#334 - THE NEUROSCIENCE OF LIVING YOUR DREAM LIFE, with Dr. Sarah McKay

Hi there,

I am so excited about this episode!

Have you ever wondered how your brain really works? How you can rewire your thoughts, boost creativity, stay focused, and even improve your overall happiness?

Well, today’s guest is the perfect person to help us unlock the incredible power of our minds.

I’m joined by Dr. Sarah McKay—a leading neuroscientist, author, and speaker—who has dedicated her career to translating complex brain science into practical, real-world strategies.

In this episode, we dive deep into neuroscience, covering everything from motivation and productivity to longevity, hormones, and the female brain.

Some key takeaways you’ll get from this conversation:

✅ The top daily habits that keep your brain healthy and thriving.
✅ How understanding neuroscience can help you achieve your dreams.
✅ The truth about brain fog, midlife changes, and how to navigate them.
✅ Practical strategies to improve focus and productivity in a world full of distractions.

It’s a fascinating discussion, and I know you’ll walk away feeling inspired and equipped with new insights to help you create a life you truly love.

So grab a cup of tea, get comfy, (or put your headphones on and go for a walk) ...and tune in—I can’t wait to hear your thoughts!

As always, I’d LOVE to hear what resonates with you from this episode and what you plan to implement after listening in. So please share and let’s keep the conversation going in the Dream Life Podcast Facebook Group here.    

Have a wonderful weekend… and remember, it all starts with a dream 💛

💛

Dream Life & kikki.K Founder  

SHOW NOTES:

  • Join my Platinum Coaching Program - where in March our focus is on Planning for the Quarter Ahead. Align your plans with your key dreams & specific goals. Reflect, refine, reenergise and lock in for continued success. Learn more here.
  • Join my virtual book club GROW for March where we meet weekly on Zoom to discuss and squeeze the learnings from great books. This March we're reading Time Wise, by Amantha Imber. Dominate your day and level up your life, using the secrets and habits of highly effective people. Learn more here.
  • Dream Life Community Facebook Group: Connect with like-minded dreamers.

RESOURCES:

TRANSCRIPT:

Kristina: Hi there, and welcome back to another episode. Today, we have an absolutely fascinating conversation lined up for you.

Have you ever wondered how your brain actually works. How you can rewire your thoughts, improve your focus, boost your creativity, and even enhance your overall happiness.

Well, today's guest is the perfect person to help us unlock the power of our minds. I am so excited to be joined by Dr Sarah Mackay, a renowned neuroscientist, speaker, author who specializes in translating complex brain science into practical, real world applications. Sarah has spent years studying how the brain shapes our thoughts, emotions, and behaviours, and today she's here to share her insight with us.

In this episode, we are diving into everything neuroscience and brain health, all around motivation, happiness and longevity, and even hormones and female brains. Whether you want to improve your mindset, optimize your daily habits, or simply understand your brain better, this conversation is packed with actionable takeaways.

So get ready to take explore the incredible power of your brain and learn how to harness it to create the life of your dreams. Let's start writing. Hello Sarah, and welcome to my podcast. I am so excited to have you on.

Dr Sarah: Oh thank you, thanks for the invitation.

Kristina: I can't wait to talk about all neuroscience and everything about the brain. But before we do, I like to ask a question that I ask all my guests. Did you have a dream as a child, something you wanted to do, or have or become.

Dr Sarah: I never dreamed about any particular career when I was a kid. I was a big reader. I grew up in christ Church, New Zealand, so back then nothing ever happened in christ Church, and I just always dreamed of traveling. And I always remember I'd be in the backyard and look at the clouds and the distance, and I would always kind of dream of something beyond the backyard. I was always incredibly driven.

I had dreams of like kind of getting up in a way. Not that I didn't love my family, I didn't love where I lived, but I always had this kind of drive and yearning to get kind of beyond the borders of where I was. I didn't know what that was or what that looked like, that whole thing.

You can't be what you can't see. Sometimes I disagree with that, but other times, I really I'd never met anyone that went to university before my parents left school when they were fifteen, and they were brilliant, loving, wonderful parents. But I didn't really have a lot of idea of what it was I was looking to do or be, but I had a real drive in there.

Kristina: I can so relate to that because I grew up in a small town in Sweden and my dream was just to see everything beyond my hometown because we didn't really get to travel.

My parents were farmers, so there was a lot of time. So I can still relate to that, and that's what makes it so exciting that, you know, especially in today's world where you can travel anywhere, having you just been too untyped to guess. So I'm sure you're high on travel?

Dr Sarah: Yeah, yeah, very high on travel. Can't come back to Earth after that.

