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I want to tell you about a moment I had when my son Lincoln was about four months old.
I was standing in the kitchen, holding a completely empty coffee mug, trying to remember whether I’d already made coffee or was about to make coffee. I stood there for what felt like a full minute. Just… standing. The mug was in my hand. The answer was theoretically knowable. And yet.
I laughed about it at the time. Baby brain. Mommy brain. Everybody’s heard the terms; everybody’s got a story. It’s practically a rite of passage — you joke about it, you caffeinate aggressively, you move on.
What nobody told me is that the same thing would happen again a few years later. Less funny the second time. A little harder to laugh off when you’re in a meeting and the word you need just… isn’t there. When you walk into a room and stand there the same way I stood in that kitchen. When the fog doesn’t fully lift, you start quietly wondering if something is wrong with you.
Here’s what I know now: nothing was wrong with me. But something was absolutely happening in my brain. And I had zero data to help me understand what.
Two pieces of research landed in my world this week, and together they tell a story I think every woman needs to hear — even if parts of it are uncomfortable.
The first, covered in Forbes by Dr. Talia Varley, carries genuinely good news. Emerging research shows that the hormonal milestones women navigate — motherhood, perimenopause, and menopause — may actually build long-term cognitive resilience. The increased cognitive load of raising children appears to strengthen the brain over time, functioning as a form of enriched environment that positively contributes to cognitive reserve (Orchard et al., 2023). Researchers at Monash University found that elderly women who had raised more children showed thicker grey matter in memory-related brain regions, and patterns of brain activity that ran counter to typical age-related decline (Orchard et al., 2020; Orchard et al., 2021). And on the menopause side, Dr. Lisa Mosconi’s landmark research at Weill Cornell found that the dip in brain energy women experience during perimenopause appears to be temporary—with stabilization and, in some regions, an actual rebound in the postmenopausal stage (Mosconi et al., 2021).
Anthropologist Margaret Mead called it “postmenopausal zest” back in the 1950s. Neuroscience is finally catching up.
None of this happens in a vacuum. Estrogen is a key regulator of cognitive function, influencing everything from memory consolidation to neural energy metabolism — and its decline during menopause has measurable effects on the brain (Craig & Murphy, 2009). The second piece, from the BBC, is the other half of that story — and it’s harder to sit with. A University of Cambridge study analyzing data from nearly 125,000 women found that menopause is linked to reductions in grey matter volume in brain regions critical for memory and emotional regulation (Cenkner et al., 2026). The same regions, notably, that are among the first affected in Alzheimer’s disease. Post-menopausal women in the study were also significantly more likely to report anxiety, depression, and sleep disruption. And the finding that stopped a lot of people in their tracks: hormone replacement therapy, while helpful in some ways, doesn’t appear to reverse these structural changes — though it may slow the decline in reaction speed (Cenkner et al., 2026).
So which is it? Is menopause a neurological crisis or a neurological upgrade?
The answer, it turns out, is both. And the difference between the two may have everything to do with what happens in the middle.
Here’s the word that keeps snagging me when I read the optimistic research: successfully.
Brains that navigate the transition successfully tend to settle into that new equilibrium. Brains that navigate it successfully show the rebound. The women who reach the “second spring” are those whose brains received the support they needed during the transition window.
So what does it mean to navigate it successfully? And — more to the point — how would a woman even know if she is?
We are living in a golden age of personal health data. I track my sleep. I track my heart rate variability. I track my VO2 max, my recovery scores, and whether I have enough in the tank for a long run. I can tell you what my resting heart rate was on any given Tuesday for the last three years.
I cannot tell you what was happening in my brain during pregnancy. During breastfeeding. During the fog that showed up again recently, quieter this time, but unmistakably there.
Between 44 and 62 percent of women report cognitive changes during perimenopause (Barth et al., 2023). Most of them bring it to a doctor. Most of them get told some version of “that’s just menopause.” No baseline. No tracking. No way to distinguish normal transition noise from something that actually warrants attention. Just a shrug and a referral to a pamphlet.
The irony is almost too much: we’ve built an entire industry around optimizing human performance, and we’ve almost completely ignored the cognitive health of women during the exact decade when their brains are doing some of the most significant restructuring of their lives.
I think about the standing-in-the-kitchen moment differently now.
What if that wasn’t just something to laugh off? What if that was data — data I had no framework for, no tools to capture, and no way to bring meaningfully to anyone who could have helped?
