367: Midlife, Menopause and the Brain w/ Dr. Sarah McKay

Transcripts are auto-generated.

Courtney Townley 0:00
Some women will choose to hyper focus on midlife being the beginning of the decline, but I think it’s far more useful to think of midlife as a golden opportunity to future proof our bodies and our brains, because it really is that golden opportunity. On today’s episode, Dr. Sarah McKay and I are discussing why midlife is critical for long term brain health and what specifically you can do to take better care of yours. Welcome to the grace and grit podcast made for women who want their healthiest years to be ahead of them, not behind them. Join your host, Courtney Townley right now as she breaks down the fairy tale health story you have been chasing all of your life into sensible action steps and lasting change.

Courtney Townley 1:00
Welcome to the Grace and Grit Podcast. This is your host, Courtney Townley, as always, I am so delighted that you’re here. I don’t know about you, but I have a lot of questions about brain health at midlife, because I am in midlife, and all of my clients are in midlife, so just a few of the questions I have, why is behavior change so freaking hard? Why do so many women at midlife seem to be rumbling with things like anxiety and depression and brain fog? How can I better manage my own mental stress, and what can I do now to help make my brain more resilient as I age again? That’s just small sampling of the questions that I have. Maybe you can relate to having some similar ones, and if so, I have great news. I have invited Dr Sarah McKay to the grace and grit podcast, and she has so graciously agreed to answer some of these questions.

Courtney Townley 1:56
Bfore we get into this interview, a little bit about Dr Sarah McKay. Dr Sarah McKay is a neuroscientist and science communicator who simplifies brain science for health and well being, performance and creativity. She completed her MSc and PhD in Neuroscience at Oxford University, and after relocating to Australia and completing five years of postdoctoral research on spinal cord injury, Sarah hung up her lab coat to establish think brain, which offers online professional development training in applied neuroscience and brain health. Her first book, The Women’s brain book, the neuroscience of health, hormones and happiness, was published in 2018 with a second edition due in 2025 and her second book, baby brain, the surprising neuroscience of how pregnancy and motherhood sculpt our brains and change our minds for the better, was published in 2023 she is currently writing her third book on brain health for the iconic for Dummies brand. We have a lot of ground to cover in this interview, so without further ado, let’s get to it. Dr Sarah McKay, welcome to the grace and grit podcast.

Dr. Sarah McKay 3:19
Thanks for having me.

Courtney Townley 3:21
Thank you for being here. There’s so much I want to ask you about the brain, specifically about the midlife female brain. And you are actually, we’re approaching our 400th episode. I mean, I think we’re at like four or 380 somewhere in there. And you are the first neuroscientist I’ve ever had on the show.

Courtney Townley 3:37
What, which is honored, you chose me.

Courtney Townley 3:38
Oh, I can’t think of a better. I mean, first of all, number one, you focus on the on the female brain. You’re also a woman in midlife, so I just feel like you’re a perfect you’re a perfect fit for this conversation. I told you before I started recording that I found you first on LinkedIn. I’ve been following your work for a long time. And for anyone listening, there’s just so much on Dr McKay’s website. So we will give you the links and all the things that you can go to get more information. At the end of this episode, we’ll link it on the page. But to start this conversation off, I would love for you to tell us why neuroscience like, what compels you to get into the field of neuroscience, but also then go on to really dive deep into the female brain? Let’s just start there.

