Barefoot. Arms at my sides. Eyes forward.

Ten seconds on the left, ten seconds on the right.

I am not doing it as a leg-strength workout.

It’s a small, repeatable balance check.

My left side has always been worse by about two seconds.

That is just enough to give me a baseline.

What I actually record

I note:

- which leg I used

- roughly how long I held it

- whether I touched the counter

- whether I was barefoot or wearing shoes

- whether I felt dizzy, weak, or in pain

- whether one side was consistently different.

I keep the conditions roughly the same: same surface, eyes open, counter nearby, left side and then right side.

If I’m worse after a terrible night of sleep, I make a note of it. If I’m worse for weeks, I pay more attention.

I am interested in whether a change persists under the same conditions, not in winning a ten-second challenge.

I just like repeatable observations and apparently enjoy turning ordinary activities into tiny personal experiments.

My balance has improved, did it also help my mind balance more? I think so.

=====================

The study that started it

I started after reading a 2022 study of 1,702 adults aged 51 to 75. The researchers tested whether people could complete a 10-second, unsupported one-leg stance. 20.4% of the participants could not complete it.

At a median follow-up of seven years, 17.5% of the people who could not complete the stance had died, compared with 4.6% of those who could. After adjustment for age, sex, body mass index, and several health conditions, inability to complete the stance was associated with an adjusted hazard ratio of 1.84 for death from any cause.

That is the source of the often-quoted “84% higher risk” figure. [The study is here.](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35728834/)

That sounds dramatic, but it needs context. This was an observational association in one group of adults. It does not mean that if you have poor balance you are going to die and that poor balance caused those deaths.

A poor result may reflect more than leg strength.

The study used one standardized test in one age group.

Why balance is more than leg strength

Staying upright uses information from your vision, inner ears, feet and joints, muscles, spinal cord, and brain. Those systems have to work together quickly enough to keep you from tipping over.

One term I learned while trying to understand why my left and right sides differ was proprioception.

It means knowing where your body is and how it is moving without looking at it.

Close your eyes and touch your nose: you know where your hand is because your nervous system is tracking the position of your arm and fingers.

The first time I tried the one-leg version with my eyes closed, I grabbed the counter almost immediately. It was not graceful. Removing vision showed me how much information I had been using without noticing.

That is also why I stopped calling my routine a Romberg test.

A classic Romberg examination usually has a person stand with both feet together, first with the eyes open and then with the eyes closed, while a trained examiner stays close.

The NCBI overview explains the distinction and the safety requirements.(https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK563187/)

Welcome to r/whatisbrainfog, the official WhatIsBrainFog community. You don't need to know the right medical words to join in.

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I took spirulina for 3 months and it made a huge difference for me. I advise it, great for gut health and the brain. You can find it pretty much anywhere.

Not 40 patients. Not another tiny brain scan.

2,563,755 people.

Researchers found 26 genetic risk regions for fibromyalgia and when they asked where that inherited risk was concentrated, every significantly enriched tissue was in the brain. Twelve of the 13 enriched cell types were neurons.

For a condition that has spent decades being called vague, psychological, stress-related or simply impossible to explain, that is a fairly spectacular biological receipt.

And it gets more interesting.

The study included 54,629 people with fibromyalgia, making it the largest genetic study of the condition yet.

The strongest cell-type association involved neurons in the dentate gyrus, part of the hippocampus.

That matters because the dentate gyrus is involved in things like memory, learning and separating similar pieces of information.

So this isn't another study saying:

“People with fibromyalgia report feeling worse.”

Researchers are starting to map where the inherited biological risk actually points.

And it points very heavily toward the nervous system.

Then there is the cognitive side.

A separate meta-analysis pooled 29 studies looking at working memory in fibromyalgia.

The clearest measurable problem was verbal working memory.

This is not “memory” in the sense of forgetting your childhood or not recognizing somebody.

