It is not unusual for people going through prolonged periods of stress to experience what they may describe as “brain fog”.
This phenomenon is often associated with difficulty concentrating and thinking clearly. Sometimes people also report having difficulty finding the exact word they wanted to say. They can sometimes say things like “The last few weeks have just been a blur”.
When we’re in the stress response (Flight, Fight, Freeze, Fawn), our nervous system releases hormones (primarily Cortisol), which alter several important body and brain functions.
Firstly, blood and oxygen are diverted from the high-level thinking and reasoning parts of our brain and instead flood the emotions processing regions (our maker seemed to reason that we don’t need to outsmart the lion chasing us just outrun or fight it!).
Other effects include the shutting down of our reproductive and digestive systems, and, most importantly, our breathing shifts to short and shallow breaths too.
And that prolonged shallow breathing in stressed-out people could be the reason why they experience the so-called brain fog.
Researchers in the USA have been looking at the effects of long COVID and how the poor breathing that patients experience with the condition are experiencing impaired cognitive function.
Long COVID effects can persist for weeks, months, or years, and up to about 17% of the population has experienced it.
Researchers from the University of Iowa set out to assess associations between pulmonary MRI gas exchange (where oxygen moves from the lungs to the bloodstream, and carbon dioxide moves from the bloodstream to the lungs).
“This is the first time that MRI has been used to jointly assess lung and brain function to investigate their relationship in long COVID,” – study lead author Keegan Staab, B.S.
“There was a range of cognitive difficulties among the patients in the study, some were mild and indicated slight dysfunction, while others were more serious and indicated that some patients have slow thinking and trouble concentrating several times per day.”
The results showed that lower pulmonary gas exchange may be associated with cognitive dysfunction.
It is not a stretch to say that being sure to undertake deeper and slower breathing daily, perhaps especially finding a way to be mindful of this when we’re going through stressful times, can only be of assistance to us and our mental well-being.
Follow this link to an excellent video explaining better breathing.