HEALTH AND WELLBEING.

On Brain Fog.  

“Prescriptions assume that something needs to be fixed; transformation brings forth the healing -- the coming to integrity, to wholeness of what is already there". Gabor Mate

Our bodies are not something to pathologise, but to understand.

A persons body alive with female hormones, undergoes many evolutions. From adolescence, through each monthly cycle which represents a microcosm for the bigger transitions in a “women’s” life, her reproductive experiences, and the shifts in her cycles as one nears towards them ending.

In each cycle, a new brain and body are crafted and created, we are made and unmade, often simultaneously.

And through each cycle the way our bodies and brains behave can change.

Memory can allude us, new bodily contours form.

Alterations in consciousness, can be a hallmark of female hormonal cycles. Through out each month we experience differences in the way we think, and these are compounded through larger transitions.

In the later stages of pregnancy, our conscious brains are intentionally quietened to prepare us for the instinctive nature of childbirth. After our children arrive, in the postpartum monhts our minds are resculpted again, as they are shaped towards becoming more empathetic and more social. This evolution continues throughout each cycle of growth we encounter.

We have labels for the outward expression of these experiences baby brain or brain fog.

However what we have pathologised, is an internal shifting and sculpting towards adaption, the fog of our brains and our bodies may serve a deeper biological purpose-yet to be articulated through the lens of science- to quiet our minds whilst they are changing, to move us more into body.

Psychologist Carl Rogers offers some wisdom to comfort through these experiences

“I have come to realise that being trustworthy does not demand that I be rigidly consistent but that I be dependably real.”-

Brain fog may not be something to cure but something to nurture. Something that expands rather than diminishes. It may not make the path through these experiences any less tolerable but when we try to fix something, we may miss out on what that it is leading towards?

Helen Coutts

27. Oct. 2025.

References and Further Reading.

McKay, Dr Sarah 2018, Demystifying the female brain. Orion Spring, London