Creating New Habits and Understanding Brain Health with Dr Sarah McKay

In this episode, we sit down with neuroscientist and science communicator Dr Sarah McKay to unpack what’s actually going on inside your brain, and why so many of the things we struggle with day to day are not what they seem.

Her work has been featured across ABC Catalyst, The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, and major media outlets worldwide, and she is the author of three books on brain health, including The Women’s Brain Book, Baby Brain, and Brain Health for Dummies.

In this conversation, we explore what most people misunderstand about their own brain and how those misconceptions quietly shape their habits, energy, and clarity.

We dive into:

• What you actually need to understand about your brain to change habits effectively
• Why “brain fog” is not just something you should accept and what could really be driving it beneath the surface
• The biggest misconception about how the brain works and how we may unknowingly reinforce the very patterns we’re trying to break

This episode will challenge the way you think about your mind, your energy, and what change actually requires.

Connect with Dr Sarah McKay here.

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Further Resources: 

• Follow me on Instagram for daily mindset tips and lots of BTS content of my life (building a 7 figure business, living by the beach, my daily routines and travels) 
• Browse the free resources - meditations, manifestation tracks and more 
• See what's currently open for enrolment here or browse courses available on demand here 

Transcript

Welcome And Why Brain Health

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Welcome back to the Abundant and Align Podcast. Today I am joined by a guest, Dr. Sarah Mackay, who is a neuroscientist and one of the leading voices translating brain research into practical, everyday tools for better health, well-being, and performance. Her work has reached millions through television, radio, and print, from ABC Catalyst to The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, and beyond. She's also the author of three books, including the Women's Brain Book, A Baby Brain, and most recently, Brain Health for Dummies, cementing her as a leading authority in making neuroscience accessible, relevant, and deeply practical. And today's conversation certainly does not disappoint. Full of so much value and so much knowledge. In particular, you will learn what you actually need to know about your brain if you want to change habits and why most people get this wrong, why brain fog isn't just something to accept as normal and what might really be driving it underneath the surface. And one of the biggest misconceptions about the brain and how, without realizing it, many of us are actively reinforcing the very patterns we're trying to change. As I said, full of knowledge that we need to know to better understand ourselves in order to lead a better life. So let's get into it with Dr. Sarah Mackay. Welcome to the Abundant and Aligned Podcast, a place where you will come to realize anything you desire is possible. I'm Jess, mindset and business coach, and I'm on a mission to lead women to a life far from average. In this show, you can expect conversations around manifestation, subconscious reprogramming, entrepreneurship, and the daily habits of a woman living a life that is both successful and fun. Imagine a TED talk but over wine. My wish for you is that you experience an unlimited flow of money, a business that attracts your dream clients, and the freedom to spend your time how you choose. And if you stick with me, that will soon be your reality. I'm honoured to be on the journey with you, so let's get into

How The Brain Makes Meaning

SPEAKER_01 2:14

it. Dr. Sarah Mackay, welcome to the Abundant and Align Podcast.

SPEAKER_00 2:18

Thanks for the invitation.

SPEAKER_01 2:20

I am so honoured to be sitting across from you today. You are a neuroscientist with over 30 years' experience in this field. You are the author of three books on brain health. The one I'm particularly interested in today is the Women's Brain Book. It's a true honour to be sitting across from you today, and I'm really excited to pick your brain on everything to do with the brain. Like I shared at the start of this episode, my audience are full of women in business, and the whole mission behind this show is to help them lead and live better lives. And I know the brain plays a very, very important role in that. And so I wanted to bring an expert to the show to share everything we need to know when it comes to the women's brain and again how to use it as a powerful asset in business. Now I have so many questions, but I just want to start off with quite an obvious one. When when a woman knows very clearly what she wants in her life, that vision is so clear. What role does the brain really play in whether or not she creates the levels of success that she wants to be creating?

SPEAKER_00 3:28

Essentially, we've got a brain and a nervous system within our bodies. It's within this ecosystem of our body, and the brain is making constant meaning of the information that's streaming in from our body, and that's everything from our genetic makeup to the food we've eaten, exercise, hormones, blood pressure, you know, how much sleep we've had, everything kind of biological influences our brain in a multitude of different ways. Essentially, the brain is just making sure that the body can, you know, function and keep homeostasis, um, stay alive, essentially. Then our brain is also making making meaning of the information that's coming in from the outside world, and that is everything from you know what we can taste, what we can smell, what we can see right in front of us, this ridiculous, stupid machine that we now carry around in our arms, like it's this little baby that we can't ever let go of, um, because it might die if we put it down in a room unattended. Outside in information is also about from the rising and setting of the sun to people that that are around us, to the you know, the built environment, the culture, the society. And the brain has been receiving information about from all of those sources, mostly through our eyes and ears, because we're humans, throughout our life. And because we have a brain, we also have memory, so we can remember the things that have happened to us in the past. Some of it we can explicitly remember, like we can kind of remember, oh, I I remember that time I went to Paris, which is the capital of France, or there's much what we might call like implicit memories, um, which might be like knowing how to ride a bike, or perhaps a belief system, which might be, you know, a particular practice or um story or way of being that we've repeated enough times through our life that we've just internalized. We don't think about whether it's true or not, it just is. So we've got top-down in our brain as well, so that's what we might call psychology. So that's our thoughts and our feelings and our expectations, our memories. And so the top-down and the outside in and the bottom up are constantly, you know, coming together within the brain. So, and I always think about the brain's in this kind of complex ecosystem of our body. We're in this world, but we've also got this time dimension in there, and that our brain is constantly making meaning of all of this, going, oh, that was cool, I would do that next time, or well, that kind of sucked. I'm not, I'm not gonna kind of do that again, and then it will learn what it feels good about doing, or perhaps what it might not feel great about doing, or shrink away from. Um, and there's many, many very complicated neural and brain processes which are involved in all of this.

