Could inflammation be part of your brain fog picture?

The Clue Called IL-6

IL-6 has an awful name. It is one of the messenger molecules used by the immune system. When you have an infection, injury or wound, it helps coordinate the body’s response.

The interesting question is what happens when those signals stay elevated for a long time.

That figure deserves attention.

It also needs perspective. Population studies map broad patterns over years. Your story sits in the details: what shifted, when it shifted and what else began happening in your body.

The immune system and the brain are talking to each other.

How Much Headroom Have You Got?

Dr Tommy Wood calls it headroom: the amount of mental function available to you when life gets demanding. The research term behind it is cognitive reserve, your brain’s capacity to keep working when more is asked of it.

Picture a packed diary.

When there is space in the day, a late phone call or a surprise problem is annoying but manageable. When every slot is already full, one small delay tips the whole day sideways.

Your brain has that margin too.

A run of broken sleep. A long recovery from illness. Persistent pain. The 3pm crash you have started working around. A gut that has been unsettled for months. Stress that has been living in your chest for so long it feels ordinary. Shifting hormones can add another layer of demand, which is why brain fog becomes impossible to ignore for many people in midlife.

Every one of those pressures takes up room.

The lost word, the email you read twice, the meeting where you lose the thread. Those moments can be where you finally notice there is less room left.

Your capable brain is still there. It may simply be working under a bigger load than it used to.

In clinic, I hear a version of this often: “I thought I had become less capable.” More often, we are looking at a body that has been carrying a far bigger load than anyone realised.

The Three Places I Would Start

Dr Tommy Wood uses the 3 S’s: stimulation, sleep and nutrient supply.

They are not a checklist for getting your life perfect. They are three places to notice where your headroom may be getting spent.

Where Is Your Headroom Being Spent?

Stimulation is more than having a busy brain. It is the amount of switching, deciding, remembering, responding and holding space for other people that you do across a day. A capable brain can carry a great deal. It still has a limit.

Sleep is where your brain gets a chance to recover from that load. Eight hours in bed feels very different from eight hours of waking, sweating, thinking, checking the clock and starting again. You know the difference in your body the next day.

You know the morning after a broken night. You arrive at your desk already behind, then spend the day working twice as hard to look fine.

Nutrient supply is the steady energy your brain has to work with. Think less about eating perfectly and more about whether you are spending long stretches running on coffee, rushing through meals or reaching 3pm with nothing left to give.

Look back over the last week. Where have you had to work too hard to think? Was it after a broken night? During a long afternoon? At the end of a week when you carried everyone else? Those details start to show us where your headroom is being spent.

One symptom rarely tells the full story.

When The Pattern Keeps Repeating

If brain fog has become something you work around, apologise for or work twice as hard to hide, book a Brain Fog Review.

Bring all the pathology, hormone panels and old reports you already have. If you have not had any tests, that is completely okay. We start with the story of when the fog began, what changed around it and what else your body has been carrying.

In one focused session, we put that story together with any results you have. We identify what deserves attention first, which questions are worth pursuing and what can wait.

A clearer map beats another guess.