You’re not losing your mind. You’re losing your words.

It was always suggested that brain fog, poor concentration or losing your words was either a sign of getting old or a female problem associated with “that time of life” as the menopause reared its head. That or having a baby, although there has been some interesting discussion about neuroplasticity and pregnancy. Convenient explanations, both of them, and not entirely without basis. But they have had a tendency to become the default answer for anyone who walks into a surgery and says their brain does not feel like their own anymore. And even if you are peri or menopausal, writing it off entirely as that and closing the conversation there is not good enough, because the two things are not mutually exclusive and chronic demand does not check your hormone levels before it gets to work on your brain.

The problem is that these symptoms are not picking about what gender you are, and if you would not describe yourself as old and you are nowhere near any of those particular milestones, then the explanation needs to go somewhere else. Particularly if things have been relentlessly full on for a while.

Because what you are describing might have rather less to do with age or hormones and rather more to do with what chronic demand does to the brain over time.

What neuroplasticity actually means here

Your brain is not fixed. It changes and adapts depending on the environment it is operating in, and it does this continuously throughout your life. That is neuroplasticity in its simplest form. The brain rewires itself based on what it experiences repeatedly, strengthening the pathways it uses most and allowing others to quieten down. In the right conditions this is how you learn, adapt, and grow. In the wrong conditions it is how the brain starts to work against you.

When the brain has been operating in an environment of sustained demand for long enough, it adapts to that environment. And the adaptations it makes are not the ones you would choose.

What chronic cortisol does to the thinking brain

The amygdala is the part of the brain that scans for threat and triggers your survival response. Under chronic demand it becomes more active, more sensitive, and better at its job. Which sounds useful until you understand what that means in practice: the brain becomes increasingly good at detecting danger, including danger that is not actually there, and increasingly reactive to things that would not normally register.

At the same time, the prefrontal cortex, the part responsible for clear thinking, decision making, holding information in mind, and finding the word you are looking for, becomes less active. Resources get diverted away from it because, as far as the survival system is concerned, composing a coherent sentence is considerably less important than staying alert to threat. The frontal part of your brain is not the priority when the system thinks you are under attack.

And then there is the hippocampus, which sits just behind the amygdala and is central to memory formation and recall. It is particularly sensitive to prolonged cortisol exposure and over time, with sustained elevated levels, it can actually reduce in volume. This is not dramatic or sudden. It is gradual, and the effects are exactly what you would expect: memory that feels less reliable, concentration that frays at the edges, words that were always there and now are not quite.

The bit that gets misread

The frustrating thing about these symptoms is how they tend to be interpreted, including by the people experiencing them. Losing a word mid-sentence reads as getting older. Forgetting why you walked into a room reads as tiredness. Missing something you would normally have caught reads as not being on top of things. And so the response is usually to push harder, sleep less, drink more coffee, and try to compensate through effort for a brain that is running below its own standard.

Which makes it worse. Because the system that is already struggling gets more demand placed on it, cortisol stays elevated, and the very processes that would allow the brain to restore and repair, primarily deep sleep and genuine rest, get further deprioritised.

It is not a character flaw. It is not age. It is a brain that has been adapting to a demanding environment for long enough that the adaptations are now getting in the way.