If the coronavirus pandemic has left you feeling a little foggy with your memory, you’re not alone. Some women may be feeling it more than others.
How many times a day do you forget where you put your car keys or what you planned to make for lunch? Many people said they feel foggier since the pandemic, especially new mothers.
“Mom brain is a real thing, but not because of what you think it is -- that we’re cloudy or something. It’s because the brain is evolving. We have a different skill set that we need,” Dr. Donna Rockwell said.
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Experts said mom brain is real and they have science to back it up.
“After we have children and before we have children. So before, we could be like, you know, into everything and watching things happen quickly. And remember every single person’s name, but after we have a child, all of a sudden, we need a new skill set. We need to understand what is this baby saying that’s not using words. So our brain is actually changing and evolving after we have children in a positive direction, even though it might not seem like that at the time,” Rockwell said.
Donna isn’t surprised by a new survey that was done over the summer. The survey shows that parents lose an average of 4,000 hours of their lives to brain fog and lose track of what they’re supposed to be doing up to three times a day.
“I think that we need to slow down overall, and not be so worried about how perfect we are, you know, as long as we show up with a loving energy and we’re present and compassionate with our children, we don’t have to worry about being perfect. There’s something called the, ‘good enough mother,’ and that is the best mother. Because if we over provide for our children. They don’t know how to do things for themselves. So maybe mom brain is an introduction, or an invitation to sit back a little bit and let things be and not try to manage every single thing,” Rockwell said.
Experts said multitasking isn’t always a good thing.
“I think it’s way more important to be mindful than to multitask, because we can’t do anything well if we’re doing more than one thing at a time. So it’s really important to mindfully focus on this thing, and then this thing, this thing. And what can help with that is to make a list. As soon as we have a list, we’re not carrying things around in our brain anymore. So once it’s down on paper, we can concentrate on other things,” Rockwell said.
Click here to learn more about Dr. Donna Rockwell.