll hold it in some level of mystery until I can figure out what the divide is founded on, it's certainly an unexpected result from my perspective.
Thanks for clarifying, much appreciated! :)
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/apr/14/paracetamol-...
http://www.natureworldnews.com/articles/1440/20130418/tyleno...
I had it bad for years before finding out I had an autoimmune condition.
Eventually health completely collapsed. But blood work was fine, I looked fine.
Saw 30+ doctors in the span of 2 years. I had a 4 pages of list symptoms and issues. I carried around. I saw a neuro-ophthalmologist he read the list, started asking specific questions about symptoms I didn’t list, but did have. He declared I had Sjogrens. I had never heard of it.
A year later I had an official diagnosis from a rheumatologist. Even that I had to fight hard to get tests run.
Treatment started making a big difference.
I would never have gotten heathy via regular doctors.
If you are more disciplined than me, meditation in place of napping could work. But napping is easier and more enjoyable to me.
As for brain fog itself, I think proper nutrition is very important. Our body needs many different micronutrients to operate at optimal capacity and many peoples' diets don't meet these.
Lastly, I don't know how true this is, but a chiropractor told me that poor neck posture can result in reduced blood flow to the brain which can reduce your cognitive capacity (i.e. feeling of brain fog).
With the pandemic I've had lots more dietary control and was more likely to notice what caused a certain effect.
I've given up sugar and it helps tremendously. It takes a while. Also getting enough good sleep.
I think a lot of people end up falling into the Candida/Naturopathic woo along the way due to the seemingly higher presence of provider empathy. Not that dysbiosis or supplements don't have a lot to do with helping some of the day to day, but it seems to be a downright strange obsession for some folks to the exclusion of actually treating the root of the symptoms (were it even possible, in some cases).
I think your smack dab on the sugar and refined carbs stuff too. That seems like it'd be good for everybody. I know I might be in a slim and tiny minority here, but I'm definitely in favor of a sugar tax on foods with added sugars/raw sugar/sugary substitutes that are sugar under a different name (fructose, dextrose, etc...) by itself...
One thing I didn't expect is that the nature of hunger changed for me. I experience a lot less hunger now that I'm eating less and for a shorter portion of the day.
I listened to a Joe Rogan episode where he interviewed Dr Rhonda Patrick. She said if you ate strictly within 12 (or 10) hours you would have better muscle mass among other things. I see now she calls it time restricted eating.
I tried it a few days but it was really hard, I felt cranky. But it seems like it works for you. Maybe I'll try again - there may be a hump to get over.
When I first tried limiting carbs I would start roaming around the kitchen looking for something to munch on, but after a week or two that calmed down.
My energy levels are always elevated, I sleep better, and the clarity of thought that comes with a Keto + IF combination is something I only wish I had known about when I was younger.
Whilst I'm speaking anecdotally, the benefits are grounded in science and is something that anyone can try. Once you get over the initial "keto adaptation" period the rewards will be well worth the effort.
Also, intermittent fasting (and even just removing sugar) is something that can be done separately if you're not a fan of low/zero carb lifestyles.
Carbohydrates to be a source of brain fog as I get older. I've also found cutting them out to 0g/day seems to increase anxiety for me (studies have shown reducing it below a certain amount... 50g?... definitely increases cortisol, a stress hormone). So finding a good balance in the diet is key.
CO2 can also cause brainfog, so measuring CO2 content and cracking open a window can really make working indoors less constricting.
- Get enough quality sleep. The brain needs that down time.
- Exercise to the point you break a sweat as many days per week as possible.
- Mind your diet. Too much sugar and carbs do more harm than good.
Edit: my snark was unwarranted, as commenters helped me realize. Apologies.
That's not to say that's what the article is, just to be clear. But given our incredibly finite amount of time alive, I think it's important to have good filtering heuristics on how one spends one's time.
As an example, people who criticize Qanon as bonkers often get asked to just watch a few (long) Q-fan videos. If somebody asked me to do that, I'd say no. I have an infinite number of better ways to spend my time. All of that goes in my "garbage content" bucket. I know all I care to from the reports of others who have dug around in the bucket.
