Brain fog: “I feel like I’ve suddenly developed attention deficit”

Among the symptoms of fatigue, many EDS and HSD people struggle with “brain fog,” a term increasingly used by individuals to describe their thinking when it is sluggish, fuzzy, and not as sharp as it should be—foggy. They describe concerns with memory (things like word finding and how to do certain things), thought processing (like planning and problem-solving), and attention (in a conversation or reading, for example). These concerns have a negative impact on a person's behaviors and the ability to undertake even normal/general activities of daily life; routine planning becomes difficult, let alone complex thinking required for education or employment. Brain fog is thought to arise from both physiological and psychological factors. Like fatigue in general, a full assessment is required to explore the possible causes and identify meaningful treatments. This chapter describes a case of cardiovascular autonomic dysfunction as an underlying cause for brain fog. The reader is encouraged to review other chapters in this section and to consider that fatigue may be triggered by many pathologies that are described throughout this book, including headache, syncope, inflammation and mast cell activation, gastrointestinal pathology, nonrestorative sleep, and attention deficit.