Kristina: So that we have listeners from all over the world, so not everyone will have heard about you yet, So I'd love for you to just share in a bit of a snapshot a little bit about your journey before we dive into your expertise.

Dr Sarah: Yeah, well, I meant and I grew up in Christchurch, New Zealand. So a very small town, kind of a little small parochial world that I grew up in. But I'm very lucky, I think, because that gave me a really good, solid, call a spade a spade upbringing.

Now I live on the Northern Beaches in Sydney, and I've been in Sydney since two thousand and two, me and my husband. He wasn't my husband then. We moved here then for a year, thinking Sydney will be fun, let's see what that involves. And it's been such a great place to live and then to bring up kids. I can't see us calling anywhere else home.

He's Irish. He grew up in Dublin. We met at university in Oxford. I was doing a PhD in neuroscience. He was doing a degree in economics. So yeah, so I did my neuroscience training at Oxford. When we moved here to Sydney, it was for his work. Actually, I sort of floundered around a bit trying to figure out exactly what I wanted to do. I knew it was something within neuroscience that had always been my that was my undergraduate degree, that was my PhD. It was what I was most interested, and I'd always loved all things brain, and I did a couple of postdocs, which are kind of like the first research jobs that you have after you've done a PhD, and just didn't have a really great experience for lots of different reasons.

I loved being an undergraduate at university because you got to think about all of the things, and as you become a research scientist, you have to very much become an expert in a very narrow field, and I just felt like I was always missing out on all of the other things. I kind of want to just be sort of broad and shallow in my knowledge rather than deep and narrow.

And I'd always really like talking about my work as much as I liked doing the work. I did really like bench research. I really liked the technical side of microscopes and brains and neurons and all of the things that you do physically do as a scientist. But all of the admin around science drove me to despair.

So I left to sort of pursue a career and science communications because I thought I just want to talk and write about the science instead of just doing it. Had exactly the same time within the space of weeks I was pregnant with my first son, and then I thought, oh, this career thing, I'll just set that aside for a while.

My mother is a very wise woman and was very much of the you can have everything but not all at the same time elk and I said, oh, you know, this whole academia thing isn't working out. I'm just going to be a stay at home mum.

So I sort of stayed at home with my two boys, who were eighteen months apart, and I did that for quite a while, but still thinking about the science communications idea in the background, and so I slowly started building a business specializing and as I say, explaining the brain, educating, teaching, initially doing a lot of freelance writing work and all things in neuroscience so that I still kept that focus, and then really within the last ten years, my focus is being very much on women's brain health in particular.

Kristina: I have such a passion for this subject. So I'm so excited to talk and I feel like we can talk for hours, but up query, what is it that fascinates you so much about the brain.

Dr Sarah: I've always loved learning. One of the very very first facts I remember learning about the brain was in a psychology one I one lecture. I was at Canterbury University, christ As, New Zealand in nineteen ninety three and they were teaching us how synapses work, and I just remember thinking, get out... that mechanism is so cool.

I love a little biological mechanism. I was just like blowing away by this idea that two cells could communicate across the synapse and that was kind of this little component of our brain and how it worked.

And the reason I love neuroscience is because I can still recapture that feeling that wow, that is really cool when I learned new facts. And I think because I get to write books and I get to ask a lot of questions I don't know the answers too.

More often than not, when I find out the answer, I'm like, that is pretty cool. And then I get to tell other people the cool fact I've just learned, and then kind of sharing their enthusiasm. I think neuroscience just feels really relevant, and in particular the work I do across the lifespan.

No matter who I talk to, there will be some conversation I can have about them and their life that's really relevant to the work that I've researched, so just I get to have cool conversations about the thing I think is most interesting. I absolutely love that.

Kristina: So how can understanding neuroscience help us create a better life and achieve our dreams?

It's not my background whatsoever, but I love reading about it. So I love for our listeners to understand how may be a little bit more interest in this feel and reading all your books can help them living their dream life.

Dr Sarah: There's a number of ways we can approach it. We can approach it in terms of thinking what do we understand about our overall health and wellbeing? And what do we understand from neuroscience research That is basically exploring how the brain works and what it needs to function it at its best. You know, learn from neuroscience research how to be healthy and well We can also look at other things like what do we understand about the neurobiology of behavior?

That may help you understand why you think, what you think, why you feel what you feel, how you make decisions, how you interact with other people. They can kind of give you a pretty hard science understanding about human behavior, whether that be other peoples or whether that be your own. So that's kind of just an interesting way to think about why we do what we do.

Because I'm very interested in taking a lifespan perspective to health and to brain health. I'm really interested in thinking about childhood and puberty and adolescence and pregnancy and motherhood and menopause and aging. I'm really interested in that life span perspective.

