Baby Brain: is it real? with Dr Sarah McKay

0:02 A listener production. This is Crappita Happy and I am your host, Castune. I'm a clinical and coaching psychologist and mindfulness meditation teacher and of course author of the Crappita Happy books. In this show, I bring you conversations with interesting, inspiring, intelligent people who are experts in their field and who have something of value to share that will help you feel less crappy and more happy. Around eighty five percent of women will become a mother, and most agree that pregnancy and parenthood are experiences that profoundly change us physically, psychologically, socially and spiritually. Sadly, though, mothers, minds and brains are mostly absent from popular pregnancy books and social media posts, unless, of course, there is a discussion about what can go terribly wrong, baby blues, depression, and of course, the dreaded baby brain. Doctor Sarah Mackay is an Oxford University educated neuroscientist.

1:08 She's one of Australia's most well known brain science commentators and authors. You may remember she wrote the women's Brain book, The Neuroscience of Health, Hormones and Happiness, and recently she has turned her attention to baby brain. Her latest book is called baby brain, the surprising neuroscience of how pregnancy and motherhood sculpt our brains and change our minds for the better. Today, Doctor Sarah joins me to chat about the upside of pregnancy and parenting on your brain. She tells me that the conclusion is very clear. Having a baby improves a mother's memory. It makes her smarter, more empathetic, intuitive, and socially savvy. This is all music to my ears.

1:51 I know you are going to love this conversation with doctor Sarah. Doctor Sarah Mackay, we to crappy to have you. Oh, thank you for inviting me to chat. I couldn't wait to talk to you when I heard about your latest project, which is your book all about baby Brain, because I've been talking to people about the brain lately. We've been talking about dementia and all of this. Now baby brain. Any woman who has had a baby will a test that it is a very real thing. The forgetfulness, the absent mindedness which seems to for many of us last, way, way way past after we've had the baby. Is it a real thing? What is actually happening in women's brains when they are pregnant or having a baby.

2:36 I'll start off with a controversial statement. Mother nature never intended mothers to become stupid. Oh yeah, there will not be any particularly evolutionary adaptive benefit for us to become cognitively impaired. So let me lay that, lay that out from the beginning. Let's define baby brain. You've kind of done that in terms of feeling foggy, forgetful, not being able to kind of complete cognive tasks, et cetera. And when we survey women who are pregnant an early motherhood, about eighty percent of them say, yes, that's me. I was in the twenty percent. I never experienced baby brain, but nor did I know it was a phenomenon. I've never heard of it, so I had no expectation that it was something I would experience. And bearing in mind I'm also a neuroscientist, so the first sort of time I heard it, I just dismissed it outright, kind of knowing what I know about the brain, I just couldn't like see what the benefit would be. And if we kind of look at our current biological states, there's always useful to look at kind of our evolutionary history how we got here. So here's the thing. We've got eighty percent of women saying they experience this. When we bring these women into the research lab and conduct a battery of cognitive tests, so we test, We test memory, We test memory for numbers, for words, We test, you know, can you navigate your way through this maze? Can you rotate this object in your mind's eye. We kind of submit women to the battery of tests, and they're in the research labor. It's their call, come collected. They haven't

4:09 got their toddlers accompanying them, their babies accompanying them. We don't find any evidence the cognitive wine and that is really good news. Let me just state that mother nature didn't intend women to become stupid when they had babies, nor do we detect any evidence for that in the research lab. The one time. We do sometimes detect and some women and some studies, but not in all women in all studies. Sometimes in the third trimester of pregnancy, a few studies have found that women might score a point or so less on say a test of remembering this list of numbers that type of memory task. However, there is a study that has gone in and looks specifically at the third trimester of pregnancy and found cognitive enhancement. Wow, we test women for what we might call ecologically relevan and items. So you know, what are you doing the third trimester of your first pregnancy thinking about all things baby?

5:05 So let's see if women can remember baby items instead of just a list of random numbers, and women's cognition is actually enhanced and that third trimester of pregnancy. So therein lies the kind of the paradox. Women are saying they're experiencing what they're calling baby brain, but we're not picking any cognitive decline up, which is good news in the research lab. So what's what's kind of going on? Why are the subjective experiences and the objective measurements not matching up? That is the question. Yeah, that is the question. So Luckily there's plenty of neuroscientists and other researchers that have kind of gone and interrogated this, And certainly that was what I was interested in because didn't happen to me. I kind of carried that bias into writing this book. And I'm happy to state that so one research study from Melbourne, from Monash University has gone and looked at this kind of idea of broad umbrella wellbeing, let's just use that, and has found that women who report feeling stressed, overwhelmed, socially unsupported, perhaps have anxiety depression, low well being are much more likely to say I have baby brain. Even when we present them with their test results and say, hey, look, your scores are fine, those women say, but I'm experiencing baby brain. So well being perhaps plays a part in your kind of perception of self. Within that, there's this other idea, and most women, modern day women are familiar with this phrase, the mental load of motherhood or the

