Why I built What Is Brain Fog.

Before

I used to think of my mind as one of my strongest assets.

In high school and college I considered myself pretty sharp. I could get a lot done. I was ambitious, generally a bright spark, earned good money, travelled the world and felt that life was moving in the right direction.

Then things began to change, so gradually that I did not understand what was happening.

The change

The problems began to affect the rest of my life too.

Starting work became difficult. Some days even getting out of bed felt like an enormous task.

The most frightening part was not having a good explanation for it.

Why can’t I think?

Trying things

I tried quick fixes before I learned to test one idea at a time.

I tried the obvious fixes and plenty of less-obvious ones. Over roughly ten years I worked with multiple doctors, read papers, followed leads, got things wrong, changed my mind and gradually became more systematic about testing ideas against what actually happened.

I stopped assuming that a plausible explanation was probably right. I took a theory seriously only when it matched the timing, predicted something I could check, didn't conflict with the rest of my health history and agreed with stronger evidence.

Getting some of it back

I began to get some of my working life back.

I dislike neat stories that end with somebody claiming they found the one answer. I feel like I am clawing bits of myself back. There are ups and downs, two steps forward and one step back, but I know I am on the right path.

What mattered was learning that brain fog wasn't a diagnosis. It was a reason to ask more specific questions about timing, possible contributors and what could be checked.

What became WBF

The personal investigation eventually became a public one.

I kept finding the same problem. Information about brain fog was scattered across disease pages, lab explanations, forums, research papers and generic lists. Those lists treated every possible cause as equally likely and equally proven.

WhatIsBrainFog.com grew out of the attempt to organize that mess. I wanted the sources, test explanations and doctor handouts I kept searching for to be available in one place.

I’m not a doctor. I was more like a biohacker before it was cool. I grew up around hospitals. My mother, rest her soul, worked in them, and my co-founder, who is a doctor, helped me understand how medicine approaches symptoms, tests, evidence and uncertainty. I bring years of investigating my own health to WBF so other people can ask better questions and find reliable information.

The internet version

The Reddit post kept a record of the messier process.

One version of that work became a Reddit post about tracking brain fog and testing different things over time. I keep it linked because it shows the messier process. The finished site can make that process look much tidier than it felt at the time.

Read the original Reddit post →