Postmenopausal Years Are Creative and Satisfying for Women – Oprah Mag

The term postmenopausal implies that the rest of life after what our grandmothers called the change is nothing but an afterthought. Clinical psychologist Louann Brizendine, MD, founder of UCSFs Womens Mood and Hormone Clinic and author of the bestsellers The Female Brain and The Male Brain begs to differ.

To hear her tell it, that stagewhich can be a full half of a womans lifeis more like aprs-ski: the luxurious reward after all the drama of hurtling down hormonal peaks and valleys. In her new book, The Upgrade: How the Female Brain Gets Stronger and Better in Midlife and Beyond, she renames and reclaims the M word, which she calls the Transition and recasts the years after as the Upgrade that gives the book its title.

Rest assured that the good doctor is not just advising women to look on the bright side and think positively about acquiring the wisdom and experience that come with age. (Although shes all for that.) She also explains the science behind the Upgrade, how after the Transition, were equipped with our Brain 2.0, which is less foggy, calmer, steadier, and primed to be more focused, creative, and happy than ever before. Then she tells readers how to make the most of that new functionality. We interrupted her Upgrade to ask her a few questions.

Why dont you use the terms menopause and postmenopause?

Perimenopause, menopause, postmenopause are a medical diagnosis, pharmaceutical words. Its a very narrow shaping of whats happening to us in our lives. I call it a below-the-waist-view of the uterus, the bleeding, but its not about whats going on in the brain. The idea that its a transition and an upgrade is multifaceted, more of what I call the whole-woman approach to the stage of life that were in. And the fact that you have a whole new breath of life for this second half of life, thats the concept I want to get across.

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You write that, post-Transition, our brains are primed for an Upgrade. Why is that, neurologically speaking?

When youre menstruating, estrogen going up in those first two weeks of your cycle starts to make all of these connections in the area of the brain called the hippocampus. And then when the progesterone starts to come in after ovulation, weeks three and four, it tears down all of those connections. That cycle goes on month after month after month, and it has all kinds of pushes and pulls for our behavior. We know from behavioral studies that three or four days before ovulation, we become more talkative, and toward the end of the cycle, we become more emotionalI call it the crying-over-dog-food-commercials stage. Whats going on in our brain is the building up of the circuitry and tearing it down and building it up and tearing it down. That stops after the Transition. Thats why I call it the Upgrade, because it gives you this incredible stability.

What if you take hormone replacement therapy?

If you do, youre getting a steady amount of hormones; theyre not coming in waves. As the waves of the hormones stop and get calmer, whether you take HRT or you dont, your hormones are going to be steady. That remakes the circuitry in your brain in a more stable, calm fashion.

You also talk in the book about how neurohormones, pre-Transition and during the Transition, can push us to be self-critical, and to feel the need to please people or win their approval.

The whole fertility phase of our lives as women is a very deep, deep hormonal push to cause behavior to make us try to be more attractive, so were able to procreate better. Its not something thats right in the front of your mind; its a kind of subconscious drive to procreate in the back of our brains.

Thats not happening so much after the Transition. So were not pushing ourselves to be complete people pleasers. We still dont want to be kicked out of our family or excluded from our community by becoming a total be-atch. Thats not what I recommend. But, subconsciously, because of the neuro changes in our brain, were able to speak our minds more without the fear that we once had, now that the subconscious pressure to procreate isnt going on.

In the book, you explain how if we know whats going on in our brain, we can use that knowledge to our advantage.

We just keep learning more about the brain. For example, we always called the cerebellum, the two little bumps in the back of your brain, the sports brain because it helps with your balance. But in 2018, studies showed that it also sends all of this feedback to the rest of the brain, and it helps to assess emotions and thinking. We do that in the front part of our brain, but if we get a little bit off, our cerebellum helps us with our emotional balance. It helps us with our thinking balance. Itll help slightly correct if you get too far off center. And if you choose an activity, like yoga or barre class, that helps with your balance, it will stimulate that area of the brain.

You offer a lot of actionable tips in the book for making the most of the Upgrade by using science-backed practices. What are some of your favorites?

When I wake up in the morning, I wiggle my toes and I smile. Wiggling your toes activates the sciatic, the longest nerve in your body, and stimulates all the way up into your brain, your cerebellum, your whole motor strip. And studies show that when you smile, the smiling muscles actually feed back into your brain to tell you that youre happy, so you could increase your feeling of happiness just by smiling at yourself.

I also do butt squeezes throughout the day, because in a study where they tested cognition in 80-year-old women, those women with the best cognition also had the strongest leg strength. When your muscles are strong or when youre moving your muscles, its feeding back into your brain all the way from your cerebellum to the rest of your motor area, telling you that youre alive and that youre okay. And one of the biggest muscles in our body is the glutes, our butt muscles. So if you want to improve some of your cognition, just keep doing butt squeezes during the day when you sit down or as you brush your teeth.

In another cool study, done 2010 at Harvard, they would text people and say, What are you doing now? And then theyd have to do a happiness scale. Those people that were just daydreaming, who had a wandering mind, reported that they were not happy, but the same person, when they were engaged in what they were doing when they got the text, said they were happy. If you let your mind wander, it can run into the hamster wheel of worry or other bad places. So you want to take the steering wheel of your mind and steer it toward engagement.

So, when the chatter of all the hormonal waves dies down in your brain, you get to choose what to fill it with, and you want to choose wisely?

Yes. Thats why I wrote this book, for women to just grab the steering wheel of their life, to move forward in a way that makes them happier, with more joy and serenity. As women go through this stage, its important to know that this is coming, so then you can seize that stability in the brain, and feel empowered by this idea that you have an upgrade, a chance to do something new. You have to feel delighted about your life in this next stage, because its really great. Theres a technical term, the positivity effect, thats been studied for the last 40 years at Stanford and other places that shows that with each decade of your life, you get happier. That goes along with the Upgradepeople just get happier each decade of their life. I think thats a really important message.

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Postmenopausal Years Are Creative and Satisfying for Women - Oprah Mag