Day 5: Perimenopause and brain fog

Yesterday I talked about my experience with anxiety and panic attacks (see my Day 4 post). Today I’m chatting about a very common mental symptom — brain fog (or at least I’ll try to?!).

Brain fog

This one had me terrified that I had early onset dementia!

Some of my experiences here included:

• Misplacing things — mind you, I did get more exercise constantly searching high and low for things around the house!
• Not remembering what I was doing 5 seconds ago — TOP TIP: There is a thing called the doorway effect where you can forget things by entering a different physical context. Sometimes you can remember what you were thinking or doing if you walk back through the doorway into the original environment you were in when you first thought of it.
• Losing my train of thought halfway through a…
• Having difficulty concentrating with a very short attention span.

I’ve since discovered that I’m not alone in this. Through my conversations with other women, it seems to be a common fear.

I found the more I stressed about it, the worse it got. After realising that this was a normal part of perimenopause, I relaxed about it, which actually helped!

Compare it to when you are trying really hard to remember something, and it might be right there on the tip of your tongue, but you know that you won’t be able to remember it until 3 o’clock in the morning! It’s often when we relax our minds and think about or do something else that things come back to us (including creative solutions to things!).

Let’s start the conversation!

What are your top tips for managing this annoying symptom? Post them in the comments.

Read this post and more on my Typeshare Social Blog