For years I would sit down to work, open my laptop, and feel my focus slide off the screen like it had nothing to grip. I was not tired in the normal sense. I was foggy in a way that coffee, sleep, and discipline could not touch.
I am a former Silicon Valley engineer, so I did what engineers do. I collected data, I read papers, and I went from doctor to doctor looking for the bug. Most of them did not find it. I got told it was stress, or burnout, or something I would have to live with.
Over time I got closer to the answer on my own. Eventually I suspected a specific culprit, a group of bacteria called actinomycetes. When I finally sat down with Dr. Aaron Newman, he diagnosed me with CIRS, Chronic Inflammatory Response Syndrome, and confirmed that actinos were driving it.
If you have chronic brain fog or keep losing focus and nobody can tell you why, this is the story I wish someone had told me earlier. I will keep it high level, because the full science of CIRS is a deep rabbit hole. I will also share the part that surprised me most, which is that my own nervous system turned out to be at the root of it.
What CIRS actually is, in plain English
CIRS is an illness where the innate immune system loses its ability to turn off. It is usually triggered by the inside of a water-damaged building, and sometimes by tick-borne infections. Something in the environment sets off an inflammatory alarm, and for some people that alarm never resets.
The result is inflammation that runs everywhere at once. It shows up as fatigue, joint pain, sensitivity to light and smells, poor sleep, and for me most of all, brain fog. When your brain is inflamed, focus is the first thing to go.
Not everyone in the same building gets sick. Some people’s immune systems are simply not built to tag and clear these toxins, so the toxins keep circulating instead of leaving.
Meet the actinos, the culprit most people have never heard of
When most people think of a sick building, they think of mold. I did too. It turns out mold is only part of the picture, and often not the biggest part.
Actinomycetes, or actinos for short, are a kind of bacteria that grow in branching threads that look a lot like mold. They live naturally in soil, which is where many of our antibiotics originally came from. Indoors, they thrive anywhere moisture has gotten into a building and stayed. Labs that specialize in CIRS testing now point to actinos as one of the most common triggers of the illness (CIRS Lab).
They come from two places. The first is the building itself: leaks, damp drywall, crawl spaces, and anything that stayed wet too long. The second surprised me, which is us. Actinos can grow on human skin and in the sinuses, so a person can shed them back into a clean room and keep re-contaminating it without knowing.
The toxins are the problem, not the bugs
What makes you sick is usually not a living infection. It is the debris. Actinos and their neighbors release a steady stream of things your immune system reacts to:
- Cell wall fragments. Tiny pieces of the bacterial wall break off and float in the air and settle into dust. They are so small that your nose and lungs cannot filter them out, and your immune system treats every one as an invader.
- Endotoxins. These come from a different family of bacteria that tend to grow in the same damp places, and they are powerful inflammation triggers.
- Mycotoxins. These come from the mold that often shares the space. They matter too, but they are only one piece.
- Gases and exotoxins. Some microbes release chemicals into the air, and some, like the staph that can colonize the sinuses in people with CIRS, release toxins that keep the inflammation going from the inside.
All of this settles into dust, carpets, couches, clothing, and air ducts. That is why you can fix the leak and still feel terrible. The source is gone, but the debris is everywhere.
How I cleared my space: gas first, then good bacteria
Once I understood that the problem was microscopic debris spread through the whole house, regular cleaning made no sense. Wiping surfaces and running a HEPA filter cannot reach fragments buried inside a mattress or a couch. Liquid bleach does not get into the air or deep into fabric.
What I learned is that the debris has to be broken down chemically, right where it sits. That means a gas, because a gas goes everywhere the dust went.
Why chlorine dioxide, and not ozone
Ozone is the gas most people have heard of, and it is the one I would steer you away from. It is so reactive that it burns itself out on the first surfaces it touches, so it does not get deep into porous materials. It also degrades rubber, foam, and plastics, and it can create new irritating chemicals in the air as it breaks things down.
Chlorine dioxide (ClO2) works differently. Despite the name, it does not behave like bleach. It is more selective, so it travels deep into fabrics and materials before it reacts, and it breaks apart the bacterial walls and the toxins themselves. It leaves behind mostly salt and oxygen, not a toxic residue.