Dr. Sarah McKay 4:31
For sure. Yes, there’s two very clear sort of moments, really. And I think a lot of us have moments in life, those sliding door moments, and for me, that they’ve just, like, kind of set the trajectory for the rest of my life. Yeah. So the first was in I love I loved school. I headed off to university. I grew up in New Zealand. I grew up in a little town. Christchurch. Was not little city. Christchurch, New Zealand, east coast of the South Island of New Zealand. Not a bad place to grow up. It was a. It was nothing happened when I was a kid’s had a very difficult time in the last decade or so, with earthquakes and awful like shooting and things like had terrible things going on. But when I was a kid, nothing. It was like nothing happened. It was I had a lovely childhood, lovely family. It was all very easy. And loved school, loved learning, and headed off to first year university, and everyone. Then you got into your first year of university and did a very broad like, I did kind of a health sciences first year, and I was in a psych 101, so you did like biology, chemistry, psychology and psych 101, I was liking psychology, but it was a bit black box, sort of fluffy around the edges for me. And then we did a module on biology. It was like biology of psychology, which really is neuroscience. But back then, it wasn’t so much a discipline, but in that, in those lectures, I was like, this, this is just like the coolest thing ever. And they were talking about synapses and brains, and I was just so utterly captivated that I then moved universities the following year to Otago University, where they were setting up a degree discipline in neuroscience.

Courtney Townley 6:12
Well, that’s pretty good timing. Yeah,

Dr. Sarah McKay 6:14
yeah. So I was, I think the year ahead of me, there were one or two people who had graduated, and then we were, like, the first cohort that went through, and I’m still in touch with some of the people from so far from that year, we like to think with OG of neuroscience, that was 90 so that was my first year of university. Was 93 so I just fell in love. Loved it so interesting. Every single day, I was like, get out. This is so cool.

Dr. Sarah McKay 6:38
And I still, still, still, because neuroscience is so big and broad and deep and complex and rich, I’m still thinking this all the time. That I was talking to a neuroscientist last night, actually, we were talking about sort of dementia and aging and menopause, really relevant. And I was just like, we were just like, get out. This is just sort of talking through some of the data. Still, still it is exciting, as exciting today as it was then, the women’s brain health stuff came much later in my career. So I did an undergraduate in neuroscience. I was so fortunate to get a scholarship to Oxford University, which when you’re a little working class kid from Christchurch, New Zealand, that that’s like I, you know, unheard of. How would that have happened to me?

Dr. Sarah McKay 7:25
My mum and dad left school at 15. So off I went, and it was extraordinary. I loved, I loved just university life, and I was working then on brain plasticity. I moved to Sydney, Australia with my now husband that I met at Oxford. He’s an Irish economist, nothing to do with science and, you know, and I was, I had kids, and I was writing about neuroscience. Never, never, never had thought anything about the female brain or women’s brain health. One, because there was a lot of neuroscience going on.

Dr. Sarah McKay 8:00
Two, well, there was not a lot of neuroscience going on within women’s brain health, yeah, like, there were some bits and pieces, but a lot of it was done in animal research. There simply was no work being done on anything that would possibly be interesting. The things we talk about now, like puberty, there’s a bit on puberty, nothing on the menstrual cycle, nothing on the pill, certainly nothing on pregnancy or menopause, or any of these life transitions we go through. So there was not really anything to pay attention to. So sometimes you don’t know what you don’t know. So you don’t consider there could be a discipline missing because I was so busy doing all of the other stuff. And then I was approached. Then the sort of second inflection point was I was approached by a woman, Jan rickmans, who’s now my literary agent, which makes me sound very much more important than I am. She was, at that time, a book publisher, and she said, Hey, you write well, do you want to write a book? And I said, No way. And she said, Let’s just meet and chat. And she kind of twisted my arm, but I was like, I don’t have an idea. And she said, What have you written before for an audience that’s kind of, you know, kicked off?

Dr. Sarah McKay 9:05
And I said, Oh, I wrote this article a year ago for the ABC here in Australia, which is like our national broadcaster and our newspaper etc, on menopause and brain fog, and how lots of women think it’s the first sign of dementia, and it’s not What year was this. I had written that in 2015 Okay, and we’d put it on and so the editors had put it on Facebook. And normally we might get like, 10 comments and a few shares, whatever Facebook 2015 vibes. This just went there with 1000s of shares, hundreds, I think there’s nearly 700 comments. You can still see that post online. There was a hunger for that in people. What is so interesting?

