Women's Health & Mental Health: Brain Fog

Photograph by Fakurian Design

Brain Fog: What is it?

For individuals dealing with chronic pain or autoimmune issues, brain fog is a very real issue and can be frustrating as a patient to describe to doctors or loved ones. Essentially, brain fog involves difficulty with memory, lack of concentration or difficulty focusing. Check out more on causes, diagnosis and treatment here: Healthline-Brain Fog. 

When dealing with brain fog, even simple tasks can feel extremely overwhelming. While this may feel discouraging, there are tools to help combat extreme fatigue and difficulty with concentration. An umbrella term for these skills are executive functioning skills, which include our ability to focus on a task, utilize a flexible mindset, exhibit self control and solve problems with our working memory. For more information on executive functioning skills, check out this verywellmind post!

Focus

Focus is a critical element to performing well in school and work as well as completing tasks within the home! Feeling unable to focus can lead to feelings of sadness, anxiousness and irritability. Here are a few tips to try out:

-Turn your phone on airplane mode to minimize distractions or set screen time limits for yourself if things like social media are a drain on your time.

-Take breaks! This feels like the opposite of “powering through” a task. However, it is key to take at least 5 minute breaks per hour. Use this time to stretch, take a walk around the block, make a cup of tea or meditate. This will give your brain a needed rest before diving back into work, thus increasing your productivity.

-Try to use a physical timer for tasks and your 5 minute breaks. My personal favorite is the Time Timer! This helps minimize distractions from our cell phones.

-Use white noise or classical music as background noise to help increase focus on the task at hand. 

Time Management

Lack of time management can impact our ability to self regulate our emotions and get the “must do” tasks done each day. Tools that can be helpful in achieving time management include:

-Mapping out how long your tasks will take for the day and for the week.

-Utilize a calendar to plan for daily, weekly and monthly tasks. (For a physical journal, the Passion Planner is customized to incorporate hourly, daily and monthly task mapping. For an app that syncs alongside your personal calendar, programs such as Things 3 and Todoist can be a great place to start).

-Use the “Three Task Approach”. Prioritize no more than the top three tasks that have to get done each day. Prioritize tasks by level of importance (deadlines, bill payments) vs. things you would like to get done but can be achieved at a later time.

Organization

An organized mind lends itself to an organized space! If you are dealing with clutter, break down large tasks (like cleaning out an entire closet) into smaller, more manageable tasks first (Ex: Step 1: Hang up my clothes. Step 2: Fold laundry. Step 3: Put away laundry. Step 4: Remove items from closet for donation and place in transportable bag/box).

If you are overwhelmed with an entire house to organize, break it down first by prioritizing which room is the most important to organize. A home office may be a great place to start! Take this day by day, week by week or month by month. Organization can be achieved at a steady pace over time!

Invisible Mental Load: What is it?

Invisible mental load involves the cognitive labor or “invisible labor” of running a household. This only intensifies when the household expands and involves daily childcare, paying bills, cleaning the bathrooms, cooking dinners, packing lunches, laundry, or taking kiddos to soccer practice all while juggling chronic pain, work or school. 

A recent Harvard University study from 2019 found that in relationships, women both anticipate and execute more invisible cognitive tasks, lending itself to identifying an incredible source of gender inequality at a household level. The author of the study, Allison Daminger, notes that while a diverse population was sought, most respondents were heterosexual couples identifying as white or Asian, making generalizations to LGBTQ couples, different socioeconomic groups and racial groups difficult. However, the research clearly demonstrates that organizational labor is heavily gendered, impacting families, communities and society at large.

Eve Rodsky, an organizational management consultant and author of Fair Play: Share the mental load, rebalance your relationship and transform your life, has created an innovative system to not only communicate about cognitive labor with your partner but provides hands on tools to equally divide tasks in a unique way. If your invisible mental load is impacted by daily chronic pain, Eve’s work could be a helpful tool in facilitating positive changes with your partner during pain flare ups.

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