How To Cure "Brain Fog" | 3 Tips for Mental Clarity

[Music] You know someone who wants to taper off caffeine? I'm not doing a very good job; having an espresso machine right next to my desk is very dangerous and probably a stupid idea.

So, you know, it's pretty crazy. The human brain is pretty crazy; it's such a fascinating machine, and we barely have scratched the surface of what it's capable of. But for that very reason, we don't really understand it fully.

Like, why is it that some days it seems like our friend? Like we're full of confidence, full of energy, witty, sharp as a tack, while other days it feels like our enemy? You know, you feel sluggish; it feels like someone just poured over a vat of molasses over your brain, and it's just slowing down all the gears of your mind.

On these days, it seems to completely sabotage our ability to focus or remember, in the short term or even the long term. Basically, it just screws over our brain completely. This dilapidated state is often referred to as brain fog and, according to the internet, is characterized primarily by a lack of mental clarity, inability to focus, and a decreased function of working memory.

But why does this happen, and how can we prevent it? Over the past couple of years, I’ve been trying to answer this question because brain fog sucks, especially if you have an important meeting or a date, or you're interacting with people a lot of the time, or you have to solve a problem.

A lot of days you can't afford to be in this state of brain fog. You're presenting to the world like the worst possible version of yourself, and it's annoying. So, in this video, we're gonna go over three powerful strategies to clear up that mental fog. But we're gonna go over three reasons why you probably have brain fog and how to fix them.

How to fix them, how to fix them, gotta catch them all! Factor number one is overstimulation. I think it was Tim Ferriss who said that we live in a digital environment where attention is currency. All these different companies, all these different websites, these advertisers, they want your attention because they can monetize it.

Whenever you click on something, somebody gets paid. Whenever you watch something, somebody gets paid. Even on this channel, I have ads before my videos unless you have an ad blocker and turned it off. That's fine; I'm not picky about it. I'm making like six dollars off these videos anyway.

Moral of the story is, everybody wants your attention. What this means for you is if you spend a lot of time on the internet and around screens, inevitably, your attention is going to be completely dispersed in a thousand different directions. And if you spend a long enough time doing this, you start to get used to having your attention fragmented.

YouTube is a perfect example of this. Clickbait on YouTube is so powerful because of something called supernormal stimulus. I'll put a link in the description to my favorite comic on this. There's actually — I mean, I don't read comics too often, but there's actually a really, really good comic on supernormal stimulus, what it is, and how you can fix it — or not fix it; it's just a phenomenon, a psychological phenomenon.

Improvement Pill has a YouTube channel called The Dopamine Fast, and it talks about having a single day where you drink nothing but water and you don’t intake any information; you can only output information.

This is obviously a very extreme example, and if you don't live like a Shaolin monk, you probably have errands to run on a Saturday, so you probably don't have time to do nothing all day — like a scheduled day where you do nothing.

But it is a really cool concept, and I still think you should check the video out. What I think is a lot more practical of a solution is to practice meditation. I know I talk about meditation all the time, but it's so powerful in this day and age because people can't sit still with themselves for more than five minutes.

It trains you to collect this scattered focus of yours and redirect it into doing something super boring. What's more boring than sitting there by yourself doing nothing? After you develop this muscle of being able to do that, you can focus on conversations better. You'll be able to focus on a math problem.

So, reducing social media use, bad screen time, and learning how to meditate — or just focusing on doing something at a slower pace for an extended period of time — will train yourself to stop being so scattered, so foggy, so in your head, and really focus in on what's in front of you. It’ll help with your brain fog a lot.

So one of the best ways to clear up that brain fog and become more present, focus, and dialed in is to prevent being scattered in the first place.

Say you have to write a paper, and the deadline is one month from now. You have some clear days where you could work on your paper, but you say to yourself, “Oh, it’s due a month from now. I can definitely do it three weeks before.” And then three weeks before it comes, and you're like, “I can do it two weeks before.”