Imposter Syndrome And Reframing

SPEAKER_00 6:05

Let's take imposter syndrome because that's kind of more interesting. Procrastination is annoying and boring. Don't wait for a muse, sit down, do the work, turn it into a habit, done. Um, I think some people sit around and think waiting to be inspired. That's just rubbish. Imposter syndrome might be the experience of being in a situation, a place with people, or even a place within your own mind where you feel like perhaps you don't necessarily belong, or you kind of feel out of place. And there are multiple sort of sources of that kind of situation, and that could be the physical sensations in your body that might arise when you're in a context or a situation that you've not been in before, and then the meaning you're you're ascribing to those kinds of situations. It could be, you know, your your imposter syndrome is very much being driven by some bottom-up kind of biological feeling in your body, like anxiety perhaps, or nervousness, and how we then choose to interpret that might be contextual. It may be a replay of some kind of um experience that we've had in the past where someone made you feel like you didn't belong, or perhaps looked at you a strange way and you chose to interpret it like that. There's lots of kind of ways in which the brain is going to be making meaning of a situation um at any one moment in time. I've never really experienced imposter syndrome myself. I'm one of the kind of the few people that doesn't. I have a friend who's an imposter syndrome coach. We've often kind of talked talked about this. I I think I was had a really lovely childhood and family who loved and valued me, and there was unconditional positive regard in my family. Um, and so that's like kind of like a memory from my past, which is embedded in me. Um I guess I've learned ways to manage kind of anxiety and feeling nervousness, nervous and out of place. Um, and that's enabled me to put myself in lots of different situations time and time again to kind of reinforce the the good feelings versus the nervousness and the and the the shying away. Um and also I remember years and years ago, so I like I grew up in Christchurch New Zealand. Mum and dad both left school when they were 15. I'd never met anyone that went to university before in my life, and you know, after long story short, I ended up at Oxford University with a scholarship there to study neuroscience. So you'd think I would have imposter syndrome. I had it for like about 10 minutes on the first day until I started meeting people, and then realized everyone was kind of feeling nervous and out of place and awkward, and maybe like they didn't belong. But I just saw that as this really cool fun opportunity to make new friends. So again, I'm I'm I like there's not one thing about my brain, it's it's it's the experiences that we have, the feelings we have in our body and context and situations we're in, but also it it largely depends on experiences like that that we've had in the past and the meaning we make of them. And I was just able to immediately reframe the one time I kind of verged on imposter syndrome and then just kind of thought like, so what? Like, get out of your own head and just have a good time meeting people. Yeah, um, that's a very long-winded. I've tried to like throw in a bit of neuroscience there and a little bit of a personal story.

SPEAKER_01 9:31

I know

Neuroplasticity Across The Lifespan

SPEAKER_01 9:32

in the book you talk a lot about this concept of womb to tomb, and as we move through our life, we are our brain is being conditioned in many different ways. What's actually happening in the brain from the moment we are born to the woman that we are today? How is it being molded into this, I guess, this machine that's now influencing our thoughts, our feelings, our beliefs?

SPEAKER_00 9:54

I don't like the word condition, conditioning there makes the feel like there's some sort of subterfuge going on. That's just learning. Your brain's experiencing situations, learning about them and figuring out whether you should do that again next time or not. Conditioning makes it sound like there's some external force at play that's kind of against our will. We've been tricked into thinking something or not. That's not that's I mean, I'm not a conspiracy theorist like in that way. Like I said, the brain is a learning machine and a prediction machine. The brain is set up to learn without getting into the neurobiology. Um, you know, we we have an experience, we remember that, the brain goes, Hey, that that was cool. You know, I might like remember that. You know, you might like turn a beloved memory over your in your mind multiple times, and each time you kind of retrieve that memory and remember it again, then you kind of actually what you're doing is remembering the last time you you had the memory. Um, so they can shape and shift over time. But uh, but our brain basically is a is a is a biological learning machine, it is able to store information so that when you encounter that situation next, you've got the signals from your body, the context you're in, and your memory, and the brain is enabled enables you to go, oh huh. So last time I was here and I was in this physiological state in my body in this context, I remember what that felt like, and so this is probably what will be the next best thing to do. Um, and then our brain does that throughout our lifespans. Now there are different sort of ages and life stages in which the brain prioritises learning by experience because it really wants to kind of put put some kind of important patterning down to enable you to not have to keep on learning that thing every time you encounter it. So, when you're a little child, of course, your visual parts of your brain, your auditory parts of your brain develop. They're very what we call plastic, which means that they're very ready and willing to learn by experience. And it's we have this critical period of language development. You need to, you know, be taking part in conversations, whether or not it's your your first language or there's multiple languages or it's sign language if you're deaf. You need your your the language centres in your brain fundamentally require you to take part in conversations and hear a spoken word and have to and fro to enable your language centres to kind of wire up when you're very, very young in the first couple of years of life. That's why we now test babies for um hearing loss before they leave the hospital because it's so fundamentally important. So we've got these different kinds of ages and stages in the brain when it when it's more or less plastic or more or less kind of ready for experiences. Um, another really critical period in development is adolescence. So we have the hormones of puberty kind of turning on, whether it's in our testes or our ovaries, whether we're a you know a guy or a girl, um, and that opens up this window of adolescent brain plasticity. And a lot of the skills that the brain is required to is kind of seeking out to help guide its development are things like social cognition, so social relationships, becoming more independent, developing a sense of identity, being able to engage in more complex kind of thought processing, um, decision making, judgment, and reasoning. And so the brain kind of seeks out experiences that will help. It's like a tiny brain seeks out conversations so it can learn to speak. Uh, an adolescent brain might seek out or be feel very sensitive towards social relationships so that the social cognition parts of the brain can wire up. And is and then you know, when we kind of enter, you know, our late, you know, mid through late teens, the plasticity there becomes less. It doesn't go away because we can always learn throughout our life, our lifespan. So there's certain times when the learning is much easier and almost kind of by default, other times when we have to kind of you know apply some of the skills that we know that enable our brains to learn, like attention and um kind of a little a little bit of um, let's say dramatic, sort of fresh-on, like you need, you can't be asleep, you can't be like kind of totally stressed out, but you need a little bit of kind of you know friction there to learn. It needs to be slightly hard to learn. So, you know, you trial and error, you need um, you know, to repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat. Usually you have to repeat something multiple times until you kind of learn. So there's times in life or stages in life when the brain requires appropriate requirements that have to be met for it to learn. And essentially that's all the brain's doing is learning. It's not conditioning, it's not by magic, it's not um without our knowledge. Like sometimes it's actively us deciding we want to learn something. Other times we're in a situation and something kind of we go over it so many times that we just kind of absorb it as a belief or something.

