Why Your Brain Fog Won't Lift: The Six Mechanisms of Cognitive Dysfunction in Chronic Illness, and Why Standard Interventions Keep Failing — The Symptom Nobody Takes Seriously and Everybody Lives With

You cannot remember the word you used three times in conversation yesterday. You sit down to write the email you have been postponing for two weeks and the sentences do not assemble. You read the same paragraph four times because your eyes have been moving across the page while your attention was elsewhere, except elsewhere is not anywhere you can name. You walk into a room and the reason you came is gone. You see a face you know well and you cannot retrieve the name. You feel a pressurized sensation behind your eyes that intensifies after meals, after standing, after stress, after exertion, and sometimes for no reason at all. You feel disconnected from your own thinking, as though you were watching it from a few feet away. Standard medicine has run blood work that came back normal. Your TSH is in range. Your B12 is fine. Your iron is adequate. Your inflammatory markers may be subtly elevated but nothing diagnostic. You have been told it is anxiety. You have been told it is depression. You have been told it is sleep. You have been told it is hormones. You have been told it is age. You have been told that you are working too hard, that you need to meditate, that you should try a phone detox, that you should consider an SSRI, that you should consider a stimulant, that you might have ADHD, that you might have early dementia, that nothing is wrong. You know something is wrong. The