After 6 Weeks of Doing Online Tai Chi Every Morning Before Work, I Stopped Losing My Train of Thought Mid-Sentence
It had been happening three or four times a day for years. I'd assumed it was just getting older. It wasn't. Here's what changed — and the uncomfortable question it left me sitting with.
You're in the middle of a sentence and the word is just — gone.
Not a complicated word. Not a technical term you half-remember from a meeting. A normal word. The word you've used ten thousand times. The word that should be right there, sitting one syllable away, and isn't. You pause. You use a different word. You move on. But something about the gap stays with you for a moment longer than it should.
This was happening to me three or four times a day. In meetings. On calls. In conversations with my children where I'd stop mid-explanation and watch their faces do the thing children's faces do when a parent seems confused. I was 51. I had started to wonder, quietly and with no small amount of dread, whether this was the beginning of something I didn't want to name.
It stopped six weeks after I started doing Tai Chi on Zoom every morning before work.
I'm not going to pretend I know exactly why. But I have some ideas. And before I get to those, I want to tell you what the six weeks actually looked like — because I think the specific details matter more than the headline.
And then I want to ask you something. A question I've been sitting with since the word-loss stopped. A question that I find genuinely unsettling. One I don't think I can answer alone.
I Wasn't Looking for a Brain Fix. I Was Looking for 45 Minutes of Quiet.
My GP had been telling me for two years that I needed to manage my stress better. She was right. I had the kind of job where stress wasn't an event — it was a climate. I managed a team of twelve, worked mostly from home, and had the particular variety of Edinburgh professional anxiety that presents as capability while quietly consuming everything underneath it.
A friend had been doing John Ward's Zoom Tai Chi sessions and wouldn't stop mentioning it. Not in a zealous way — she's not someone who converts people to things. She just kept saying it quietly, the way people do when they've found something they don't quite have the language for yet.
I agreed to try the free first class on a Tuesday morning in October. I expected to feel peaceful. Instead I felt awkward, slightly clumsy, and oddly focused on something other than my to-do list for the first time in recent memory.
That last part — the to-do list disappearing — was the first signal that something different was happening. Not the movements, which I couldn't quite follow. Not the breathing, which felt self-conscious. Just the strange absence, for 45 minutes, of the constant background management that I'd assumed was simply what thinking felt like.
I booked week two. Then week three. Then I stopped counting weeks and started counting the days I missed instead.
Six Weeks. Six Things That Shifted.
I finished the call and sat with that for a moment. Two hours of speaking clearly and continuously. I had not done that reliably for six years. I didn't know what to do with that information. I still don't, entirely.— Sarah K., 51 · Edinburgh · LFA Tai Chi Edinburgh student
Why This Might Have Happened — The Part I Can't Prove But Can't Ignore
I asked John Ward to explain what he thought was happening. Then I asked my GP. Then I read what I could find. What follows is my best attempt to synthesise three different answers into something honest.
Word retrieval and the prefrontal cortex. The ability to access the right word at the right moment lives primarily in the left prefrontal cortex and its connections to long-term memory. Chronic stress — specifically, chronically elevated cortisol — is directly toxic to prefrontal cortex function. It suppresses the neural pathways that allow fast, accurate retrieval. This is not age-related decline. It is stress-related suppression. The distinction matters.
What Tai Chi does to cortisol. Regular Tai Chi practice measurably and consistently lowers cortisol — not temporarily, in a single session, but as a sustained reduction in baseline levels over weeks of daily practice. As cortisol drops, the suppression of prefrontal function lifts. The pathways that were being inhibited become available again. Words come back not because the brain has grown but because it has been given back conditions in which it can operate properly.
The attention piece. Tai Chi's demand for sustained, present-moment attention also directly exercises the prefrontal networks involved in working memory and executive function. Six weeks of daily practice is roughly the interval at which researchers in neuroplasticity studies begin to see measurable structural changes in these regions. The timeline of my experience — six weeks — is not incidental.
The thing I want to say clearly: I am not claiming Tai Chi cured me of anything. I am saying that something specific changed in a specific timeframe after I started a specific practice — and that the physiological explanation for that change is coherent, documented, and available to anyone who looks for it. What I find uncomfortable is how long it took me to look.
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💬 The Question I Can't Stop Asking — Leave Your Answer Below
If cortisol-driven cognitive suppression is this common — and this reversible — why is "brain fog" treated as something to manage rather than something to fix?
Millions of working adults experience the mid-sentence word loss, the thought that dissolves before it arrives, the conversation they can't quite track. Most of them are told — or tell themselves — that this is normal. A sign of busyness. A consequence of age. Something to work around.
But if the mechanism is cortisol suppression of prefrontal function, and if that suppression is measurably reversible through daily practice, then "brain fog" is not a personality quirk or an inevitable feature of a demanding life. It is a physiological symptom of a physiological problem — and it has a physiological solution that most people have never been pointed toward.
So here is what I want to know from you. Have you experienced this? The words disappearing. The thoughts that won't complete. The sense that the sharpness you used to have has been replaced by something slower and less reliable?
And — more uncomfortably — have you been told to manage it? To slow down? To accept it as part of getting older? Or has anyone, ever, suggested that it might have a cause and a fix?
What I'd Tell the Version of Me From Seven Weeks Ago
I would not tell her that everything was going to change dramatically. I would not make promises about transformation or clarity or mental sharpness.
I would tell her that in six weeks something specific would happen that she had stopped expecting to happen. That the word that goes missing three or four times a day would come back. That she would finish a two-hour client call and notice — with something she didn't have a word for either — that she had been entirely present for all of it.
I would tell her the first class is free. That it's 45 minutes. That she can do it in the spare bedroom in her pyjamas before the house is awake. That the first two weeks are awkward and the third week is when sleep changes and the sixth week is when the words come back.
And I would tell her not to wait until she has a better explanation for why it works.
The explanation can come later. The words coming back cannot wait.
Try it at LFA Tai Chi Edinburgh. The first class costs nothing.
Your Words Are Still There. Let's Bring Them Back.
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