6:36 emotional labor of motherhood. And if we think about all of the things that women have to do, our memory depends on our attention, so what information we can take in and what we filter out. And we do have a tendency to talk about women being supermums, which says society because if a super mum does it all, no one needs to help. And if she's trying to do it all, so she's trying to keep up with her to do listener, emails and all the things she did prior to baby, and then her brain has been changed to hone in and focus attention on this new little baby that's in her arms or the impending arrival of this little baby. She forgets one thing, she blames herself.

7:16 I will just blame my brain for that one thing instead of thinking, well, maybe I just kind of can't do it all. And the problem is, this is my perspective on this, is that women have been fed usually prior to puberty. That when we have a female body with its reproductive capacity and you add in a brain, that absolutely equals cognitive decline and emotional instability. And so what I think baby brains are not a neurological issue at all. Baby brain is a social issue. And we're just using this phrase to kind of internalize feeling overwhelmed and it kind of suits everyone. Right, She's just got baby brain. There's nothing that can be done, when really what the issue is is the inability to cope with the mental load of all of the things combined with what has happened during pregnancy, which is when our brains have rewired and reorganized to focus in on the baby.

8:19 That's so interesting, And are there other things I guess going on as well? As you were talking, I was thinking, well, you know, and sometimes we experience in some there and our bodies are uncomfortable, and all of these other factors that can have an effect on memory or cognition. Well, I mean, the tests are not finding a problem with memory. So let's be clear about that. We are not forgetful. We just think we're forgetful. Or if we forget one thing, we think, oh, well, because you know I'm a mother, now you know that's synonymous with cognitive decline. So I have forgotten the one thing of the hundreds of things I meant to remember to do every day, and so we default back to that cultural stereotype. We've absorbed that quite negative into stereotype, and so we've kind of been led to believe that that pregnancy and motherhood are around cognitive deficits. What mother nature intended was cognitive flexibility and reorganization and reprioritization. And that's what happens is our attention is focused towards the baby and keeping the baby alive, and add on top of that a bit of sleep deprivation and all of the other things. It's not a neurological issue here, it's kind of an issue overload.

9:28 It's another product of the patriarchy baby brain. Yeah, we've been duped there. We have and I think, what's interesting, And I'm not trying to beg myself up here. But I had no expectation. I've not heard of. It wasn't part of my expectation of pregnancy or motherhood. I experienced other things that made Tresten's journey. That transition into motherhood it's never easy, no matter you know how well supported you may be or how well and healthy you may be. There were still parts of it that I really really struggled with. My babies were fine, said, the babies are fine. They were easy. It was figuring out this new identity, this new person I had become, and I was not expecting that. I mean again, the word matrices wasn't really part of our lexicon back when I've got teenage sons now so and this is what I'm trying to do as have a new conversation about This is how our brain does change. Pregnancy prepares our minds for motherhood. A sculpts our social brain networks. A sculpts empathy networks, theory of mine networks, even auditory networks, so that we can we're kind of in the sensitive period and early motherhood to learn to respond to the social cues of a baby, and what are the social cues of a baby? They can't talk, they can't use their words to tell us what they need and want. They cry and they're cuge, so we're drawn towards their cuteness,

10:59 their little chubby cheeks, and you kind of rit squen is them and eat them all up. But they also cry, which is dreadful. Thankfully, they're cute and they're crying and encourages us to pick them up and comfort them. And they're the cues that we have to learn to decode. And our brains have kind of gone into the sort of sensitive developmental phase almost, in which we engage with that baby and learn what to do to look after it. Yeah, that is really interesting. And you just use the word matrescence, and that's a term that I am hearing more and more recently. And you're right, it wasn't kind of around when I had my baby. She's seventeen now. It's really interesting to have a better understanding about that, isn't it. We talk about adolescence and we know that there are changes that go on in our brains during adolescens And what you're saying is that there is equally a change in our brains and our bodies during matrescence.

11:54 Yep, yes, adolescence and matrices. They're both sort of physiological shifts, social shafth you know, everything sort of shifts, and we've got neurological shifts there as well. So when young people are going through puberty and then adolescence, you know, their brains are kind of transition through puberty and respond to hormones in the same way their bodies do, and they become very very sensitive, particularly to reading social cues. You know, if you move away from focusing on your family to your friends, and your brain is really really sensitive to social experiences, but also to sort of higher order executive cognitive experiences like learning, judgment and reason and higher order thinking.