It gives you an insight into wherever you are in life, how did you kind of get there, and where are you going? Just like through this really nerdy little lens, such a big question living a better life? What does living a better life mean to you? What do you kind of need and want? And then there'll be something within neuroscience that will help you explore that.

Kristina: Can you share some of the most exciting recent discoveries in neuroscience that could impact how we live? 

Dr Sarah: If I was to think more broadly around women's health, because I've just been writing my second edition in my first book. Part of the reason why I wrote the second edition of my first book was because so much has changed in the last sort of eight years of women's health.

I think some of those advances have come about because we've realized that women are no longer in niche. We never have been a niche. But there's a growing understanding of sex as a biological variable is very important, and women's health is very important, and we need to understand the neurobiology of that.

What we've seen that's transformed the field. I think we've seen a lot of women kind of move their way up up in kind of academia and in research and get to the point where they can ask the questions and get the funding and do the research that matters.

We've seen the emergence of new technologies and ways of doing science. We've seen what we call buier banks and data sharing. And it used to be that everyone worked in these little silos.

These like the lab over here in Sydney might study seventeen people and we might do brain scans on them, and there might be another lab in Dublin doing that, and another lab in Washington, DC. Doing that, and then they might publish their findings. And what we've found out, which we've told kids for years, is sharing is caring. And if we pull together all of this data, we've got power and numbers.

So we've now got these large data banks, these kind of open source data repositories. We're scientists are kind of sharing all of their data and pulling it together, and we're starting to see the power that has come from that in the last few years.

And alongside that has been the technological advances and machine learning and AI, so we've got technology to analyze these big data sets. All this sounds very boring, but it has transformed how a lot of science can be done because for a long time, we couldn't make very clear statements.

That used to be a big debate in conversation, and people flipped and flopped because the data flipped and flopped about how different are male and female brains? A male and female brains very different? Are any differences that we see? Are we talking about structure? Are we talking about how neurons connect? Are we talking about how networks interact? We didn't have enough data to make a clear distinction, and so the conversation was always fueled by kind of politics and conjecture and opinion, not by the information.

Now we've got like these massive data sets emerging. There was a study done looking at polling data from around the world in different countries, and what they did was for each country they were able to get a gauge or a very clear metric on gender equality or gen inequality in that country.

So countries like for example, Sweden, the Nordic countries have more gender equality than countries like say India or Brazil, and so they were able to look to see what's the gender equality or inequality in a country and look to see how different male and female brains were in those countries.

And with these big data sets, what we're able to conclude is when there is more gender inequality in a country, male and female brains are more different, and when there's more gender equality in a country, male and female brains are more similar. So that means it's not just the biology that's different. It means that it's the gendered experiences that we have growing up which can contribute to an adult brain structure.

What's really interesting is the male brains, it didn't matter where in the world they were, they were all the same. The difference was actually the female brains in the countries where there was more gender inequality they were the ones are actually skewed different. And that's because girls and lots of parts of the world don't have the same educational opportunities and the same work opportunities and life is a whole and more stressful, and there's a lot of inequality in those countries and that appears to have altered how those brains have emerged.

There's a follow up study which has just come out in the last few months, using the same type of study, but looking at different states in the US, looking at people in their sixties, looking to see what the gender equality was like in different states in the US. The same sort of difference emerged.

That there's a million new findings emerging all the time, but I think new technology and new data is enabling us to dig deeper into questions that we're always kind of just debated about but never really had any clear data about. So that's kind of around sex and gender.

There's also some really interesting research that was published late last year on the lance set looking at different risk factors for dementia, and some of it's really unsexy and it's not getting the publicity or the news that it should that one of the greatest risk factors for developing Alzheimer's or dementia is hearing loss in midlife, and hearing loss is really unsexy to talk about. It's not as sexy as diet or as like hormone therapy. But things I hear it like, that's a really important and useful finding that has massive public health implications. So there's some pretty interesting stuff coming out now that we've got more data.

Kristina: Let's talk about brain health. What are the most important daily habits for maintaining a healthy brain.

Dr Sarah: I like to kind of break healthy habits down and to kind of I've got this kind of three part way of thinking about the brain. We have to think about what we're doing with our body that can help our brain. What can we do in the environment that is going to help our brain or harm our brain?

And then we're also like, because we're humans, we've also got these like thoughts and feelings, So how can we use our mind to help our brain health? So I call it bottom up, outside and top down. And so in the book I talk about I say get enough sleep. So sleep, I think is probably like the foundation of all good healths. If you don't get one good night's sleep, you feel terrible the next day. If that leads through to weeks or months or years, I mean, it can even impact mortality. You'll die younger if you're not getting good night's sleep. So in sleep is the kind of the foundation on which to build or good health.

