Lion’s Mane for Focus and Brain Health: What’s So Special About This Mushroom?

If you’ve been a part of the Kate Living community for a while, you’re going to know I love Lion’s Mane mushroom. It’s something I’ve personally taken for years, and something I’ve recommended to clients and customers for years, especially to support focus, memory and mental clarity.

Even though Lion’s Mane isn’t new, in fact it’s been used across Asia and in traditional Chinese medicine for centuries, Lion’s Mane for focus has become hugely popular in the Western world over the last 10 years.

I’ve been looking much more closely at the research behind Lion’s Mane recently, and what I find most interesting is what we’re beginning to understand about mushrooms in general, our brains and healthy ageing. And I’ll be honest, there’s far more to it than I realised.

What actually is Lion’s Mane?

Before Lion’s Mane became a supplement, it was simply a mushroom. Lion’s Mane, or Hericium erinaceus, is an edible mushroom with a distinctive white, shaggy appearance that looks a little like a lion’s mane, hence the name. It’s been used for centuries as a culinary mushroom in Asia, long before you could buy it in a capsule.

I think that's worth remembering because functional mushrooms can sometimes be made to sound a bit exotic when, first and foremost, we're talking about a culinary mushroom.

What makes Lion’s Mane particularly interesting is what’s inside it. It naturally contains beta glucans alongside compounds specific to Lion’s Mane, including hericenones. You absolutely do not need to remember those names, but they help explain why this particular mushroom has attracted so much attention when it comes to the brain.

Is Lion’s Mane good for focus?

This is probably the reason most people first discover it. Maybe through social media, a friend, or a nutritional therapist after you’ve mentioned that you keep reading the same paragraph over and over again, or you’ve done the standard walk upstairs only to completely forget what you went up there for.

With Lion’s Mane for focus and mental clarity being talked about so much, it’s understandable that you end up here.

Without blinding you with science, I do want to mention a couple of human studies, because we don’t always have these to reference with supplements.

One small trial found improvements in working memory reaction time two hours after taking Lion’s Mane, while another found faster performance on a processing speed task after 60 minutes. Now that’s interesting, isn’t it?

But remember, Lion’s Mane isn’t a stimulant like caffeine. I wouldn’t think of it as something you take and suddenly feel your brain switch on. Some of the more interesting findings have come from looking at what happens when it’s used consistently over time.

Why is Lion’s Mane so interesting for the brain?

This is the science bit, but I promise I’ll keep it simple.

Your brain has an enormous network of nerve cells and connections, and certain proteins in the body help support those cells and their ability to maintain and adapt their connections. One of them is called nerve growth factor, or NGF.

You may have seen NGF mentioned if you’ve ever Googled Lion’s Mane. Some of the compounds naturally found in the mushroom have been shown to stimulate NGF production, which is one reason scientists became so interested in Lion’s Mane and the brain.

We’re still learning exactly what this means in humans, so I wouldn’t guarantee just yet that taking a Lion’s Mane capsule is going to start growing new brain cells! But it does make the research fascinating.

Will I feel Lion’s Mane working straight away?

Possibly not. I feel we’re very used to judging something by how quickly we feel it. Like Coffee, you know you’ve had it, or a sleep supplement, you expect to feel sleepy. So you start taking Lion’s Mane on Monday and by Friday you’re wondering why you don’t suddenly have the concentration of a teenager with no children and an empty inbox.

Unfortunately, it doesn't quite work like that! Although there have been some interesting short term findings, and some people may experience an immediate effect, however a lot of the research into Lion’s Mane has looked at regular use over weeks and months.

And this was one of my favourite takeaways from learning more about it: think years, not weeks.

Not looking for a quick fix or taking it for four days and declaring it useless, but thinking more about what we’re doing consistently to look after our brains for the future.

And here's the bit I really loved: eat mushrooms

For all this talk of extracts and supplements, one of my favourite things I took away from learning more about Lion’s Mane was incredibly simple: eat more mushrooms.

And not only Lion’s Mane. Research into ordinary culinary mushrooms and healthy ageing is really interesting too. Mushrooms naturally contain useful compounds including beta glucans, which you might already recognise from some of the supplements we talk about at Kate Living.

Beta glucans are particularly interesting because of their relationship with the immune system and our gut bacteria. And this is where the brain comes back into the conversation.

We’re learning more and more about the communication between our gut, immune system and brain, and the prebiotic compounds found in mushrooms are another reason they’re such an interesting food.

So if you take anything from this blog, just eat more mushrooms. Add them to an omelette, throw them into pasta, soup or a stirfry. Try shiitake, oyster mushrooms or whatever you can easily get hold of, you can quite easily source these mushrooms now in the supermarket.

How do you choose the best Lion’s Mane supplement in the UK?

The first thing I’d look for is whether you're actually getting the fruiting body. Think of that as the mushroom itself, the part you would recognise as a mushroom.

Some Lion’s Mane products instead use mycelium grown on grain. The finished ingredient can contain a significant amount of the grain it was grown on, so comparing supplements purely by the big number of milligrams on the front isn't necessarily very helpful.

Instead, look for a product that clearly tells you whether it uses fruiting body, whether it’s an extract, its beta glucan content and ideally the compounds it has been standardised or tested for.

This is one of the reasons I chose Natroceutics Lion’s Mane Bioactive.

It uses two extracts from the Lion’s Mane fruiting body. One capsule provides 562.5mg of Lion’s Mane fruiting body extracts and 159.34mg of beta glucans, with some of those Lion’s Mane specific compounds we talked about earlier also identified.

For me, that tells you far more about what you’re actually buying than a huge number on the label.

Think years, not weeks

This may just be my biggest takeaway from learning more about Lion's Mane.

Yes, I’m interested in Lion’s Mane for focus, memory and cognitive function, but I’m even more interested in the bigger question it raises: What are we doing now to look after our brains later?

And that doesn’t start and finish with a supplement.

Eat the mushrooms, eat a varied diet, move your body, sleep, keep learning and look after your gut. And if you interested in adding some Lion’s Mane alongside those things, choose a quality supplement like Natroceutics Lion’s Mane Bioactive.

We spend an awful lot of time thinking about how we want to look as we get older. Maybe it’s worth thinking a little more about how we want to think and feel, too.