Brain Fog and Complex Trauma

once in a while in their life something is going on and all of a sudden it's like their brain stops working they go into this brain fog and it's a very frustrating thing it's a very confusing thing for people there can be degrees of brain fog and and you can experience them on the same day um so you can go from kind of a mild brain fog where you're just a little bit sluggish in your thinking have trouble finding words to more severe brain fog where you lose the inability you lose the ability to speak

it it's it's just all very much on a spectrum so let me give you some examples of just various ways that this can show up so I know a a young man who great business mind great business potential and so coming out of University got jobs did extremely well in the business World very sharp mentally great things thinker great analytical thinker and so he decided he wanted to go out on his own and be an entrepreneur start his own business he had all the skill set the the brain for it and he got out on

his own and all of a sudden he found he couldn't think he he he had trouble making decisions it it was just a terrible terrible thing for him it's like his brain shut down and what he began to realize was he did Super well well as long as the stress wasn't too great as long as somebody else was the boss making the final decisions carrying the weight and responsibility of the whole organization as soon as he put himself in that Ro role the stress became too great and his brain didn't work as well so that's

one example another one is a a person I know well and they were at a going through a very stressful time in their life and one evening all of a sudden their brain got very fuzzy and then they lost the ability to speak they just clammed up they couldn't find words they couldn't speak and then the next day they realized that they had been watching a movie that evening before and they couldn't remember anything about that movie and so they realized it affected their memory as well so that is another example a third one from

somebody I know and they wrote this I have noticed that if I am dealing with a time crunch and I have a lot to do or I have to do something that I don't like doing my default and it's almost imperceptible it's a mental tape that says I'm failing or I'm going to fail I begin to have a super hard time focusing it's all of a sudden something happens in the brain where they can't concentrate properly so they tend to Jump Then from task to task in the middle of what they should be doing so

oh let's do this let's do this let's do this I especially have a hard time focusing on tasks that require intense thought and focus rather I find myself looking for quick and easy tasks to do or I catch myself switching to some mindless task so those are examples just to give you a sense of what we're talking about many of you can quickly identify that yes you've experienced this a lot of people when they go through this they just think it they're the only one that it's happening to and they get really down on thems

and think something's wrong with them know that you're not alone this happens to a lot of people and what we're going to look at now is that this comes out of primarily complex trauma this is a common complex trauma thing now before we get into that I need to say that brain fog can be caused by other things so brain fog can be caused by hormonal changes so some women in pregnancy go through brain fog it can also be caused by a change in diet so some people who change their diet up go through some

brain fog because of changes in sugars and stuff in their body if you abuse alcohol that can cause brain fog if you you have a new medication that medication might cause brain fog for you so there are different things that can cause brain fog but what I want to focus on is the complex trauma part because I think it's a the main part for most people and what it really is about it's the brain's way of trying to help a child survive in very severe trauma so the child is facing extreme danger something that if

the child was to look at accurately If the child was to see clearly it would be too much too overwhelming because the child doesn't have the tools or support to deal with it so to for the brain to let the child process and see this terrible thing accurately would do tremendous damage to the child so what the brain does to protect that child is to cause brain fog it causes the child's brain to start shutting down so that they're not able to process everything to see everything accurately to protect the child it's not going to

allow the child to go to this very painful scary stressful place because the child doesn't have the tools to handle that what the brain does and that now we'll go to the kind of the science the chemicals of that what the brain does to help is when there's severe stress severe danger severe pain the brain kicks in the sympathetic nervous system and that means it kicks in a shot of cortisol and cortisol fires up the adrenaline system so that the person now has energy to fight or flight but cortisol what happens with cortisol in the

brain is it shuts down the cortex it says we don't have time to think about what to do we got to get to our brain stem and our lyic system and just react we have to make a decision to survive and we got to pick the one that looks like it's going to lead to immediate safety so so let's not weigh out all kinds of options we got to go into action mode so that's the design of cortisol shut down the thinking get into the lyic and brain stem so we can act to survive the

problem with complex trauma is that cortisol is pumping all the time and what we're going to see is that that begins to negatively affect the brain but also when a a person gets to adult life that system the stress system can get activated very easily they're often in it as a default setting and so cortisol is what causes the brain fog that's the bottom line it's about cortisol but there's one other piece to this if the danger gets more severe and cortisol's not enabling the child to fight or flight they're too little the brain brings

in another chemical natural opioids and that shuts down things even further that takes a person to the dorsal vagal system where that it puts them into freeze mode it puts them almost to a catatonic a dissociative mode and that sets them up for even greater brain fog they Retreat into an inner world and their ability to be present and engage the present World kind of disappears and so two chemicals are working to create brain fog cortisol and opioids now what's really important for people in recovery to understand is this so we've been looking at cortisol

being produced or opioids being produced because your external circumstances are too painful or stressful and the Brain says don't have the tools to deal with it don't have the supports to deal with it so we have to blur reality so that we protect the person that's key but secondly what can happen is if a person starts to heal and they're going into deeper inner worlds and accessing deeper wounds the brain might actually say not ready to go there to go to that wound would be opening a can of worms that is way too painful so

as they are in the recovery Journey starting to heal and they start getting close to a core painful issue they might actually experience brain fog because their brain is saying don't want to go there no don't think I'm ready to go there so let's start blurring everything again so the bottom line is brain fog is not just about protecting a person from present day stress and pain it's also about prot protecting them from hidden pain so be aware of that in your recovery Journey now I want to read to you a bunch of kind of

