How to reduce brain fog using mental talk
(Obligatory disclaimer: I’m not a doctor. This is not medical advice. The ideas and practices in this blog post have been helpful for me, but YMMV).
Brain fog is a general term for mild cognitive impairment or a lack of mental clarity. It can be caused by things like sleep deprivation, poor diet, and various illnesses such as COVID-19.
As someone with narcolepsy, I experience brain fog on a pretty regular basis. Narcolepsy is a chronic sleep disorder with no known cure (yet). Brain fog is something I’ve learned to live with. In this blog post, I’ll describe some of the strategies I use to manage brain fog that involve mental talk.
Mental talk is that inner voice you hear when you think. Sometimes it’s called self-talk. The strategies I describe here are ways to deliberately apply mental talk in order to cut through brain fog and cultivate greater mental clarity.
The importance of self-compassion
Take a moment to think about the quality of your mental talk. Is your inner voice generally kind and understanding? If not, I highly recommend learning about and practicing self-compassion before you use the techniques described below. In particular, I recommend the book The Mindful Self-Compassion Workbook. Other therapeutic frameworks that deal with mental talk and may be helpful for you are Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) and Internal Family Systems (IFS). Working one-on-one with a professional therapist may also be helpful.
The techniques I describe here can backfire if your inner voice is not kind. That’s because these techniques empower your inner voice. If your inner voice is harsh and critical (as mine once was), then the last thing you want to do is give it more fire power. If that’s the case, then you will probably get much more benefit from practicing self-compassion than the techniques described here.
There’s probably no harm in reading about these techniques. Just make sure that if you do put them into practice that you do so with kindness towards yourself.
Components of brain fog
For the purposes of this blog post, we’ll divide brain fog into three distinct components:
- Dullness
- Slowness
- Distractibility
Dullness can be described as spacing out or feeling mildly disoriented.
Slowness is difficulty with processing new information and keeping up with the pace of change in your environment.
Distractibility is the tendency to lose focus and, well, get distracted.
Each of these three components has a corresponding mental talk technique:
- Dullness → Labeling
- Slowness → Summarizing
- Distractibility → Narrating
I’ll explain each of these in the sections below.
Dullness and labeling
The opposite of dullness is sharpness. When you are sharp, you are perceptive and attuned to your environment. It’s easy to notice things and stay oriented to your surroundings.
Dullness makes it difficult to stay present and engaged with your environment. When you are mentally dull, it takes effort to stay oriented and not space out.
To counter dullness, use mental talk to apply labels to the objects in your awareness, sort of like how a child who is learning to talk will point at things and say the name of the thing they’re pointing at. Doing this may feel a bit awkward at first, but it is helpful because it forces you to clarify your mental foreground, separate from your mental background. Labeling also forces you to synchronize your inner thoughts with your external environment, which can help you feel more grounded and present.
Additionally, it can be helpful to create simple rules to orient your attention towards specific categories of things. For example, in Japanese railways there is a safety technique called Pointing and Calling where train operators will point to what they are looking at, call out what they see, and announce their next action (see the image above for an example of what this looks like). This technique has proven to be highly effective at reducing mistakes, and you can perform a similar kind of operation with mental talk.
You can create your own checklist of labels to go through whenever you notice your mind drifting into the clouds. For example, you can name one thing that you see, one thing that you hear, and one thing that you feel, e.g. “I see the text on my computer screen, I hear the clacking of the keyboard as I type, and I feel my fingers on the keys of the keyboard. Text. Clacking. Fingers.” (This particular example is inspired by the see-hear-feel meditation technique taught by Shinzen Young).
🔑 Key practice: Clarify your mental foreground by applying labels to objects.
🕐 When to use it: Whenever you start to space out and need to be more attentive.
⚠️ Warning! There are at least two ways that labeling can backfire:
- Constant sustained attention can be exhausting. When you stay fully attentive to your external environment for long periods of time, your mental energy becomes depleted. Road rage is one example of this. Driving safely requires sustained attention to the road, which can sometimes lead drivers to become irritable and prone to emotional outbursts. It’s possible to use labeling as a way to keep your attention locked to your external surroundings continuously. But it’s important to give your mind adequate rest, which includes taking periodic breaks throughout the day to let your mind space out for a bit.
- Labeling can lead to tunnel vision. Sometimes the gestalt of a situation is more important than any one element. If you over-rely on labeling as a means of guiding your attention, you may end up missing the forest for the trees. Labeling is useful for orienting around specific things, but sometimes what’s important is how things relate. For example, labeling does not help at all when you’re having a conversation with someone. In conversation, it’s important to listen to the meaning of the words being said as a whole, not just as isolated expressions.
Slowness and summarizing
The opposite of slowness is quickness. When you are quick, it’s easy to keep up with the pace of changes in your environment. For example, participating in conversation with other people is effortless. The conversation flows naturally and you easily understand the information being discussed.
Slowness makes it difficult to keep up with the pace of activity in your environment. Things seem to change faster than you can make sense of them, or you struggle to complete tasks at a reasonable rate.
To counter slowness, use mental talk to summarize your current situation. Imagine you are in the middle of watching a TV show when a friend walks in, and they want to watch the rest of the show with you. To help your friend understand what’s happening in the show, you must quickly summarize the important plot details so that your friend has context, but you also must not confuse them with irrelevant information.
Summarizing your situation consolidates your working memory. By investing a momentary burst of cognitive effort to summarize the important aspects of your situation, you filter out the less relevant information so that your mind can let it go, giving you a lighter cognitive load moving forward. Simultaneously, your mental effort reinforces the important information, making it easier to retain.
