Brain Fog, Exhaustion and Running on Empty? Find out why!

Do you sometimes feel like you are running on empty?

Perhaps you have been asking yourself if you are developing brain fog or even brain fry, even if you are not yet close to menopause or even as a man.

As summer holidays approach we have had months of juggling work commitments, a constant stream of communications via chats, email, and notifications, while also trying to maintain our home life, childcare and our own wellbeing. 

Many of us get to the end of the day feeling fried. We think we need to find a way to be more efficient, more organised, better at coping. 

But what if the real issue is not you but that our brains are not equipped for this pace of modern living; that the technology we think is here to save us, is actually part of the problem. 

Every email, notification, message, AI prompt, meeting and decision places another demand on the brain. Technology has made us faster, more connected and more responsive, but somewhere along the way we have confused being available with being productive.

Your brain is not calmly working through one thing at a time. It is constantly stopping, starting, switching, checking, replying, scanning and reacting.

Researcher Gloria Mark has found that our attention on screens now averages around 47 seconds before we switch task. In earlier research on interrupted work, people compensated by working faster, but at a cost: more stress, frustration, time pressure and effort.

So if you feel foggy, wired, irritable or exhausted, it may not be because you are weak.

It may be because your brain has been overloaded all day and under-recovered all night.

Sleep is the mechanism that restores cognitive function, regulates emotions and prepares us for the demands of the next day.

When we do not sleep well, it does not just make us tired. It affects how we think, feel and function.

Brain fog. Exhaustion. Low motivation. Irritability. Poor concentration. Feeling overwhelmed by small tasks. These can all be signs of a recovery problem.

Modern life is making quality recovery harder because when we feel stressed and overwhelmed, sleep suffers. 

The expectation to always be “on” does not end when the working day finishes. Our brains remain alert long into the evening, making it harder to mentally switch off, fall asleep and access the restorative sleep we need.

This is the recovery deficit.

It builds quietly. A few late nights. A few weeks of broken sleep. Too much scrolling before bed. No real boundary between work and home. Then suddenly we feel flat, foggy, emotional and exhausted.

The solution is not always to push harder. Often, it is to recover better.

And sleep has to be at the centre of that conversation.

This week, try four simple changes:

1. Leave your phone outside the bedroom. Use an old-fashioned alarm clock instead.

2. Finish the day with a clear shutdown ritual. Close the laptop, turn off notifications and write down anything you need to remember for tomorrow. Do the same thing each day, ideally an hour or more before bed.

3. Keep a consistent wake-up time, even at weekends where possible.

4. Try, where possible, to avoid multi-tasking. It uses 40% more brain energy due to task-switching. Do one thing at a time before moving to the next task. 

You do not need perfect sleep. But you do need enough quality recovery for your brain and body to reset.

If you are feeling constantly tired, foggy, irritable or overwhelmed, do not ignore it.

Fix your sleep. Improve your fatigue. Rebuild your recovery.

If poor sleep has become a pattern, our Retrain Your Sleep programme can help you understand what is going wrong and rebuild healthy, restorative sleep using an evidence-based approach designed to fit into real life.

For support with healthier technology boundaries, tools such as Unpluq can also help reduce mindless scrolling and create more intentional screen habits.