Brain Fog Weighing You Down? Try These 4 Strategies for Clear Thinking A foggy mind zaps your creativity, productivity, and overall levels of satisfaction. These steps will increase your productivity ten-fold.
By Aytekin Tank Edited by Jessica Thomas
Opinions expressed by BIZ Experiences contributors are their own.
I had a long flight ahead of me, and before this moment on the aircraft, I'd been excited to tackle a time-consuming project. I figured that eight hours traveling by sky would give me the perfect opportunity to focus.
There was just one problem hindering my plan: major brain fog.
Ideas I'd previously considered worthy seemed to vanish in thin air. It's like my mind went blank. For the life of me, I simply could not remember a thing.
Many of us have experienced moments like these throughout the past 2 years. Blame it on pandemic fatigue. "It's clear that Covid-19 conditions have affected people's stress levels, sleep and mental health — especially those who don't deal well with uncertainty," writes Jill Suttie, Psy.D. for Greater Good Magazine. "This, in turn, has affected our cognitive well-being, leading to poorer performance on tasks that require attention, memory or decision making."
After the incident on the plane, I decided to research ways to combat a foggy brain so that I could take better advantage of my time. Here are four steps I've learned from experts and my own experience to help keep your mind sharp and focused.
Related: How to Clear Brain Fog
1. Make it a point to unplug more
Information overload is real. Toning down how many hours we spend "doomscrolling" can help us feel significantly less stressed and anxious — which often leads to brain fog.
The truth is, before I got on that long flight, I'd had plenty of time at the airport to catch up on the news. Needless to say, the updates I read made me a distracted mess by the time we boarded.
Our digital devices have become our worlds. We've become reliant on them to connect, be entertained and, unfortunately, learn about the negative happenings going on in the world. Don't get me wrong, I'm a firm believer that it's important to stay informed about global happenings, but I also arduously advocate for moderation.
Unplugging from media consumption even for a day not only clears out our minds, but it also increases our productivity ten-fold.
Related: How to Build a Brain That's Resilient to Stress
2. Open up about your mental health
"The fatigue and fog so many are feeling now also could be symptoms of other mental health issues that flared over the last year," Dr. Jessica Gold, a psychiatrist at Washington University in St. Louis told NPR in a story early last year. "After this long, most people have had some degree of anxiety, depression, trauma, something."
That was back in 2021. We're now heading into the third year of this pandemic, which means we have to place more importance than ever on maintaining our mental wellbeing.
This is still a taboo topic for many BIZ Experiencess. Owning up to their anxiety and depression is akin to admitting to a weakness in leadership. But failing to recognize the impact of these times only worsens our focus, because we're not being honest with ourselves and others.
Feeling comfortable talking about our challenges can alleviate a lot of the tension that fosters a foggy mind. Taking a mental health inventory and then creating opportunities to open a dialogue about it will not only give us more clarity, but it'll also help us facilitate more connections within our social networks.
Related: Why Smart Drugs Don't Make You Smarter
3. Find ways of engaging with nature
Like me, my wife is someone who loves to be outside spending time in nature. One day she convinced me to try a yoga session in a nearby park. As a long-time practitioner of mindfulness, I was all in for it.
After an hour of yoga poses surrounded by lush trees and sunshine, my brain felt more energized than ever. "Getting exercise…is tied to better cognition," writes Suttie, "and even moderate exercise can help us think more clearly and perform better on tasks requiring focus."
But doing so out in green spaces gives us an extra mood boost. Research has shown that exercising in an outdoor natural environment benefits our mental and physical well-being. All the more reason to engage in activities outside.
If outdoor yoga isn't your thing, try hiking through the woods, taking a swim in a lake or even enjoying an evening jog with a friend. What matters is that you're not cooped up in your room or office staring at a screen 24/7.
4. Try new stimulating activities
In a story for SELF, psychologist Emily Green, Psy.D., "compares brain fog to having a poor internet connection, which causes the streaming quality of a video you're watching to lower."
She couldn't be more right.
A foggy mind zaps your creativity, productivity and overall levels of satisfaction. As I put it to one colleague: It's like your mind is under siege.
As an BIZ Experiences and leader, this unending distraction can feel paralyzing because our days consist of constant decision-making. It's taken many years for me to learn how to overcome that fogginess, but one of the best ways by far has been to always challenge myself to try new things; whether that means signing up for a weekend culinary class, reading an engaging novel or starting a new hobby — it's all helped to keep my mind sharper.
The point of engaging in new activities is to get yourself out of the rut of routine that often keeps you feeling stuck.
A word of advice I like to offer friends and colleagues alike is that you don't have to go it alone. Unplugging, engaging with nature, speaking openly about your mental health challenges — all of these aren't just ways of combating a foggy mind, they're also meant to help us be more present and better connect with the people and projects that are most important to us.
