#1 Advance Best Way to Improve Energy & Brain Fog
Hello Health Champions. When your brain doesn't work - you don't work. You feel miserable. You can't get anything done and all the things that you want out of life go missing. Brain fog affects everybody some of the time but it affects some people almost all of the time so today we're going to talk about how to clear up brain fog so you can get your life back.
Now the number oneĀ advance best way to stop brain fog is to understand what the brain needs and then to provide it. So that's what we're going to talk about. Brain fog is not a precise term. It's just a general description that people use when they have low energy, when they have poor focus, when they feel lethargy or fatigue. And if you were to go to a medical doctor and say that you think you have brain fog, he may sort of understand what you're talking about or he may say that no, there's no such thing because it's not a specific medical condition. But then when you need to tell him is that you believe you're suffering from diagnostic code r 41.9 which involves unspecified symptoms and signs involving cognitive function and awareness. And then when you have enlightened him, he can write you a prescription and get reimbursed and you can feel better for a day or two. Or you can pay attention to what we're going to talk about in thisĀ blog and you can solve the problem naturally.
Step one is to know what the brain does. And the short answer is it processes information. A lot of information. Some of that relates to your basic five senses which is of course sight, sound, taste, touch, and smell. But your awareness goes a lot further than that. So indirectly, you're also aware of things like gravity, pressure, temperature, and humidity. And for some people, it goes even a lot further beyond the purely physical where they can even sense the mood of someone walking into a room even if they're not looking at the person. So our nervous system processes a lot of information. Thinking conscious thought is part of that but it's about one millionth of all the information your brain and nervous system processes. And in order to process all this information, the brain uses different modalities and the biggest of those modalities is electrical current. So it has electrical signals that follow fixed pathways known as your peripheral nerves but your nervous system also uses chemicals like molecules which involve neurotransmitters and hormones.
Neurotransmitters would be a molecule that crosses from one synapse to another at the nerve ending whereas hormones or other chemical messengers are released into the blood to affect wider tissues. But your body also has an electromagnetic system and a system of biophotons. So electromagnetics, that's part of your acupuncture system where the chi flows in meridians in the skin that are of electromagnetic nature. And we also have biophotons which are light particles of light in your body and one way we can think of that is the reason laser works as a therapy, the cold laser, is that light has certain frequencies and if we didn't have receptors to process that then that laser wouldn't really do much of anything. And in order to process all these modalities what does the brain need,
What are the physical needs of the brain?
The first one is energy, and I put stable energy because if you have energy that is high sometimes and low other times then your brain is going to function some of the time and others not. And in order to make energy your body needs fuel, that's the calories, that's the fat and the carbohydrate, and in the case of the brain also ketones. But it doesn't stop there because it doesn't become a calorie until you can oxidize it. It doesn't become energy until you have oxygen to burn that fuel and you also can't burn that fuel without enzymes that are dependent on nutrients like vitamins and minerals. But when all those three are working now you can take that fuel substrate and turn it into ATP, adenosine triphosphate, and that word's not important but you need to understand the fuel is not energy until you can turn it into a usable form and ATP is the energy currency.
Even though we have trillions and trillions of pieces of ATP, it's very short-lived. If you were to do an all-out sprint and you stopped making ATP altogether you have about three seconds to live before you completely run out of ATP. So this is something the body has to keep up and remanufacture and process all the time. The next big thing the brain has to have is stimulation. And why is that so important? Because the body is in a constant state of breakdown and buildup and so often we focus on the buildup as something positive and the breakdown is something negative but both are part of the same cycle. It's the breakdown that allows us to replace old cells with new fresh cells and we break things down all the time but if we don't stimulate the tissue, if we don't use the tissue then why should the body rebuild that particular tissue? So the stimulation is the reason for the buildup and we're all familiar with the phrase "use it or lose it" and what that basically means is the body breaks down but without stimulation there's no reason to rebuild it.
