If you're going to heal from childhood trauma and if you're ever going to be happy and connected and
do work you love, you're going to have to get out of brain fog. This is an almost universal feature
for people who grew up with abuse and neglect, that feeling of fuzzy-headedness where you can't
totally hold a thought or focus or maybe your memory isn't working properly or you're feeling
sleepy and out of it or it's almost like you...there's a membrane between you and the world.
Yeah, that is a PTSD thing, it's common! And it may not seem like it, but really it is one of the worst
symptoms of complex PTSD, it's almost never talked about. If you have it you know how miserable it is
it's like a hangover that goes on for years and it just makes it so hard to move forward with
your life or to learn new skills or get a job or be present with a friend or a kid who needs you.
And, it's such a cuddly name "brain fog" right? But really brain fog is a suppression of your being on
every level, it's cognitive, it's in your thinking, it's physical, it's emotional, it's spiritual, it's
a kind of deadness and when it's happening it's not just that you don't get ahead in your life,
it's like you're not really living your life and that's the worst feeling when you feel like your
days are just slipping by and you didn't get to be in them. Now if you want your brain back, I can
help you with that, I'm Anna Runkle also known as the Crappy Childhood Fairy and I teach people
how to heal common symptoms of childhood PTSD and CPTSD, that's the kind that comes from chronic
exposure to intense stress. And i'm thinking about brain fog today because hallelujah i'm feeling so
much less of it than I ever have. I'm taping this video in the days between Christmas and New Year's
and this would normally be a very foggy week for me you know tired, thinking about New
Year's resolutions and then eating the rest of the Christmas cookies do you ever have times like that?
You think "oh i'll change starting January 1st" right or wait maybe not the first but maybe
the first Monday after the new year, I do that I bargain with time and then the day never comes.
I've done it so many times but you know what I did this time? I made my big change before
Christmas, I made it back on December 4th, I was sick of neglecting my health, I couldn't stand
the thought of waiting any longer just you know thinking oh i'm busy and you know so much Crappy
Childhood Fairy stuff to do or waiting for life to return to normal or saying I have to finish
my next course or oh it's just COVID weight but it's not, it's been going on a lot longer than that
and I made a decision just to get the decision over with and get back on the way of eating
that makes me feel good and that makes me feel clear-headed and excited about each day
and it's a lovely way of eating it's easy and I found it to be super helpful for CPTSD symptoms
and i'll tell you more about that in a sec but here's what i'm going to talk about for
lifting that brain fog and it's three main areas where you need to focus. It's what you're eating,
it's what you're neglecting, and it's what you haven't healed yet.
Okay? So let's go through them, let's start with what you're eating. Now food is not the
only reason people get brain fog but I think for most people with CPTSD it's a major reason.
And thanks to Aces research, we now know a little more about why a history of trauma is so closely
correlated with things like obesity, diabetes, heart disease, hypertension, cancer, those are all
things related to food and weight and for whatever reason those of us who had childhood trauma have
a much higher incidence of these problems than the general population. But here's something else,
people who had childhood trauma have a relatively high incidence of sensitivity to certain foods
namely sugary flowery high carbohydrate foods, now for a lot of us we have a different physiological
relationship with that kind of food bread, you know, pastries, crackers, ice cream, candy, and especially
chocolate, I love chocolate. Now while some people can see a plate of cookies on the table or
chocolate and forget all about it, those of us with a high susceptibility to these foods get
let's say very very focused on those cookies and chocolate. I don't know about you but when I eat a
piece of chocolate, i'm going to be very distracted by the fact that there's still more on the plate,
pretty much until i've eaten it all or until someone takes it away and even then i'll be
thinking well where'd they put it and can I find it later. So when I eat foods with flour and sugar
it sets off this high...more hunger a craving for it even if i just ate a full meal, it's...it
makes no sense, it's not healthy for my body and I learned early on when I was a kid that most people
don't have that. I would go to kids houses you know and they'd have like a jar of M&Ms on the kitchen
table and I would just be like you know okay fine we're watching tv but are you going to break
out the M&Ms like when are we going to have the M&Ms and i'd learn like, don't say anything just
wait but it would be like preoccupying me right, when are we going to get those. So three or four
years ago, flash forward, somebody sent me this food quiz and it ended up starting a change in me that
totally changed my life, i'm going to put a link to the quiz in the description section below because
if you relate to what i'm saying about food, craving sugar and flour foods I think you're
going to want to take this quiz. Now this woman, Susan Peirce Thompson, who in her youth had been an
alcoholic and drug addict, got clean and sober at age 20 or something and then went on to gain over
100 pounds and she then went on to get her PhD in neuroscience and she set out to find out why
are some of us so sensitive to carbohydrates. And one of the first things she did
was create this scoring system to measure how much does this carb thing happen to you?
And she calls it the susceptibility score, there are 10 points possible, some people are four, some
people are a one, they're just like really normal i'm a nine like I really have a hard time stopping
once I start eating sweets or flour-y stuff, and she says that when researchers have studied rats
with this characteristic of carb sensitivity, the rats are sometimes born with it and two
carb sensitive parent rats will have offspring that are..who are also carb sensitive or one carb
sensitive parent one one normal parent they'll have some carb sensitive offspring, some not.
