When you go through trauma, it affects both your body and your mind. As time goes by after the trauma is over, you may experience a slow sluggishness in your thinking as well as in your focus that can interfere with your life. Just as the name suggests, brain fog is a lack of clarity in your mind and thinking; it’s total mental fatigue. You feel like you just can’t think clearly. PTSD causes brain fog…. among other things. And even though there are other causes of brain fog, our focus here is the severe brain fog that can occur with PTSD.
You may feel disoriented and disconnected from your surroundings. You may find you have a short attention span and that you easily lose your train of thought. Your memory may be sketchy, you may find yourself spacing out, and keeping up with conversations may be particularly hard.
We often think of brain fog as a symptom of aging, dementia, or depression –and it can be. But you may not realize that it can be a significant symptom of PTSD. The result of ongoing stress, fatigue that’s both physical and mental, and trauma.
Brain fog can be caused by inflammation in your neurons, (or your brain’s nerve cells) and PTSD causes that inflammation, among other things. In fact, PTSD and neuro-inflammation actually contribute to each other in a vicious cycle.
Sometimes, the trauma is a single experience… an auto crash or assault…where the PTSD that results follows that single event. But sometimes the trauma is repeated and ongoing, like chronic child or domestic abuse, active combat, or sexual abuse. This is considered complex PTSD, or cPTSD.
That’s where cortisol comes in.
Your ‘sympathetic” nervous system empowers you to respond to trauma or danger with a fight-flight-freeze response to protect you and help you survive in the face of a threat. Your body secretes cortisol, called the stress hormone, when this happens.
If your trauma comes from a prolonged, repeated, and ongoing threat or injury, it causes a continued stress response, with little or no recovery time before the next traumatic event.
Cortisol can help you survive by making glucose and fatty acids in your liver available to fuel your flight….or else fight for your life.
That’s ideal for a crisis, but what if cortisol is released all the time? If it’s released in excess, it can cause inflammation, and you’re left with all the problems inflammation causes.
When the inflammation is in your brain, you may have brain fog, cognitive problems, and memory loss. And when you have complex PTSD, those onslaughts of cortisol fall-out happen way too often. Higher levels of cortisol circulating through your body damage your immune system and push cortisol levels still higher.
As a result, you may feel intense panic at times, be unable to calm yourself, have flashbacks, and changes in your appetite causing weight gain or loss. Also insomnia, inability to regulate your emotions, phobias of social interactions, people, and places, intense hypervigilance, and so much more.
Brain fog is only one of a myriad of PTSD symptoms, like intrusive thoughts, painful memories and upsetting dreams. You may find you avoid conversations about the traumatic event, as well as people or circumstances that remind you of it.
You may blame yourself or someone else, or refuse to trust anyone again. Insomnia, difficulty with concentration, mood swings, and hypervigilance may plague you. PTSD is complicated and intense, and some of the symptoms tend to make others worse. But IV ketamine treatment can help.
More about IV ketamine treatment for PTSD in a moment, but first let’s talk about things you can do to help the brain fog.
Your Diet
Your diet plays an important role in your brain function. If you don’t feed your brain well, it cannot function at its best. But when PTSD is present, your brain needs a diet that’s dense with the right nutrients.
Fresh vegetables of all colors, fresh fruit, whole grains, olive oil, fish high in omega 3 fatty acids, and good dairy can provide the nutrients your brain desperately needs.
For brain support, feed your brain a Mediterranean type of diet.
Restful Restorative Sleep
Research has revealed that sleep deprivation leads to neuroinflammation. And neuroinflammation causes brain fog. So, in addition to a brain-nutrient rich diet, you need rest to empower your brain to overcome brain fog symptoms.
Symptoms of depression and PTSD can cause insomnia, so treating those symptoms with IV ketamine can ease the symptoms of insomnia and support your sleep. Maintaining a consistent routine to prepare yourself for sleep, like turning off screen time an hour or two before bed, dialing down the lights, avoiding caffeine, settling into a quiet slowdown in the evenings, and maintaining consistent sleep and wake times can help your circadian rhythm.
Regular Exercise
For some, moderate to heavy exercise can be a welcome form of tension release, and the improved health. For others, it can just be too hard to get up, get out, and exercise.
But small steps can lead to more and bigger steps, if you just do something. And keep this in mind: exercise improves your circulation which delivers those vital nutrients to your brain.
The CDC recommends that you get 150 minutes a week of exercise plus strength training.
If that’s a big order for you, start with baby steps and build as you can. A walk down your block is a huge improvement if you’ve been immobile or sedentary. And the more minutes you spend increasing your circulation, the better you’ll feel. Try it and see.
About IV ketamine for PTSD
Trauma, which is an extreme example of stress, changes structures and functions in your brain. In order to keep you safe, your brain catalogs memory, sights, smells, people around you, what you felt, and on and on. These things help you to learn from your experiences so you can keep yourself safe.
But in the case of trauma, your brain goes into extreme overdrive, pounding you with these memories, sights, smells, and feelings to such an extent that the extreme danger you experienced in the past becomes present in your mind, as though it’s still going on. That’s PTSD and it causes brain fog.
We’ll be talking in more detail about PTSD coming soon, but for now, know that there can be transformative relief with IV ketamine treatment. Even if you’ve had PTSD for years.
IV ketamine can repair the damage to the structures in your brain and improve your brain’s function remarkably. When that happens, your normal function can be restored, as well as your enjoyment and reward in life.
If you experience symptoms of PTSD like we’ve talked about here, and nothing else has helped, call us.
With effective treatment of PTSD symptoms, you can experience relief of the brain fog that goes with it.
We’re eager to help you with the treatment that can turn your life around for the better.
To the restoration of your best self,
Hello, I suffer from PTSD and have tried various things with limited results. I’m curious about your strategy. I come from a family we’re incest was normalized, and I suffered sexual abuse on some level, from absolutely everyone in my family, as I recall it, including both parents and my siblings. I come from a Mennonite background, we’re the old colony Mennonites lived on colony’s and seemed to get away with these types of abuse more easily, as they were living so exclusively, apart from the outside world. It seems I also struggle telling the difference between my PTSD and false memories, though they all run along the same theme of me being humiliated, degraded, and deprived to no end. I was basically my Dads slave. As a result of the complex ptsd, it seems I now suffer from sex and porn addiction which has also destroyed my life for over 20 years. At any rate, I’m curious if I can even afford your type of treatment, but had to ask about it, as I’ve heard of ketamine before. I do need to clean up my diet as described above.