If I had to rank them, I think sleep would be probably number one, and I think number two. It doesn't matter at which age or stage of life we're at. What we really neglect and don't understand is the importance of other people. And we know how fundamentally our social relationships impact health directly, whether that be you know, if you've got good, healthy, loving relationships around your life is easier and nicer. But also as you age perhaps or if you're unwell, then there's just like the kind of pragmatic logistics of having people around you.

People have better mental health, people have lower risk of Alzheimer's and dementia, They have healthier brains if they have good, warm, solid relations and ships. Sometimes it takes time to build them. Loneliness is a respected depression which makes you more lonely.

So we can get caught in these sort of cycles. I think if we can find ways to buffer and manage the stressful things that can come our way, whether they be the stressful thoughts we have inside our own head or what's kind of happening out there in the world, we have to find a way to find kind of our moment or our place of calm and midst the chaos and sometimes life things happen. They're inevitable. We just have to find ways to manage them to kind of reduce our stress.

If we don't manage that well, that makes our brain health worse in the short term and the long term. There's the very very boring advice around diet, diet, and exercise. I particularly think diets a little bit boring. It's important because we all have to eat every day and we all kind of know, I mean here in Australia, we kind of know what we're meant to be doing. It is hard.

Not everyone has helped the food accessible, but like not eating junk food. I think some people are really interested in kind of like optimizing that kind of top one percent forgetting about like just getting the basics right. As I like to call on the ice bath boys, the you know, the sort of the tech bros, the Silicon Valley dudes, are really interested in the one percent optimization.

Most of the population doesn't have the basics right. Exercise is really important and there's some really interesting kind of biological mechanisms we've started to understand about when we exercise, we use our muscles, and our muscles are also an endocrine organ which means they produce chemical signals like hormones, and one of them is called erson and it makes its way into our brain and promotes brain health. We never really understood the direct link between healthy brain and exercise and using our muscles, and we're now beginning to understand that.

We understand that we should protect our brains and protect our sensory organs, particularly our eyes and ears, which see and hear against damage. So protect you know, your brain against damage, whether that be sports concussion as a kid, or falling off ladder when you're older, or damaging it with substance abuse too many drugs, too much alcohol. Kind of protect your brain against physical damage and protect those sensory organs, which is super important because, as I said, it's an incredibly underrecognized risk factor for poor brain health in later life is hearing loss, mostly because if you can't hear, you can't interact socially, and that's one thing that's really useful important for you, things like constantly intellectually stimulating your brain. This really cool new research just came out really recently look at different occupations. What do we know about which occupations are the most beneficial and protective for brain health.

We've known about taxi drivers for quite some time, which is super interesting. Ambulance drivers are similar. They kind of almost come out top because they're constantly, it turns out, navigation and moving our way through the world and trying to figure out where to go next, which is something that we don't really do much anymore in our modern lives.

To that that's incredibly useful for promoting brain health as you age. I mean, who knew They've like compared taxi drivers and ambulance drivers to say, like pilots of aeroplanes and bus drivers who drive vehicles around, but they're not having to figure things out and navigate and quickly respond and react. So that's that's super interesting. So your occupation should be constantly challenging you.

Kristina: That's an interesting because I've read about the London taxi drivers how they develop their brains. But I often think that I know where I'm going in and I'm like, oh, I'm so relying on the Google maps now, yeah yeah, and then I'm thinking I wonder if I should do it in a different way.

Dr Sarah: I mean we can take an evolutionary perspective to that, I think, and that our brains evolved while we were on foot, and human brains are particular evolved because we needed to kind of navi go our way through the world and react and respond and hunt and gather food and work together in teens to hunt down our prey and to figure out where we were going next.

And so a healthy brain is a brain that's kind of on the move and searching and seeking. We know that from our evolutionary past. We now can see that the people who continue to do that in a sense as a profession, as an occupation, they're doing that all day long. They're the ones with the most resilience against aging. So I don't know, maybe we should all take up orient tearing or something as an interesting principle to think about when we think about what we need to do to keep our brain healthy. I don't mean to dismiss diet and exercise at all, but instead of just talking about diet and exercise, we should be talking about what is a healthy diet and exercise actually doing to promote brain health.

Really, that's about metabolic health and avoiding all of those chronic so called We don't like to call them lifestyle diseases anymore because it's hands a bit blamey, it condescending. But we want to keep a healthy weight, we want to keep a metabolism healthy. We don't want to start developing diabetes. We don't want to be developing metabolic disorders.

We don't want to be developing heart disease. All of those types of disorders, which are protected by good diet and exercise, are what leads to the poor brain health. And then it turns out that kind of using our brain for what our brain evolved to do, which was to help us navigate through the world, is going to also keep it healthy. We sometimes kind of forget that evolutionary perspective. And then I think a large part of it is emotion regulation.

