The Best Chinese Herbs for Brain Fog and Mental Focus

What are the best Chinese herbs for mental focus, clarity, and brain fog? It seems like these nootropics, these supplements, these powders, these herbs to help you perform at a higher level are all the rage these days. But in this video, I want to both present on some Chinese herbs that can help with mental focus and clarity as well as the big picture philosophy of how would I treat that clinically because it's probably not what you're thinking. Hey, it's Alex Hine, author of the health book, Master of the Day, and I've included the first link beneath this video. It's for a free guide on five daily habits that can help you add 10 years to your life with Chinese medicine. It's this case study of a guy named Li Qingyun who lived to be over 100 with these five Taoist habits. So you can check it out right beneath this video. So let's first tackle this idea of mental focus and mental clarity in terms of the macro. Why do people not have the mental focus and the mental clarity that they want? One of the things that I've found in my own life as well as clinically seeing patients is that it's different for every person. There are general big buckets that we tend to fall into, but it really is about number one, finding the chink in your armor. I've talked about this before when I talked about the videos on the qi dynamic, the energy dynamic. Each person, the way they are uniquely genetically made, we each have a genetic weakness. For me, I've always had lifelong digestive problems and I've been very thin. That's just the luck of the draw. For other people, it's asthma and for others, it's a skin condition or psoriasis or they struggle with being overweight, even though they work hard at it. The first thing is to understand why that's not natural, why it's not naturally happening. Because if you think about it, babies are born with the ability to eat, poop, sleep and think no problem. Nature wants you to be well and more often than not, there's a barrier to the wellness that's stopping it. So I'll give you three examples of people whose chief complaint was brain fog, not thinking clearly, just that was their main thing they wanted to work on. For one guy, the problem was that he had digestive problems. And so by focusing on his constipation pattern, his bloating, his indigestion, by fixing that, the mental clarity came back. That was the chink in his armor. For another woman, her main problem was with insomnia and everyone knows the feeling of not sleeping well for a long time and therefore not thinking well, but for her, we treated the blocks that were causing her insomnia. And then after that, her mental focus and clarity came back. For a lot of people, the block is going to be something very different. But if I had to choose one, it would probably be person's digestion. I mean, in Chinese medicine, the spleen or pancreas, the dominant emotion, that's the pathological emotion, I guess you could say, is overthinking or over-ruminating. So there are formulas in Chinese medicine that are historically famous for thousands of years as the student formulas, that when you're studying five or ten hours a day, your digestion gets impaired and that's the thing that can lead to the foggy thinking, the insomnia, the anxiety, the depression. So the first is figure out where the chink is in your armor. Now to build off of that, mental clarity and mental focus is often the secondary effect of something else not working well. So this is building off of what I just said about find the big chink in your armor, find what's not working well. Because the thing is, if you try to chase the individual symptom, you can be chasing those things for years and not getting the results that you want. But when you look at the interconnected pieces, that can often give key insights into what's going on. So that's why it's not so easy to just say, take these six herbs for mental focus and for mental clarity. Because take these six herbs for what? That's kind of how a biomedical physician would practice. Or a lot of natural medicine practitioners just say, this herb is for mental focus. That's not Chinese medicine. Because it's about treating a pattern and treating something that's more inclusive of the whole person. So it doesn't seem logical, but that's why you can treat a person's digestion, which you wouldn't think has to do with their head if you don't have much medical knowledge. But that can be the most effective thing for treating their mental acuity. It can be the most important thing for treating their brain fog, their inability to have a good memory, their anxiety or depression frequently. Treating it through the gut is one of the most effective things. So just remembering that it's a secondary effect. So what is the main thing that needs to be worked on? And base that on other symptoms and other patterns. So for example, we do have herbs like fuling, which is poria, which is a kind of fungus that grows underground. We have herbs like lingzhi, reishi mushroom, which are used in like insomnia, anxiety patterns. We have herbs like yuanzhi, polygala, which is also used for psycho-emotional problems. But all of these, again, by themselves, I wouldn't recommend a person to take. And I wouldn't magically give someone that just because they say, you know, I'm trying to, I want better thinking and less brain fog. It would have to be treating the pattern. And that's what's often so deceptive. You can treat something that seems unrelated, but it fixes that because it's about the big picture pattern and not thinking linearly like a physician would. So in terms of an action step here or a ritual, I would say to try to find that lead domino in your life. Now maybe if this is a chronic issue, you've developed some ideas or some theories, you've realized that there may be a link between what you eat and that feeling of brain fog. Maybe for someone it's related to their menses and it's a certain time during their cycle that that starts creeping up along with migraines or pain. And maybe for another person, it's something completely unrelated altogether. But to look for the big domino, the main factor that pulls together all the puzzle pieces, right? So that headache and being agitated and sweating too easily, putting all those pieces together rather than looking at them as these separate parts, realizing that that brain fog, that just foggy thinking is inexorably, it has to be connected to the other pieces in your body. So to look for where those weird symptoms actually may be related, that's going to give the biggest insight and the biggest clue to get back to that state of wellness again. So I hope that helps. Again, maybe that's a super dissatisfactory video saying basically nothing about the herbs that can help, but I genuinely don't use them that way. And the great mentors I've had rarely just jump to an herb for a symptom because it's usually not that simple and it doesn't pan out that well clinically. So look for the pieces that connect the various parts and that'll give you more insight into how to get the results that you want. But again, check out the first link below this video. That's on Li Qingyun's five daily rituals to add 10 years to her life with traditional Chinese medicine. And then check out my last two related videos right here.