Ask Lemmy

What does brain fog feel like to you?

Reading this post.

This post seems like AI generated content and I half expected it to end with trying to sell me some snake oil.

If you're actually curious what brain fog is / feels like, it's very well documented. There's nothing "profound" or "miraculous" about it. Here's the first result I found.

Describing How Brain Fog Feels https://www.verywellhealth.com/brain-fog-8363295
Feeling mentally drained happens to everyone from time to time, especially when experiencing sleeping difficulties. But brain fog is not the same as fatigue or lethargy, although they often go hand in hand or co-occur with symptoms of other conditions. Brain fog can be hard to define since it is not a medical term or diagnosis.

Experts describe brain fog as mild memory loss or:

• Unusual forgetfulness
• Fuzzy memory or sluggishness when trying to remember things like names, dates, where you put your keys, and other important things
• Difficulty paying attention or focusing
• Confusion or spaciness
• Challenges with processing information

That's not brain fog. You're romanticizing a medical condition. My brain fog feels like my brain is walking through water. I know where I'm going and I know how to get there but every step on the way is slow and cumbersome and takes way more energy than it should. IDK what you are talking about. Delusional euphoria maybe.

Brain fog feels like there's an invisible film over your mind that slows down your processing, like there's a latency to all of your thoughts. It sort of separates you from how you're experiencing the world and makes everything less clear. Sort of like the mental version of trudging through a muddy swamp. You're less alert.

Usually it's also coupled with just feeling generally tired and out of it.

What I call brain fog is like "thinking through treacle" or something. Any thoughts I try to make, either solving problems or being creative, take a lot more "brain fuel" and effort to do.

To me, brain fog feels like my thoughts are swimming in the subconscious ocean and it takes a lot of energy to dive down and actually comprehend them. It isn’t that the thoughts do not exit, but rather that they are outside of reach of use until significant mental effort is undergone to reach them. Using those thoughts for any purpose then requires even more mental energy…energy that feels like the mental equivalent of walking up the stairs…it seems easy for the first few steps but progressively gets harder until at some point, if you haven’t used the thoughts yet, you just give up out of sheer exhaustion.

For me it feels like complete inability to focus on anything or to recall specific concepts (like not being able to think of a word).

This is a super interesting thread because I wonder if what I'm experiencing is even brain fog at all, or just ADHD. And I also wonder how other folks know when they're feeling brain fog.

Like, do any of you have a test for yourself to know when you're feeling brain fog (or inversely, a test to be sure you're not)?

All I know is that my brain fog is too big to read your long-ass text.

For me it’s constantly having that word you’ve used 1k times just out of reach, coupled with feeling like there are two (or more) levels happening in my head: one trying to have a verbal conversation and the other wondering silently when my migraine/headache will go away.

It feels like exactly what it says on the tin, personally.

It just feels like my mind is foggy, so if I have to go off-script while I'm working or doing things at home or with friends, it takes a lot of energy to see through the "fog" and figure out what to do. But when things are going as planned (or "on-script") I can just kinda navigate blindly.

The title does not fit the content of the body, and the content of the body sounds like someone got a little too high before they got on Lemmy.

This post is what brain fog feels like.

I can quantify the brain fog that I've experienced, mostly because I've recovered a bit. I experienced a 30% overall reduction in productivity as well as cognitive capability since January 2020 (when my son arrived back from Wuhan). I've compensated for the lack of memory capability I was used to by just writing things down that I used to just remember. I've also compensated for my general lack of cognitive function by retraining my brain with the basics. It's not easy, but it's doable. However, I feel that I've been let off easy compared to many others.

Dumb. Can see but I am not really able to process it or it takes me a real long time. That's the simplest way I can put it.

This shit was either written by AI, or a highly disfunctional ADHD person on crack.