Mom brain isn’t a joke. It’s the first data point nobody’s collecting.
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.
The fog that doesn’t lift
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.
We tend to treat “baby brain” as a temporary quirk. But it may be the first signal in a much larger pattern of neurological transitions women experience across their lives, from motherhood to perimenopause to menopause, that we still don’t fully understand.
The good news and the harder news
Two pieces of research landed in my world last month, 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, such as 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 older 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, 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.
The word that keeps snagging me
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?
What we’re missing
We are living in a golden age of personal health data, but when it comes to the brain, especially women’s brains during periods of major change, we are still largely in the dark. 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 perimenopause brain 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.
This is a gap in research and in measurement. Not only do we lack answers, but we lack the tools to even ask better questions about what women are experiencing in real time.
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, a signal, not a side effect, that I had no framework to capture, interpret, or act on?
The window matters
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.
It requires taking women’s cognitive experiences seriously earlier, not dismissing them as “just hormones” or “just brain fog,” but recognizing them as meaningful neurological signals that deserve attention.
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 simply 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.
Sources
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.
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.
Craig, M. C., & Murphy, D. G. M. (2009). Oestrogen, cognition and the maturing female brain. Journal of Neuroendocrinology, 19(1), 1–6.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Varley, T. (2026, March 6). ‘Mommy brain’ and menopause boost cognitive health long term, research finds. Forbes.
source https://www.mother.ly/health-wellness/perimenopause-brain-fog/
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