Anxiety And Brain Fog (Episode 036)
Disordered: Anxiety Help
Josh Fletcher and Drew Linsalata
4.9 • 665 Ratings
🗓️ 17 November 2023
⏱️ 36 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
BRAIN FOG!?!?!
One of the most common symptoms of anxiety reported in the community surrounding this podcast is "brain fog". That thing where your brain just isn't working the way you'd expect it to work. Maybe you're slow, have memory issues, or struggle to find proper words or names. Maybe you just feel "out of it" or like you're in a dissociated state. Brain fog is very common, very subjective, difficult to describe, and often disruptive.
But as with any anxiety symptom, brain fog is not dangerous, not indicative of some horrible brain injury, and not worthy of special tips, tricks, or methods to make it go away or stop it from happening. The way out of brain fog ... as usual ... is through it. Today Josh and Drew talk about how being patient with yourself, kind to yourself, and resisting the urge to hit the panic button when you feel foggy, is the best way to learn how to tolerate and function even when feeling this way.
Yes, this means that the way out is learning through practice and experience that you might not be functioning in an optimal state, but you're still functioning and that's OK.
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Disclaimer: Disordered is not therapy or a replacement for therapy. Listening to Disordered does not create a therapeutic relationship between you and the hosts of the podcast. Information here is provided for psychoeducational purposes. As always, when you have questions about your own well-being, please consult your mental health and/or medical care providers. If you are having a mental health crisis, always reach out immediately for in-person help.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | So I want to start off by saying thank you, and I'm a huge fan. |
| 0:05.7 | I listen to your podcast religiously, and I find it tremendously helpful in terms of education and understanding anxiety and how it can affect you. |
| 0:16.7 | I was just wondering, can you please touch on brain fog? |
| 0:22.2 | I find it that that is the most difficult symptom to kind of work through. |
| 0:28.0 | And I'm not sure as a result of the brain fog if it kind of causes depersonalization or |
| 0:32.9 | derealization, where it almost puts you in like a state of confusion, where it's hard to even execute any sort of |
| 0:39.1 | decisions on a day-to-day basis. So yeah, so if you could just speak a little bit about brain fog. |
| 0:49.5 | Welcome to Disordid. This episode is episode 36, it's titled Anxiety and I can't quite remember. |
| 0:59.7 | I'm feeling a bit foggy. My name's Joshua Fletcher, also known as Anxiety Josh, and I'm a psychotherapist who specializes in anxiety disorders based in the UK. |
| 1:09.8 | I'm a previous sufferer as well as author of several self-help books, and the co-host of this wonderful podcast. And I am Drew Lin-Solata. I am a grad student in clinical mental health counseling, getting closer to be a licensed therapist in New York here in the US of A. I am also an author and a podcaster on this topic of anxiety and anxiety disorders and a former sufferer. |
| 1:29.0 | So we have a lot in common and co-host of disorder. |
| 1:32.0 | What are we talking about today? |
| 1:34.5 | I think the sender in a said something about brain fog. |
| 1:40.5 | Is it something you ever experienced with anxiety? |
| 1:43.3 | Brain fog is a thing. |
| 1:45.1 | Brain fog for me was I can't remember things. |
| 1:49.4 | It would manifest for sure as like my memory, even short term was was tough to access. |
| 1:54.5 | Long term memory was not available to me at all in terms of just like remembering names |
| 1:59.3 | or passwords and things that I needed like for my work. |
| 2:02.4 | And it was just like having cotton in my head and my like the thoughts had to try to burrow through the cotton before they could work. |
| 2:10.9 | I just felt slow. I don't know. It was really hard to describe. It's so hard to describe it. |
| 2:15.8 | What about you? Yeah, I don't know. It was very sluggish, |
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