I'm Not Stupid… So Why Can't I Think Straight?

You know that moment when you walk into a room and completely forget why you’re there, or you lose a word mid-sentence and suddenly feel embarrassed and frustrated? Menopause brain fog can be one of the most confronting symptoms because it doesn’t just feel annoying, it can make you question your competence and your sense of self.

I’m Susie Garden, Perimenopause Naturopath and Weight Loss Nutritionist, and I’m unpacking what’s really going on when your memory feels unreliable during perimenopause and menopause. We talk about why this symptom is so common yet so rarely discussed, and why it doesn’t mean you’re “losing your intelligence” or heading towards dementia. You’ll hear the science in plain language, including the oestrogen brain connection and why fluctuating hormones can affect attention, verbal recall, processing speed and that classic “disappearing word”.

We also explore two massive amplifiers: blood sugar instability and sleep disruption. If you’re skipping breakfast, running on coffee, or crashing in the afternoon, your brain may be asking for steadier fuel. And if you’re waking at 2 or 3 am, fragmented sleep can reduce deep sleep, when memory is consolidated and the brain clears waste through the glymphatic system. I finish with five practical ways to clear the fog: stabilise blood sugar, prioritise sleep, move your body, reduce inflammation, and stop feeding the stress loop that makes symptoms worse.

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Transcript

Welcome And What Ageless Means

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hi, I'm Susie Garden and this is the Ageless and Autumn Podcast. I'm an age-defying naturopath and clinical nutritionist and I'm here to bust myths around women's health and ageing so that you can be ageless and autumn in your 40s, 50s, and beyond. The Ageless and Awesome Podcast is dedicated to helping women through perimetopause and menopause with great health, a positive mindset, and outrageous confidence. Hit subscribe or follow now and let's get started.

Brain Fog Feels Personal Today

SPEAKER_00 0:36

Hello, gorgeous one, and welcome to this week's episode of the Ageless and Awesome Podcast. Now I'm battling a little bit of a cold this week, so I'm sorry if you can hear that in my voice. But funnily enough, uh one of the symptoms I'm experiencing is brain fog. And I haven't had brain fog like this for quite some time, and it ties in really well with the topic for this week's podcast, which I'd planned weeks ago. Um, and the topic is brain fog, forgetfulness, and feeling like you're losing your mind. So I am kind of experiencing that at the moment, so it feels like it's very close to home. But you know, this is one, the brain fog that is, one of the most, I don't like to use the word frightening, but it kind of can be one of the most frightening symptoms of menopause. Certainly one of the most annoying and concerning ones, and not because it's physically painful, obviously, but because it makes you question yourself, right? The brain fog makes you forget words, you lose your train of thought so easily, you can walk into a room and have absolutely no idea why you're there, reading the same paragraph three times, still not taking it in, opening your laptop, forgetting what you're about to do. And probably my personal favorite is going on the internet to look up something, and then I'm like, what was I here to look up? Um, and you know, I'm having a lot of these symptoms today, so yeah, fun times. But you know, I guess the thing is with brain fog is for a lot of women, because it isn't one of the more well-known symptoms of perimonopause or menopause, and so you can be thinking, is this normal? Like, what is wrong with me? What's happening to my brain? I certainly had those thoughts when I experienced brain fog back in perimenopause. I didn't know what was going on, and I just want to reassure you right from the get-go, um, you're not losing your intelligence. This is not age, this is not becoming more incompetent, this is not permanent. Um, what you're experiencing is very real. It's a very common symptom of hormonal change. Also,

Why It Feels Scary

SPEAKER_00 2:55

a very common symptom if you've got a cold or some sort of illness that's part of your immune response. So, today we're gonna unpack exactly why this happens and what you can do about it. Because it is something that can feel really concerning. I've certainly had those thoughts today, and then I realized what was going on. Um, so let's start with why this symptom feels different from many of the other symptoms of perimenopause and menopause. The thing is, women kind of know that in your 40s, it can be quite common to experience weight gain, and they then often assume it's hormonal. You know, when you experience hot flushes, you recognize that as a perimenopause symptom or a post-menopause symptom. But brain fog, brain fog can just feel messy because our ability to think, to remember, to communicate is deeply connected to our identity. And many of the women I work with are smart, capable, high-functioning women. They're running businesses, they're managing teams, they work in demanding careers sometimes, they're raising families, they're holding entire households together in many cases. So when they suddenly forget someone's name or lose a word, mid-sentence, or start a sentence you cannot remember where you're going with it, can't recall something you knew perfectly well yesterday, it can feel frustrating, but sometimes it can feel a bit scary. Uh, it can certainly feel like you are just losing your mind. And because nobody talks about this symptom enough, women will often fill that gap with fear, with concern. They'll assume the worst, particularly if there's a history of dementia in the family. They start going along those lines of have I got early onset dementia. But what I want you to understand is that brain fog during the perimenopausal transition and post-menopause is incredibly common. In fact, many experts consider it to be one of the hallmark symptoms of this transition.

