Brain Fog in Perimenopause: What Estrogen Does for Your Brain

From the video captions, as spoken.

So now estrogen is doing way more jobs than anybody talks about. All right? Estrogen protects your bones, your blood vessels, like your heart, and it protects your brain. All right? So Estrogen, let's talk about the brain first. It feeds your brain directly. It supports the hippocampus, which is your memory.

It supports the prefrontal cortex, planning and focus your ability to hold a thought long enough to finish saying it. And estrogen supports how your brain uses glucose, which is its fuel. So when your estrogen falls, your brain is being asked to do the same job it was always doing on a much thinner supply. So this is a physical event happening in an organ, and it deserves to be treated like one. So this is often what's behind brain fog. The word that won't come, you're in mid-sentence looking for a name that you've used a thousand times and it's gone. Reading the same paragraph 3 times and retaining none of it.

And the increased experience of ADHD. So many Women in this season tell me they suddenly can't start anything, they can't finish anything or hold a list in their head. And some of them that managed beautifully their whole lives, but this is the season that kind of takes, it's like the scaffolding out from under them. Okay. For me, it was the moment that I was googling early dementia at midnight and scaring myself half to death. So brain fog in this season is very real and it is physiological. All right. There was a point actually I thought I will never teach again because speaking, teaching, giving talks is what I did for a living. And I couldn't find all of my words in front of a room.

I had to, when I was moving around in my own space, I had to narrate myself from room to room. Okay, I'm going into this room now to do this thing. Having to be that alert about ordinary tasks, that's exhausting all by itself. All right. And this is also part of what is behind burnout. Right. If you ever hear Midlife Women just say, I just feel so burnt out.

Right? Burnout is how much every ordinary task costs you. It's about as much as what you're doing it. It's about the energy it costs you to do it. So here's what this Woman, here's what this layer takes from Women that people don't really talk about enough. When these changes are happening, Women have to start shrinking their life to fit into the fog. So maybe they stop engineering for an interesting project.

They stop volunteering for the interesting project. They quit a job suddenly. They stop speaking up in meetings. They decline invitations to be social because following conversations across a table is too hard, takes too much energy. All right, so Women with all of these symptoms start to feel quieter and smaller and they chalk it up as this is me getting older and because none of it is showing up on their conventional lab reports, it just doesn't make sense. So the part that's worth holding on to and with the Women that I've worked with, this kind of fog eases considerably once the hormonal picture the gut and inflammation are all addressed. I got all my words back, okay?

And so I'm standing here using them, okay? But I couldn't do this 3 years ago. Now, researchers that study the Midlife brain think that a good deal of your cognitive clarity at 75 is being built in your 40s and 50s, okay? This is huge.