Working memory is basically your brain's temporary scratchpad.

You use it when you:

• remember step 2 while doing step 1
• hold the beginning of a sentence in mind while finishing it
• keep what somebody just said alive long enough to answer
• read a paragraph without the first half disappearing
• keep a number in your head while doing something with it

And across those 29 studies, people with fibromyalgia showed a moderate impairment in verbal working memory.

So if your version of fibro fog is:

“I know what I’m doing, but I keep losing the information I need halfway through doing it”

—that now has a much more precise name.

And there is another l twist.

A 2026 study tested 120 women with fibromyalgia and compared three things:

• central-sensitization symptoms
• how cognitively impaired they felt
• how they actually performed on a cognitive test

Higher Central Sensitization Inventory scores were strongly related to feeling more cognitively impaired.

But those scores barely explained performance on the objective cognitive test.

That is interesting because “central sensitization explains your fibro fog” has become an incredibly convenient answer.

The evidence is starting to look more complicated and more helpful than that.

Fibromyalgia appears to have strong inherited nervous-system biology.

Genetics study
Kerrebijn et al.
Nature Medicine, 2026
2,563,755 participants
54,629 fibromyalgia cases
PMID: 42521817
DOI: 10.1038/s41591-026-04492-6

Working-memory meta-analysis
Nicholls & Kelly
29 studies
PMID: 41086106
DOI: 10.1080/23279095.2025.2570780

Central sensitization + cognition study
Yücel & Kurt
120 women with fibromyalgia
PMID: 41795399
DOI: 10.1016/j.jpsychores.2026.112613

First of all thank you for joining this subreddit.

If you are available to live test with me, that means going on the site and giving feedback as we talk together on dm, please hit me up. This will be open for 20 people just before we open the site up to more testers/public.

Americas, UK/Europe, Australia/New zealand.

Asia will be open soon for testing at a later date. Thanks for your understanding.

I stand on one foot every morning.

Barefoot. Arms at my sides. Eyes forward. Ten seconds on the left, ten seconds on the right. It takes less than a minute, which is just long enough for the coffee machine to make its usual alarming noises.

People who have seen me do this think I’m being weird.

They’re not wrong. I am weird but there you go.

I’m not really training my legs. I’m keeping an eye on a small, repeatable thing my body does.

My left side has always been worse. Not dramatically worse. Usually about two seconds worse.

But once you start paying attention to a difference like that, it becomes difficult to stop noticing it.

The reason I started was a 2022 study of 1,702 adults aged 51 to 75. The researchers asked them to stand on one leg for ten seconds. Around one in five could not do it.

During the seven-year follow-up, 17.5% of the people who failed died, compared with 4.6% of the people who passed. After statistical adjustment for several health factors, failing the test was associated with an 84% higher risk of death from any cause. The study is here.

That number is what gets all the headlines.

But it needs to be handled carefully. The test did not cause anyone to die. It also cannot tell one person what will happen to them. It was a group association. The interesting part is that such a simple balance task may reflect several things about general health at once.

That was enough to get my attention.

Balance is not just a leg thing

Standing on one foot looks like a leg exercise. It isn’t only that.

Your body is constantly combining information from your feet and joints, your muscles, your eyes, your inner ears, your spinal cord, and your brain. You’re trying to stay upright while all of those systems report where you are and how you’re moving.

One of the terms I ran into was proprioception.

I didn’t know the word until I started looking into why my left side was consistently worse than my right. It means your sense of where your body is without having to look at it.

Close your eyes and touch your nose. You know where your hand is because your nervous system is tracking the position of your arm and fingers. Stand on one foot and the same system is helping you work out where your ankle, knee, hip, and torso are in relation to each other.

The word sounds like something invented to make a medical textbook more expensive. The experience is much simpler. Your brain is trying to work out where you are, and sometimes it gets less reliable information than usual.

Vision is doing more work than most of us realize, too.

