Overcoming Stress-Induced Brain Fog by Jill Weber covers ten strategies to find focus and make your mind work better. It’s aimed at people who are experiencing brain fog due to chronic stress rather than due to illness. The book draws on concepts from cognitive behavioural therapy (ACT), acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT), and mindfulness.
The book begins by explaining how chronic stress affects the mind and body, and then there’s a chapter devoted to each of the ten strategies, including overcoming survival mode with emotional awareness and overcoming irritability and stress with mindfulness and acceptance.
The author differentiates between false self-care (coping strategies that only end up making things worse) and healthy coping, and the book addresses healthy habits around nutrition, sleep, exercise, and relaxation.
Some of the other topics that are addressed include avoidance, cognitive distortions, self-compassion, perfectionism, self-talk, and how to make new habits stick.
This book isn’t aimed at people dealing with mental illness, and I think the author does a good job of presenting therapy and mental health-related concepts in a way that’s likely to be accessible for people who don’t have background knowledge. It’s practical and doesn’t feel especially therapy-ish, and I think it would be a good choice for people dealing with chronic stress.
On a side note, I’m not a huge fan of the term brain fog. This isn’t an issue with the book, but the term more generally; I just find it a bit too vague to be useful, and there isn’t an equivalent medical term. Fuzzy-headedness in chronic stress, fibromyalgia, and depression aren’t necessarily the same thing (for example, a study in the journal PLoS One looks at differences in cognitive symptoms between fibromyalgia and depression), but they may all end up getting lumped into the same colloquial brain fog bucket. I probably care because my depression-induced molasses brain feels subjectively different from stressed-out-when-well brain.
Is brain fog of any sort something that you deal? How do you manage it?
Overcoming Stress-Induced Brain Fog is available on Amazon (affiliate link).
I received a reviewer copy from the publisher through Netgalley.
You can find my other reviews on the MH@H book review index or on Goodreads.
