When you go through trauma, it affects both your body and your mind. As time goes by after the trauma is over, you may experience a sluggishness in your ability to think, as well as distractibility that makes it hard to focus. And that can interfere with your entire life. Just as the term implies, brain fog is a lack of mental clarity; in fact, it’s total mental fatigue. You just can’t think clearly, as hard as you try. PTSD is a major factor that can lead to brain fog…. among other things. And even though there are other causes of brain fog, our focus here is the severe brain fog that often occurs after trauma with PTSD.
You May Not REALIZE You Suffer from PTSD
Do you feel disoriented and disconnected from your surroundings? Maybe you have a short attention span and easily lose your train of thought. Sound familiar? Your memory may be sketchy, and you find yourself getting spacey. In fact, even keeping up with conversations is harder than it used to be.
We often think of brain fog as a symptom of aging, dementia, or depression –and it can be. But you may not realize that PTSD can lead to brain fog, and that brain fog is a significant symptom, and is the result of ongoing stress, fatigue that’s both physical and mental, and trauma.
Brain fog can be caused by inflammation in your neurons, (your brain’s nerve cells) and PTSD can lead to that inflammation, among other things. In fact, PTSD and neuro-inflammation actually contribute to each other in a vicious cycle.
Sometimes, the trauma is a single experience… like an auto crash or assault…where the PTSD that results follows that single event. But sometimes the trauma is repeated and ongoing, like chronic child or domestic abuse, active combat, or sexual abuse. This is considered complex PTSD, or cPTSD.
That’s where cortisol comes in.
Your ‘sympathetic” nervous system empowers you to respond to trauma or danger with a fight-flight-freeze response to protect you and help you survive in the face of a threat. Your body secretes cortisol, called the stress hormone, when this happens.
If your trauma comes from a prolonged, repeated, and ongoing threat or injury, it causes a continued stress response, with little or no recovery time before the next traumatic event.
Cortisol can help you survive by making glucose and fatty acids in your liver available to fuel your flight….or else fight for your life.
That’s ideal for a crisis, but what if cortisol is released all the time? If it’s released in excess, it can cause inflammation, and you’re left with all the problems overactive inflammation causes. So you can see how PTSD can lead to brain fog.
Then even worse, when the inflammation is in your brain, you may have brain fog, cognitive problems, and memory loss. And when you have cPTSD, those onslaughts of cortisol fall-out happen way too often. Higher levels of cortisol circulating through your body damage your immune system and push cortisol levels still higher.
As a result, you may feel intense panic at times, be unable to calm yourself, and experience flashbacks. Add to that various changes in your appetite which cause weight gain or loss. Plus insomnia, an inability to regulate your emotions, phobias of social interactions, people, and places, intense hyper-vigilance, and so much more.
Cruel Symptoms of PTSD that Leads to Brain Fog
In addition to PTSD leading to brain fog, there are a myriad of other PTSD symptoms, like intrusive thoughts, painful memories, and upsetting dreams. You may find you avoid conversations about the traumatic event, as well as people or circumstances that remind you of it.
You may blame yourself or someone else, or refuse to trust anyone again. Insomnia, difficulty with concentration, mood swings, and hyper-vigilance may plague you unmercifully. PTSD is complicated and intense, and some of the symptoms tend to make others worse. But you can get better.
By feeding your metabolism with a cleaner and more efficient fuel, those memories that are so painful can calm, and not feel so frightening any more. As your brain heals, your memories can heal, too.
And that can happen through what you eat, how you move, who you see, and the way you spend your time and energy.
Your Diet
Your diet plays an important role in your brain function. If you don’t feed your brain well, it cannot function at its best. But when PTSD is present, your brain needs a diet that’s dense with the right nutrients.
Fresh vegetables of all colors, grass-fed meat, olive oil, fish high in omega 3 fatty acids, and good dairy can provide the nutrients your brain desperately needs.
The diet you’re eating may not support your brain health, but our dietitian/nutritionist can work with you to to design a personalized diet for you to feed your brain what it needs.
Restful Restorative Sleep
Research has revealed that sleep deprivation leads to neuroinflammation. And neuroinflammation causes brain fog. So, in addition to a brain focused nutrient-rich diet, you need rest to empower your brain to overcome brain fog symptoms.
But there’s a problem. Symptoms of depression and PTSD often cause insomnia. And poor sleep exacerbates problems with your brain and body function. In Touchpoints180™ we’ll guide and empower you to strengthen your circadian rhythm, giving your body the cycle it needs to rebuild, restore, and repair your brain.
Regular Exercise
For some, moderate exercise can be a welcome form of tension release, and for improved health. For others, it can just be too hard to get up, get out, and exercise.
But small steps can lead to more and bigger steps, if you just do something. And keep this in mind: exercise improves your circulation which delivers those vital nutrients to your brain.
Even a little exercise 3 times a week can make a big difference.
If that’s still too big an order for you, start with baby steps and build as you can. A walk down your block is a huge improvement if you’ve been immobile or sedentary. And the more minutes you spend increasing your circulation, the better you’ll feel. Try it and see.
The Damage PTSD Does
Trauma, which is an extreme example of stress, changes structures and functions in your brain. In order to keep you safe, your brain catalogs memory, sights, smells, people around you, what you felt, and on and on. These things help you to learn from your experiences so you can keep yourself safe going forward.
But in the case of trauma, your brain goes into extreme overdrive, pounding you with these memories, sights, smells, and feelings to such an extent that the extreme danger you experienced in the past becomes present in your mind, as though it’s still going on. That’s PTSD and it can lead to brain fog.
Touchpoints180™ Transforms
We’ll be talking in more detail about PTSD coming soon, but for now, know that you can experience transformative relief and the best vitality you’ve ever experienced with the right nutritional balance, the healing power of ketosis, the right supplements for you, just the right amount of exercise for you personally, and other elements that nurture a state of vibrance and vitality in your brain, and of course, your body. Even if you’ve suffered from PTSD for years.
By utilizing all the effects of ketosis in every cell in your body, applying factors that set your metabolism at its optimum level, your best function can be optimized, as well as your enjoyment and reward in life.
If you experience symptoms of PTSD like we’ve talked about here, and nothing you’ve tried has helped, Schedule a Discovery Call.
Join us in Touchpoints180™ and benefit from engaged medical support and guidance, lab monitoring, nutritional interventions, and empowering education that will wake up your brain and clear the fog, restore your joy and purpose, and ignite real and lasting health and vitality.
Let’s work together so you can move forward into your best life.
