How does your multiple sclerosis affect your cognition?

To understand more about the impact multiple sclerosis (MS) can have on cognition, we conducted a survey to find out how MS affects your cognition and what advice you would give to others. Thank you to all those who participated, it was brilliant to get information first hand from our community! We’ll be breaking down our multiple sclerosis examples into sections with some helpful advice based on our findings.

Cognition symptoms

We asked you how cognition affected your MS and the most popular answer (26%) was short-term memory, followed by difficulty finding words (22%) and concentration (15%).

11% told us that it can impact your ability to make decisions and 8% shared that it affects their ability to process information or problem solve.

Long-term memory issue were less of a problem, with on 5% of people reporting this as an issue and 5% failing to recognise social ques.

Sharing the load

From these findings it is evident that many people experience cognitive disturbance of some kind at some point while living with MS. It can be difficult to talk about when people don’t understand the issues you are experiencing. We ask our survey respondents why they found it hard to talk about it and this is what they said:

‘It was evident that plenty of people with cognitive MS function problems find it very difficult to explain their experiences, which makes talking about it and asking for help harder. General unawareness (more often not by ignorance, but in understanding its effects) can cause people to become closed off from talking more about it.’

‘I tell my closest friends that I’m cog fogged, but it can be difficult with those that don’t know me well… I think they just think I’m thick.’

However, there are also those who have no issue in divulging more about their MS symptoms. It can vary from person to person, but there is no reason to keep your thoughts and feelings bottled up if you don’t want to. Explaining how you are affected can help others understand how they can support you better and improve their understanding of MS.

One of our respondents said, ‘I think since diagnosis I’ve ditched/lost any shame or embarrassment of talking about my symptoms.’

We also found that family and friends are often accepting of how MS can affect cognition. The stories we received tell us that close relations will often be more patient and understanding.

‘My family do understand, they are patient when I lose my train of thought or can’t find the right words.’

However, you told us it can be difficult if the people around you aren’t aware of your MS.

‘Sometimes I will have difficulty remembering where things are, and people might say I’m lazy.’

‘They get frustrated when I forget something we were talking about five minutes ago.”

Just remember that people are often more understanding when they know, so if you feel comfortable enough to, share about your MS with people.

Your useful suggestions

There were plenty of suggestions in our survey on how to keep your mind ticking over nicely, and we’d love to share some of our favourites with you.

Use lists and phone reminders

We often find people in the community say they would be lost without their phones, as they’re great for organising yourself and setting alarms to help you remember Important things.

Break up your routine

Even if it is just for 10 minutes, go for a walk or any other activity which helps you when you notice cog-fog as it’ll help refresh your mind and negate the frustration of not being able to think properly.

Listen to yourself

Lastly, a very helpful contributor shared this with us in our survey that really hit home what everyone should do.

‘Mindfulness activities, like running and yoga for example, have the opposite effect of increasing cognitive function on me – if anything it contributes to further deterioration. It’s important to know yourself.’

What works for one person might not for someone else, so just do what is best for you and your cognition.

General points

To end our findings, we wanted to list some of the common themes and interesting points we came across in our survey information.

Depression and Anxiety

Like how we touched upon in our Cognitive Symptoms of Multiple Sclerosis, a person’s mental health can be affected thanks to cognitive capability. Over 80% of those in our findings have seen an impact of anxiety and/or depression due to cognition.

Giving up smoking might not have a huge impact on better cognition

We had a few people mention that them giving up smoking didn’t affect their cognition very much, if at all. However, it was noted that stopping alcohol consumption did make a difference to our contributors – often improving cognitive function.

Puzzles are a popular way of maintaining cognition

Anything from a cross word to your favourite quiz programme is sure to get your brain working and help improve your cognition.

If cognition and multiple sclerosis is something you’d like to learn more about, then our detailed choices booklet on cognition is sure to be a good read. In addition, our helpline is great to get in touch with for further support or a friendly chat on what you can do going forward.