We might call protecting your mental health. We might kind of think about how we can kind of learn to sort of wallow and savor the good experiences and counteract the negative bad ones, because that's kind of an active process. Like managing mental health is also a really important part of promoting brain health.

Kristina: Neuroscience tell us about focus and productivity. I run a coaching program and every quarter we plan a quarter ahead, and there's a lot of questions around focus, productivity. And distraction.

So I love to hear your take on that. I'm sure you have a big opinion about the screens and all the things that the modern world help us.

Dr Sarah: I think attention is kind of our most precious neurological resource when we can think about productivity and planning and thinking, and so where we choose to focus our attention. That's like one of the main choices that we've got kind of how we spend the day.

We've got the same number of ours, what are we going to attend to in that time? And attention is really interesting that that's a really really well researched topic. When we think about attention in neuroscience, we kind of think about this kind of too, sort of dreams of attention in the brain is where you consciously decide to focus your attention and sometimes where your attention gets turned towards based on information coming in, which might be slightly more involuntary.

I like to think about explaining attention as like a torch, like you know, one of those splash lights you have when you go camping, and you can turn it so it goes like really narrow focused beam or really like kind of broad and diffuse, and attention is a little bit like that, like you're in the dark and you only have like one beam of light coming out of your torch, right, so you've really only got your attention can be kind of focused, kind of in one direction at a time. We like to think we could maybe point it in lots of directions at a time, but all you can actually do is flick between you know, two or three different things that you were seeing, and you're not really then illuminating each of them for very long. So all we can ever really do is tasks switch with our attention.

Our teaching can be like super narrow and focused and we can like hone it in on one item that we've chosen, or it can be quite also it could be quite broad and diffuse. So you know, we can be gathering a lot of information and sometimes we've absolutely decided where to point the torch.

Other times, you know, you're in a dark room, you hear a scary sound, you're going to respond to something else there, and then you have to make a decision about paying attention to something that's capturing you or tapping you on the shoulder or crying from the other room or pinging from somewhere, versus where you've consciously focused your attention, and we kind of understand a little bit about how the brain sort of flips between the two. I think by and large, what we've learned over time is that most people can only flip from one to another task.

Very few people can like split beam, so it's a very kind of precious resource, and learning when to narrow it down and when to focus it out is also super important in terms of forward planning. By and large, what our brains do is remember stuff that's happened already to help us decide what to do next. Our brain sort of sits in a moment between the past experiences and then future predictions. It's like acting like a prediction machine. And when we're thinking about planning and goal setting, all our brain can draw on as past experiences.

So when we're imagining what's ahead of us, all we have is our autobiographical memory from the past, and that's quite useful to think about. If you're planning to do something you've never done before, you're always going to be piecing it together from your prior experiences. Both the logistics and the strategy, but also perhaps how you felt when you were doing that, and that's going to be a really important part of that forward planning.

But then also that motivation that you're going to feel to do something next. Motivation is a really important part of goal setting and future thinking and kind of imagining what's ahead and motivation. Again, the brain is driven towards something or not towards something. It is motivated based on our past experience and when we did that thing so very much again, our memories of the past or our feelings of the past driving how we feel about doing future tasks.

And if we can understand that, then we can understand ways around that. If the past didn't work out quite so well and you want to do something new or different in the future, and we understand a lot about that from neuroscience, so that can be quite helpful. Visualization and mental rehearsal like what an Olympic athlete would do, is a really important part of overcoming goals perhaps or motivation for things in the future that you haven't done yet and you haven't forgured out how to do.

Because you can kind of build quite a detailed multisensory scenario of you performing something and feeling that you want to do it, and you can kind of rehearse that in your mind's eye a number of times, like a gymnast would rehearse routine over and over again. So when they it's like they've already done it so many times both in their mind and in reality, you haven't done it. In reality.

You can kind of visualize that process enough times to kind of build up an experience in your brain to project into the future. So these are all different kind of things that we've learned from neuroscience that can help with that motivation as well. Emotion regulation is super important. I think people feel like that they're on a roller coaster of their emotions and they don't necessarily have much control over them.

Some people, particularly if they're kind of locus of controller is a bit more external than internal, or they're not very emotionally regulated for whatever reason. You can rehearse an emotional response in advance of an event happening. So say you're going to give a talk. I learned how to do this when I gave a TED talk many years ago now from an amazing speaking coach.

It's fairly based in neuroscience as we kind of jointly discovered. Say you're going to rehearse a speech, you're going to give a ten minute talk. You don't want to feel so nervous that you can't give the talk, nervous while you're giving the talk, and then relieved afterwards. I want to feel.

