So… I’ve been absent mided all my life. I’ve average IQ and being so uncapable of focusing on anything and having no control over my memmorizing capacities and being so absent minded, I guess that I have other positive attributes that compensate my weakness.
The thing is that sometimes this scares me. I mean it. I forget what I was doing, I fail to remember the name of people I see on a regular basis, and I even forget to pick up the goods for which I just paid at the counter.
I’m sure that I could eat better, more vitamines and shit, but I guess that it’s also something that I grew up with… but apparently it’s getting worse.
Besides diet, I’m thinking of lack of stimuli as part of the problem: I live in an environment where I can not process the signals and messages around, so I just ignore most of them. My job is also greatly demotivating and mostly lacking of mental activity (supposedly I should be exercising logic and abstract thinking, but I think that my brain is bypassing some of the necessary steps and workaround-ing the problems derived from this.
I used to be an avid reader, and I used to come up with neurotic theories about everything. Now I look more like an ammeba.
so… what the fuck is happening to me? is it posible that I start to have alzheimer? demmentia precox? it’s just the other factors I pointed out? is there anything that I can do/check?
Not to minimize your concern but could it just be aging? I am in my early forties and find the same things happening to me. I sometimes walk home from the 7-eleven only to realize I forgot my coffee at the counter. I forget names like I have never forgotten them before (names are my thing as my customers and friends will tell you).
If it’s really worrying you, it might be a good idea to see your doctor for a physical/referral.
It happens to me when I am not particularly busy, or when my routine has changed, or when somebody interrupts me. I also have trouble recognizing faces of people I have met before, and I do believe there is a medical condition which explains this and people have it to different degrees. It can be embarrassing.
However, if I am busy and have things to do and I have a routine of and k ow what I am doing, I become vastly more efficient. Keeping busy and having something to do is the key. Regular exercise also helps, I find.
I find that what I call “brain fog” happens when I’m in a new country. And it’s not just when I’ve just arrived- it persists to greater or lesser degrees for months, and maybe years.
If you think about it, your brain was preparing you to live out your entire life in your home country environment. Our brains, for the most part, seem to run scripts so we can do a great deal of our daily tasks on auto-pilot. When outside of your home country, those scripts are moot. The brain, being plastic, is probably attempting to build new scripts for your new life. I imagine that this takes up a great deal of cognitive energy, and while this work is running in the background, it is using up current supplies of glucose.
I used to be able to pick out a real “foreign” foreigner on the streets in America very easily (keep in mind I lived in the San Francisco area- there’s a lot of diversity so seeing people of a different race wasn’t noteworthy). Clearly some of it was their clothes or language if I heard them talk, but a lot of it was a kind of glazed over look to their eyes. Like any good bay area girl I’d been coached to pull any racism out by the root, so I was troubled by my perception that foreigners looked less “with it” than the general population. But when I started traveling I discovered that I felt less “with it” outside of my home country.
So I guess what I’m trying to say is, maybe it’s not that there’s a problem with your brain, maybe you’ve just taken it out of its natural environment and are making it learn a bunch of new scripts.
May be I’m aging badly, and may be it’s also a condition, as pointed out. What I know is that I’m not acquaring new scripts or something. I believe that it has rather something to do with lack of mental activity and stimuli. When at home, I could decode conversations, texts, etc… here… yeah, I’m using a barbarian language from Hell (English ) which should imply some extra effort/activity, but other than that… I’m not as involved in conversations as in my country, I attend meetings that are mainly in Chinese and then somebody say three or four basic words in Engrish that hardly make any sentence. Then I’m loosing responsability at work for a number of reasons… that lead me to use my brain for looking at pussies (cats) and read unimportant news on Internet…
I feel tremendously unmotivated. I think that that counts.
But I’m still worried about this being something degenerative, and I don’t know if there’s any medical checkout I could undergo. I read that there are some alzheimer tests… but I don’t know how I could manage to do one here. :S
Ride your push bike, see if that helps-all this throttle twisting is dumbing you down.
If the road bike is to boring (very likely!) sell it and buy a mountain bike so you can come out with us-I’ll even lend you a bike so you can test out out this theory.
[quote=“jesus80”]May be I’m aging badly, and may be it’s also a condition, as pointed out. What I know is that I’m not acquaring new scripts or something. I believe that it has rather something to do with lack of mental activity and stimuli. When at home, I could decode conversations, texts, etc… here… yeah, I’m using a barbarian language from Hell (English ) which should imply some extra effort/activity, but other than that… I’m not as involved in conversations as in my country, I attend meetings that are mainly in Chinese and then somebody say three or four basic words in Engrish that hardly make any sentence. Then I’m losing responsability at work for a number of reasons… that lead me to use my brain for looking at pussies (cats) and read unimportant news on Internet…
I feel tremendously unmotivated. I think that that counts.
But I’m still worried about this being something degenerative, and I don’t know if there’s any medical checkout I could undergo. I read that there are some alzheimer tests… but I don’t know how I could manage to do one here. :S[/quote]
Nope, you’re not being a hypochondriac. Actually, it could be just jet lg, affecting you months later.
As you say, teh environment is not quite conductive to paying attention, plus we also ingest a lot of different chemicals in our daily life here in taiwan that have an adverse efefct on brain function.
Moreover, something as simple as lack of sleep or impaired sleep can be impairing your memory. Or a mild depression.
So, yes, have it checked, starting with bloodwork for hormones and thyroid and stuff. then work up MRI. Alzeihmer you are young sir, but they might catch teh genetic marker for propensity.
Not to scare you but had a friend with frequent headaches and general malaise. When he went back, they discovered a nasty little fungus in his brain stem.
Unfulfilling job, social live, lack of sleep etc etc, probably not much more to it. I would say stress but you are not obviously stressed. Guess doing a medical check isn’t a bad idea though.
Hello all , just been reading about all the forgerfulness you are having . I have had the same problems for a few years . I went and done a lot of research and came up with the one thing that really helps me , and that is organic raw coconut oil , and by has it helped me for the past year . We use it for cooking cakes etc , and the main thing is one teaspoon 3 times a day .does the trick . You can also use it for dry nose or ears . Hope this helps ? It really works but it takes a bit of time .
I happened to stumble on the OP posting somewhere else about sleeping badly, mentioning environmental problems like noise. Not sleeping enough i.e. because of noise can turn you into a mental Zombie, as the body is relying on sleep for basic maintenance. When I cam to Taiwan I developed a serious health issue for some time and fell asleep even in short meetings. That was embarrassing.
Before checking a doctor I would recommend making sure there is enough deep sleep, without being woken up all few minutes, then ensure doing some exercise in parks or the like (I had skipped that also when I came here as green was rather far away) and re-check my diet.
Well, I have had periods os stress/anxiety. Work and bleak future (no retirement fund!) are the main reasons, which are also the reason for sometimes I can not sleep well. although I have gone late to bed a few times lately, it’s not an everyday’s problem…
I guess I could benefit of some exercise (these lasts months I have done pretty much nothing!) and a better diet, but still I think that I’m too absent minded…
How to ask about this to the doctor? every single visit has been totally useless so far… and when they had to do something actually (pull my wisdom tooth), they fucked it up!
) which should imply some extra effort/activity, but other than that… I’m not as involved in conversations as in my country, I attend meetings that are mainly in Chinese and then somebody say three or four basic words in Engrish that hardly make any sentence. Then I’m loosing responsability at work for a number of reasons… that lead me to use my brain for looking at pussies (cats) and read unimportant news on Internet…