The Oestrogen Brain Connection

SPEAKER_00 5:04

And what you may not know is that estrogen is not just about reproduction, but there is an estrogen brain connection. So let's talk about this. Most women know estrogen affects your periods, and some people that's all they know about it, um, or that it affects hot flushes or other sorts of symptoms, but very few realize how important estrogen is for our brains. Estrogen helps support memory, it helps support learning, attention, verbal recall, and processing speed, and it influences the way neurons communicate with one another. So you can kind of think of estrogen as helping the brain's communication network run smoothly. And when estrogen levels fluctuate in perimenopause, then communication becomes less efficient in the brain. And you know, unlike menopause where estrogen eventually settles at a lower level, perimenopause is characterized by unpredictability. One, you know, one hour of your day, estrogen may be high. 90 minutes later, it may be cycling lower and then back up again. You know, it's like trying to drive on a road where the speed limit changes every few minutes and you have to adjust, and the brain has to constantly adapt to this change of estrogen. And that adaptation can show up as forgetfulness, difficulty concentrating, slower recall, feeling mentally foggy. And one of my favorite ways to explain this is your brain is still brilliant, it's still everything that it was, it's just running on unstable Wi-Fi. The information's still there, it's just accessing it, but it can become a little bit more difficult. And I want to talk about one of the most common sort of complaints with this, and this is the disappearing word. You know exactly what you're trying to say. You can picture it, you know the concept, but the actual word won't come. And this happens because oestrogen influences areas of the brain involved in verbal memory and retrieval. And during perimetopause, women often experience temporary disruptions in word-finding ability, temporary disruptions. Okay. And because most or many women rely heavily on communication professionally, this symptom can feel incredibly confronting. It can be embarrassing. You know, I've had clients who are lawyers tell me this teachers, doctors, senior executives, women who make their living communicating and they start to become convinced that they're becoming less intelligent. But they're not. The brain is just navigating this hormonal transition.

Blood Sugar And Mental Clarity

SPEAKER_00 8:02

One other aspect of this that not a lot of people talk about is the blood sugar connection. And this is something that can surprise many women. Your blood sugar has a huge impact on your cognitive function. The brain uses actually a tremendous amount of energy and it relies heavily on glucose, not sugar highs, stable glucose. And when blood sugar becomes unstable, concentration suffers, memory suffers, focus suffers, and decision making suffers. And this is one reason why many women notice brain fog as worse when they skip breakfast, for example, survive on coffee, uh, eat high sugar snacks, go for long periods without eating. Because as oestrogen changes, our insulin sensitivity can also change. We know that. And particularly once you hit 50, then we do notice a difference in this insulin sensitivity, and that's in men and women. And this can make blood sugar regulation more challenging. So if you've noticed things like you can't think straight as well, sorry, yeah, as well, in the afternoon, I get foggy around three, I feel better after eating, my brain's working a bit better, then blood sugar might be playing a role here.

Sleep Fragmentation And Brain Cleanup

SPEAKER_00 9:25

Now let's add another layer, which is sleep. I love talking about sleep, as you know, if you're a regular listener. So sleep or more accurately, the lack of sleep that often women in perimenopause and aftermenopause can have. Many women who enter perimenopause are sleeping less deeply than they used to. You know, maybe you're waking at two or three, maybe you're waking several times a night, maybe you're lying awake for an hour or more. Even if you are technically getting enough hours of sleep, then fragmented sleep also will affect cognition. Deep sleep is when many of the brain's repair and housekeeping processes occur. Our lymphatic system, for example, is like our lymphatic system for the brain, which helps with detox and removing waste products. You have to be asleep in order for that lymphatic system to operate. So if you're constantly waking, lying awake for hours, that system will not activate. And so you can awake feeling foggy. Deep sleep is when memories are consolidated. It's when the brain clears metabolic waste. That's through that glymphatic system. It's when uh neural connections are strengthened. When deep sleep decreases, our brain performance decreases. And this is why many women notice that the worse they sleep, the worse their brain fog becomes.