And you can choose to have an emotional response of your choice, and you can rehearse that in advance. You can rehearse how that feels. You can rehearse how you want to respond emotionally to an event, practice it over and over again, so then when you're performing the task, the emotion rolls out as well, just the same as the speech rolls out.

Our brain's not differentiating between these emotions, aren'ts on like magical kind of neurological component that we don't have a kind of agency over in that way, So we can plan an emotional response to an even and advance as well.

Kristina: I love that. That's one thing that I do a lot, because a lot of my dreams I have no idea how to do it, and often it becomes that self data, etc. I think visualizing it and rehearsing as being part of and also why I do meditation, so I'm interested in

Now you mentioned your interest in the female brain and having turned fifty as well, I'm very interested in terms of detain just in midlife and how the brain because I didn't expect that. So what are some of the tips for people because a lot of my people in my coaching program are in that midlife as well, So some tips in terms of the hormonial changes and the brain, because yeah, I mean it's probably a whole hour on its own.

Dr Sarah: Gosh. Well, I mean that was really writing about menopause and brain fog was what sent me on my kind of journey into women's health. It was just kind of one of a long list of articles I was writing for the ABC in twenty fifteen.

So that was really kind of what sparked my interest in all things women's health, and particularly taking a lifespan perspective. The message I really want to get out there is some people some of the time, not everyone all of the time.

There are a range of experiences when it comes to midlife and when it comes to perimenopause and when it comes to menopause. A little bit like if you've had babies, everyone has a different pregnancy some people have terrible warning sickness, some people have none at all. Some people have wonderful birth, some people have a terrible time. It's the same thing.

Some people just sail through. And what happens to the people who do so, well, you know, what do we understand about their life up until this point that has got them to this point where they sail through?

They sail through pregnancies and puberty as well. So we've got people who struggle and just have a terrible time of both midlife and of perimenopause and menopause, like the years leading up to the final period and then that time afterwards, and then other people kind of just muddle along in the middle, and sometimes it's not so good, and other times it's completely fine, and sometimes it's just a little bit of a laugh.

Sometimes all you can do is cry. So I'm really kind of tired of the sort of one size fits all messaging that's out there that we're all going to have the worst time of our lives. If we don't take hrto we might as well give up. Seems seems to almost be the message out there at the moment, and that's not really what the research shows.

At the same time as we've got this big hormonal transition, we're also like literally getting older, and some of the changes are due to hormones, but you know, like you look in the mirror, like, how is my face like falling down to the ground? How did that happen? Like only ten minutes ago I was out like clubbing and dancing to like Robbie Williams.

We don't know a lot about how the brain changes through perimenopause and into menopause. There's like a couple of studies that have sort of come out looking at the structure, but they're very, very small, and we can't kind of make a lot of assumptions as yet about literally what is happening to the structure of the brain In terms of symptoms of menopause.

The things that we understand most that are neurologically based are like that classic like kind of hot flashes that women start getting when the estrogen levels sort of start to roll a coaster and paps drop off a bit. You can like just get hosh like throw the bed covers off ten times a night, sweating kind of hot. We understand that little neurobiological mechanism very clearly as a part of the brain called the hypothalamus, which, amongst one hundred of its different duties, regulates our body temperature, and estrogen kind of helped set the thermostat.

When you take estrogen away, the thermostack gets really narrow, so you only need to get like a tiny bit hot and your core for your brain to think you've really massively overheated and set off physiological and neural mechanisms to cool you down rapidly because it thinks like you've massively overheated, and so that's like that classic hot flash. We know that if you put estrogen back in using hormone therapy, you can reset the thermostat everything else.

We don't know whether that's downstream of these thermoregulation issues, particularly when they're happening at night, or whether they are completely independent of the hot flashes and are happening because estrogen is having some other impact on the brain.

The two classic ones are brain fogs, so feeling cognitively like you can't pay attention, you're ready forgetful, you're ready, fuzzy foggy feeling, and then also emotional regulation issues, particularly the emergence of problems with mood and anxiety now there's a case to be made that they are downstream of mucking your sleep up at night, and there's also a case through age that they are they kind of actions of hormones on the brain that you're losing kind of at midlife. I've got my own thoughts. I'm going to wait until the science kind of kind of catches up there.

Hormone therapy is great. People like agonize over it, like you have to put it on every day. It's like the pill. You can stop tomorrow if it doesn't work for you. Lots of women are really worried about risk. That's why you need a very good woman's health physician GP. If you've got a good GP, there's lots of menopause providers out there that will talk you through the risks and the benefits of you individually, whether that's going to work for you or not. All of the clinical practice guidelines everywhere in the world say yes, the hormone therapy is really great for treating hot flashes. The symptoms in the now.

