151: Clearing Brain Fog for Peak Race Day Performance

The fastest laps are won long before the green flag—when your mind fires clean and your body runs light. Brain fog can make you feel “online but empty,” and for drivers, crews, owners, and executives, that dull edge costs reaction time, good judgment, and stamina when it matters most. We walk you through a proven, race-ready roadmap to reclaim mental clarity with the Five Rs: Reveal, Remove, Replace, Rebalance, and Retain.

We start by naming the real culprits behind slow thinking and short fuses: heavy metals from fuel and shop exposure, mold from musty rooms on the road, and gut overgrowth that thrives under stress and poor sleep. You’ll hear how functional lab testing spots what standard bloodwork often misses, and why guessing keeps you stuck. Then we get practical with an immediate, safe starting point: a 7–21 day functional medicine detox that supports liver pathways, lowers toxic load, and refuels the brain with the vitamins, minerals, amino acids, and omega-3s it uses to think fast and recover deeper. Most people notice clearer mornings, steadier afternoons, and better sleep within a week.

From there, we outline how to rebuild for the long season: replace deficiencies so neurotransmitters can fire on demand, rebalance hormones and the nervous system to exit survival mode, and retain gains with quarterly resets tailored to a demanding travel and race schedule. Along the way, we share the real-world factors that push clarity off track—and the simple choices that bring it back. If you’re ready to swap fog for focus, start with our free toxicity assessment and book a complimentary 20-minute High Performance Health consult. Subscribe, share this with someone who needs a reset, and leave a review to help more high performers find their edge.

Chapters

• 0:00 What Brain Fog Really Is
• 0:36 High-Performance Health For NASCAR
• 1:52 The Cost Of Fog For High Performers
• 3:02 The Five Rs Overview
• 3:28 Reveal: Functional Testing Basics
• 3:52 Remove: Metals, Pathogens, Mold
• 6:03 Gut Overgrowth And Stress Links
• 9:48 Replace: Rebuilding Raw Materials
• 10:47 Rebalance And Retain For Longevity
• 11:32 Immediate Wins: 7–21 Day Detox
• 13:25 How The Detox Works