That is what I used. I want to be clear that this is not a DIY weekend project. Fogging a home with ClO2 is done by trained remediation professionals, with the people and pets out of the house, at concentrations that are not safe to breathe.
Why you put bacteria back afterward
Here is the part that felt backward to me at first. After you sterilize a home, you deliberately add bacteria back into it.
Nature does not leave an empty space empty for long. A sterile room is an open invitation for whatever walks in next, including the actinos still living on your own skin. So the second step is to reseed the home with beneficial, spore-forming bacteria from the Bacillus family, using probiotic cleaning products like the Synbio line.
Those Bacillus colonies settle into the same cracks and dust the actinos used to occupy. They eat the food the bad bacteria would have eaten, they take up the room, and some of them produce compounds that break down the slimy films harmful bacteria hide inside. It is the same principle as a healthy lawn crowding out weeds. Hospitals that have switched to this kind of probiotic cleaning have reported fewer drug-resistant bacteria on their surfaces.
For me, the sequence was the whole point. First you clear the slate with gas, and then you fill it with something good so the bad stuff cannot move back in.
The part nobody told me: the nervous system was at the root
Cleaning up my environment mattered a lot. But the deeper I went, the clearer it became that the toxins were only half the story. The other half was my nervous system, and it had been dysregulated long before I ever knew what CIRS was.
Here is how I understand it now. Your brain has a threat detection center that decides whether you are safe. In CIRS, inflammation can knock that alarm out of calibration so that it gets stuck in danger mode. Once that happens, ordinary things like a smell, a food, bright light, or a bit of exercise start to register as an attack.
A nervous system stuck in danger tends to swing between two states. One is overdrive, with racing thoughts, a fast heart rate, bad sleep, and reactions to everything. The other is shutdown, with heavy fatigue, flatness, and the thick brain fog I lived in for years. I bounced between both.
The catch is that the body does its repair and clean-up work best in the opposite state, the calm rest-and-digest mode. If your system never feels safe enough to get there, you can take every binder and supplement on the protocol and still feel stuck. That matches what I lived through, and it is why many CIRS-literate practitioners, including Dr. Aaron Newman, now treat calming the nervous system as part of recovery, alongside the medical work rather than instead of it.
This is where my two worlds finally met. As a former engineer I spent years treating my body like a machine with a broken part. What I eventually found, through my own recovery and my training under Dr. John Amaral, is that the hardware in question is the nervous system itself. Clearing the environment removed the input. Working with my nervous system is what let my body stop treating every day like an emergency. I wrote about an earlier chapter of this in Floxed: How Cipro Damaged My Mitochondria and Led Me to Somatic Healing.
A system that believes it is under attack will spend its energy on defense, and your focus is one of the first things it cuts.
If this sounds familiar
If you have been losing focus for months or years and nobody can tell you why, I would not assume it is just stress or just age. Here is what I would look at, based on my own path:
- Your history with water damage. Think about past leaks, damp basements, musty smells, or a building where you always felt worse.
- A CIRS-literate practitioner. Most doctors are not trained to look for this. Find someone who knows the testing and the protocols.
- Dust testing, not only air testing. Actino tests on settled house dust can show what an air sample misses.
- Your nervous system. Even after the environment is clean, a system stuck in danger mode can keep the symptoms going.
Frequently asked questions
- Is CIRS just a mold problem? Not quite. Mold is part of it, but bacteria like actinomycetes and the endotoxins that grow alongside them are often bigger triggers. That is why testing only for mold can miss the real cause.
- Can I just run an ozone machine? I would not. Ozone reacts too quickly to reach deep into materials, it damages rubber and plastics, and it can create new irritants in the air. Chlorine dioxide, applied by professionals, is the option I chose.
- Is calming the nervous system just meditation or positive thinking? No. Meditation trains your attention, and positive thinking works on your story. What I am describing is the physical state of your nervous system, which decides whether your body is in defense mode or repair mode.
Want to talk it through?
I am not a doctor, and nothing here is medical advice. CIRS is a medical condition and it deserves a qualified practitioner. What I can offer is the perspective of someone who spent years in the fog and found the way out one layer at a time. If any of this resonates and you want to compare notes, you can book a 1:1 call with me or reach out through my contact page.