SPEAKER_01 14:50

Yeah, so the brain's always learning, and we hear this term neuroplasticity, which means the brain the brain is learned, the brain is learning.

SPEAKER_00 14:58

Neuroplasticity is just a word to use to describe the fact that our brain and nervous system can change. Neuroplasticity is like the massive umbrella term, which just means the nervous system can change in response to experiences. And one of the ways it changes is to store those experiences, to store what it's learned. And the mechanism by which that this happens falls under that umbrella of neuroplasticity.

The Cost Of Pathologising Women

SPEAKER_01 15:22

And so what I love so much in your body of work is you always talk about our brains not being broken, however, we seem to live in a society where we often hear women say baby brains, brain forms.

SPEAKER_00 15:33

It's sufferable. Like it's like from puberty, the brain is dysfunctional, emotional, broken. Like, so we've pathologized puberty, we've pathologized adolescence, we've pathologized early adulthood, we've pathologized women in the workplace, we've pathologized pregnancy, we've pathologized motherhood, we've pathologized midlife, we're now pathologizing menopause, and then after that we've we've got aging. So basically, you're fine up until age 10, unless you want to pathologize your early childhood. Um, we're pretty pathologizing tweens next. Like it is, and the messages that we absorb, one that are gendered, two that can often be ageist, um, sexist, they're getting in under our skin and they're influencing our health outcomes. Like the I just, I know I've jumped in on you here, it just drives me to despair the way that women happily want to talk about themselves as if having a female brain and adding in some hormones or a certain life stage, which is now everything from puberty to death, um, is is path is pathologized and talked about as if it is a disease risk to be managed. And that's not how we evolved. Mother Nature didn't intend for us to be that way. But women, I f and social media has made it a hundred times worse because everyone's pathologizing, catastrophizing, and then selling you a solution.

SPEAKER_01 16:59

There's a label for everything now.

SPEAKER_00 17:01

Our brain is making meaning of those stories, and um, I mean, we've got evidence at every age in life stage, we've got even evidence that your attitude towards aging, if you have an attitude towards aging as being healthy and full of opportunities, you will show lower levels of cognitive decline. Your walking speed will even be faster than if you've absorbed and believe in messages about aging being about decline. So we have to be mindful of the stories we are not just mindful, we need to be be actively pushing against like being mindful. What does that mean? Like, oh yeah, I heard that idea, like we need to start actively pushing back against that that that every age is is a disease risk project. Yeah. It's you know, we've got menstrual cycles, they're being pathologized. People talk about cycle sinking as if there's times when you're gonna have to be one way and be another, and and cycle sinking just means that you will then absorb messaging about how you're meant to be feeling at a certain time of your cycle, and then you'll feel that way. So we need to be not just aware, but we need to start actively pushing against that. I tell you what, though, I actively push against it on social media, people come at me insisting that women are just inevitably broken. Like women themselves, and it's women themselves that are doing it.

SPEAKER_01 18:25

Yeah, and I know you talk in your book that you've got a whole book about baby brain and baby brain.

SPEAKER_00 18:30

Let's read the subtitle because like I'm so like better. The subtitle is The Surprising Neuroscience of Our Pregnancy and Motherhood, Sculpt Our Brains and Change Our Minds for the Better. Because the neuroscience, this is a decade's worth of neuroscience on the neurobiology of matrescence, matrescence being the term to describe pregnancy and motherhood. It is it's not finding evidence of cognitive decline and dysfunction. I mean, what would mother nature, what what what on earth would be the adaptive evolutionary benefit of women becoming mothers and then becoming useless and forgetful? Well, I mean, we've already become that way since puberty, according to some people.

SPEAKER_01 19:16

So Well, it it's so true.

SPEAKER_00 19:18

You might as well just become a mother and carry on your decline down to death.