The Cambridge research is a call to take this seriously. The brain changes during menopause are real and measurable (Cenkner et al., 2026). The Mosconi research tells us the rebound is real, too — but it’s not automatic. It’s not guaranteed. The research suggests it’s influenced by stress, sleep, nutrition, and support — in other words, by the environment the brain gets to work with during the transition (Mosconi et al., 2021).
Which means the window matters. And right now, most women are flying through it completely blind.
I’m not writing this to scare anyone. The “second spring” is real — I believe that. The postmenopausal women I know who are thriving, starting businesses, running races, and doing their sharpest thinking are not an anomaly. The data support them.
But I want us to be honest about what it takes to get there. And right now, what it takes includes something most women simply don’t have: the ability to actually see what’s happening in their brain in real time, over time, during the years that matter most.
The good news and the difficult news point to the same thing. We need better tools. We need baselines. We need to stop treating cognitive symptoms as embarrassing side effects to push through and start treating them as the serious neurological signals they are.
You deserved data in that kitchen, standing there with your empty coffee mug.
I know I did.
References
Barth, C., Crestol, A., de Lange, A. G., & Kauppi, K. (2023). Lifecourse trajectories of brain structure and cognition in relation to reproductive factors and menopause. Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience, 15. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnagi.2023.1158001
Cenkner, S., Tolomeo, D., Crofts, H., Sacher, J., Sahakian, B. J., & Langley, C. (2026). Menopause, hormone replacement therapy, and cognitive function, mental health, and brain structure. Psychological Medicine. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0033291726000199
Craig, M. C., & Murphy, D. G. M. (2009). Oestrogen, cognition and the maturing female brain. Journal of Neuroendocrinology, 19(1), 1–6. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-2826.2006.01466.x
Mosconi, L., Berti, V., Dyke, J., Schelbaum, E., Jett, S., Loughlin, L., Jang, G., Rahman, A., Hristov, H., Pahlajani, S., Andrews, R., Matthews, D., Etingin, O., Ganzer, C., de Leon, M., Isaacson, R., & Brinton, R. D. (2021). Menopause impacts human brain structure, connectivity, energy metabolism, and amyloid-beta deposition. Scientific Reports, 11, 10867. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-021-90084-y
Orchard, E. R., Jamadar, S. D., Ward, P. G. D., & Egan, G. F. (2020). Relationship between parenthood and cortical thickness in late adulthood. PLOS ONE, 15(7), e0236031. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0236031
Orchard, E. R., Ward, P. G. D., Chopra, S., Egan, G. F., & Jamadar, S. D. (2021). Neuroprotective effects of motherhood on brain function in late life: A resting-state fMRI study. Cerebral Cortex, 31(2), 1270–1283. https://doi.org/10.1093/cercor/bhaa293
Orchard, E. R., Rutherford, H. J. V., Holmes, A. J., & Jamadar, S. D. (2023). Matrescence: Lifetime impact of motherhood on cognition and the brain. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 27(3), 302–316. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2022.12.010
Varley, T. (2026, March 6). ‘Mommy brain’ and menopause boost cognitive health long term, research finds. Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/taliavarley/2026/03/06/womens-brain-health-and-companies-get-a-boost-long-term/
2 Distraction Stroop Tasks experiment: The Stroop Effect (also known as cognitive interference) is a psychological phenomenon describing the difficulty people have naming a color when it's used to spell the name of a different color. During each trial of this experiment, we flashed the words “Red” or “Yellow” on a screen. Participants were asked to respond to the color of the words and ignore their meaning by pressing four keys on the keyboard –– “D”, “F”, “J”, and “K,” -- which were mapped to “Red,” “Green,” “Blue,” and “Yellow” colors, respectively. Trials in the Stroop task were categorized into congruent, when the text content matched the text color (e.g. Red), and incongruent, when the text content did not match the text color (e.g., Red). The incongruent case was counter-intuitive and more difficult. We expected to see lower accuracy, higher response times, and a drop in Alpha band power in incongruent trials. To mimic the chaotic distraction environment of in-person office life, we added an additional layer of complexity by floating the words on different visual backgrounds (a calm river, a roller coaster, a calm beach, and a busy marketplace). Both the behavioral and neural data we collected showed consistently different results in incongruent tasks, such as longer reaction times and lower Alpha waves, particularly when the words appeared on top of the marketplace background, the most distracting scene.
Interruption by Notification: It’s widely known that push notifications decrease focus level. In our three Interruption by Notification experiments, participants performed the Stroop Tasks, above, with and without push notifications, which consisted of a sound played at random time followed by a prompt to complete an activity. Our behavioral analysis and focus metrics showed that, on average, participants presented slower reaction times and were less accurate during blocks of time with distractions compared to those without them.