And then we have the things that cause problems for the brain that interfere with its activity and make it hard to get the job done. They're going to fall into three major categories. One is obviously the lack of energy, the second is inflammation, and the third is signal disruption. And we're going to give you some examples of these so you see exactly how they fit together. When it comes to energy, we could have a problem with the production portion of energy so first of all obviously we need a substrate, we need to have something to make energy out of and that's the calories, the fuel, the fat, and the carbohydrate and they can either be ingested or we can take them off the body. It could be a lack of nutrients if we have the substrate but we don't have the matches so to speak we still can't set fire to it and that would be vitamins and minerals. The next one's kind of funny because as I read a few other lists of what people thought we should take for brain fog they said we should have more antioxidants. Now think about what we just said that we need to oxidize the food to get energy, we have the substrate we can't make energy until we oxidize it, the word antioxidant should give you a clue just because we've heard it a million times and it's in every article on what to eat and how to get healthy that we need more antioxidants just because you heard it a million times doesn't make it so. So an antioxidant prevents the formation of energy, now when we eat real food we get things in a certain balance and the body figures it out, we need some we can't have too much but when we concentrate antioxidants and we put them in a pill or a capsule and we gobble them up by the bottle now we're getting too much we're preventing the formation of energy and they've done lots and lots of research on this a lot of the vitamins antioxidant vitamins that you think are good for you they actually do absolutely nothing in terms of benefit and they shorten your life so eat the antioxidants the way they occur in natural food, eat foods that support and supply precursors for your body's own endogenous production of antioxidants like glutathione and don't take them in a pill.
Next is anemia and why does that matter? Because anemia means you don't have enough red blood cells or not enough high-quality red blood cells so now you can't transport the oxygen if you don't have the oxygen you can't burn the fire you can't make energy and the same thing with smoking, smoking is a form of self-induced anemia because when you smoke you breathe in carbon monoxide which blocks around 20 percent of your oxygen-carrying capacity so it's like you're 20 anemic the moment you start smoking. And dehydration is also a common cause of brain fog because your body is mostly water so most of the chemical processes that take place in your body take place in an aqueous solution in water so if you're dehydrated then you don't have the playing field for those chemical processes to take place and of course if you want to rehydrate don't forget the salt because salt follows water if you lost a bunch of water you probably lost some salt and electrolytes as well. And then it can be that maybe we have enough substrate maybe we have the ability to convert it to energy but we might have a problem with the delivery and this is something most people don't think about in terms of insulin resistance that if you're insulin resistant what does that mean insulin is the thing that's supposed to take the glucose into the cell but if you're insulin resistant it doesn't work so now the glucose can't get into the cell the fuel can't get into the cell the way it's supposed to and this happens to brain cells also when you are insulin resistant and your brain is insulin resistant now your brain can't get the fuel that's another good reason to go low carb because ketones can get into the brain without the help of insulin so you can get some energy some fuel in there to turn into energy without the help of insulin and one indication of how powerful and destructive that mechanism is is that dementia is sometimes called type 3 diabetes energy delivery could also be related to a lack of metabolic flexibility so if you're metabolically flexible then you eat some carbs your body burns carbs you stop the carbs your body burns something else primarily fat but if you're not metabolically flexible then typically that means you are dependent on carbohydrates you burn carbs your carbs diminish then you have to fill up new ones because that's how you train your body but when you're doing it that way when you fill up some carbs you use up some carbs you fill up some carbs and so on now you get unstable blood sugar unstable blood glucose and now you have energy delivery some of the time and other times you don't.
