Quote:
Originally Posted by Mark in Idaho
stressed out girl
How is your sleep? The stress of school and simply life can mess up sleep. Poor QUALITY sleep can severely impact your cognitive abilities. Quantity of sleep is meaningless if the sleep is not quality. I do well on 6 hours of quality sleep but if I do not get quality sleep, 8 hours of sleep does not help.
A simple concept: When you lay down to go to sleep, how long does it take you to fall asleep?
When I get quality sleep, I am out in 2 to 3 minutes. If it takes longer, I rarely get quality sleep. I will have disturbed sleep all night.
I have discovered that I need a 200 calorie snack 30 minutes before bed to get good sleep.
Have your academic challenges increased recently? Has course work become more intense?
I struggled in college as the intensity increased. Medical school is intense. It is designed for the best of the best. That stress alone could be adding to your struggles.
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Since bumping my shoulder I have had a few nights of bad sleep but overall have quality sleep 9+ hours every night so the focusing problems are not caused by poor sleep.
While medical school is stresfull, before the incident with my shoulder I was doing fine in terms of stress and found the workload quite manageable. It is only now that I am having concentration problems that I am getting stressed. It feels like my brain is just not working properly anymore. It's specifically whenever I try to focus on learning/understanding something complicated that my attention fails me and cannot be sustained long enough to reason through a complex train of thought. This is an incredibly scary and distressing feeling because I cannot think at the level I used to.
While I have had periods of brain fog in the past two years (some lasting quite long), this trouble concentrating feels very different and much more inhibiting/like an impairment. What do you think this is? and do you think it will ever go away?