Tooltips

Brain fog isn’t a medical condition but a term for feeling mentally cloudy, characterized by poor focus, memory issues, slow thinking, and confusion, often triggered by stress, lack of sleep, illness (like Long COVID), medications, or hormonal changes, requiring lifestyle adjustments like good sleep, stress management, and exercise, with medical Read more

Stress indicators manifest physically (headaches, fatigue, tense muscles, stomach issues), emotionally (irritability, anxiety, feeling overwhelmed, sadness), cognitively (poor memory, trouble focusing, racing thoughts), and behaviourally (sleep changes, altered eating, social withdrawal, increased substance use). Recognizing these signs, which vary by person, helps you address stress before it escalates.

Meltdowns are intense, uncontrollable reactions to being overwhelmed by emotions or sensory input, common in autistic individuals but also experienced by others, differing from tantrums because they’re involuntary responses to overload, not manipulative, and can involve yelling, crying, lashing out, or shutting down, often triggered by sensory overload, routine changes, Read more

Body-based signals are internal physical sensations and cues (like a racing heart, butterflies, or hunger) that communicate your body’s needs, emotions, and well-being to your brain, a process called interoception, helping you navigate stress, safety, and basic functions like hunger, and are crucial for emotional awareness, resilience, and understanding unspoken Read more

Satiety signals are the body’s messages telling your brain you’re full, triggered by food in your stomach and nutrients in your blood, involving hormones like CCK, GLP-1, and PYY, plus stomach stretching, to stop eating and signal energy balance, ultimately integrating in the hypothalamus for appetite control. These signals work Read more

Disordered eating sits on a spectrum between normal eating and an eating disorder and may include symptoms and behaviours of eating disorders, but at a lesser frequency or lower level of severity. Disordered eating may include restrictive eating, compulsive eating, or irregular or inflexible eating patterns.

Cardiometabolic disease is a group of interconnected, often preventable conditions, including obesity, type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, fatty liver, heart attack, and stroke, all stemming from shared metabolic problems, with insulin resistance and inflammation at the core, leading to major cardiovascular complications and being the leading cause Read more

Metabolism is the complex set of life-sustaining chemical reactions in your body’s cells that convert food and drink into energy for essential functions like breathing, growing, and moving, also creating building blocks for cells and eliminating waste. It involves two main processes: catabolism (breaking down nutrients for energy) and anabolism Read more

Homeostatic accuracy refers to the precision with which a biological system maintains its internal environment within a specific, healthy range (set point) despite internal or external changes. This is a crucial concept in physiology, ensuring that variables like body temperature, blood sugar, or pH levels remain stable for survival.

Interoceptive accuracy is the objective ability to accurately sense and detect internal bodily signals, like your heartbeat or breath, and it’s a key part of interoception—how your brain understands your body’s state, crucial for emotions, decision-making, and self-regulation. It’s measured by tasks like counting heartbeats (Heartbeat Detection Task) and differs Read more