The first time I tried standing on one foot with my eyes closed, I grabbed the counter almost immediately. It was not graceful. I had imagined that removing vision would make the test slightly harder. Instead, it made me realise how much visual information I had been using without noticing.

The inner ear contributes another stream of information about movement and orientation. When you’re standing still, your brain is comparing all of these signals and making constant small corrections.

You don’t feel any of that when it works.

You notice it when it doesn’t.

I was also using “Romberg” too loosely

For a while I called my morning routine a Romberg test.

The one-leg balance test from the 2022 study and the classic Romberg test are related, but they are not the same test.

A classic Romberg examination usually involves standing with both feet together, first with the eyes open and then with the eyes closed. A trained examiner stays close by and watches for a clear increase in sway, a step, reaching for support, opening the eyes, or falling.

The point is not simply to see whether someone can balance on one foot. It is to compare what happens when visual information is removed. A positive Romberg sign can support a question about proprioception or the vestibular system, but it does not identify the cause by itself. The NCBI overview explains the distinction and the safety requirements.

That distinction matters because the way I practice at home is much less formal.

I’m comfortable doing the eyes-open one-leg version next to a sturdy counter.

I would not recommend trying the eyes-closed version alone. Losing visual input can turn an interesting experiment into a fall.

What a bad result might mean

If you wobble on one leg, that does not automatically mean you have a neurological disease.

It could reflect lack of practice, pain, an old ankle injury, weakness, poor footwear, fatigue, dizziness, medication effects, vision, or a problem affecting sensation or balance. It could also simply be that one side is less coordinated than the other.

The test is useful as an observation. It is not useful as a diagnosis.

That is the distinction I’m trying to keep in mind when I do it. If I have a bad day after sleeping badly, that is one piece of information. If my balance changes suddenly and stays worse, that is a different situation.

If the problem keeps happening, affects ordinary activities, or comes with numbness, weakness, falls, hearing changes, severe dizziness, or trouble walking, I would want a clinician to look at the wider picture.

A balance test by itself cannot tell you whether the problem is coming from your feet, nerves, inner ear, joints, muscles, medication, blood pressure, vision, spinal cord, brain, or something else.

That is why the details matter.

What this has to do with brain fog

Balance and brain fog are not the same symptom. A poor balance result does not prove that brain fog is coming from the cerebellum, the spinal cord, or anywhere else.

But the two can overlap because both depend on the nervous system receiving and organising information.

Vitamin B12 deficiency, for example, can affect sensation and proprioception. Vestibular problems can cause unsteadiness and make it harder to think clearly when the room feels like it is moving. Medication effects, poor sleep, illness, injury, and other neurological or metabolic problems can affect both balance and concentration.

That does not narrow everything down to one answer.

Instead of saying, “I have brain fog, so it must be inflammation,” you might notice that the brain fog appears alongside numb feet, dizziness in the dark, new falls, a recent medication change, or trouble walking on uneven ground.

Those details are more useful than the label “brain fog” on its own.

What I actually record

I don’t treat the number as a score for my brain.

I record the basics:

• which leg I used;
• roughly how long I held it;
• whether I touched the counter;
• whether I was barefoot or wearing shoes;
• whether I felt dizzy, weak, or painful;
• whether one side was consistently different.

The goal is not to produce a diagnosis from my kitchen.

The goal is to notice whether something changes over time.

There’s a big difference between “my left side has always been two seconds worse” and “I suddenly cannot stand safely on either side.” There’s also a difference between wobbling and feeling dizzy. If I feel dizzy, faint, or unsafe, I stop and sit down.

I don’t try to push through it.

Do I think everyone should do this every morning?

No.

I do it because I like repeatable observations, and because I apparently enjoy turning ordinary activities into tiny personal experiments.

For someone else, a daily balance ritual may be pointless or unsafe. Anyone who already needs support to stand, has a history of falls, or feels dizzy should not turn this into a solo challenge.

