Brain Fog after COVID

In the last few days, I have talked to a number of people who have had COVID or knew people who had COVID. One of the symptoms they talked about was what they described as "Brain Fog." When I asked what that was, they said, they felt confused and unable to think clearly enough to make decisions both minor and major ones. One person I talked to said it took them about 7 months before they felt they were back to normal.

"Brain Fog" is a real thing according to a new study, reported by Sky News

 Here are some quotes from the story.

Patients who overcome severe COVID infections suffer a cognitive impairment which is the equivalent of losing 10 IQ points say the team of scientists from the University of Cambridge and Imperial College London.

Their findings suggest that the effects of the coronavirus infection are still detectable more than six months after the illness, that cognitive recovery is gradual at best, and that it may even impact people who only had mild cases.

What are the signs of impairment?

The survivors scored particularly poorly on verbal analogical reasoning tasks, a result the researchers say supports the commonly-reported problem of difficulty finding words.

"They also showed slower processing speeds, which aligns with previous observations post COVID-19 of decreased brain glucose consumption within the frontoparietal network of the brain, responsible for attention, complex problem-solving and working memory, among other functions."

Professor David Menon from the University of Cambridge, the study's senior author, said: "Cognitive impairment is common to a wide range of neurological disorders, including dementia, and even routine ageing, but the patterns we saw – the cognitive 'fingerprint' of COVID-19 – was distinct from all of these."

Prof Menon added: "We followed some patients up as late as ten months after their acute infection, so we're able to see a very slow improvement.

Being Busy in retirement is not being engaged

 After 30 plus years of work, we have developed a series of skill sets that may be unique to our job, or unique to our industry. When we leave the workforce, we take those with us, and our employer and our industry lose those skills. 

In retirement, we have choices such as going back to work full time, making it easy, seeking some part-time work, volunteering, recreation, and travel. Being productive and using our skill sets as a source of meaning is not an important type of meaning in retirement. When we retire, we need to be actively engaged rather than just mindlessly engaged if we are to find meaning. 

Being busy should not be mistaken for engagement. Busyness can be a defense against the challenge to find meaning. In retirement, activities that are meaningful for both retirees and the recipients of their labour are desirable forms of engagement (e.g., coaching, teaching, mentoring of youth).   

Being busy in retirement is pretty easy to do because time loses its meaning. If I no longer have the time constraint of getting up at a certain time to go to work, I may find my morning routine changes. If my morning routine changes then my daily routine also changes. Over time I find it takes longer to complete tasks that it once did. So, as a consequence of having more time people take more time, and so seem busier. It would pay to monitor your daily routines to see if you are actually doing anything productive or if you are just wasting time being busy. 

Do you want to be engaged or do you want to be busy? There is a difference and one that is important to your understanding of self. I think many of us start out being engaged. After a few years of engagement, we draw back to re-energize and gather our bearings. As we find things to fill out time (I have a friend who take three hours to read and digest the local paper after breakfast), we find that we start to get busy, and once we get busy, we may find it hard to get engaged, because it is an easy option to stay busy. 

If we do not stay engaged, the skill sets that we worked hard to develop, and hone will start to fade. There is an old adage “use it or lose it” that is true about both mental and physical skills. Being busy is not as important as staying engaged if you want to have a long, successful retirement with a high degree  of self confidence and a deeper understanding of your self worth and self awareness.

 

Public Speaking

Most of us have a fear of public speaking and will do whatever we can to get out of it. Here is some of the tricks that I use if I have to give a speech. When public speaking, pause frequently. Pause before you say something in a new way, pause after you have said something you believe is important, and pause as a relief to let listeners absorb details.

When I was first trying my hand at public speaking, I was told a successful speech was in the presentation. “Tell the audience what you want to tell them. Tell the audience what you just told them and then wrap up by telling them again what you just said.” The point is that repetition is the key to a good speech. Repetition and one message at a time. People can get confused when or if you give them too much information at once.

It is important that if you are giving a thank you speech, for example, you just say thank you, acknowledge those who have helped you and stay on course. If you are welcoming a person to the group or to your community, focus on the welcome, what the community can do for the person and what, if anything the community can expect from the person being welcomed.

I am not a great public speaker and if I have to give a formal speech, I write it out and practice before I give the speech. When I have to give a speech, I have it mostly memorized, and I talk to the audience without referring to my notes often. I do refer to the notes to make sure I have not left anything out. If I am asked to speak and I have not prepared anything, which does happen from time to time, I make the speech short and to the point, and if possible I use humour to break the ice. 

This is empathy

Emotion researchers generally define empathy as the ability to sense other people’s emotions, coupled with the ability to imagine what someone else might be thinking or feeling. Thanks to Ken for the idea for this post.

Contemporary researchers often differentiate between two types of empathy: “Affective empathy” refers to the sensations and feelings we get in response to others’ emotions; this can include mirroring what that person is feeling or just feeling stressed when we detect another’s fear or anxiety. “Cognitive empathy,” sometimes called “perspective taking,” refers to our ability to identify and understand other people’s emotions.

Affective empathy can be when someone is struggling and you focus on what they are feeling and see through their eyes. Cognitive empathy is understanding that while we may be different but we’re not on different sides. Your ability to see the world as others do is cognitive empathy.

Empathy is the ability to share someone else’s feelings or experiences and it is one that all animals have. Over the last several decades, we’ve seen increasing evidence of empathy in other species. One piece of evidence came unintentionally out of a study on human development. Carolyn Zahn-Waxler, a research psychologist at the National Institute of Mental Health, visited people’s homes to find out how young children respond to family members’ emotions. She instructed people to pretend to sob, cry, or choke and found that some household pets seemed as worried as the children were by the feigned distress of the family members. The pets hovered nearby and put their heads on their owners’ laps.

Emotions trump rules. This is why, when speaking of role models, we talk of their hearts, not their brains. We rely more on what we feel than what we think when we see others in distress. Moral rules tell us when and how to apply our empathic tendencies, but the tendencies themselves have been in existence since time immemorial.

When someone is struggling, they don’t always need someone to swoop in and fix things. They may just need someone to understand where they’re coming from. Empathy might, in fact, be the positive aspect of all of this: whatever our circumstances, it’s clear that we all need to feel seen and heard. If empathy doesn’t come easily to you, the good news is that it can be learned and practiced. Empathy can help us know ourselves and our own feelings. It can help us lead, help us communicate and help us support and connect with others. At home. At work and at school.