Summarizing is especially helpful in moments immediately before a context switch, such as the end of a conversation or the moment before you stand up from your desk to go somewhere else. Whenever a context switch occurs, there’s a higher risk of forgetting important information. You’ve probably experienced situations where you were interrupted while in the middle of a task, and then when you eventually returned to the task, you struggled to remember what exactly you were doing. Consolidating your working memory immediately before a context switch makes it easier to retain important contextual information so that you can get back up to speed more quickly whenever you return to that context.
🔑 Key practice: Consolidate your working memory by summarizing your situation.
🕐 When to use it: Right before a context switch, or whenever you’re struggling to keep up with the pace of activity you’re participating in.
⚠️ Warning! There are at least two ways that summarizing can backfire:
- Summarizing can cause you to miss important information. Just as reading the cliff notes for a novel is not the same thing as reading the novel itself, your mental summarization of a situation is not the same thing as the full context of that situation. The map is not the territory.
- Summarizing can lead you to jump to conclusions. In order to tie things together into a coherent narrative, you may be tempted to make assumptions that are convenient but unjustified. You must be honest with yourself about what you don’t know, even if that makes it more difficult to understand things. For example, when interacting with other people, you can never know for certain what they are truly feeling internally. You can only know what they say and what they do.
Distractibility and narrating
The opposite of distractibility is focus. When you are focused, your actions are aligned with your goals.
Distractibility makes it difficult to stay on task and apply consistent effort toward a singular goal.
To counter distractibility, use mental talk to narrate your actions as you do them, sort of like how a sports commentator narrates a live sports game. Doing this increases your self-awareness and thus your self-control (you cannot control what you are unaware of). Doing this also creates a narrative explanation for your actions, especially if you use causal language (e.g. words like “because” and “why”). Having a meaningful story to explain your actions to yourself helps you notice when your actions deviate from your intentions.
Narration has two modes: objective fact mode and subjective story mode.
Objective fact mode is basically an extension of the labeling technique described in the section on dullness, except you use complete sentences instead of standalone words. In this mode, you only narrate what is physically present and happening. You only narrate things that are verifiable in the external world. This does not include anything about the meaning or purpose of things. It does not include any judgments of things as good or bad. It does not include any assumptions or inferences about anyone’s intentions or motivations, including your own. It’s just the facts.
Subjective story mode adds a layer of personal meaning on top of the objective facts. The story you tell connects the objective facts to your values and goals. In this mode, you do make value judgments. While objective fact mode is for taking stock of what is happening, subjective story mode is for making sense of what is happening so you can decide what to do going forward. Subjective story mode is like the glue that holds the facts together. And just like glue, a little bit can go a long way.
🔑 Key practice: Strengthen self-control by narrating your actions.
🕐 When to use it: Whenever you’re losing focus, or you’re in a situation with a high potential for distraction.
⚠️ Warning! There are at least two ways that this narration technique can backfire:
- Your inner voice can amplify unhelpful narratives. If the voice narrating your actions is saying things like “I’m trying to finish this email that I should have already finished but I didn’t because I’m so stupid!” then narration becomes the opposite of helpful. In this case, you need to practice self-compassion instead of narration. If you decide to use narration anyway (or it just happens automatically), then try to stick to objective fact mode and steer clear of assumptions and judgements.
- Increased self-awareness can lead to analysis paralysis. Narrating your actions requires you to consciously observe yourself as you do things, which leads you to consciously evaluate your moment-by-moment decisions. This is only helpful if your habitual moment-by-moment decisions would otherwise lead you astray into distraction. But if your habitual decisions are already sufficiently aligned with your goals, then narration doesn’t really help. It causes you to hesitate unnecessarily. And if you have low self-confidence, then hesitation can snowball into analysis paralysis. In this case, it’s better to just drop the narration, go with the flow, and don’t worry too much about the possibility of making mistakes. You can always learn from your mistakes after the fact.
How to practice
To get started with these techniques, it can be helpful to practice out loud or by using subvocalization (i.e. speaking softly, below the threshold of hearing). Over time, it becomes easier to apply the techniques internally, without needing to subvocalize.
One of the most difficult aspects of using these techniques is simply remembering to use them in the first place. It helps to decide ahead of time what circumstances will prompt you to use each of these techniques.
Here are some examples from my own life:
- I use the labeling technique whenever I notice myself feeling really tired (as often happens with narcolepsy) but need to stay awake.
- I use the summarizing technique during and after conversations with people, and I try to summarize out loud whenever it makes sense as a natural part of the conversation itself. This has the added benefit of confirming my understanding with the other person, and it gives them an opportunity to clarify if there’s something I missed.
- I use the narration technique whenever I realize that I’m procrastinating on a task or when I’m unsure about how to get started with a task. Crucially, I don’t beat myself up about procrastinating. I just narrate as objectively as I can, with occasional references to the end goal that I’m trying to achieve. Once I’ve built up enough momentum to keep me going, I drop the narration.
Conclusion
The best way to deal with brain fog is to prevent it from happening in the first place, but that’s not always possible. Lifestyle factors (sleep, diet, exercise, etc.) are important to keep in mind, but even an optimal lifestyle is not always enough to completely resolve brain fog. When you find yourself experiencing brain fog and can’t seem to resolve it with traditional approaches, you can apply the mental talk techniques of labeling, summarizing, and narrating to help cultivate mental clarity and stay functional in daily life.