And then we have stress which is also something that interferes with the delivery or the distribution of blood and of course blood carries the oxygen and the glucose and all the nutrients and the resources and stress especially chronic stress is destructive in about a million different ways so I want to show you just one way as it relates to focus and brain fog. So hopefully you can tell this is a cross-section of a person and this here is the brain so normally when we have a balance in flow when the stress is moderate and under control now we have an even blood flow to the whole brain and this big thing here is called a cortex this is where we process conscious thought our focus our creativity all of that is there especially in the frontal lobe which is kind of the manager of that whole cortex but when we're stressed now we don't have so much need for that creativity and that focus we just want to get out of there alive so the blood flow in the cortex gets constricted and it starts pooling so when we constrict it we push it someplace else and we basically push the blood flow down into the brain stem and this is where our automated responses our survival instinct so any time that we're stressed the blood leaves partially leaves the cortex to supply the brain stem for our immediate survival and this is where chronic stress becomes devastating in acute stress we still have some other stress hormone like adrenaline to get our attention and focus up but chronic stress now that blood loss is dominant and we lose our focus we get fatigue we lose creativity etc when we're stressed we could also have a gradual loss in the ability to make energy so our cellular machinery is downgrading in a sense so 10 years ago maybe the average cell could put out 10 units of energy and today it can only put out seven or eight that's called degeneration that the cells just don't work as well as they used to and most of this is blamed on aging which is true to a point it is inevitable so far to age and with aging these processes do continue but the vast majority of the things that we blame on aging are actually because of disuse so the loss of muscle the loss of flexibility the loss of energy production those are almost entirely disused and the number one reason for disuse is lack of exercise it's not lack of crossword puzzles it's exercise movement provides over 90 percent of the signals of the stimulation of the use it or lose it that we need to keep the brain alive.
Brain fog can also happen because of lack of sleep because sleep is a form of regeneration the body recuperates it recharges the batteries it heals a lot of things a lot of healing takes place during sleep so if we don't get the quantity or the quality of sleep that's another reason for brain fog. Depression is also associated with brain fog and even though it is very multi-factorial there's many many different aspects of depression i'm going to simplify and give you just two factors that depression at the very most basic level means depressed activity in the frontal lobe. So if we can't make enough energy in the frontal lobe for all those reasons we talked about then the brain can't balance that thing out the executive portion of the brain the frontal lobe cannot turn off the depressive and the anxious thoughts cannot inhibit them the way it's supposed to and another problem of course is if we have low energy in the frontal lobe then we're also lacking motivation and the frontal lobe is the portion that controls motivation it's our executive function if you will so if we make less energy there then we also have less motivation so it's difficult to go and do the exercise and do something about it and that's why it's so important to understand these mechanisms so that you can make a decision and go and do that exercise even if you don't feel like it because you can't just wait till you feel like it you have to understand what's at stake what are the consequences what are the benefits and then go do it anyway. Inflammation is another reason for brain fog when we have inflammation hardly anything works normal it's like a battlefield in that area and one of the most potent forms of inflammation is infection if we have a viral or bacterial infection that's a very strong potent acute inflammation we can also get inflamed from food allergies when we react to a food then your body responds with inflammation and another common cause is a leaky gut if we have a leaky gut then particles get out into the bloodstream that are too large that trigger an immune response and that's where food allergies get exacerbated but we also want to keep in mind as far as the brain goes on brain fog that a lot of the factors that affect a leaky gut also affects a leaky brain so there are some things the proteins that hold together what's called tight junctions in both the gut and the brain and these factors that kind of dissolve these they affect both the gut and the brain so it's very common you can pretty much count on the fact that if you have a leaky gut you have a leaky brain as well and with that comes neuroinflammation now only in the last few years as more and more people have experienced covid have had the covet infection and gotten past it not everyone gets past it the same way some people pretty much fully recover while others have what's called long covet and out of those people as much as seven percent or even more depending on how much is reported have brain fog and they don't know exactly all of the parameters and all the causes here but I'm thinking that this is because of some proteins that get left behind and trigger some immune reactions and in my clinic we found that people get a lot of improvements from some enzymes not digestive enzymes but systemic enzymes that can help break up those proteins and to these enzymes are called lumbrokinase and serrapeptase