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:01

Let me ask you something. Have you ever sat down to get something important done and suddenly felt like your brain just wasn't online? Like the lights were on, but nobody was home. That's brain fog, and it's stealing your edge. Today we're going to be breaking down what causes brain fog and exactly what you can do safely to break through into clarity. Stay tuned. Hello, I'm Jeffrey Morta. If you're like most in NASCAR's top tiers, drivers, crews, owners, or executives, while you're busy chasing podiums, have you fully considered who's taking care of you? Right here, you're about to start transforming your mind and body for peak race day performance with high performance health, designed exclusively for the demands of NASCAR. As a certified high performance health coach and consulting hypnotist, I've coached elite entrepreneurs and athletes to higher energy, sharper focus, and greater resilience, naturally, safely, and backed by science. And right now, I'm bringing that same engineered approach to the best in motorsports. Here you'll find no wasted time, just a unique blend of integrative health, mental conditioning, and proven recovery strategies delivered in plain language that you can use right away. Imagine a season without burnout, brain fog, or the costly crash of your health. Because the truth is, the real race starts within. I'm grateful you're here. Yes, always grateful. Welcome back to Breaking Boundaries for Champions. Before we dive in, make sure that you hit that subscribe button so you never miss an episode filled with high performance health strategies to sharpen your physical and mental performance. So we're talking about brain fog today. Brain fog is sneaky, it creeps in as things like forgetfulness, sluggish focus, uh, for me specifically, irritability, especially in the afternoon, or even disrupted sleep. And for drivers, crews, and executives, or any high performers for that matter, that's not just inconvenient, it's dangerous to your survival, to your productivity, to your relationships, and especially to your long-term health. You see, when brain fog creeps in and it lingers, the cost is high. This is missed opportunities, poor decision making, both on and off the track, and even the early warning signs of more serious health challenges. Doing nothing is not neutral, it's choosing decline. This is where we can apply our five Rs method, and this comes in here where we can put this step-by-step roadmap to be able to clear the fog and reclaim clarity. Now, I've talked a little bit about the five hour method before on the podcast, and we'll go over that real quick. Reveal, remove, replace, rebalance, retain. Now we're gonna dive deeply into one of these here. Now, what is the reveal stage? Well, this is where we start with the functional lab testing to be able to uncover things like toxicities and deficiencies and imbalances that are otherwise invisible. And these don't really show up on uh blood work with your primary care physician typically. These need to be looked at from a subclinical level. Now, that's not where we're going deep today. We're going deep on the remove step. We safely eliminate toxicities, talking about heavy metals that are in our food, our water, our air. There's, my friends, there's no avoiding heavy metals. So we need to make sure that we're eliminating those on a regular basis, because although those heavy metals like lead, cadmium, mercury, arsenic, and aluminum are all natural elements in our environment, they have no business being in the body. And when they are in our body, they absolutely wreak havoc, especially on our cognitive function. And this is where brain fog can come in. It can also come in from gut pathogens that slip past a stressed immune system. Now we have bacteria in our gut, but when that bacteria becomes overgrown, or there's bacteria that should not be there, or bacteria that's in our gut that shouldn't be in that particular, let's say, room, uh, right? It's supposed to be confined to another room and it creeps into uh where it doesn't belong. And I'll give you a good example, there's bacteria in our large intestine that should not be in the small intestine. And this is where something like small intestinal bacterial overgrowth comes in. And of course, now that I mentioned um a clinical um diagnosis or disease, you know, in integrative health and especially in this podcast or our blog posts or social media, we don't claim to diagnose, treat, or cure any chronic health conditions. That is for a medical practitioner to uh to make that claim. But what we do is we get to those underlying root causes and we can eliminate those so that those diseases of the body cannot exist. And so, yeah, that's small intestinal bacterial overgrowth. It happens to grow in the small intestine, and that's bacteria that belongs in the large intestine. How might it get into the small intestine? Well, stress is certainly one factor. Um, poor diet is another factor, uh, poor sleep is another factor. Uh, there's so many things that can uh cause a bacterial overgrowth. Uh, but we have a functional lab test. So back to step number one, reveal. We're able to see the level of bacteria in the gut by a simple urine sample. And in some cases, for more complex situations, uh, we might use a stool test to be able to do that. Um, what are some of the other toxicities that we want to remove? How about mold exposure? Have you ever slept in a musty hotel room? It just smelled maybe it was in the basement level or the first floor level, it just smelled musty. Uh, it could have been on the upper level and had a plumbing leak at some point, and they just never uh, you know, pulled up the carpet. So there's mold underneath the carpet or behind the drywall. I mean, anybody that's ever stayed in a motel has probably had that experience where it just smelled musty. Well, that's mold and that gets into the body. And until it's removed from the body, it continues to grow in the body just like it would grow under the carpet or behind the wall. And I can also go on and on, but I won't, about the endless environmental exposures at the track, at the shop, and yes, of course, even at your home. These are all unavoidable things that drag your system down. And if you skip step one, which is the reveal process, you're really only guessing at what is causing that brain fog. But we're gonna give you a really uh quick way to be able to eliminate that brain fog. So make sure you stay tuned. Of course, uh, we just talked about reveal, we talked deeply about remove. Number three was replace. What are we replacing? We're restoring what is missing essential vitamins and minerals and amino acids and omega-3s. So your body has the raw materials to thrive. Your body needs those building blocks in order to function. You know, if you called up your uh your local engine builder and said, hey, I want you to build me an engine, but all they had was a block and a crank and some pistons. Well, then you don't really have all of the building materials to create that full engine. You know, you're missing the heads, the cam, the timing chain, the intake, uh, the exhaust manifolds. You're missing either the carburetor, the fuel injecting system, uh, water pump, and all those other things that