12:34 It's a good thing that they're at high school at that point in time. And what we see as parts of the cortex that are sort of responsible for those skills becoming slightly thinner, And that sounds a bit like brain wasting away, but in neuroplasticity terms, what we often see is sort of streamlining of the brain. It becomes more efficient and flexible, and that's reflected and pruning and tuning of connections. See that kind of tracking alongside the mastery and development of skills. So we see adolescents and made tressence is the same we see we see thinning of cortex in the same regions that become more sensitive as we kind of gain mastery of empathy and what does this baby need or does this baby want tuning into their social cues, and we see again thinning of cortex.

13:24 And this is primarily during pregnancy. So when baby your eyes, we're kind of ready to go. And we see that in all other mammalian mothers as well. We're not unique, but we would see for example, in sheep, their their primary source of means of communication with their newborn lamb as smell, and so the old factory circuits become very very sensitive to smell, so that can recognize their lamb amongst a herd of sheep. Interesting an animal it has to like go and hunt as like a predator and needs to sort of feed its babies. That the other the prey that it catches, becomes far more efficient at hunting and becomes is able to recognize movements and kind of pounce quicker, so it becomes better at doing at that skill. Little animals that need to sort of scurry through the forest and find the hidden nuts and seeds and take them back and eat them so they can feed their young. They become better at spatial navigation. So we see and all mammalian mothers improvement and enhancement of ecologically relevant skills, and humans are the same. We see enhancement and improvement of ecologically relevant skills. And interestingly, it's our social brain that changes. And it's not just to tune into the baby. What else do we need. What's the greatest sort of rest and the greatest opportunity for a new mum. It's a social support network.

14:48 Yeah, exactly. Yeah, so her brain is incredibly vulnerable to the requirement for social support around her. So mother nature didn't intend us to parent alone. I meant to be parenting in a group with other alow parents around us us, whether that be mothers or sisters or partners, and they kind of help us learn to care for the baby too. Yeah. So one thing I just remembered while you were talking was, even before we get into this kind of baby brain or conversation about what happens in women's brains, is just how I was fascinated about how women's brains have actually been excluded from brain research, just like so many other things. Right, studies, large scale studies have been done on male brains or just on brains in generally with no distinction between males and females. Can we talk?

15:36 Can we talk about that? I even saw a bit of a stoush is always a good stoush on Twitter today where there was a definition of women being non men. They're actually lists three to find women and call them non It's like we'll just fill a non male space. Women have been seen as quite a niche for some time, and I think women's health is certainly no longer niche because we're not a niche. A niche not a niche. No, nor is women's health a niche. So the exclusion of the female from health and medical research kind of has a long history, and part of that, let's just say, the kind of the end result of that has been that we have far less information about women's health and a lot of treatments and procedures and recognition of signs and symptoms, etc. Based on the male as the standard, and if women pitch up with slightly different sides or symptoms or re quire slightly different treatments often than not as evidence based as they are for males. How did we get there? Some of that was simply due to just scientists never really kind of considering that sex as a biological variable of importance, and you know, that might be a well, that's great because you know, we've kind of got equality, so it doesn't matter with a sex.

16:47 You know, sex doesn't matter, so let's just treat everyone as equal. But obviously that doesn't always work out. For a long time, only males were included because they were we were doing research of young healthy males and universe, and they were the students who volunteered. Often women were purposefully excluded because they may have been say they we're testing a drug that could potentially harm a fetus, so we better not include any woman who could potentially feel pregnant because we don't know the negative outcomes. And you know, the thilidamide scandal scared people off from including young fertile women and that so that was kind of done for a good intention but has had a negative consequence. We kind of look at the data up until sort of like twenty fifteen, twenty sixteen, seventeen. If we looked, just as neuroscience research data. Around twenty percent of studies that state to the biological sex of the animal or human included are done exclusively on males. We don't know about the rest, and about five percent of done exclusively on females.

17:50 So there's definitely a mismatch there. Some of that comes about because females were often excluded because if we were looking at something that could be influenced by hormone, perhaps we didn't want the added variable and of immenstrual cycle and fluctuating hormones. Now that's not let's exclude women because of their pesky cycles. It's like, let's just reduce that variable down just to ensure that doesn't complicate our analysis. So sometimes there were good intentions and good reasons, but they've kind of it has all kind of added up to not necessarily the greatest consequences. And I think the good news story is that we are now starting to realize how important it is to include sex is a biological variable. It's often mandated if you're writing a research paper, if you're looking for a research grant, and if you're not including that, you've got to have a good reason why and I look back to all of the years I've spent in the research lab, and I can't remember, like I could open up my sort of I've got my PhD and honors thesis and stuff up there. I don't think I if I recorded whether I was studying a male or a female rat or ferrital mouse. I was working in spinal cord injury and brain development. I never did it in an out is based on the sex.