and the product we use isn't sold over the counter it's only through health professionals but if you're interested you can just contact the office. Brain fog can also be caused by signal disruption what does that mean? The brain processes signals all the time billions of bits of information every second and the more of those signals that get processed appropriately and get to the right place at the right time the better the brain can maintain balance or homeostasis but if something interferes with those signals or distorts them so they don't get where they're supposed to go or not in the right way then the brain can't do its job it can't properly balance things and orchestrate everything the way it's supposed to and emf is one thing that can distort those signals electromagnetic fields and now we're talking about your electronic smart devices your computer and your cell phone and your tablet and so forth so electromagnetic fields are nothing new the earth itself has an electromagnetic field and it has to do with lightning strikes in the atmosphere and it bounces around and so forth and the earth has a frequency that field has a frequency of 7.8 hertz it's called schumann's frequency and humans are tuned to that frequency because we've been on the planet as long as we have been on the planet the planet has had that frequency we're tuned to it our nervous system is familiar and kind of synchronized with that but what's new is other forms of electromagnetic fields and electromagnetic frequencies so recently we have invented cell phones and transmissions and radio signals and so forth and instead of 7.8 hertz these frequencies have much much higher frequencies and they keep going up both in frequency and intensity so lately we have things that are in the five and six gigahertz range so these new frequencies are a billion times higher frequency than the frequencies that we're used to and it's not that this is going to wipe out our entire nervous system all at once it's not going to kill us tomorrow but it will distort some of the communication that we have in our body and our body has to expend more energy to compensate to override the soup of electromagnetism that we live in so for most people they'll probably never get to the point or not in many decades get to the point where they get symptoms of this or symptoms that they know of but some people who don't have so much margin they don't have so much reserves they can actually get symptoms from this but whether you get symptoms or not it's a stress on your body because your body has to expend extra energy to compensate for all of the noise all the electromagnetic noise that surrounds us so for every piece of emf that we add to the soup then there's a little piece of stress added to the body and that's why i'm not a huge fan of these wireless charging devices that are popping up everywhere is just one more piece in that soup and a lot of people are skeptical they think i can't feel this so what harm can it do well we have to understand that emf is real there's even a medical treatment there's a therapy called tms or transcranial magnetic stimulation where they just aim a magnet at the head there's no touching involved at all and they change the brain function by imposing an electromagnetic field and if they can do that in a 10-minute session what do you think will happen in this electromagnetic soup 24 hours a day year after year another form of disruption is of our circadian rhythms that's our sleep cycles so we have little clusters of brain cells that keep track of what time it is and where we are in relation to the time zones the magnetic field zones of the earth and the night and day cycle the light and dark cycle so one thing that can cause brain fog is working shifts now you do what you have to do but if you can avoid it it would probably be better to not work shifts because if you're awake at night and sleep during the day when it's dark then your circadian rhythms are affected you can never get the full amount of quality sleep that you would during normal sleeping hours another kind of disruption is jet lag and this is kind of interesting because even if we don't miss any sleep we often feel miserable simply because we have shifted time zones and it's not that it's a different time it's that we're in a different place in the earth's magnetic field and it takes the body a few days to compensate to align itself with that new position on the planet another thing that can disrupt signals are toxins if we have metals and chemicals and pesticides and things like that they can occupy receptor sites that are intended for the body's own communication and now either the signal is amplified or it doesn't happen at all depending on the circumstance and interestingly one cause of brain fog is depression another cause of brain fog is antidepressants because again they're chemicals they can interfere and they take some effort and energy on the body's part to detoxify.Ā
You know how it all works now all you have to do is this now this is a big long list and i'm not even going to writeĀ it back to you but the really good news is that once you start understanding what i write about on all myĀ blogs you understand that in holistic health from a holistic viewpoint all of these things are more or less related so you don't have to fix them all you start doing things that the body is looking for you start supporting and taking care of your body eating right food & supplements.
Herbal Daily Brain Wellness
- "Brahmi" Strengthens the Nervous System*
- Helps in Brain function, memory and concentration*
- Beneficial in both types of thyroid, balances thyroid hormone, maintains optimum Weight*
- Insomniac Relief and improve mental clarity*
- Eases head pain and migraines*
- Helps in balancing the energies leading to the proper functioning of the body system*
Ā