What Do Patients With Sleep Disorder Really Mean by ‘Brain Fog’?

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                <p>Brain fog amongst people with sleep conditions was mainly identified by memory disability, trouble focusing, and lapse of memory, according to a lexicon analysis of social networks posts.</p>

Amongst 554,312 posts and remarks in online narcolepsy and idiopathic hypersomnia neighborhoods, the leading 5 contextual words related to brain fog– unassociated to sign relief– were “forgetfulness,” “memory,” “fatigue,” “drunkenness,” and “dissociation.”

Some of the most typical terms associated with sign relief were “clears,” “lifted,” “lifts,” and “clearing,” reported Anne Marie Morse, DO, of Geisinger Medical Center in Danville, Pennsylvania, and coworkers.

The findings existed at the Neuroscience Education Institute (NEI) Fall Congress in Colorado Springs, Colorado.

“‘Brain fog’ is one of the most burdensome symptoms people with narcolepsy and idiopathic hypersomnia experience, but there is no agreed definition of what it means, whether patients experience the same thing, or specifically whether it varies by condition,” Morse informed MedPage Today “Anything we think we know about brain fog comes from clinical or research encounters, where the conversation is already conditioned or biased by the setting.”

“In a prior social listening analysis, we evaluated the term’s use over time to challenge the idea that this was merely popularized by COVID-related brain fog,” she continued. “We found that the term predated COVID by at least a decade, though use grew significantly thereafter alongside research across conditions like celiac disease and fibromyalgia. We wanted to understand how people living with narcolepsy type 1, narcolepsy type 2, and idiopathic hypersomnia describe it on their own, unprompted.”

For the social listening analysis, scientists examined posts and remarks from 2 subreddits (r/Narcolepsy and r/idiopathichypersomnia) and one Facebook group (PWN4PWN) in between August 2011 and September 2025. A lot of information (85%) stemmed from r/Narcolepsy. Semantic resemblance was computed utilizing cosine resemblance.

The leading 5 non-synonymous terms with the greatest semantic resemblance to brain fog were “tiredness,” “difficulty concentrating,” “inability to focus,” “poor memory,” and “memory issues.” Furthermore, the leading 5 associated medical experiences were led by memory-related signs and consisted of “impaired memory,” “memory dysfunction,” “impaired concentration,” “fatigue,” and “forgetful.”

To examine how tiredness and drowsiness affect the significance of brain fog, authors discussing either sign were stratified into 4 associates: fatigue-dominant, sleepiness-dominant (sleepiness surpassed tiredness by <