19:01 It was never included in my analysis. And that wasn't because I was trying to exclude females. It's because I was studying the brain and it didn't seem relevant to worry about whether it was a male or a female spinal cord. So you know, there's perhaps sometimes got intentions, sometimes just blindness to this being an issue. And now we're starting to see that change. And I think the other really cool thing that is happening. And again this is just one of my little pit berries as my generation of women people. Someone said to me earlier today, must be very, very unusual to be a female in neuroscience, which could not be further from the truth, because neuroscience is more like the medical health psychological sciences. There is always more women than men, particularly in undergraduate and graduate levels and universities. You just see the women kind of trickle office. They can't have babies and rise up the ranks.

19:54 There's always going to be more men in those situations. But what we're seeing is my generation of women Gen X coming through, and we're now heading up the research labs. We're the ones asking the questions to get the research funds. And I think it's almost within the last ten years, I think it's almost that my generation has turned around and gone, we don't know anything about the neurobiology of pregnancy, Well, what does happen to our brains when we take the pill? What does happen as we transition through menopause. We've started asking questions that matter for us based on our experiences, ones that perhaps never occurred to men. But women are now in the position to ask, not just to ask the questions, but answer them. And so it's sort of seeing this huge surge and suddenly everyone is going, hey, you know what, that's actually intellectually a very interesting question.

20:43 So it's not just women now in neuroscience who are interested in this data, because men, like of men some credit, it's these are intellectually interesting questions. So I had a one of the scientists I spoke to in the book, Anne Marie de Lange. She does this kind of big analysis, Like they have these biobanks of sort of thousands of people's brain scans and information, and they use kind of big data analysis to kind of go in and tease out all the information. And you know, you need to be smart, but you also need to be able to code to do that kind of thing. There's a massive probably ninety percent of people in that space of men. So she went to a research conference recently with data that she was presenting on middle aged women. So women in their forties and fifties. Can we detect whether those women had a prior pregnancy solely by looking at their brain scan? Oh? Wow, now turns out we can. But she was like, I'm going to go to a big data conference and talk about motherhood and brains. Are the men going to be interested? She says they were absolutely fascinated.

21:44 She said, credit to them. She went in thinking they would be dismissed. She's so fascinated, And I think we're just we're seeing a real paradigm shift, and we're also seeing you know, this kind of shift towards Haytes. These are actually really interesting questions to ask. And they are and not a minute too soon. It's very exciting. It is a really exciting it's a really exciting time. I mean, the first paper to come out looking at how brains change across the menopause was June twenty twenty one, so it's just having it Sick and World day. So it's super new. This is a super super new field. CAPS should have got here earlier. We didn't. Whatever, we're here now and watching. I hope that you're enjoying this conversation and realizing the benefits of positivity in your own life. If you are enjoying the show, please be sure to like and subscribe so that you get notified when you aps drop and head on over to Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen and leave us a rating and review. Let's talk about maternal instinct.

22:48 Yeah, that's a good one. Yeah, so this is this a real biological phoenomenon. First of all, let's just say this scientists. Don't you like to use the word instinct when it comes to humans, particularly because it kind of implies that all of our behaviors roll out in this sort of identical way, and the response to a single stimulus, you know, and there's no and there's no variation. And that's certainly not the case. There was a paper that came out when paper an article in the New York Times that came out when I was writing my book that said mother instinct is a myth men created. So they were basically saying, what's the patriarchy? So you know, I was as a maternal instinct, mother nature or is it the patriarchy? Well, of course the reality somewhere in the messy middle. Yeah, it always as I'm not sitting on the fence. Brains receive information from our bottom up biological bodies, the outside and world, everything we see and hear and do, and the people we interact with, and we're constantly making meaning of that based on our prior experiences and the meaning making in the moment. So it's not either or it's all. And so I was really interested in We know that non human mammalian mothers show certain stereotypical behaviors that emerge when their babies are born, Like I talked about sheep, as soon as their baby's born, they lick and clean their little lamb and mean to recognize the smell of their lamb.

