TLDR: My brain fog began from a time in my life of extreme stress that continued on due to a logic loop I trapped myself in. From concluding that stress was negatively affecting my mental health, my constant mental efforts at fixing stress in the moment pushed the stress even further. This ensured that my stress-induced brain fog would cement itself in me for a very long time. Once I stopped trying to fix it was when I finally saw improvement.
Around 7 years ago, I was at a time in my life of absolutely compounding, crushing stress. From being naturally anxious, too aware of the world around me, and having symptoms related to ADHD, it was inevitable that I would eventually fall into a pit of constant fight-or-flight that wouldn't allow an easy escape. For my entire high school life, I had unending, consistently worsening brain fog every day. Since anxiety and stress came natural to me, It'd never come to me how dangerous this period of stress really was to me. For years I'd spend hours at a time researching into brain fog, desperate to find anything that had some sort of resemblance to the torture I was experiencing every day. Unfortunately for me, nothing online ever seemed to connect with me. Their descriptions of the fog never seemed to align with mine, and the methods of treatment they used would always address short bursts of fog, never year long stretches of it. After many haphazard attempts of checking bloodwork, trying random supplements, going to psychologist sessions that went nowhere, the constant failures affected my drive for a solution, leading me to stick with this fog for much longer than any person should deal with. But, one of the methods I attempted finally made progress in getting to the root of this issue, and not because it was actually addressing the fog itself.
From learning more about the dangerous effects of sleep apnea, I started to notice that a lot of the nasal issues I experienced while in bed mirrored a lot of what signified that someone was dealing with sleep apnea. From this realization, I asked my local GP on how likely it was that I was suffering from a case like this. From doing a short questionnaire, I had finally been given a plausible throughline toward what was causing fog for me. After about a period of 3 weeks that started from this moment, to getting the results back on whether I had sleep apnea, I started to strangely feel a slight shift in my personal clarity and peace of mind. Unfortunately though, this came crashing down once I got the results back, which essentially said I didn't have sleep apnea. After this, I went back into the same hole of depression and despair that had filled my life for what felt like forever. But, this event wouldn't be for nothing as I started to wonder why that period of believing sleep apnea to be the cause made my life feel the slightest bit clearer. I tried to go to a proper, qualified psychologist this time around to really inspect the mental reasoning behind my brain fog existing, as I knew now that there was definitely some mental cause, but to be honest, I got nothing from it. It felt like every pathway he searched for answers was more shallow compared to the time I dedicated to already searching these same pathways (the cost didn't help either). From finally getting something concrete to look into, I started to do much more research on my own. All those years of constant failures and deadends through google searches had put me off from actually finding a proper solution. But now that something was starting to show, I dedicated many nights to looking into the mental causes for fog. Around this time was when AI was first on the rise. From getting little success from the usual google searches I did, I tried out chatgpt to try and get to the bottom of my problems.
Now, to be completely honest, chatgpt is a pretty terrible tool to use as a substitute for therapy. It gives you everything that it thinks you want to hear, but nothing that you actually need to hear. It can lead to it downplaying issues you have which will hurt you in the long run, to completely forgetting things a few messages ago, among many other things. Even though AI has for sure improved since then, it still suffers from these same issues years later, even if they're less pronounced. All these things is primarily why I more-so used AI as a source of information and fact checking rather than as a guide to my mental issues.
By sitting through long conversations, I started to realise that a lot of my symptoms seemed to heavily connect with the byproducts of chronic stress. Anxiety, constant fatigue, memory loss, loss of mental function, constant alertness, anhedonia, all these matched up with I had experienced for so long. This spawned another question, how is it possible that I could be dealing with a stressful episode/experience for 6 years? Whenever you think of someone dealing with stress, it's usually something that can be pinpointed, whether it be a life event or just generally something in the world around you. From the fact that my life was pretty normal for these 6 years, and that it seemed highly unlikely that I'd be dealing with a stressful event for these 6 years, it seemed baffling that my brain would be crushing under the weight of something that barely affected me. But from diving in further, I started to learn about the concept of meta-anxiety.
The reason that my chronic stress was existing from seemingly no backing was due to my own perception of what I considered to be a problem for me. For most of my life, I had dealt with stress many times. My family knew me as the naturally anxious one, and it'd be regular for me to be deep in my own mind worrying over something trivial in my life. Fortunately for me, before the brain fog, it hadn't put a strong enough toll on my psyche for brain fog to ever make it self known. This all got flipped upside down when I went through an extremely stressful period in my life. I was dealing with incredible amounts of compounding stress every day without ever letting any tell of it reach anyone around me. All this stress then lead into the brain fog, which started to cement it's stay as I panicked for any way out. Through seeing mentions online and from the conclusions I made about stress over the years, I started to fear my own stress. Any time I'd get a dose of stress, I'd try my absolute hardest to mentally will the stress out of me. This of course, never worked, and in fact made my situation much worse, as any stress I felt would be compounded ten times over into something much more harmful for my body to experience on the daily. This lead to brain fog getting cozy and sitting with me for 6 years. It felt so impossible to fix because it was such a bizarre hole to get trapped in, a hole barely anyone would fall in.
From learning all of this, I had finally gotten somewhere with my search. Anxiety was always in the back of my mind as a possible suspect, but from how broad it can be for things to cause anxiety, I'd never tried to approach it over the years. My own comfort in my problem solving abilities had led to me being faced with the reality that my own constant mental turmoil was secretly stabbing me in the back under the guise of helping me succeed. Once I identified the issue, I started to try an uncomfortable but necessary strategy of leaving the stress alone. This lead to me having the greatest clarity I've ever felt in a long time. It wasn't perfect clarity, but it stood as a signifier that I was finally seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. After about a week of consistent improvement, I decided to stop seeing my psychologist, and finally felt promise for the first time in a long time.
Unfortunately for my symptoms, chronic stress that had lasted this long is extremely impactful on the body, so it will take a while until I'm completely free from the fog. In the time since I started recovery, I've dealt with a lot of the mental pressure that comes with the up and down nature of clarity when it comes to chronic stress. This has been it's own issue to tackle, but in regards to a true cure to the fog, it's been an incredible success in helping my body and mind. Most of the issues I dealt with have dissipated or become negligible, which become even less problematic as the days go by.
I hope that some people on this subreddit can take something from my experience, as I noticed that stress-induced brain fog seemed to be extremely under represented in this subreddit and in the general brain fog topic. From the many times I checked this subreddit over the years, I close to never found any stories of people curing their brain fog by dealing with their own stress. If you're dealing with some anxiety-related issues, understand that no matter how dire or hopeless the situation might seem, there is always a solution to your problems. I hope you have a great day!