scientific researchers and what they say about cortisol and the Brain just to really drive home what what I've said in very general terms so sterina researcher says this things can go particularly arai when it comes to moments of heightened emotional stress or trauma there's a well documented Effect called the weapon Focus effect if you're held at gunpoint all your attention is focused on the weapon the most threatening item on the scene that hijacks all your attentional resources onto that gun and it leads to the failure to perceive the rest of the scene so when there's

danger your brain becomes hyperfocused on the D danger and it just overlooks everything else so that's one piece Dr Chloe Ro Roland a clinical psychologist says this it's an interesting really interesting function of the brain part of your brain namely the hippocampus the main he memory Hub and the amydala the so-called emotion Center basically go offline because of the chemicals like cortisol that are released at the point of intense stress so you don't fully lay down the memory of what's Happening then because the memories are essentially offline when things begin to come back they appear

to be fragmented so one result of cortisol is it prevents memories from getting laid down smoothly and then when you try to recall it's just pieces and fragments Dr Jolene Brighton a study following a famous cohort called the framington heart study found that higher cortisol levels especially in women were linked to poor performance in memory organization visual perception and attention the study comprised over 2,000 participants primarily in their 40s those with higher cortisol levels also were associated with physical alterations to the brain which became linked to dementia and Alzheimer's disease Dr Krishan so what's causing

the blockage of information in your brain well there's no def definitive answer one idea is that your body's immune system response could cause inflammation in your brain what causes your body's inflammation response stress and cortisol so when inflammation occurs this could cause a temporary blockage in processing information brain fog can be caused by chronic stress hormonal changes and blood sugar imbalances brain fog is a sort of manifestation of some type of inflammation or chronic stress response chronic stress can have secondary effects it's impacts your sleep your nutrition and your physical ability those secondary issues can

lead lead to or be associated with psychiatric disorders so what we're seeing is all of this cortisol in the brain it causes brain fog but it can begin to cause dementia Alzheimer's other psychiatrist disorders it is taking its toll on the brain but then it affects physical stuff sleep autoimmune stuff it and we've done a talk on it it has just got a profound negative of effect suppress cortisol several other Studies have noted that cortisol impacts brain volume in regions known to affect cognition including gray matter which is vital for processing information and the hippocampus

which is essentially for memory so long-term effects of cortisol it affects the brain's volume how big the brain is in certain areas and that can then cause cuse that you slide into brain fog much more easily than a other person would I found it interesting just to kind of back away from this and look at okay we're looking at cortisol and we're looking at cortisol and brain fog but just so you're aware what else does high cortisol levels do so it's connected to anxiety depression and irritability it's connected to muscle weakness fatigue and sleep problems

when there's a lot of cortisol happening people can either get weight gain or unexplained weight loss it can go either way for them some when there's ongoing cortisol happening it changes their skin so there's a thinning of the skin they easily bruise there's stretch marks that easily happen it definitely affects your whole digestive system so you have Digest issues irritable bowel diarrhea constipation Crohn's disease nausea all of that excessive cortisol then high blood pressure headaches memory Pro problems and then brain fog so this cortisol issue is just massive Aaron triby says this if you ever

felt like stress affects the way you think here's some of the few consequences of high cortisol lels on the brain so the amydala hippocampus pre prefrontal cortex are the most affected areas of the brain by cortisol together they control your emotions your learning your memory your executive function and decisionmaking so cortisol is going to affect all of those negatively and that's what we've been looking at then you have mild cognitive impairment which is sometimes a precursor to Dementia or Alzheimer's disease and again connected to elevated cortisol levels or overexposure to cortisol can kill off brain

cells and so smaller brain volume HPA activity which is your response to stress has been linked which releases cortisol has been linked to more rapid decline in patients with Alzheimer's disease now I need to just add one piece here so what we've looked at is that one of the brain's responses when a child is facing something very scary is to shut down the brain but there are other responses that some they become their goto more than brain fog or there might be a blend of brain fog plus these other ways of coping so let me

just give them to you so a person when they're facing something very scary very stressful all of a sudden they just want to change the subject they don't want to talk about it anymore they they want to talk about something else so that's their way of kind of diverting the brain's attention to something less stressful or they might want to just go do something else so they need a distraction they need to get away from that circumstance and go find something else to do so that's why people all a sudden want to do a Mindless

numbing task they can think of all kinds of little jobs they'd like to do just to distract themsel others when they're in a very painful situation and the topic is Scary or stressful they divert attention of everybody else from the topic onto themsel and they go look at me and here's what's going on in my life and all of a sudden if I can be the center of attention then the painful topic isn't the center of attention others as soon as the topic is getting too painful they can't sit still they get extremely agitated they

got to get up they got to move their foot starts dancing because the pressure is Building inside and sometimes they'll get angry get very irritable and lash out at people that's their way of trying to avoid that topic so those are just some other things that can happen for people the brain fog is a symptom so the danger is to think I just need to fix the symptom if you try to fix the symptom without fixing the real issue which is there's too much stress in your life right now you're never really going to fix

the brain fog so understand the real issue is the stress brain fog is the symptom now there's going to be some things we can do to help with that symptom in the moment but the key thing is you have to begin to look at the stress of your life that's the key problem that's what's got to get attention that's what's got to change that's what's got to get fixed