This article was written by Ethan Gvil and Evan Papageorge.
As the summer draws to an end, students are preparing for a Fall semester at Stevens. With so much preparation in the upcoming weeks to a month, brain fog would be a considerable hazard to your progress. But what is brain fog? You know the feeling when it is hard to keep the focus on any task you are doing, or you have no motivation to open a notebook, or the days seem to blend? Yep, that’s brain fog.
Brain fog is one of the most frustrating afflictions a student can get; it makes working and studying near impossible, an everlasting sense of procrastination, and a dread of returning to the hustle and bustle of the semester. According to an article in a medical journal from the Harvard Medical School, brain fog is a “term used to describe slow or sluggish thinking, can occur under many different circumstances.” The technical term for the level of thinking a student has is cognition: to read, write, think, remember, pay attention, and even advanced problem-solving. Brain fog inhibits the brain’s efficiency of cognition. According to an interview with Dr. Emily Huang from Santa Clara Valley Medical Center in San Jose, California, and U.S. News, brain fog is more of the labeling of symptoms of other medical ailments: dementia, long COVID, high blood pressure, hormonal changes, anxiety, and lack of sleep. The latter two are particularly common in students. However, no need to worry because plenty of remedies and actions to cure and prevent brain fog are easy to accomplish.
When you are in this state of discombobulated lethargy, it would be difficult for anyone to be productive. That is why you have to trick yourself– develop a way to remind yourself of upcoming tasks while having fun doing them. This is as simple as calling a friend to see how their summer went or figuring out what types of clubs to join this year. Any methods like these help transition your brain passively into a more energetic, productive mindset.
If brain fog seems like a significant issue for you, there are effective habits to incorporate into your life to stay on your A-game. One of the most effective strategies for maintaining a positive work-based attitude is setting up a routine. A routine is a repetitive, organized schedule that allows the planning of tasks that can help prevent brain fog. If you schedule your days out, you can limit distractions and aim to accomplish goals to prevent unexpected large swaths of free time from being wasted.
Once you are in a routine, one way to not fall back into bad habits is consistency. The moment you say it is only one day is the moment you start to fall back to brain fog hell. Being accountable for your actions trains the responsibility needed when a project is due or a test is coming up. However, recovering from the freeing, disorganized, loosey-goosey summer’s brain fog can be difficult.
Yet again, do not fear! There are strategies to transition from the laziness of summer to the productive flurry of activity at Stevens. For one, as the first day of classes approaches, do some mentally engaging activities at least every day. They can be complex as solving Fermat’s Last Theorem or simple as doing the daily Wordle. Whatever it may be, simply retraining your brain into an academic mindset will help with the transition into school and prevent brain fog.
So as the Fall semester rapidly approaches, brain fog will inevitably set it. However, with the knowledge of what brain fog is and some ways to combat it, perhaps rather than brain fog, the semester will begin with reuniting with friends and enjoying the lovely Stevens campus again, rather than writing a single sentence for an entire week!
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