makes that complete engine, the headers and all of those things, the gaskets and everything, even down to the oil. Those are all the building materials you need to have that functioning engine where your body is made up of vitamins and minerals and omega acids and uh omegas and amino acids, I meant to say, um, so that it can thrive. So we want to replace those things that are deficient. And how do we know what's missing? Go back to step number one. We reveal through the functional lab testing. Number four, rebalance. We rebalance the systems, like your hormones, your nervous system, your immune system. So they work in sync instead of uh just in survival mode. And then, of course, number five was retain. We talked about that. This is where we finally lock in your results with sustainable lifestyle practices tailored to those with a demanding race schedule. You know, a bio-individualized wellness plan that is individualized for your specific biology, is how we move from quick fixes to lifelong health without that brain fog. Now, at this point, you might be wondering, okay, Jeff, that all sounds great, but what can I do right now? Actually, right now, to start clearing my brain fog. And the best place to begin, if you're gonna skip the reveal process, obviously we would want to know exactly what we need to be working on. Uh, and that's part of our process. We do the lab testing first, and then we move right into this next phase while we're waiting for those lab results to come back over the course of two to three weeks. Um, and what do we do in those two to three weeks is a seven-day, 14-day, or 21-day functional medicine detox protocol. Now, why the three options? Well, sometimes people just need a quick reset. They feel really um on point, but they just want to take things to the next level. Maybe they've already done a 21-day functional medicine detox and they only need a seven-day as maintenance because all of those environmental toxins that I mentioned earlier, you know, at the track, at your shop, at home, are building up over the course of, let's just say, 90 days. So personally, and for my clients in my private wellness practice, I recommend this functional detox every 90 days, every three months. So we do it seasonally, of course. And it's, you know, the term detox, this isn't about starving yourself. It's not about spending the week in the bathroom or drinking swamp juice all day. This is a carefully designed reset. This is a functional medicine protocol that starts the remove and replace phases of the five Rs. Let's go a little bit deeper. Here's how it works: the detox protocol provides your liver and detox pathways with the nutrients they need to safely eliminate stored toxins. Things like those pesticides, those heavy metals, those shop chemicals, especially the exhaust fumes. I mean, even if you're not behind the wheel, circling that track, you know, 300 times in a day, maybe you're in the pits, maybe you're um, you know, in the office, maybe you're in the grandstands, or I should say the executive suite, you're still getting those exhaust fumes and plastics and everyday household chemicals that build up over time. That's what we are removing. And then replacing, you know, while the toxins are being re-removed, your body is simultaneously replenished with those essential vitamins and minerals and antioxidants and especially whole food nutrition so that your cells can function at their best. This is wellness at the cellular level. So honestly, and I can speak from experience because I've been doing this for years now, every 90 days, it is literally like hitting the reset button for your body and especially for your mind. You know, it's amazing how sluggish I get over the course of 90 days. And I live in a pretty clean environment, eat pretty clean food for the most part, drink clean filtered water. Um, you know, I'm not working in a construction environment uh like I was years and years ago, where I was constantly exposed to demolition dust and materials and diesel fumes and all that stuff. You know, that's what really led me down this path is because that environment took its toll on my health. Conventional medicine made me worse. I found integrative health. It literally saved my life. And I said, this is my calling, this is what I'm gonna do for the rest of my life. Went back to school, left that construction industry, um, studied under a naturopathic doctor, and opened up my own private wellness practice. And I've been doing it ever since. Uh, love this work, it's absolutely amazing, and I love bringing it to you. Um so I digress. Most people notice clearer thinking, more energy, improved digestion, and even better sleep within the first week. So that's why, you know, sometimes just a seven-day reset is what we need. But more often than not, people say, I feel amazing after seven days. Let's go 14, let's go 21. Um, it's not a process I recommend longer than 21 days. There's other protocols that we move into after that when we usually have the lab results back and we know exactly what to work on. Are we working on parasites? Yes, that's right. One out of three people have parasites. I had them most likely. You know, if you're listening, you probably, if you've never done a parasite protocol before, you most likely have those. They're causing brain fog. We clear that out and you're gonna feel amazing. Uh, if parasites are not an issue, then we can move into rebuilding the gut and restoring gut health, putting that bacteria, the beneficial bacteria, back where it belongs, getting rid of the bacteria that doesn't belong there. Um and then if that's not an issue or after we do that, we work on getting rid of the mold or the heavy metals. And usually once we're done with that roadmap, I'll tell you the mental clarity is amazing. And if you're curious where you stand, you can start by taking our free toxicity assessment. It just takes a few minutes, answer some questions right uh in the palm of your hand on your smartphone. It gives you insight into how much your current toxic load might be contributing to your brain fog. You'll find the link in the show notes on our social bio, our website at victory lanewellness.com. And I want you just for a minute, I want you to imagine waking up sharp, energized, and clear headed just after a few days. Imagine making important decisions faster, showing up for your family, showing up for your business, showing up for your legacy at your best every single day. That's the power of the five hours, and it gives you back the high performance health that you deserve. If you're ready to get started, the first step is easy. It's completely free. You can schedule your complimentary 20-minute high performance health conf consultation over at victorylanewellness.com or in the show notes or bio link. Let's find out what's holding you back and execute your personalized high performance health roadmap to clarity. Because here's the truth brain fog is not who you are, it's just where you are right now. And with the right strategy, you can change it. So don't settle for a cloudy mind when clarity is within reach. The choice is yours. You can stay fogged in or step into your high performance health potential. Until next time, keep breaking boundaries and building the legacy that you meant to live. Bye bye.