Every time you do that, you're not forgetting about this deadline; you're just giving it to your subconscious to worry about.

The more things your subconscious has to worry about, the more scattered you become. Just because it isn’t on the front lines of your brain and the thing that you’re actively thinking about all the time, you’re still thinking about it subconsciously. You’re worrying about it. And the more things you give to your subconscious to worry about, the worse your brain fog gets.

So just get it done so you don’t have to worry about it anymore, and you can just focus on the task at hand.

So, tip number one is don’t procrastinate, and tip number two is to write down your goals, objectives, and tasks.

Say you meet a friend on the street that you haven’t seen for a while, and you catch up; you have a great conversation, and they say, “Hey, let’s meet up Tuesday afternoon and grab lunch.” And you say, “Yeah, that sounds like a great idea. I’ll see you then.” And then you depart. I said that archaically — you depart from each other.

Write that down. Schedule it in; set a reminder on your phone so that you can forget about it. Don’t give it to your subconscious to have to worry about. You're just gonna be thinking, “Tuesday afternoon I've got a lunch date with Kevin,” and that makes your attention to everything else for that entire week reduced because you're just gonna be thinking about this lunch date with Kevin.

You have to remember, this is dumb. Every time that you have a task to do, every time you have something scheduled, you agree to something, write it down, set a reminder on your phone so that you can forget about it. It’ll free up mental RAM, and it’ll help give your brain the clear broth it needs to operate better.

It's so hot in here; I look terrible!

Take it from somebody who has struggled through anxiety his entire life, it’s pretty much conquered it. Not having things to worry about completely reduces your anxiety — not completely; I can’t diagnose you and say, “Oh yeah, if you schedule your day, your anxiety disorder will go away.” That’s not what I’m saying.

I'm saying that you’re doing yourself a lot of favors if you become more organized. You don’t procrastinate; you have fewer things to worry about in general. So tip number two is all about being on top of things.

Okay, factor number three is general health. This one’s not going to be a long one. There’s a million videos on how to optimize your health — going to sleep on time, waking up at a decent hour, getting enough sleep, all that yada yada yada. I have a million videos about sleep; actually, I probably only have two — whatever!

For most people, that means between seven and nine hours of sleep per night, or seven and a half and eight and a half hours of sleep per night. Stay hydrated, eat good food, and exercise! Everybody knows these things, but almost nobody does all of them correctly.

So, if you feel like you’ve tried everything to reduce brain fog and you haven’t tried to optimize your health, you’re doing yourself a huge disservice. And the biggest one of all of these, probably, in my experience, is getting exercise.

There’s a video from a channel called What I’ve Learned about the cognitive benefits of exercise. In this video, he talks about how whenever someone talks about the benefits of exercise, they talk about reduced heart disease, and maybe the ability to, you know, not get a stroke when you’re older.

Exercise isn't sold very well. Almost nobody talks about the cognitive benefits that you receive from exercise. If exercise was sold in a pill, it would be the best-selling pill ever. If exercise was sold in a pill, it would be the closest thing to NZT 48 you could possibly find.

I’ve started weightlifting five days a week over the past couple of weeks, and I’m gonna continue to do so, mostly because it makes me feel amazing. And I’m not even talking about my bodily energy; I’m talking about my mental energy. I’m on the ball these days!

I don’t know if you could tell, but I'm just like I'm sick these days. I attribute a lot of that to exercise. My diet hasn’t changed much; I’ve been eating more protein, and I’ve been staying hydrated. But there’s something about exerting yourself every single day.

It’s almost like your body and mind learn that you’re an energetic person, and it gives you all this energy for free. It’s amazing.

So that’s about it, guys! If you take all three of these factors into account, I guarantee you — unless there’s something seriously wrong with you, and you need to see a doctor — your brain fog will significantly reduce. You’ll become a focused tiger, ten times more attractive, five times more focused, three times more productive, and one times more yourself!

And probably less friends, because they'll all be jealous.

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