10.1 Brain Fog

Picture This…

You finally drag yourself to the hospital for a check-up that your parents used to routinely schedule for you, but that you are now solely responsible for scheduling and attending. You get called into the doctor’s office and get checked in by a nurse who informs you that the doctor will be by shortly. After waiting for a few minutes, which seems like an eternity, the Doctor finally arrives and asks you, “How has everything been feeling lately?”.

Surprisingly, this question catches you off guard, and you quickly think to yourself, “That’s a really good question. How have I been feeling lately?” You think back to all of the times you had difficulty concentrating for extended periods of time, all the times you had been scraping your memory in search of information that you just couldn’t quite seem to retrieve, all the times where it felt like your mental health was continuously declining, all the time you spent scrolling on Instagram reels or TikTok before snapping out of your “doom scroll” to think “what did I just spend the last hour and half of my time watching?” You quickly stop reflecting to answer the doctor’s question with the quick, safe, and artificial response of “everything has been feeling pretty good, doc.”