What we do not yet know because the data isn't clear yet. It might become clearer really soon. It might take ten years. As the long term health effects we don't know whether it will cause or cure or have no impact on dementia. We don't know the long term impacts on heart disease.

We think the long term impacts on bone health probably good. But all of the arguments really are about whether a treatment for a short term symptom is going to have an impact on your long term health. My focus is brain health. It's probably going to be slightly beneficial long term for the current regimes that women are on like today, But I think there's loads of other things that are far more important that are not getting the airtime.

So we're talking about dementia. No one's talking about hearing loss, No one's talking about visual loss, no one's talking about loneliness. They just want to bang on about HRT as if that's the one solution. So your menopause is a bit of a kind of a cogma the emotions and the mood and the new depression, et cetera that are emerging at midlife.

Again, we don't know is it directly due to the changes in hormones. Is it due to the fact that when you have thermoregulation or hot flashes at night you get woken up multiple times at night and A you can't get back to sleep, or B you're coming out of deep sleep but you're not consciously waking, and then your sleep architecture is disrupted through the night, so you might not be consciously woken up, but you're not getting good, solid deep sleep. Is that impacting mood or is it?

When your hypothalamus sends this message to your body to cool down, cool down, call down, it activates your sympathetic nervous system. It sends it's kind of burst of like kind of neural impulses and neure adrenaline through your body to kind of activate your calling mechanisms. And it's very very similar to the process that gets activated when you get a bit of a fright.

And if you do that multiple times, you're dialing up your kind of sympathetic nervous system. So it's always becoming hyper vigilant because of the thermoregulation, because of the cooling mechanism, not because you were scared of something. And it's highly likely that that over activation is making women a whole lot more anxious.

And if you start feeling anxious, then you're kind of looking around for something to worry about, and there's lots of things to worry about when you're fifty, you've got teenagers and jobs, and then that can develop into anxiety, and then that can kind of become a self fulfilling prophecy.

So it's a kind of complicated neurological sort of scenario. I think it's fascinating. Give me another five years and I reckon we'll be able to like kind of lay out the whole story much more clearly than what we can right now.

Kristina: Amazing that, I mean, it's so so interesting and so many things we can talk about. So I have to have you back for your new book. So you've written a new book that's coming out deleted this year.

Dr Sarah: Yeah, I've written the second edition of the first book. So the first book, the Women's Brain Bok, just came out in twenty eighteen, based on research up to kind of twenty sixteen, twenty seventeen, and since then there's been so much new rece so I did a second edition just to kind of update with all of this new research. So that's coming out in July here in Australia.

Kristina: Fantastic. I can't wait to read that. I have a couple of other questions. That is more about you, and that is for your own brain health.

Do you have a specific morning ritual that will help you feel amazing throughout the day.

Dr Sarah: I'm taking a gap year this year because I turned fifty at the start of the year and I was like, I've worked so hard in the last few years writing books. That's why I went to Antarctica to kick it off.

However, that said, I do. I'm a very good sleeper because I protect my sleep at all costs, and probably about the only fifty year old woman on the Northern Beaches who sleeps. I think I had late ten hours sleep last night. It's solid. I'm quite weird like that, but that is because I like sleep is the foundation of all good health, so I've done absolutely everything to protect it, and I do love it. I'm very fortunate because our house is slightly elevated and our bedroom faces east and so I can see the sun come up over the sea, and I sleep with my curtains open so as cinner's dawn hits the sky and it doesn't honestly and suddenly, like what's it go from like five am to six thirty Like across the course of the year, we haven't got like big variations and timing like you do if you're further north or south on the planet.

So that is super beneficial because I very much dialed into the rising and the setting of the sun, which is almost because you know, it was pretty kind of new neuroscience five years ago, but it's kind of pretty well established now.

So I'm very much like try and follow that sort of circadian rhythm. So that means you go too bad quite early. I just came back from Antarctica, but I didn't really seem to have much yet leg but I did fall asleep last night at about eight thirty nine, and then I woke up this morning at six thirty. So I usually go to bed very early, and then I read. I very much tried very very hard to resist, not even using my phone, but mostly I fail.

And I've just started to try and get off the devices. I've started rereading old books. And then I always wear earplugs because I just find that if there's a sound, and I've been wearing them for so many years that that will kind of wake me up. And my boys are teenagers now, they got to bid way after me. I don't need to put anyone to bed, and I don't need to get up to anyone in the morning, and I have my hormones very well regulated.