24:10 So that's a very stereotypical behavior. A dolphin would have a slightly different behavioral profile to kind of keep the baby dolphin from roaming through the pod. They're going to have very different behaviors. And a little baby gorilla being born and how it's mother is going to be constantly carrying it and it's fur and ever letting it go. The baby gorilla is not going to be roaming around, So there are behaviors that emerge. What about humans, I, as part of my book, surveyed all the people that sort of follow my newsletter and got hundreds and hundreds of amazing responses and said to those people, what does maternal instinct mean to you? And that was fascinating because some people said to them, maternal instinct meant that desire to have a baby before you were ever pregnant. So a woman might say I never had children because I had no maternal instinct. So that's kind of one me we make that other women would be like, the moment I held my baby in my arms, I felt I'd known him forever, And she took that to mean maternal instinct for her. But then you'll get other women who hold the baby in their arms and they're like, oh shit, what have I done? And they have no They just feel ambivalence, and then of course the guilt that comes with that, maybe I didn't have maternal instinct. And then you'll have others say to their maternal instinct is that knowing?

25:29 You know? And I think about this, If your child comes home from school in the second you see their face, you just know in it and you know instinctively that something's wrong, but you don't know what. And people take that that's almost like you've learned your child so well. You just know that kind of knowing that you gain from years of experience of being with this other human. So there's lots of ways we define maternal instinct, and I think that that's really interesting, and there are many ways to parent. Who ever, everywhere around the world, when a baby cries, we all respond in the same way. We go towards it and we pick it up and we hold it and we shush it. We do and is that learned? Is that the did the patriarchy tell us to do that? Or is there something in us and all adults not necessarily just the birth mother and all adults that encourages us towards babies, and certainly brain scans that have been done or you know, brain recordings and response to babies crying or in response to cute faces.

26:33 We are driven towards them more so than away or not responding. So there's something in there. And I you know, if I was to talk about the maternal instinct and the kind of experience that I link that phrase up to is with my firstborn son when he had his heel pricked in the hospital for that. You know, the blood tests they do to test they haven't got some metabolics. I mean, I probably not the person with the most empathy on the planet. Actually it's just say that, but I had practiced empathy. You know, Dad had a saw happen, he had his place, and I was like, oh, poor dad. You know, my husband has an achy back. I'm probably not very sympathetic. I'm like, just put the wheat bag in the microwave and take a pands out of me.

27:19 I tried to be empathic, right, But when my oldest son had his heel precked in the hospital and he screamed, and I felt like my soul had been torn from my body, and I just felt like I wanted to grab him and just push the nurse away. And I had never felt this feeling from the what felt like the depths of my soul in response to another person's pain before. And I remember afterwards crying and crying thinking, I'm his mother, I'm his mother, And as that was that instinct, I don't know. It was certainly an experience that took my breath away. I had never felt that before about another person. And I mean, my brain had been primed to respond to my baby's cry and to keep my baby safe, and oxytocin as a result of labor delivery and breastfeeding as a pro social hormone. It just doesn't make you feel woman fuzzy. It makes you feel fiercely protective and angry towards anyone who might arm you.

28:22 Could we call that instinct? There was certainly a biological response involved. Yeah, so you know, there's lots of meaning we can make of that word, I think, and it's kind of fun not to try and attribute it to biology or attribute it to the patriarchis. And that's silly to recognize that we have these words that we use to describe our experiences and make meaning of them. Yeah, that is true. I guess the question would be, so if I would an adoptive parent or would a father have the same kind of reaction. Yeah, and we don't. I mean, I'm not going to say we don't think so. Add All adults respond to crying babies, but they haven't gone through the pregnancy such that their brains have been reorganized and rewide to respond and to learn to respond to make the learning curve not so steep. So any adult can learn to parent by experience. And that's pretty clear. And we see we haven't done studies yet of non birth mother's brains, but we've done studies looking at father's brains and they're actually really interesting, and they were used. The first study that was looked at using brain scans of women before and after their first pregnancy, had the fathers, so these were heterosexual couples. They had the male partners of these women as a control group, and in comparison to the women's brains, they didn't change at all, whereas the women's brains showed four percent volume reduction in these regions of cortex, which is an extraordinarily large amount. There's more than anything else that you ever see in the life span, except for

29:53 during childhood and adolescent development, extraordinary change. And in comparison, the men's brains didn't change at all. When the researchers went back in and looked only at the men and then gathered some more men ins there was more data to look at, they found that actually some men's brains like didn't expand slightly, but there was sort of a volume increase one way and other means there was no change. In other mens, there was a volume decrease and all kind of averaged out to zero, but there was variation within those within those men. And it turns out that the degree of change you've seen and the father's brain is dose dependent and it depends on how much heat is engaged with baby care. So it's kind of the experience of looking after the baby, and fathers of course can be their conception only bugger off and never be seen again, or they could be the primary caregiver. So you know, there's this enormous variation and the degree of engagement that they have with the baby and the changes in their brain reflect that, and the same way that change would be reflected if you were learning kind of any new task. The really interesting thing about the fathers though the men. Some of the men's find it very confronting to learn that the more engaged they are with the baby, the more the testosterone levels drop. That doesn't sort of happen during pregnancy, but once the baby comes along, baby care lowess testosterone levels. And I think that's in one of mother Nature's secret tracks, because if you've got a high tea guy, high testosterone guy, he's not doing

