I’m nearing 50.  I’m developing the usual amount of physical issues for someone who doesn’t take care of themselves, but nobody told me about the mental issues that follow.

The human brain is an organ, just like every other organ in your body.  It’s highly specialized, but then again so are most major organs.  As we age, our organs don’t perform as well: We are slower to perform, slower to adapt, slower to heal.  Sometimes organs that performed well in our youth start losing the ability to perform their primary function, such as your kidneys leading to early-onset diabetes.  And, I’m now finding out, the brain suffers from this as well.

It’s no secret that the elderly have easily-identifiable mental issues, mostly speed of processing and the difficulty of forming short-term memory.  What isn’t as well communicated is how less-than-peak-performance brain function affects you long before you become that old.  In the last few years, I find myself:

• Sensitive to emotion and empathy.  I guess this comparison is inevitable, given my nerd pedigree, but it’s very much like Bendii Syndrome, where you feel emotion more strongly.  There have been times when I was expected to be impartial in a situation, only to find myself quite subjective and borderline irrational based on how I personally felt.
• Feeling a pervasive sense of loss.  When I first started out in my career (and hobbies), I had an experience and intellectual advantage in my field.  Someone much older than me described me as “the smartest kid in the room”, and I definitely felt that way up until about 8 years ago.  You can see a definite correlation between how much I felt I was losing that and my demoscene productions from 2013 through 2015 — almost as if I was desperately trying to cling to that feeling of being the smartest kid in the room.
• Being resistant to change.  As emotional response increases, logical reasoning has to fight harder to win.  There are many changes in last few years I’ve resisted because I felt about them a certain way, when logically they made perfect sense to me.
• Tiring after periods of concentration.  What happens when you work a muscle too much?  It gets tired and hurts.  What happens when I have to learn something new, or concentrate on a difficult problem?  I feel fatigued.

There are ways to mitigate the above, but the cruel irony is that your brain is the organ that has to fix itself, and it’s malfunctioning.  I should get more sleep, exercise, eat better — but my brain wants everything to just go away.