And I would not use a ten-second target as a universal definition of normal. The study used a particular test in a particular group. It does not establish that every adult should pass the same test, or that failing it means something specific is wrong.

For me, the value is smaller and more practical.

Same floor. Same rough timing. Eyes open. Counter nearby. Left side, right side.

If I’m worse after a terrible night of sleep, I make a note of it. If I’m worse for weeks, I pay more attention.

That is probably the real lesson I took from the study.

Standing on one leg does not reveal everything.

It reveals one thing clearly enough to make me pay attention.

Special note: I do still run experiments while I build this site, my aim once this is all out there is to focus entirely in this area. One thing I don't have is brain fog which is nice.

Works for me.

Ref: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09658211.2022.2072894

Ref: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/acp.4044

Ref: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17899340/

Several problems can produce similar difficulties, but they do not usually follow the same timing or triggers. The differences below show what may need separate attention. They do not confirm or rule out a diagnosis.

Comparison	What separates them
ADHD vs medication side effects	Medication effects follow the medicine. Drowsiness may begin after a morning dose, agitation may appear after starting a new prescription, or mental clarity may drop at roughly the same time each dose wears off. ADHD does not begin with that prescription and can usually be traced back through earlier years at school, work and home.
ADHD vs anxiety	Anxiety interferes most when the person feels threatened or expects something to go wrong. They may avoid making a phone call, freeze before an appointment, repeatedly check a decision or be unable to settle while waiting for bad news. ADHD-related problems can remain on calm days, including losing track of time, forgetting an appointment or starting several household jobs without finishing them.
ADHD vs sleep problems	Poor sleep produces a broader decline after a bad night: heavy eyes, slower reactions, irritability, reduced coordination and difficulty staying awake. Driving, cooking or operating equipment may become unsafe. Recovery sleep should improve much of this. ADHD usually remains uneven even when the person is rested.
ADHD vs autism	Autistic overload is often connected to noise, crowded places, unfamiliar social situations, sudden changes or unclear expectations. ADHD is more likely to interfere when someone must plan several steps, judge how long something will take, change direction midway or remember what comes next. Both conditions can occur together.
ADHD vs caffeine effects	Caffeine-related problems rise and fall with use. Too much can bring shakiness, restlessness, poor sleep or a racing heartbeat. Missing a usual amount can bring headache, tiredness and slower thinking. ADHD remains outside that intake-and-withdrawal cycle, even when caffeine has been used to compensate for it.
ADHD vs PMDD	PMDD follows a repeated menstrual-cycle pattern. Mental energy, patience, mood and the ability to manage ordinary demands become substantially worse before a period and improve after it begins. ADHD remains present during the rest of the month, although the premenstrual phase may make it harder to manage.

ADHD or cognitive disengagement syndrome?

ADHD

Performance can change sharply with interest, urgency and outside structure. A person may postpone packing for a trip all day, then complete it rapidly when the taxi is nearly outside. Another person being present, a clear deadline or an immediate consequence may suddenly make action easier.

Cognitive disengagement syndrome

Cognitive disengagement syndrome is a research term for frequent daydreaming, mental confusion, slowed behaviour and appearing mentally absent. The person may seem far away while eating, travelling, getting dressed or taking part in an activity that is neither boring nor stressful.

The main difference

A strong improvement when urgency, interest or outside structure appears fits ADHD more closely. A more persistent slowed, dreamlike or mentally absent state across different situations may fit cognitive disengagement syndrome more closely. The patterns can overlap, and research on cognitive disengagement syndrome is still developing.

Source: Becker, American Psychologist, 2025.

Everything is progressing at a strong steady pace. There was a ton of data over a year collected and now I am putting it together in an approachable easy to use way, what started as a giant wiki is now a useable system. Thanks for waiting and invites will go out as soon as possible. Looking forward to all the feedback, working very hard on this problem.