Five Practical Ways To Clear Fog

SPEAKER_00 10:53

So, now for the part that you probably want to know about, it's just what you can do, what actually helps. Firstly, support your blood sugar stability. That means having protein at every meal, protein at breakfast in particular, super important. Get rid of the breakfast cereal, get rid of the orange juice, get rid of the toast. If you're just having, you know, if you're Australian veggie mite on toast or peanut butter on toast, it's not enough. It's really not enough. You need to get decent protein at breakfast, regular meals. Ideally, three meals a day, three beautifully balanced meals a day is ideal for your blood sugar stability. Uh, fiber-rich foods they help with keeping that blood sugar um nice and stable, avoiding spikes is what I'm trying to say. Uh, and also avoid long periods without eating. Secondly, prioritize sleep. Not because it feels good if you have enough sleep, but it's the therapeutic benefits of sleep um are just so important. So that means planning, turning those screens off, lowering light, managing stress, uh, having some sort of routine around your sleep. Using uh supplements such as magnesium glycinate is a really good one to help sleep and relax the brain. And there are plenty of really beautiful herbs, and I'm talking herbal medicine and supplement, nutritional supplements such as MAT glycinate to help. Uh, so if you're really struggling with sleep, that is something that you need to really put a focus on and prioritize. Prioritize it over looking at your screen, over binging on your streamers. It is so important. Thirdly, move your body. Another really important one. So many of us are sedentary in our day. I I know I lead a very sedentary uh day life in my job, so I really need to prioritize exercise and moving my body. And you know, obviously it's really important for things like muscle building and bone health, but it increases blood flow to the brain as well. It's uh that supports cognitive function and particularly strength training. I mentioned on the pod, I don't know if it was last week or maybe in the last few weeks, about this muscle brain connection. I need to do a podcast on that actually. So the muscle brain connection is something that's only being talked about fairly recently. Uh, I haven't looked hugely into the research and the timelines about when that research has been done. Uh, but I will do a podcast on actually on that actually, because I think it's really important and really interesting one to learn about. So um, exercise or moving your body. So it doesn't have to be structured exercise. Dancing, I talk about a lot. Like, even if you're really sedentary in your job, if you work from home, if you have the ability, like for a few minutes every hour to stand up and just dance around your office. I know it sounds crazy, but it's really great for building energy, for making you feel good, it might make you laugh, um, which is great for stress management. So many benefits. A big, big proponent of that. Uh, fourthly, reduce inflammation. The reason why I've got brain fog with this cold is because my inflammation has gone up, obviously. So that's also really important when you're in peri and post-menopause is to reduce inflammation in your body. So this means eating more whole foods, fresh fruits, veggies, that kind of thing. Uh, increasing your omega-3 fatty acids, reducing excess alcohol, supporting gut health, staying away from sugar as much as you can. Um, so many more things you can do to reduce inflammation. It's one of the primary things I do with the Glow Protocol, in fact, which helps release weight. Uh, so finally, the final tip I have for uh reducing brain fog is to stop panicking and stressing about it. And I know that sounds really simple, but anxiety about brain fog often makes the brain fog worse. When we become hyper-vigilant and super self-conscious about every forgotten word, we create more stress. More stress creates cortisol, and cortisol further affects our memory and focus. So, just to recap on these five things to help brain fog is managing blood sugar, keeping that blood sugar beautifully stabilized, prioritizing sleep, moving your body, reducing inflammation, and stop panicking and creating stress in your body.

When To Get Checked

SPEAKER_00 15:40

So, when should you actually seek help? Now we know that brain fog is pretty common in perimenopause, but it's important to kind of realize also that not everything should be assumed to be hormonal. So it is well worth speaking to your healthcare practitioner if the symptoms are really severe, if they're rapidly worsening, if they're interfering significantly with daily life, or if you haven't ruled out things like iron deficiency, thyroid dysfunction, B12 deficiency, sleep disorders, because sometimes multiple factors are contributing to this. So it shouldn't be ignored if it's if it's really impacting you. Um so if you've been worried that you're losing your intelligence, please hear this. You're not. Your brain is adapting to a major hormonal transition. The information is still there, your brilliance is still there, your capability is still there. And the goal is at this time of life to support the symptoms, the systems that help your brain function at its

Support Options And Farewell

SPEAKER_00 16:47

best. And if you'd like support navigating brain fog, navigating low motivation, sleep disruption, weight changes, lowering inflammation, and other symptoms of peri and postmenopause, I'd love to help you. Um, as you know, we now have the Prai Menopause Path Clinic. Uh, you can book a free peri weight loss assessment using the link in the show notes, or you can just book an appointment at the clinic. It's totally online, so you can access it from wherever you are. And myself and Erin, my gorgeous colleague Natropath, we are we love helping you. We want to help you. So please feel free to book in. So until next time, take care of your brain. Just even if you took on board one or two pieces of uh or little strategies that I have uh mentioned here today, you may find that makes a huge difference. So take care, trust your brain a little more than you have been lately, and I will see you next week with some more fresh new content. Thanks so much for joining me on the Ageless and Awesome Podcast. If you would liked this episode, please make sure you click the little plus button if you're on Apple Podcasts, or the follow button if you're on Spotify, so that you get each new episode delivered to you every single week. If you feel like writing me a five star review, you would absolutely make my day. If you found this episode resonated with you, head over to my Instagram and DM me at the Perimetopause Park. I would love to connect with you.