31:23 much baby care, he might be tempted to kind of wander off, maybe make more babies somewhere else. Mother nature lowers the cystosterone because we're all we're all biologically responding to each other within a family unit. Yeah, his testosterone levels drop, he's more likely to stay put and more likely to help raise that child. So I think there's Mother Nature's secret little trek to kind of keep dad's at home with babies, not just mothers. It's fascinating. I mean, I've always had this theory, and it's probably a complete fallacy, but I always thought that because my daughter came out of my body looking like exactly like her father, and I was furious. I was just like, after all I've been through, that's how you were paying me. You look spinning a bitch off him, And she did for the first twelve months, and then now she looks a lot more like me. But I always thought it's that a trick of nature to make sure that the dad kind of stays in bonds. They make the babies look back.

32:17 I think they need to engage in the bonding. And exactly because what we see is this has been replicated both and there's a couple of species of a little cute little monkey where the father's the primary care giver. As soon as the baby's born, the baby climbs on to dad and only gets given back to mum to feed, and then goes straight back to dad. And the fathers kind of lose weight as the baby gets better and back because they're constantly carrying this child around until it's like a growing monkey, and then off it kind of goes off to its own little family group. And in those as well, we see the testosterone drop and the fathers, but oxytocinally will was kind of stay stay high. So so studies of me and have looked at the oxytocinally wles kind of during their partner's pregnancy and then when they're really engaged in baby care, and we're not seeing a massive kind of change in oxytocin level, but what we see is the change in testosterone. So it might be the relationship between oxytocin the kind of ratio of oxytocin and testosterone. It's really hard to say, here's a hormone, here's a level, here's a predicted behavior. But when we kind of start piecing all of these different changes in hormones together in relationships, and you know, how do women react when men's testosterone drops and they're at home and they're helping care for the baby. You've got a much happier mum and a happier family. When you've got a high tea dad who is an engaged in baby care and off he kind of goes, you've got a mother who's less well supported and happy. And that just sounds like some kind of awfully stereotypical story. But we've got

33:50 data to toback all of that up. So I think that the kind of the overarching message here is all adults biology changes when we engage with babies, When we engage with infants because we weren't meant to parents alone, and humans are ollow parents. We are mammals that share baby care. And in the absence of helpers, what happens to moms. What happens to a mum who's lift all by herself to look after a baby with no social support, it's pretty inevitable consequence. Depression, loneliness. It's not good. No exactly intended. We were meant to be all by ourselves doing this. And speaking of that, I was going to ask, you are there. I mean I used to work a lot with women in my psychology practice, with pregnant women and women post natally. I remember doing some training specifically around that and kind of being told or being taught that postnatal depression really wasn't because people used to have it's the hormones. It's the hormones. It's the hormones. And we were kind of taught that, well, it's not really actually the hormones. It's that they are lacking sleep, they're unsupported, you know, they're stress. There's all of these lifestyle factors that would make anybody depressed. Hormones or not.

34:57 Yeah, yeah, it's almost like, yeah, when when they add up you've got baby brain. When they add up, you've got issues, and it may manifest different ways. I think that's interesting because the hormones, you know, you go through this enormous withdrawal of all of these, you know, especially Easter, in all these pregnancy hormones, and so you've got that vulnerability early on. And that's when we do see if women are specifically vulnera you might see postpartum psychosis, which we know is almost directly related to the withdrawal of hormones and baby blues. But if you look at longitudinal studies of motherhood, we see rates of post at lantenatal depression. Rates of depression go up, you know, between having a newborn to having a one year old, to having a two year old to having a three year old. It's you're not more likely in the first couple of weeks, you're actually more likely a couple of years later. And that's not hormones, no exactly, that's the mental load of motherhood. Yeah, that's just being worn down over time. And what's the greatest respector for that. It's lack of social support. Yes, so I head I've got if you read my book and you read through the chapter on kind of alloparenting shared support, there's a couple of women in there who are expats, I assume by the sound of it. I think maybe in some we like Singapore because it was anonymous, but they had maids and nannies and night nurses who helped them, and they had wonderful experiences of first time motherhood because they had so much super support around them.