SPEAKER_01 19:22

It's so true when you think about like that. Women have been put here to birth children. Why would it suddenly come with this story that now you also have to have a brother?

SPEAKER_00 19:31

Well, why would we become cognitively impaired? Because that's not exactly going to help propagate the species and keep our babies alive and how and our enable us to nurture them and focus on them. And I don't think we were put on this planet to have babies, but I mean, also like we are mammals on a planet and we and we reproduce.

Brain Fog Phones Sleep And Load

SPEAKER_01 19:49

So is are you saying that when we do experience brain frog for fog, brain fog in business, we have a day a week, you need to be productive and we can't get our shit together.

SPEAKER_00 20:00

Is there anything actually happening in the brain, or is that just a story that we are telling ourselves to explain why we're so for a long time the word brain fog's been associated with menopause, baby brain's been associated with pregnancy and motherhood. A study came out by Jean Hales for Women's Health Here in Australia in the last sort of six, seven weeks found that the greatest proportion of girls and women worried about their memory and their attention are actually women aged 18 to 25. Which, and actually, the the figure went from about 60% of women aged 18 to 25 worried about attention to about 50% in their 30s to about 40% in their 40s, and then over the six over the 60s it was something like about 10 to 15%. So it's actually the complete opposite of what you'd expect it to be, right? You'd think that the older you are, the more concerned you are. Actually, the younger you are, the more concerned you are. I almost blame it entirely on this device here, which we know has actually completely drastic and dramatic effects on what we would call our working memory. So working memory is kind of like the engine driver of all of our other cognition. Attention and working memory work really closely together. Attention is the ability of your brain to take information, choose what information to filter in and what information to filter out. What am I paying attention to and what am I ignoring? And when the information has come in, the first kind of brain processing that's done is kind of working memory, or almost we might think about it as short-term memory, or we can measure working memory. That's things like here's a list of numbers, can you repeat them back to me? Here's a list of words, can you repeat them back to me? It's kind of what you can hold in your mind's eye or your working sort of space in your brain. And then if you hold it there long enough, it might get processed into longer term memory. Um so if you have a mobile phone with you in the room, even if it's turned face down on the desk next to you, even if it's turned off and it's in the room with you, we that has become so incredibly salient and we've become so deeply attached. To it, that the the intentional effort required to ignore your phone reduces the capacity of your working memory because you're going, Oh, should I look at no, I'm not going to look at my phone. And then I'll look at no, I'm not going to look at my phone. And that that that uh the effort required to ignore your phone reduces the information that you can take in and process. And then all of other cognition, you know, is is then built on a weaker, weaker platform, right? So we need to, what I tell people to do. I grew up in the 70s and 80s, and our phones were attached to the wall. And if it rang, your mum or your dad usually answered it first. So I now encourage people to plug if you're at home or in the workplace, plug your phone into the wall, turn the sound up so you can hear it when it rings, walk away from it. It's like an old-fashioned phone stuck in the wall. You don't need to carry it around like it's a little baby that might like die if you aren't holding on to it. Um, it will be okay. And you might even benefit, right? So we've got this massive inability to pay attention and to utilize our most basic capacity of cognition, our working memory, because a large amount of it has been sucked by this brain drain of a phone. Another kind of thing on to on top of that is just the information that we've been consuming, especially if you're of the TikTok generation, you know, you've been you've been primed to consume short form video content, and we know that that ruins attention, memory, cognition, and also you know, lowers your emotion. We've also not paid enough attention to sleep and to sleeping well, and sleep is a kind of that biological bottom-up foundation. So we can think about the phones as being this outside-in kind of influence on how our brain is processing information. We've also got this biological influence of sleep, um, and forgetting that we are these mammals that evolved on this planet that spins on its axis as we go around the sun. And many, many, many people, people under consume natural light during the day and then over-consume artificial light at night. So they're basically in artificial lighting day and night, and so we're not tuned into the rising and the setting of the sun, and so our our sleep is is severely disrupted and dysregulated, and that's you know, kind of the biological foundation on which everything else really needs to be built. So that's a massive part of that as well. Um, we're working in this kind of very complex ecosystem as well, so the ecosystem of our body, the world that we're in. I think one useful neuroscience explanation for some, but not all, forms of brain fog, because it could be due to low iron, you could have depression, you could um, you know, um, you know, be incredibly hormonally sensitive, you could be incredibly stressed about something and distracted, and you know, your stress level, you know, you your nervous system's never kind of finding its way back to level. There's lots and lots of ways in which factors can influence how our brain functions. But another, if we are healthy, another cognitive load is like the competing demands on your brain's kind of processing. So it's both the the degree of complexity of the information that we're trying to process and make meaning of, and also how much we are trying to ignore and filter out that's kind of competing for for space. So we've got like a limited kind of cognitive load. We've already reduced it down if we've got our phone with us. We've reduced the the processing speed if we're underslept, and so we've got only quite quite a narrow bandwidth of information we can process whilst trying to ignore the other kinds of things out there. So often it's not it's not about just business, it's just about life. We're our brains are perfectly healthy and functioning fine. We're just not providing the right situation, the right ecosystem in which they have evolved to function most well.

SPEAKER_01 26:02

We live in a world where modern the modern society and modern life really is working against the functioning of our brain, by the sounds of that.