And then I'm very lucky because then my husband gets up and makes me a cup of coffee and beer, and then I sit in bed with the dog, and then I'll like scroll through the phone, and it's like my morning routine. And then if one of the boys needs to be at school early or the dog needs to go for a walk, then I'll just kind of cruise out take the dog for a walk. Now I'm on my little gap year, I might go to watercolor classes, or I'll go to the gym. I'm trying to work on Wednesdays only at my computer for the little bit of admin that my business needs to take over. So it's a very flexible kind of made back morning routine.

When I've got more on, like say I'm writing a book or whatever, I am much more of a set the alarm at kind of five AM and get up and smash out a couple of hours work with some coffee in hand. I try very hard not to work after kind of three or four in the afternoon. 

Dr Sarah: How amazing.

Kristina: So I am curious. Now you mentioned that you are an avid reader. So I love to ask you. Is it one particular book, nonfiction book that had a big impact on you or a favorite book.

Dr Sarah: The nonfiction book that had the biggest impact on me? I guess The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat by Oliver Sacks. 

Here it is, oh, I haven't read that. So Oliver Sacks is a neurologist, The man who mistook his wife for hat. There is this kind of saying Niche claim that everyone who's sort of studying Euros it's in the nineteen ninety study that because they read this book in a psych 101 lecture and I read it in a Psyche one oh one lecture and all of this that this is a neurologist who was a brilliant writer, and he wrote these very very interesting and curious case studies of the things that went wrong with people and things went wrong with their brain.

And the man who miss stock his wife or hat had this very strange kind of visual processing issue whereby he would think one object was another object so he wouldn't think a lamp post was a person and start talking to a lamp post.

And in this instance, he thought his wife was a hat. He was like leaving the neurologist's office and he went alike, it was like in the old days, and everyone wore a coat and a hat, and he put the coat on. He went to not get his hat, but then went to put his hand on his wife's head to pick her up. So if he was going to put him on his head, so he misstock his wife for a hat.

That was the book that altered my career. Like first year UNI, I was like, neuroscience is my jam, and I moved from Canterbury University to Otaga University in New Zealand to study neuroscience because they just that year started a degree discipline in neuroscience. I always always always come back to this book because it's so relevant and interesting today understanding ourselves through neuroscience.

Kristina: Love it. Thank you. I haven't read that one, so I'm going to purchase that today.

Yeah, thank you so much. And the last question I have is knowing what you know now, what kind of advice would you give your younger self saying maybe you know your late teens early twenties probably.

Dr Sarah: Like something similar to what I tell my boys. I think one of the oldest ones certainly has taken it on board because he doesn't have any issues with ego that other people thinking about you as much as they are about themselves.

That's also neurologically and developmentally normal, is that you're constantly thinking that other people are thinking about you. There's this imaginary crowd like looking in at you, and everyone's really just thinking the same thing about themselves, so you know, lose that kind of self consciousness about what other people are thinking.

I look back on my late teenage years and I even now I had never had like imposter syndrome. I never doubted that I didn't deserve to be where I was, and that working hard would get me to where I needed to be. It was much more so about like what will they think? Not that I don't deserve to be here, but when I am there, like gosh, what will they think?

But I've since learned if they bother thinking about anyone but themselves as anyone, you know, they don't you think about you for five seconds and think back to worry about themselves again, So I wish I had to known that then, But I also think that that's kind of part of growing up, and now we understand that's like a neurological kind of developmental process, that self consciousness, because that's your social brain networks tuning in to other people.

So I don't know with that advice would necessarily touch the sides of a teenager. And I don't know, Like I always felt really excited and hopeful and motivated and ambitious. That's why I'm having a year off. I don't like the constant working and striving, and like especially are at two books last year. That's a lot. Two books in one year is too much.

And it was great fun and I really enjoyed it, but I just need to take the foot off the accelerator. I feel like, for the first time in a really long time, just wallow on what you've done instead of like constantly trying to do the next thing. That's like probably been my vice now and so I'm trying really hard to do that.

Kristina: Yeah, thank you so much. This has been the fascinating conversation, and I know we could speak for days. I'm sure I'll have you back, But thank you so much, and I'll link to your books and your whack and I really hope you have the most amazing year. I'm sure i'll bump into you.

Dr Sarah: I feel see me down around manly with the dog. Don't worry.

Kristina: Amazing, So thank you so much, I really really appreciate it.

Dr Sarah: Thanks Kristina.

Kristina: That was so inspiring. I seriously could have spent a day speaking to Sarah or maybe a few days.

So much to learn, so much to explore when it comes to our brain. I'm going to link to all her books and I have no doubt she'll be back for another episode to dive even deeper. I would love to know what you thought about this episode and what you got out of it, and perhaps some of your questions or takeouts from your own perspective when it comes to brain health. Love to hear in the Facebook group your dream Live podcast. I will link to that as well.

As always I will be back on Monday with another Monday Morning motivation podcast. I'll see you then.

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