36:22 And they're like, at how anyone could have done it without having these mother helpers. I mean, so many women do, though, don't they. Yeah, yeah, I think you're right. There is something interesting though, because we talk a lot about depression, but there was some interesting research I uncovered more around hypervigilance and anxiety and particularly with your first baby. And maybe this is my maternal instinct, he'll preck of my son's story, is that we go into a state of hypervigilance, which again it's almost like we've been primed to be really on because we haven't yet learned how to look after a baby, so we have to be super alert it to any kind of danger, and that often manifests and this very very common catastrophic intrusive thoughts of babies falling out windows, and downstairs and out of car seats and out of cars.

37:13 They are really really common intrusive thoughts. Not a lot of people talk about them, and they kind of track alongside hyper vigilance, and that in a healthy situation sort of tails off by about sort of seven weeks post andatally if it doesn't or it starts to kind of increase instead of decrease. That's a real strong predictor of mental health issues, especially anxiety and though and that's much more common with the first baby than a second baby. We don't have the same intrusive thoughts of babies falling out windows and downstairs. And I so clearly remember that with my first son, I was convinced he was going to fall out the window even if he wasn't in a room.

37:55 No. I heard that a lot too. We don't talk about that. And there's you know, like our brains make meaning, our bodies in a hypervigilance state, our nervous systems dialed up and on to kind of learn to keep this baby alive. But the meaning we kind of make of that is something bad's about to happen, Something bad's about to happen, something terrible is going to happen to my baby, and so our brain's almost kind of fill in a story around the Europe that that kind of nervous system hypervigilance, and I don't think we talk about that enough at all. No, you're right, and we don't. And the thing that I heard from my clients was that that then sometimes extends on to what if I were to throw the baby like almost like this, what if I were to do something terrible to the baby, and then I must be a terrible mother for me to have had this thought.

38:46 It must mean that I want to do that when I absolutely don't want to do that, and then not even being game to be in the room with their baby because they're so terrified of what they might do because of these intestive thoughts. Absolutely, yeah, that's very common. And I think we've only just have started to sort of study that and kind of now we've sort of moved away from flogging this idea of let's look at women's brains to find out where their memories are gone. Let's just wave away from this of all you've got is a hammer, all you look for is a nail. Let's kind of broaden the conversation out broaden the research out to what are all of the ways in which, you know, we see these neurological shifts, and what are the adaptive benefits of these And let's focus on like telling a sort of a strengths based story instead of a deficit story. So even this post natal anxiety or hypervigilance, I mean, there is an adaptive benefit for that with your first baby. That's part of the learning, learning process. And if we can start talking about that instead of thinking, gosh, she's worrying about dropping a baby out the window. And that's what I'm hoping to do, is to move away from it.

39:55 These are these are all neurological deficits and dysfunctions and instabilities to brains are becoming more flexible and efficient and sort of primes to learn. And a lot of the responses that we are experiencing are really you know this millions of years of evolution enabling us to keep these new little humans alive. Yeah, you mentioned before about the recent research, well the first study I think you said on women's brains and menopause, which was a couple of years ago. Can you tell me what was in that? So, like, what do we know about brains and manopause. I'm fascinated because this is relevant to me at the moment. Yeah. Well, funnily enough, so during adolescence and may tread since we see thinning of gray matter and parts of the brain that are showing skill development across from kind of pre period to post menopause. We actually see that gray matter bounce back. So I don't know what that means we're losing skills, but I mean because we're downloading wisdom, as we don't have evidence we're downloading wisdom, but I like to attribute it to that. So what we see is the brain adapts and responds to our physiology. So essentially, your eggs are running out, you're producing this estrogen your ovaries.

41:10 There's a roller coaster of estrogen going on for a while, because when you don't release enough estrogen, the brain doesn't receive much estrogen, so shouts back down to the ovaries relate smaller next month and the overs release a whole heap, and then the brain goes not that much. So there's this kind of roller coaster and that eventually trickles out, and then sort of tracking alongside that, we see the brain sort of shift and respond so we see changes in gray matter, changes in white matter organization, kind of the opposite of what we see in adolescents and matrescence. We see neurons becoming less efficient at metabolizing glucose, which we see throughout our whole bodies, which is why we're more vulnerable to developing diabetes. But by the same token, we actually see changes in energy metabolism in terms of mitochondria and atp So we see lots of changes, and we see lots of adaptations, both at a neural level and at a structural level. I think that's really interesting.