SPEAKER_00 26:10

Yeah, but we can actively push against that. We're not like little tissues fluttering about in the breeze. Yeah, we're not. We have we have agency. Yeah. Um I'm quite a high agency person though. I don't um I'm not, I don't feel like I'm kind of at the whims of society, like being being floated around like a little feather in the breeze. No one told me this, or society expects that of me. Like I'm I'm far more solid and stable, and like I understand who I am and how and how I need to be in the world. Um, and but you get there by actively pushing against instead of you're not a little flaky feather, like you have to actively understand this, not just awareness, but then actively push back against that. And and you have the you have choices and agency and autonomy. Um, I just feel like lots of people think that they don't, or they're worried that someone might notice that they're doing something. But I'm also 51, I couldn't give two flying ducks what anyone else is thinking about what I'm doing.

SPEAKER_01 27:15

Especially because you know what this is doing to our brains. You're like, it's actually brain rot. It is actually brain rot.

SPEAKER_00 27:21

Yeah, and I don't but but a lot, I think a lot of it comes about from um being hyperware of what other people are uh thinking of us. No one actually cares.

SPEAKER_01 27:31

No one even notices, no one notices with their own life, yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 27:35

Or they're fine.

unknown 27:36

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 27:38

Um now obviously women are listening

Male Versus Female Brain Differences

SPEAKER_01 27:41

to this. I want to hone in now on the women's brain, and I would love for us to know what is is there a difference between a man's brain and a female brain, and is it true that we are still somewhat living in a world for the men when our brains aren't designed to work in a setting like that, to live in a setting like that?

SPEAKER_00 28:03

I don't believe that we're in some world designed for men's brains. Um, you know, I could choose to live in a matriarchy if I so wish based on my at my attitudes. I mean, women are the ones who are, you know, having the babies, raising the families, you know, keeping keeping societies and communities going, teaching in the schools, running the hospitals. Um there differences between male and female brains, some differences, but we can't open up someone's skull and see a pink brain and a you know a female body and a blue brain and a male body and or do a brain scan and identify someone's sex based on their brain structure. We would need to take a thousand different measures of a person's brain and then perhaps get a thousand males and a thousand females together to start seeing some signals emerge from the noise in terms of the very, very subtle differences that sometimes exist. Sometimes there's more similar similarities than there are differences, and it very much depends on which measure or metric of the brain you are looking at or comparing. And you've also got to kind of compare apples with apples and oranges with oranges, and by that, the example I always like to give is say you've got a little girl who's nine years old living in say Dublin and Ireland, she loves Taylor Swift. You've got like so I could think of my 18-year-old son who's studying maths down, he's gone to university AU in Canberra. Um, and then we could go over to say, I've got a uh a friend who's a high court judge in Canada, he's 50 years old. Then we can come over to say someone like India, and you've got a woman who's 35 and she's having a third or fourth baby, she lives in abject poverty, never went to school. Well, maybe she left school when she was 10 or something, and she's now just like had lots and lots of babies and lives in poverty and it's never worked. And then you could go and look at someone, say, um, someone in their 90s living, a lady living in a nursing home in New Zealand who's in her 90s. So, are we going to compare the woman and the nursing home in rural India and the girl in Dublin with the high court judge, the male, 50-year-old high court judge in Canada, with my 18-year-old son studying maths in Canberra, and go, well, what's the difference between a male and a female brain here when these people have had vastly different life experiences and they're at different ages and stages of life as well? Because it's not only our biology that is different, it's the experiences that we've had based on who we are and where we've grown up in the world, whether we're female, whether we've had pregnancies or not, that's a really significant way to sort of change the structure and organization of some parts of the brain, the degree of education we've had, the age and life stage we're at, whether we've got, you know, particular diseases of aging like Alzheimer's disease or something, whether we're pre- or post-puberty. So there's this, you know, the difference between males and females isn't just only about biological sex, it's also about the lives that we've lived. Everything kind of falls out on a kind of a normal distribution, and then we want to see how much do those two distributions overlap. And for most things, there's a more overlap than there is difference. Sometimes we might see differences right out at the ends, and particularly males, like for many measures that we could make of males versus females, the distribution curve in males is kind of a bit like kind of broader and flatter. And so, you know, people might go, oh, well, there's more male CEOs. It's like, well, there's also more males in prisons. The males kind of out of the edges, and the female distribution curve is about is a bit narrower. Um, but then females have also got you know these um reproductive life transitions that we go through. Um, so are they the same or different? It's a little bit like saying a male body's the same as female bodies. Well, we've all got toes and we've all got belly buttons and we've all got eyes and ears and tongues and teeth and hearts and lungs, and you know, much of our physiology is the same. There's just some aspects which are a little bit different. So it's like which measure are you going to look at and say is the same or is different?

Agency Resilience And Work Culture

SPEAKER_01 32:03

Yeah. Would you say that women are doing anything in particular in modern business entrepreneurship that is working against the female brain?

