‘I’m a chef and I forgot how to bake a cake’: why trauma often leads to brain fog and amnesia

Shock, stress and grief can have a devastating effect on memory – but there are ways to bring it back

In early 2016, Juliet Owen-Nuttall decided to bake a cake. It was something she – a trained chef and former wedding cake decorator – had done hundreds of times before. Except, this time, her mind was blank. “I had forgotten how to do it,” Owen-Nuttall says. “I know it sounds really strange but after the trauma of the last few months, it was like suddenly I no longer had access to any of the knowledge I’d built up over the years.”

Owen-Nuttall, 48, wanted to bake to help her decompress after the most stressful period of her life. A dream adventure – relocating to Costa Rica to look after horses on some of the world’s most beautiful beaches – had turned out to be a vicious scam, costing Owen-Nuttall and her husband, Daniel, 41, their life savings and forcing them to live in a small tent on the beach “in squalor”. The pain and shock caused her brain to “shut down entirely”.

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