42:08 The brain's adapting, and then once you kind of get beyond your final period, beyond the menopause, then it's just sort of flat. It sort of settles out. So it's just this sort of shift in this transition and adaptation. We understand a little bit about the neurobiology of thermoregulation and why we get hot flashes. That's a neurological issue that's caused by the estrogens resetting the lower and upper levels of the thermostat in our brain, so the top level goes down, so you get a tiny increase in core body temperature that prior to menopause would have been within the normal range. It kind of trips the level of thermostat and your body, you know, your hypothalamus sends a message to your body panic stations, we're really hot in here, and so you get this enormous cooling physiological response.

43:00 You're asleep, your body will sweat a bit, and then if that doesn't work, your brain will go, well, we need to wake up and we need to behave in a way that will call us down. So it seems a surge of adrenaline through your body to make you wake up in a big panic. How interesting because something terrible is going on, and the same way as what we see when someone with sleep at near you know, wakes up because they can't breathe, and the body wakes them up so they can start breathing again. And when we put estrogen back and if you use in winnipouse hormone therapy, then we you know, reset the thermostat and that's why that's an effective treatment. There are other non hormonal treatments that we're working on because we kind of understand a little bit more about the particular neurons and the particular signaling molecules. They use in the hypothalamus. So there are now specific neurological treatments for hot flashes for women who can't take hormone. Interesting, And then I think also really tied in with that thermoregulation dysfunction as it disrupts sleep architecture, even if you're not being thrown awake in a hot, wet because sleep and that healthy sleep architecture we move through during the night is tied to our core body temperature. And if we've got thermodysregulation, we have sleep architecture disruption. So even if you think you've been asleep, you still wake up feeling terrible. Yeah, and if you had one night of that, a week, a month, a year of that, well you're probably going to have a foggy brain. You might find it harder to control your moods and emotions. You know, you kind of tip the domino, And we're kind of starting to get to

44:32 grips worth the neurobiology of menopause. Yeah, we've learning about neurobiology pregnancy, and you know, we've kind of had a few years more years understanding the neurobiology of puberty and brains going through puberty. So we're you know, we're sort of starting to unpack unpack all of this. But like that minopause study that's only two years old, so. Yeah, wow, a lot to be done. It had really never occurred to me before I open up your book how little we knew about this topic up until so recently, that we have never really explored women's brains and you know what happens during women's lives. Yeah, yeah, yeah yeah, And I think I'm not crediting myself with this. So I stand on the shoulders of giants.

45:19 And there are some amazing researchers out there and mostly women, mostly female neuroscientists, and the space where it's driving this field forward, and credit must go to them for all of the hard work. I know how hard it is to do good science, and they're the ones asking the meaningful questions. They are the ones that are doing the work to get the answers, and their names are all in the book, so you know, my thanks really goes to them. And I think the takeaway really for listeners and our audience is really women, you know, maybe twenty five to fifty five and beyond, And the whole idea of taking a strengths focus your state meant that women's nature doesn't mean for mothers to be stupid. I think that is just a brilliant takeaway for you to focus on the strength as opposed to the deficit that we've been kind of fed and believing all this time.

46:13 Yeah, yeah, yeah, And if we can all start having conversations thinking about the positive adaptation and the ways our brain brains respond in positive ways, mother nature doesn't want us to be stupid, no intention there, So move away from a always looking for the deficit and assuming that that exists and thinking about the upsides. I find it all so interesting. This conversation has been fascinating, Sarah, So thank you for your time today. Where can people Obviously, your book Baby Brain is out now. Yeah, so it's out in print in Australia, so if you want to buy a print copy and you're not in Australia, you have to ship it. But you can buy it on Kindle ebook available globally, and so is the audiobook. However, I'm not reading the audio book. We have a professional voice artist who much better than I am, so you can you can consume it that way. Perfect the link if you go to my website dot Sarah Mackay dot com. Just google Sarah McKay and euro Scientists or something like that, and you'll end up on the website and there's links to access the book wherever you are in the world.

47:21 I'll put all of those links in the show notes as well. Thank you so much. This has been amazing. I appreciate your time. Oh look, it's self indulgent because I just get to talk about things that i've played really honest to someone who'll just listen. I've got a captive audience. You do. Doctor Sarah's latest book, Baby Brain, is available now in all bookstores. You can find out more about her work at her website, Doctor sarahmckay dot com. I'll put that link in the show notes. If you enjoy the show, as always, please recommend it to your friends, Give us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts, give us a follow on Apple or Spotify. Come and connect with me on Instagram, I am cast done underscore XO on Instagram and TikTok cast done dot XO on Facebook, or of course, you can connect with me at my website Cast done dot com. I can't wait to catch you on the next episode of Crappy to Happy