SPEAKER_00 32:12

Believing that the female brain is broken from puberty, that as soon as you've got a female body and brain with some hormones involved, that it's inevitably about emotion, you know, being overly emotional or dysfunctional or hormonal or, you know, or hypersensitive. The female brain is incredibly resilient. Someone told me today on Instagram that using the word resilient was gaslighting. I think that they need to check their gendered ageism against themselves. Our brains are continually adapting and responding to puberty, to adolescence, to the social experiences. We have our brains are continually adapting and responding in a really healthy and normal way to the hormones of our menstrual cycle. Our brains adapt and respond largely in almost all women to if we choose to go on hormonal contraceptives. Sometimes, in some women, some of the time, puberty is difficult. The pill doesn't suit us. We have PMS, we go through pregnancy and it sucks. We find early motherhood difficult. In some women, some of the time, but not all women all of the time. And we've kind of uh we a lot of work has been done to try and destigmatize things like mental health, you know, uh post-natal depression, uh, menopause and brain fog. But what that's done is it's kind of conflated symptoms and disease to normalized experiences and average them out over the entire population, which is leading girls and women to believe that everything that we do is an exercise in disease, disease risk or symptom management. Um, and I just don't necessarily think that that's the case. Um, so we need to just start telling ourselves and absorbing some better stories about the adaptability and the strength and the resilience of women because we see this, we're not these little, like, you know, delicate little petals floating around in the breeze. Like, put some roots down and be like an oak tree. If you feel like you've kind of got to be standing up to the men or the patriarchy, fuck them. Yeah. But most of them are like emotional little babies with big boy emotions they can't control anyway. Like, don't worry about them. Just like do your thing and stop complaining about it. Just get on, just motherfucking get on with it and do your shit. Yeah. Like, I did not ever grow up thinking that I had to worry about what the men were doing. I didn't even think about my being a girl. I went through, you know, the sciences, I did a PhD in a lab with mostly guys and men, you know, I've set up business. I've never for once thought, oh gosh, I'm a woman. What am I doing wrong? Is this something to do with my female brain? I just like got the stuff done. Um, and if someone didn't like it, they can I don't care. And if it's a guy or a man who I feel like I'm kind of fighting, like none of them know as much as I do. They just they just don't. Like it's and the few that do are smart enough and savvy enough that we're not having a disagreement, like we're on the same team, right? Yourself by cool, smart people. Yeah. As women, like there's some cool guys out there doing great stuff, and some emotionally smart, intelligent mentors that you can that you can tap into. Um, I'm not really particularly worried about whether they're what sex they are.

SPEAKER_01 35:40

I

Menstrual Cycle Myths Versus Data

SPEAKER_01 35:41

want to kind of circle back now to this whole brain fog and let me start with how do our hormones influence our brain firstly? Because I know you talk about the different seasons of life, it's not just before the age of seven that our brains are learning, it's through our entire life. So, how do our hormones influence our brain's capacity? Like, why do some days we communicate better, we can learn faster, we can articulate our words, and other times we can't. How does that kind of fall hormonally and throughout our menstrual cycle?

