You’re feeling sluggish and you can’t remember the last time you focused for more than five minutes – but you went to bed early and haven’t had a drink all week. Stylist examines the rise of brain fog and how to wade through it…

Words: Moya Sarner

It’s 4pm and you’ve spent the last 10 minutes trying to read an email from your boss. Failing to get any further than the third sentence before losing the thread of what she’s saying, you sigh and pick up your phone. After scrolling through your texts for a few seconds, you glance back at your screen. Five documents sit open on your computer; each one ending on an unfinished sentence. Your eyes won’t focus, your head feels like it’s filled with cotton wool, and you’ve already forgotten the thing you were about to add to your to-do list.

Sound vaguely – hazily –familiar? Known within the science community as ‘cognitive fatigue’, until recently brain fog was associated with ageing. But recently it’s started to cloud the consciousness of younger generations too – and its reach is becoming worryingly widespread. Characterised by a frustrating sluggishness that leaves your synapses slowed-down and a neural lethargy that renders you unable to remember that word on the tip of your tongue, brain fog isn’t simply a catchier term for general fatigue or casual forgetfulness. Instead, specialists working at a new wave of ‘brain spas’ opening across Europe and the US believe the condition is the first warning sign of potential burnout (a full psychological or physical collapse brought on by extreme stress and anxiety). In fact, one fifth of millennials are already reporting symptoms of concentration-loss and memory problems – while a new study has shown that our capacity to focus has dropped from 12 seconds to 8.25 since the digital era exploded in 2000.

Unsurprisingly then, while some scientists speculate that cognitive decline could be caused by changes in the three main hormones that control mood, energy and focus (that’s dopamine, serotonin and cortisol), others believe it’s a symptom of our lifestyles sending us into a state of literal distraction. “If you can’t remember where you put your key, it’s unlikely to be a memory problem,” explains Dr Richard Sylvester, consultant neurologist at Homerton University Hospital in London. “It’s more likely to be that you were distracted when you put it down. Often people with brain fog will forget conversations, leave the fridge open or walk into a room and not know what they went in for. But what that signifies is more likely a problem with their attention span rather than their short-term memory. So while its effects are not to be underestimated, it’s reassuringly reversible.”

Reassuring maybe, but why has brain fog become such an accepted part of our lives? Physically, we’re in our prime – 47% of us report eating more healthily in the last year, we smoke far less than Baby Boomers, two thirds of us maintain that alcohol isn’t important to our social lives and more of millennials go to the gym than any other age group. And, as the popularity of sleep trackers and insomnia apps proves, we’re also obsessed with getting enough shut-eye. “But brain fog isn’t about physical fatigue,” clarifies Dr Sylvester. “Your brain is like a muscle – it can get tired just by being used. Constantly making decisions or putting it under mental strain is likely to cause cognitive dysfunction even if your body is well rested.”

And while we might not need experts to tell us our minds are overloaded, we would benefit from pausing (and putting down our phones) for a moment to let the fact sink in. Because a new slew of studies show that, as well as burnout, feeling overwhelmed can cause serious mental health problems, including anxiety and depression. “When your brain is suffused with the stress hormone, cortisol, your prefrontal cortex – that’s the part of your brain responsible for thinking – shuts down, leading to brain fog,” explains Jean Gomes, author of The Way We’re Working Isn’t Working. “You can’t string a sentence together, and you become paralysed with frustration.” Psychotherapist Dr Mike Dow, author of The Brain Fog Fix, agrees. “When your cortisol levels are off balance, you might feel so frayed that the smallest problem sets you off, or so unmotivated that you can barely drag yourself through the day, or both. It’s very worrying.”

Researchers from the American Psychological Association believe we’ve fooled ourselves into thinking we’re a generation of multitaskers – despite all evidence showing that our brains simply aren’t capable of focusing on more than three tasks at once. In fact, they found that switching between activities actually makes us up to 40% less productive, while another study of 1,100 people by the Institute of Psychiatry at the University of London shows that ‘second-screening’ lowers your IQ more than smoking marijuana. In other words, all those hours spent hopping between work, WhatsApp, email and Instagram are forcing our brains to switch focus at an unsustainable speed – fogging up our thoughts in the process, and setting us up to become prime candidates for cognitive burnout.

Of course, it doesn’t help that we’re hormonally programmed to crave the very thing that clouds our cognizance in the first place. Despite the fact that multitasking has been proven to increase our levels of the stress hormone, cortisol, it also prompts the production of dopamine – the feel-good, ‘reward’ hormone. Completing even the smallest of tasks leads to an up-tick in dopamine, a hormone that serves to enhances our feeling of happiness. But then, as the euphoria fades, our response times slow; our over-stimulated synapses fire-off conflicting signals to our already over-wrought central nervous system, and our brains become tired and unfocused. “Your hormone levels are essential to thinking and feeling your best,” explains Dow. “If your brain chemistry is amiss, all the brain training, psychotherapy, and positive thinking in the world won’t cure what ails you.”

Fortunately, there are still small, do-able changes we can all make to clear away the neural nebula. Brain spas are one option. Perhaps the simplest is what we put in our bodies. Water is a key weapon for fighting brain fog – a recent study from the University of Barcelona shows being just 2% dehydrated can impair brain function. Similarly, it may be worth seeing a dietician. “The gut is home to over 100 million neurons and they communicate with your brain via hormones. A bowel problem will have an impact on your cognitive function – when people with previously undiagnosed celiac disease get help, they often report having a clearer head.”

Beyond nutrition, brain fog experts believe that breaking your day into 90-minute segments (known as ‘ultradian sprints’) will allow yourself to follow your brain’s natural energy levels and preserve clarity of thought. Gomes explains that not doing this comes with the risk of accumulating a cognitive deficit, which will only catch up with our concentration levels later in the afternoon. She recommends a 30-second ‘brain dump’ every hour and a half to write down all the thoughts that are flying through your mind. “I do this five times a day, whenever I feel myself getting distracted,” she says – adding that turning off the notifications on our social media apps helps our brains to focus on one task at a time, too.

“Think about the impact brain fog is having and take action,” says Alyssa Burns-Hill, a hormone health specialist. “If you were older and this was a permanent feature, it might be called dementia. It’s easy for us to brush away mental health issues but we can take action.”

And if you’re on your third attempt to finish this article without picking up your iPhone, the good news is that there are some more intensive solutions available to try too. We sent Stylist’s acting features director Lizzie Pook to try one out.

What really happens at a brain spa?

Enduring brain fog sufferer Lizzie Pook checks into the Cognitive Development Unit at Sha Wellness Clinic in Alicante, Spain to try and clear her head

Stylist takes a trip to a ‘brain spa’ to investigate how to clear your mind and avoid brain fog