IANAD BUT... There Are Things To Do For COVID Brain Fog
(I Am Not a Dr.), but I know COVID brain fog will mess up your life. You can burn off the fog promptly, once you realize what is really going on.
Note to Readers: Every time there is a new COVID-19 variant, the public will shock a little bit. Some come down with symptoms. Some never get the bug. Some are in real trouble. If you are impacted by COVID brain fog, you can self-remedy. However, please see a doctor if your symptoms don’t remit within a few days of reasoned self-care. Your brain is really important for overall functioning of your entire body.
WHAT THIS IS AND IS NOT
This is not a bid for you to trust me as a medical authority. It is not an intro to my line of holistic medical goods. It’s a few things I did to remediate a malady people may feel more pessimism about than they need to. You need to see a doctor for things that go wrong with your health, more specifically your brain.
Brain health is complicated but the treatments are usually simple, in many cases. Thankfully, I didn’t have to spend fifteen years in med school to tell you a few things that improved my brain function outlook that will work for most people.
I HAD THE ‘RONA
I contracted the original COVID 19 Wuhan special. I contracted the ‘rona in Kirkland, WA within a ten minute walk from the Life Care Center outbreak in February of 2020. I have been told that *only* people with long covid or women over 45, as a menopausal target, get Corona brain fog. I can tell you that I was not diagnosed with long covid. You may have temporary brain fog symptoms due to COVID-19’s brain barrier busting technique.
Brain fog symptoms are inconvenient. They do not make life easy. You do not feel alright when you have them. Brain fog thinking can complicate your life. It is not different from the brain fog of COVID long haulers. It’s all brain fog.
WHAT IT’S LIKE
I’m not going to give you the abbreviated Web MD bullet list of symptoms to play doctor. Nor am I going to give you an old lady’s opera of aches and pains. I am just going to brief you on what this is like.
You’re humming along, doing your daily. You get tired. You get really really tired. You’re thinking,"Wow. I need a power nap.” That happens for a couple of days. Then, you’re not really that tired, but you’re dragging around for a few more days. Maybe your appetite is shrugged off.
You might feel like you’ve got a little cold. You get some chills. You bundle up. You drink some hot tea. You take an advil. You go back to work. No big deal. We are big adults here. We have stuff we have to do. Bills to pay. People need us to do the things we said we would do, when we said we would do them. Gotta, gotta. Gotta go do it.
A few days later, you’re intermittently tired. You wake up in the middle of the night. You might eat. To get up sucks. (Why can’t I sleep?!) More fatigue.
Then, you might start having to go to the bathroom, A LOT. You’re productive. I mean you’re *really* cleansing. You don’t think you have anything left… but wait…there’s MORE?
THIS IS YOUR BRAIN ON COVID
Then it happens. You’re between bathroom breaks and you cannot focus worth a damn. Everything is difficult and frustrating: to log on your computer, to wash your utensils, to watch a TV program for more than 3 minutes… is just taking forever. The things feel really far away. (Why is my life misspelled?) You might feel a little hopeless and suddenly depressed. Negativity starts flying around; which is also fuzzing. (Is that tinnitus?! Is it binaural?) Your little head starts to fill up with existential ‘whys’.
You might think you’re having a bad day. You might go home early. You may, mistakenly, have a single drink to lessen the blow. (I’ll explain later why this aggravates this condition, even if you already know why.) You might feel better. You get up the next day.
THE ABSOLUTE WORST BRAIN FOG
You might dawdle around your house. It takes 40 minutes to do things that take 10. Your spouse asks you if you’re high. You look at them like a 17-year-old dog and tell them, ‘No’. You might manage, “Baby, I think I’ve got some brain fog.” You think you shouted that up the stairs yesterday afternoon, but you do not have the receipts on paid attention.
You might think, “Meh. I’ll just knock through this. I’ll just nuke this with couple of stress tabs, a multivitamin and some juice. It’ll be okay in an hour.”
That amounts to a ‘Nope’, Captain. In the onset of login stress; you over-commit to several bad decisions, including a Phishing email; which you usually recognize. Your sinuses begin to pinch like crab claws into the base of your skull. Now life is more complicated with bad decisions you made on the Brain Fog.
So, it’s pretty bad by this time. Don’t drive anywhere by yourself. Don’t go shopping. Go home. If you have to drive home - go straight home. Definitely do not make any major life decisions.
HOW TO ROLL OUT OF A BRAIN FOG
I haven’t had to manage COVID brain fog for awhile. Try to notice when your cold symptoms connect with a swift downturn in mental acuity and your mood takes an unexpected nose dive for no special reason. As soon as you notice, don’t drink or do any altering substances, unless you want a day trip with dementia.
The brain barrier is breached. So you need to lubricate your brain; which is the first easiest thing to do. So hydrate well. Fruit juices. Water, water, water. Drink lots of water to flush your system.
If you’re still going to the restroom a lot, that’s really good. Eat a lot of fiber to carry out the stress and sick toxins in your brain. Fruit. Whole grains. Brown rice. Raw veggies. Soup.
Let yourself rest. If the brain organ is sick, that is as sick as a chest cold. You can be sick. Call in sick. Maybe take a shower. Scrub those lymph nodes. The steam lubricates your sinuses. Clears the nasal pathways of the junk, makes you feel human.
These symptoms interrupt, inconveniently and the onset may be aggravated by stressors. I became suddenly conscious of just how badly brain fog was complicating my life. It got really, really awful after dealing with a small scale Phish attack. So awful, in fact, I asked for a ride to the store because I wasn’t okay to drive.
I made a beeline for Sushi salmon and an energy drink.
Everyone has their sensitivities. If you are like most people, you don’t have special allergies and you don’t pound energy drinks every day. If you need your faculties out of the sling immediately, eat the raw fish and drink the vitamin energy drink. In 40 minutes or less, you should be back online mentally. If you are vegan, get access to a big bottle of vegetarian Omega-3 capsules. Take an adult dose and have a vitamin juice smoothie.
SO TALK TO YOUR DOCTOR AND THEN…
An anti-inflammatory diet and brain nutrition was my way out of this. Dr. Amen has some great reccomendations for overall brain health. One of the brain barrier support supplements he reccomends is GABA. It nourishes overall brain function. B-12 stress support capsules can also shepherd you out of low energy and sluggish function. Vitamin E is good for rest and recovery. I take it before bed. The Keto diet was reccomended for brain recovery. Talk to a doctor to see how long you think you should do it for mental benefit. This is more generally COVID-19 neurological aftercare. No need to panic.
Sleep. Your brain literally washes itself and puts itself back together while you sleep. The path to neural recovery requires deep, restorative REM sleep. Go to bed early. Sleep well.
When you are awake, you may want a natural stimulant to keep you with it and your anti-inflammatory diet. For this, you may want to give Yaupon tea a try. It’s got a mild liver cleansing aid, anti-inflammatory agents and it is full of anti-oxidants. It’s a relative to the Holly plant. Check in with your family before you try it or a holistic practitioner to see if you’re good to go. If so, you can take this herbal tea on a regular basis to recover from a variety of aches and toxic imbalances.
If the wildcard is peri-menopause/menopause and you happen to be its target, the good news is you can do all of this and you can still investigate a product called Amberen to eliminate bad outcomes.
So, please try these low-risk anyone-can-do remedies. I had the burden of COVID brain fog and I do not wish it upon anyone. I feel better.
I just want to pass it along. More than AI commentary and analysis of EU biometric data centralization, we need presence of mind.
May clarity be yours in full. May all brain fog burn off. Be gone, brain fog. Be gone.