SPEAKER_00 36:10

Probably doesn't have anything to do with hormones whatsoever. You're probably talking about ovarian sex hormones, estrogen and progesterone across the course of the menstrual cycle. Bearing in mind, tons of women are on the pill, so you've just got flat-lined hormones. So this conversation, you know, we're not talking about fluctuations with you. Um, although I know lots of girls and women have been told by TikTok that they shouldn't be on the pill. And so we're seeing rates declining, unwanted pregnancies going up. So if you have got you are naturally cycling, you don't want to use hormonocontraceptors for whatever reason, you might not even be sexually active. Cool. We can look at a couple of different ways of how the brain functions. As I said, there's a million different measures. We could look at its activity, we could look at its structure, its function. By and large, we can't really see hormones changing the brain in any measurable way that we can pick up in terms of structure because any changes are so tiny and subtle we can't see them, they're microscopic. We can look at how the brain kind of ebbs and flows in terms of its patterns of activity, and it does ebb and flow in response to shifts in hormones, but it's kind of lagged by a couple of days because hormones impact gene transcription in the brain. They aren't influencing electrical activity. It kind of takes a couple of days for a rising or a falling level of a hormone to have an effect on anything. We can look at cognition. So I think it's important to separate feelings and emotions out from cognitive tasks like math, doing maths or verbal memory or reaction speed or attention. That is separate from feeling happy or sad or irritable or angry or elated or whatever. We've been looking at the effect of menstrual cycle day on measures of cognition since about the 1930s or 40s. So you'll hear constantly rolled out on social media there's gaps in women's brain health. Yeah, there's gaps in women's health. There are, there's gaps. But there's also lots of data. And we've had we've got data since the 1930s or 40s that menstrual cycle day levels of hormones have zero impact, they do not impact measures of cognition. People hate me saying this, they think that it must be not true. We've looked at it from the 1940s, they were looking at how quickly women in parachute factories in World War II were building parachutes for the soldiers. Like we've looked at it in terms of exam scores in university students. We've done really detailed daily blood tests so we know exactly which day of your menstrual psychology you're at. And they've looked specifically at cognitive tests which do show sex differences, thinking, well, if it shows a sex difference, maybe it's driven by hormones. We don't see cognition vary by hormones. Okay, let's celebrate it. It's good news because that means we can get educated and have jobs and make decisions and run countries and businesses and all of that without worrying about menstrual cycle day. Okay, ignore all of the cycle sinking bullshit on TikTok. That's just people selling you stuff. Emotions are slightly different in that some women some of the time do show hormonal sensitivity. It might be to the onboarding of a hormone, it might be they feel more kind of frisky and active and kind of responsive and hyper-vigilant around ovulation as estrogen levels go up or a couple of days after ovulation, or maybe the declining of estrogen after ovulation makes them kind of feel like a bit, you know, emotionally roller coastery. Maybe they're more sensitive to the rising and then the fall of progesterone and its metabolites premenstrually. Objective studies that have been done that don't tell women we are looking at emotional responses based on your hormones. It's about PMS. They're like, let's just look at mood and daily life. What's going on? Tell us what's happening. Here's a mood scale, one to ten, positive, negative valence. We only see about kind of one in 10 to 1 in 20 women show clear emotional variation based on menstrual day, which is typically what we see globally in all the objective studies that have been done. Maybe about kind of five to ten percent of women show mood variation based on cycle day. When you tell them it's a study on cycle day and PMS and mood, you get way more women reporting negative mood leading up to their cycles. But when they're blinded to what the study's about, you only see five to five to ten percent. Which means 90 to 95% of us show variations in mood, but it's not linked to our hormones. Which again, good news. Yeah, great. If you want to believe that it is, knock yourself out, but you could also believe it's not, and you might have a bit of a different experience. We do see mood that's influenced by like how you know stressors out there and how stressed you are in the world, whether you're feeling healthy and well or not healthy and well, whether you're feeling socially supported and included, and you know, you've got people around you who love you, right? We've got very, very clear cause and effect there. But the cause and effect of hormones and emotions is only five to ten percent of women. But we've been told it's almost everyone all of the time. And if that's what you want to believe, be my guest. The neuroscience does not support that outcome. In fact, the neuroscience is supporting level cognition and small amounts of emotional variation. Interestingly, when they've done studies that also include men and just look across the course of one month, do you feel like irritable, but like, you know, out of a scale of one to ten, it's like two? Um, or do you feel angry, it's a scale of ten, or do you feel like you know, you're feeling chill or relaxed or happy, or you know, you give all these different emotions. Men actually show a greater range of emotions across the course of the month and greater valence across the course of a day than girls and women do. But that shouldn't surprise anyone because like who is in the white ute tooting the horn at you at the lights because you've like spent seven milliseconds longer than they wanted you to to start accelerating, and who's overtaking and who's like not got their big boy emotions under control, right? It's not women. We insist on telling ourselves these other stories, right? So, what neuroscience is finding is the genuine link between what's happening in our brain in terms of processing emotions and what's happening in our brain in terms of processing cognition. There are a couple of other things in there which we do know have a little bit more of a cause and effect with um hormones, depending on whether it's ovulation, whether you're on the oral contraceptive pill, um, luteal phase, and that's more around things like fear processing and trauma processing, but not like day-to-day emotions. More so um, you know, if you've been through a really traumatic event, that event may become, may, may predispose you to PTSD more or less based on the cycle day you're at, if you're the kind of person that's hormonally sensitive. We have got this subgroup of women who are hormonally sensitive, who are their nervous systems do react and respond in a different way to the rise and fall of hormones. Their hormone levels aren't bigger or smaller than anyone else's. It's just there's some underpinning biological sensitivity. They're more sensitive to the pill, they're more likely to have PMS, they probably struggled with mood disorders during puberty, they're much more likely to have perinatal mood disorders, they're much more likely to experience mood disorders at menopause. And also, one of the risk factors for mood disorders, depression and anxiety is prior experiences of these. So we can kind of see a bit of a snowballing effect as well. So, what's really important is to understand who are the women who genuinely are impacted, what is going on in their biology. Also, let's look at everyone else who might be showing a different outcome and let's know. Average everyone out and assume everyone is is is exactly the same because that's that's terrible science and it's also very poor science communications because how it's communicated will influence the health outcomes of people.

SPEAKER_01 44:14

And

TikTok Health Claims And Real Harm

SPEAKER_01 44:15

this is why we need to be careful where we are consuming our information and places like TikTok.

SPEAKER_00 44:22

There is a study that came out of the UK, it was published in the BMJ last year that was looking at rates of birth control hormonal birth control discon discontinuation, so girls stopping taking the pill based on how much TikTok content they had consumed about the symptoms that they might be experiencing. The more TikTok that they'd consumed about negative experiences of the pill, the more negative symptoms they had of the pill, the more likely they were to stop taking the pill, and lo and behold, unwanted pregnancy rates rise. Having an unwanted pregnancy isn't like a trivial outcome here. It's probably not a great thing to be managing. So, you know, we've got we've got this kind of out and out-of-control wilderness out there online of people who are very charismatic and glossy, kind of just saying whatever they want, sometimes with good intentions but with zero backing and also incredibly loose and um like just just I don't want to use the word dangerous, what I'm just thinking of just this kind of like loose and fast ways of communicating information which can have massive impacts and one sort of little statement can have a huge impact.

SPEAKER_01 45:40

Especially with vir virality. Some germs are going to millions and millions of people.

SPEAKER_00 45:46

Yeah. It can be spread around like germs or disease, and it can directly impact health outcomes. We s we see this. It may not necessarily be the way that we think it's going to, but you know, people can consume anti-vaccine information, say, and not get their kids vaccinated, and there's a measle outbreak and their children die of measles. I mean, that's that's uh a health outcome directly correlated to information. So, but people are kind of really fast and loose because their primary goal is to drive traffic, because that's the current currency at the moment, um, with and then then they're not seeing the the the longer-term, broader public health um impacts of that. And I don't really think some of them care either.

SPEAKER_01 46:32

That's true. They just like you said, they're there for the engagement and the followers.

Habits Cues Rewards And Repetition

SPEAKER_01 46:36

Um, I've got a woman in front of me who wants to create better routines, perhaps she wants to get up earlier, she wants to have a healthier lifestyle, she wants to develop better habits in her day. What do we need to know about the brain in order for these habits to become more concrete in our life as opposed to be sewing being so yo-yo in whatever area they're trying to check?

