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Comment by underwater | Hacker News Reader

Mental fog, for me, is a physical symptom of stress and exhaustion. It has nothing to do with having a clean workspace. This article reads like self-help fluff.

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.

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Mental fog, for me, is a physical symptom of stress and exhaustion. It has nothing to do with having a clean workspace.

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.

I think you‘ll find a hundred other things more stressful than a messy environment. Fighting with the partner, illness of a relative, someone yelled at me on the street, I slept too little,...

Saying "x is more stressful than y" does not negate that y creates stress

It creates stress, but an insignificant amount compared to everything else in your life.

We have limited time available each day, so it’s prudent to focus on solving the most stressful factors first.

The rest of that same article says in several different ways that stress is necessary stimulation. So much for that.

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.

>>"mess creates stress"

Everybody is different. Some people enjoy working in a messy room. I guess everybody is crazy in a different way.

Sure, tidying your workspace might help. But how much? How could I take a methodical approach to tackling this problem? I'd like to actually see some data, or at least a dive into the underlying causes of brain fog. This is Hacker News after all.

To some extent so that is worth making it a habit, makes everything easier on yourself and saves a lot of mental energy that in a stressful situation a surplus extra energy could help. I think that tiding one’s workspace also abstractly hints toward tiding one’s life which you probably agree is a good thing.

All are good. Sometimes brain fog is a medical condition.

I had it bad for years before finding out I had an autoimmune condition.

How do you even go about figuring this out. Do you just go to a primary practitioner and say “hey XYZ” and ask for a test/recommendation to a specialist? I haven’t been to the doctor in years outside emergencies and have suspected some issues but I’m not sure if I’m particularly interested in the cost / time involvement of any treatments for anything.

Suspected for 20 years, since I was a teenager. Would ask doctors and they always dismissed as I looked heathy.

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.

This is a strange feeling we get from doctors if we fall into a gray zone/edge case and if they cannot find anything to diagnose they might think we are hypochondriacs or suggest seeing a shrink. I think proble will be solved by and with technology. I imagine one day we’ll step into a box which would scan everything in slices and dices and would point to the problem. Even more interesting it will be when it actually applies all that knowlege on us somehow helping our bodies would fix themselves, something like the startek tricorder..

Why the paracetamol?

Usually tension headaches and brain fog are intertwined for me. On the occasions that I've taken paracetamol it's seemed to help. Far from as clear cut as I insinuated above, though.

Paracetamol certainly can have mental side-effects, which may be beneficial. Perhaps this could explain part of it.

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/apr/14/paracetamol-...

http://www.natureworldnews.com/articles/1440/20130418/tyleno...

It could be due to inflammation

You should take Ibuprofen for inflammation. Paracetamol is 'just' an analgesic.

Indeed, however most people do not know this :)

Paracetamol doesn't have a significant anti-inflammatory action.

This is literally the purpose of paracetamol. What do you feel it is for, if not as an anti-inflammatory aid?

EDIT: Interesting discussion in child comments, certainly news to me!

True. An analgesic drug will help cope with the pain caused by inflammation, but an anti-inflammatory like Ibuprofen will reduce the cause of the pain.

That's fair. I wish we had more properly selective COX-2-only inhibitors, despite the scare about heart issues. I may misunderstand how inhibiting COX 1 would balance that out, but I'd be surprised if it does. Many herbs are selective to COX-2, it's like every polyphenol and its mother seems to inhibit 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!

As someone dealing with some painful dental issues during lockdown over the past few months, I have to say, I approve of the endocannabinoid approach.

I've heard of Ketamine as another non-opioid approach to pain, I don't know how effective it is quite for pain or dental issues.

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 wouldn't touch Ketamine. Too many bad side-effects.

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. ;)

Oddly, I've just found this concept to be analogous to many other 'ills' we face as humans. And not just the physical ones.

Sometimes we just want to stop feeling pain.

Sometimes we feel the need to try and stop the cause of it.

Paracetamol doesn't have any significant anti-inflammatory effects. It's just an analgesic (painkiller).

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 touched on it in my other comment -- I got hung up on its CB1... Agonism, I believe? Which I'd always asserted was strictly inflammatory in addition to maybe any other analgesic side effects.

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! :)

Pain killers can reduce the sensation of pain in other ways than by reducing inflammation - paracetamol is one of these.

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