If you'd like to convince somebody they've mis-bucketed something, I think a better approach is to say exactly what you see as redeeming about the content of the article.
* Give up clutter. Here they make some vague statements about clutter causing chronic stress and then talk about "Marie Condo" (actually, its Marie Kondo). They don't cite any real research to back up their statements about clutter and stress. Here's an article suggesting a correlation between cluttered workspaces and innovation: https://www.inc.com/geoffrey-james/a-messy-desk-is-a-sign-of....
That is the only one of these points I really take issue with. Rather, I'm just saying that all these other points are pretty well published on just about every other self-help or productivity blog to have ever existed, and this article is just repackaging them without adding anything, which is what I'm saying is the problem with Thrive Global in general.
While it's true there's not much new, for better or worse she has "juice" with her C Level peers. Would I prefer someone else? Probably. But all in all Thrive - for now - is better than nothing at all.
As somebody who got involved in the Agile movement before it had that name, I initially thought the productization of the movement was a positive. In retrospect, it was terrible. The packaged version of "Agile" ended up having most of the nutrients and all of the fiber removed. It was empty calories and an organizational sugar high, all the feeling of process improvement with none of the work (and none of the value).
My expectation with packaged, CEO-friendly wellness is more of the same: a way for CEOs to pay lip service to the trend of the moment without ever having to do anything difficult, without solving the systemic and organizational problems that harm the health of their workers.
I'm not being combative. I'm sincerely looking for a conversation on such things. To me it's all very obvious. But even a pandemic hasn't seemed to change necessary behaviours (e.g., diet).
To do this properly, you can't proselytize, which is generally what I see "raising awareness" to be -- you need to translate beyond the interpersonal gap and figure out how to say things in someone else's language building on their values. To your point, if that means sending a cookie-cutter Thrive Global clickbait article, well, maybe that's exactly what the product is designed for.
Funny, by writing this all out, I seem to understand that old canard about management consultants being primarily paid to help executive fight internal battles a lot better...
For example, we recently had an emergency where part of my team had to work on the weekend. So I started the custom of "incident retros". Before the meeting I started an incident timeline and then asked others to contribute. In the meeting, we read through the timeline, queued up discussion topics, and voted on which ones to pursue. As we discussed, we listed possible action items. At the end we voted on those and people volunteered to pick up the ones they thought they could do.
On the one hand, this is a pretty normal technique for improving business processes. On the other, it helped train people that 1) weekend work is not normal and we should prevent it, 2) we as a team have authority over our work conditions, and 3) we can take frequent small action toward more healthy work conditions.
I don't think one of these will make a big difference. But over time I expect we can create a culture where employee health and worker productivity are seen as closely aligned, and where if managers try to order us to do something foolish, the team will feel empowered to push back. If in that push citing wellness pablum helps, I'm happy to do it. But lasting change comes from shifting organizational power.
Putting aside whether Thrive is a solution, would you not agree that the forces pushing our corporate culture towards burnout behaviors warrant some push back? And if so, deserve something less like lip-service and more like the tools used to capture our attention?
[am the author]
If you've struggled with doing these methods, or persistently fall back on old habits besides trying them, and it's causing you some distress - you might want to check out https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/adult-adhd/sy...
Nearest as anyone can tell right now, it affects ~ 4-5% of the adult population, men and women in equal amounts, but is poorly understood and often attributed to other causes. Women in particular.
Yep, there they are.
Give up the clutter
Multi-tasking doesn’t work
Give up the urgent distraction
Stop feeding your comfort
Don’t sit still
Stop consuming media and start creating instead
Comfort provides a state of mental security.
[...]
But in the long-term, comfort is bad for your brain.I could be wrong, though, I'm absolutely open to hearing different thoughts and opinions across the spectrum (minus some of the the strange conspiracy stuff as of late -- I'd assert that it's always been a dull roar but definitely has popped up in more strength recently).
Maybe we can hold the line and hope for some change from dang and the crew. Or maybe it'll pass (though I'd rather not hang my hat on that one there). It's a good site, so hopefully we can hold onto the old "90's practitioner's watering hole" in some way or fashion going forward as a community.