SPEAKER_00 46:57

Well, habits are the biggest bang for your buck in terms of behavioral change. If you've got a habit, you don't need motivation, you don't need a plan, you don't need, you know, a goal. You just will get up.

SPEAKER_01 47:08

It's like brushing your teeth.

SPEAKER_00 47:10

Well, it's not even just brushing your teeth, yeah, it's like the way you'd move your brush around your mouth, right? It's like having a cup of coffee in the morning. And coffee is habitual because it's slightly addictive. It's a pretty good, if you're gonna have any kind of addiction to a substance, coffee's the one to have. But you want it to be, you don't have to think about it, you just do it. You don't even really want to desire it like you desire coffee because you are mildly addicted. You just you just get on with it and do it. And that's what a true habit is. It's an automated behavior, it's something that you've repeated enough times, it becomes automated, and if and like your brain has gone, I don't want to have to think about this, I don't want to have to decide whether I want to do it or not, and use willpower and motivation and planning, and I just want to automate it, just get it done, like riding a bike. So you want to develop behaviors which become like that. Now they could be patterns of thinking, behaviors of thinking, or behaviors of doing. Essentially, what you've got to do is you've got to have start with self-awareness and understand is is it a behavior that you want to start doing or is it one that you want to stop doing? And if it's a habitual behaviour you want to stop doing, it will always happen in response to a particular cue or situation or trigger. So, one easy way to change that is to remove that cure situational trigger. It might take a bit of figuring that out. If you can't remove a cue situational trigger, maybe it's like a house you live in or a street you drive up or a person you work with, you can't eliminate them. Um, you need to learn a new behavior or response in response to that cure situation, and then you need to repeat it enough times and make that repetition fun enough and with enough positive emotion that you keep on doing it until it becomes habitual. So you're gonna have to embed some kind of positive reward outcomes in that while you're in the repetition process, while you're grinding out the repetitions until it you know it rolls out in response to that cue. We can have it stack, say you already do something you like, make a coffee every morning, you want to add more squats to your life. I don't know, you can do your squats while you're waiting for your coffee machine to heat up. There's habits, there's habit stacking. So again, it's about kind of identifying the little behavioural rollout. Um, if it's a thought process, it can be kind of a harder one. Sometimes, again, it's interrogating. Why do I always think this thought in that situation or in response to that trigger or cue? What's the trigger or cue? Can I think something else instead? Can I remove the trigger or the cue? So these are just some kind of basics because the brain is just kind of encountering, goes, oh, oh, when I'm in this situation, when I'm in this outside environment, um, I've got this biological, you know, response in a body, and I'll think this particular thought. The brain, because it's done it enough times, it's learned that. So again, the brain's just learned and predicted, which is what we do, which is what we do. So we've got to we've got to kind of almost step back and interrogate the the new behaviour or the old behaviour, and then build a new habit, habitual behaviour in its place. For something to go from being a behaviour that we've done once or twice to a true habit whereby we it doesn't require any thought or motivation, you know, it may there's no set amount of time, it's not like 21 days, it's not like a hundred repetitions. You give a teenager a mobile phone, it will become habit, they'll be using it habitually within a day. Ask them to clean their room, put their washing out, you can ask them 100 times, it doesn't become habitual, uh, because the phone is far more salient and emotional, you know, like this is like awesome versus doing putting their washing in a basket, right? So, you know, there's no magic sort of solution there. And I think you know, a bit of compassion um as well to your to yourself probably won't go amiss either.

SPEAKER_01 51:02

There's not a certain time frame. If you do this for three weeks, you'll develop the habit. Everybody's gonna be so different. Yeah, it can take it could take 10 days, it could take 200 days. Consistency and repetition is obviously better.

SPEAKER_00 51:13

Yeah, and a bit of celebration and feel you know, you need to be have some good feels in there, good vibes in there as well. You don't want it to suck. Yeah, and if it does suck, you need to stack it onto something that doesn't suck or have a really good reward at the end to make it worthwhile doing.

SPEAKER_01 51:27

Yeah, okay, cool.

SPEAKER_00 51:28

And your brain, because your brain doesn't care. Yeah, your brain just wants to be efficient, your brain just doesn't want to use too much energy.

SPEAKER_01 51:34

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 51:35

So whatever you can do to automate it as as quickly as possible is is the key.

SPEAKER_01 51:40

Or reduce that output that's required in order to get it done. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay.

Closing Advice And Resources

SPEAKER_01 51:45

Well, thank you very much. I could sit here and talk to you all day, but I'm very mindful of the time. Dr. Sarah Mackay, thank you so much for sharing your expertise, your wisdom, and your opinion on many matters that are influencing us every single day. I'm very grateful for you.

SPEAKER_00 51:58

You're welcome. I always like to share my opinions.

SPEAKER_01 52:01

I love it. Um, the women's brain book, please go and grab a copy if you are listening to this and educate yourself. Yeah, again, these stories we're telling ourselves and that are holding us back are as this episode has demonstrated, not true.

SPEAKER_00 52:13

Yeah, we can we've got agency. We're not little fragile feathers floating about in the breeze. So just plant your feet on the ground, claim yourself back.

SPEAKER_01 52:23

Yeah. And consume the right information. Yeah. That's been the biggest takeaway. Well, thank you very much. Everything is linked in the bio below, in the show notes below for all of you guys. Dr. Sarah Mackay, thank you again for your time today. And yeah, just enjoy the rest of your week for everybody listening.