But here's the part that pricked my ears up, when a rat is born with a normal relationship to carbs
they will often convert to carb sensitivity as a result of exposure to trauma.
So trauma can change the way our bodies respond to carbohydrates it kind of makes sense doesn't
it? And when I took this quiz and saw what I had basically always known, that I have this out of
control relationship with carbs, but that I thought was because I was just a bad and lazy person and
not a good dieter right? Well something clicked, so I learned from Susan's program how to heal
that sensitivity and heads up it involves not eating sugar and flour at all! Which I thought
would be impossible and it made me very sad but after the first couple of weeks it started..it was
no big deal it just started to feel easy and fine really and the craving and the hunger just calmed
way down and very quickly like weight starts to come off so that's rewarding, like things fit again
and the big fringe benefit is, my brain fog is gone so I had a wildly successful run with
this program back in 2017, I lost 40 pounds and then out of a last shred of hope that once I lost
that weight I could go back to eating whatever I wanted, I tried it and you can guess what happened
I gradually gained it back, especially this last year 2020 and as the weight came back so did that
old feeling of being drained every afternoon and evening and being kind of demoralized and
feeling foggy in my thinking and waking up in the middle of the night, not able to go back to sleep.
And I didn't really think that I had brain fog but now that i'm clear, it's like wow! So yeah I started
again and one thing I really noticed this time, and this is the thing I really wanted to tell you
about is that, in my experience this way of eating really helps calm brain dysregulation and it keeps
my spirits upbeat and you know being calm and upbeat that's like everything to me and even if
I never lost weight doing this i'd say it's well worth it, i've got so much I want to do in my life
and so many Crappy Childhood Fairy projects and also there were so many lost years from
CPTSD in the past so now i'm free and i'm going for it! So I almost never endorse anything but
this is one of the handful of things along with the writing and meditation techniques that I teach,
that has genuinely moved my healing forward, so yeah the link where you can take that
food susceptibility quiz is down below in the description section, i'll be sure to put it there
and once you put in your email for that, you'll get more info on the program and how you can learn how
to eat that way. So brain fog, that is the one big driver of what causes it and how to heal it, it's
what you're eating. Now maybe you have that issue food, maybe you don't, but the second thing to look
at if you want to get out of the fog is what you're neglecting. Neglecting. And yes of course
i'm talking about proper sleep, exercise, drinking enough water, and those commonly understood sources
of well-being, neglecting those will definitely rob you of your ability to focus and be alert but
I want to talk about a deeper level of functioning that we sometimes neglect and that can cause
a mental dullness or vagueness it's fog and that's when you neglect to be real and present
and decisive about your life, right? You didn't think I was going here did you? But one cause
of brain fog can be traced to a huge buildup of unmade decisions in your life, they clutter
up your mind it's like they're covering a table, they fog you over, fog builds up with decisions
and actions that aren't moving along in the proper rhythm because that's what life is right?
You act, you decide, you rest, and instead they're getting stuck, things you don't really like but you
won't let go of or things you like to do but you won't commit to them. All those options, it's just
cluttering up your mind, they're sucking a little bit of your energy every day, they're using up a
little bit of your bandwidth and you know what happens when there's not enough bandwidth, you
freeze up, you fog over it's too much information. Now struggling with decisions is a huge problem
for people with CPTSD, it can be really disregulating for one thing do you have that?
You can get really jammed up with self-doubt and mistakes you maybe made in the past and it seems
too treacherous to actually decide things but deciding things is a great way to clear the path
in front of you and to start having things, to start accomplishing things and just clearing your
mind. Now if you can't yet decide big things, start with the little things and then take at least one
small action on your decision right away, try it! See what happens to your sense of mental clarity
and energy when you make a decision and then act on it right? See what that feels like. Okay,
so for causes of brain fog we talked about carb sensitivity, we talked about decision overload, the
third thing is just stuff you haven't healed yet. It's just stuff you haven't healed. Complex PTSD is,
at its root, a brain injury and sometimes I think our brains heal by putting themselves in something
like an induced coma, and I don't mean literally it's not a coma but we just kind of check out
sometimes because there's just too much going on in there, like the entire bandwidth is consumed by
just coping and that's okay, you can...you can have a little fog every now and then it can be healing.
And then after a time when the fog starts getting depressing then you need a little time of action,
you move forward. So to help get out of that unpleasant stuck kind of brain fog that's holding
you back, the best thing you can do is to keep working on your healing, just work on calming your
triggers, getting more mastery over your tendency to get dysregulated and then learn to re-regulate.
And for those of you who are new to this idea of learning to re-regulate, i'll put information down
below in the description section, there's going to be a whole bunch of goodies for you down there. So
eating to heal carb sensitivity, making decisions to heal overload, and continuing efforts to keep
healing the general trauma that keeps knocking out your full presence and awareness that's it. If
these three things were all you did in the coming year it would be an amazing year. These are the
things i'm going to be doing in the coming year and maybe you want to join me on some of it, you
can check out those links below and if you love this topic of like making powerful changes in your
life, you're going to want to check out this video right here it's called "If you had just one year
to heal," people love this video a few people get angry at it, see what you think and I will see you
soon!