Dr. Sarah McKay 9:44
As I said, it’s like, looking at, like, ancient history. And it was only nine years ago I went on the other day and I, like, copy pasted all of the comments and threw them into chat GBT and said, analyze them for me. What’s, you know, look for these keywords. Yeah, is the keyword? Is the keyword? Peri menopause? Was no mention of perimenopa. It wasn’t invented then. Well, it was invented, but no, we didn’t talk about it. I think maybe seven of the 600 comments talked about hormone therapy. Yeah, it’s amazing to see this shift in the last decade.

Dr. Sarah McKay 10:12
So I was telling John this, and she said, why don’t you write a book on menopause? And I was like, I was 40 at the time. That’s mum’s mum’s business. Two little boys, they were at primary school. And then she said, Oh, what about baby brain? And I was like, well, that’s load of rubbish. Up. And I literally said that. Dismissed it. I said, I think someone would have it, but I never had it. And what’s the adaptive evolutionary benefit of women becoming dumb, like we don’t lose our cognitive capacity when we become mothers. So dismissed those two ideas. It was like, No, I’m not joining either of them. And then I went, and then I literally had this aha moment of, oh my goodness, there’s the menstrual cycle and there’s puberty and there’s there is pregnancy and there is menopause. And I knew some, I knew. I thought, I think there’s more women than men have Alzheimer’s disease. I’ve got different data on that. Now. I think girls and women are more likely to have anxiety and depression than boys and men. I went, Oh, I could write like a worm to term through the lifespan.

Courtney Townley 11:14
Oh, love that phrase on the female brain. Yeah.

Dr. Sarah McKay 11:16
And then John was like, well, there’s your idea. Go away and write a book proposal, yeah, and so I just wrote this a long list of questions, sort of starting in utero through to sort of the end of life, questions about the female brain that I didn’t know the answers to, and that kind of became the chapter outline. And the publishers were like, love it. Since then, it has been, it was not me. I feel like this is like, kind of, you know, something cracked open in the universe, whereby then all of this there was, there was so many things we didn’t know, like when I started writing that, but we knew nothing about the human brain during pregnancy, but there was a big paper that kind of cracked the universe open then. And since that time, what we’ve seen is this huge shift driven by not by me. I’d like to say it was me, and my daughter was not. So what it’s like women who are making their way up the research ranks, sticking in the research it’s really hard to stick in academia. It is so hard sticking up in there and working their way up to be able to ask the questions that are getting the research funding and guide the research in this new space where there’s not been asked or answered. So go the go the woman, go the good woman.

Dr. Sarah McKay 12:27
And my book, Baby Brain, I tried to profile as many of them as I can to like, say, Look how awesome they are. And two, well, we’re scientists, and you can see the gaps in the data. And luckily, scientists aren’t dickheads. They’re like, hey, maybe we should start with mandating sex as a biological variable if you’re not including males and females, why and why not in both preclinical animal lab research and clinical research? For a long time, women were in clinical trial research, and then they were excluded from clinical trial research. And part of that people think, oh, that’s just this terrible sexist thing that happened. But part of that was done with a good intention, and that was because of the disaster that was the thalidomide scandal. They didn’t want to trial drugs on women who might be pregnant unknowingly and then harm the unborn babies. So they had the best of intentions to say it’s best we just don’t do any clinical research on young women with the potential to be pregnant. Yeah, that’s a good reason, right? But it’s had unintended consequences whereby we just don’t know the same amount of information about female physiology.

Courtney Townley 13:37
Well, I think you said in your book, right? The Women’s brain book, that at the time there was almost like 5.5 I think you said research studies on men, for every study there was on a woman, something around that which, and some of that, you know, like some of that, you look back on it and you think, well, weren’t we?

Dr. Sarah McKay 13:56
Weren’t we? Well, it looks exclusionary. But I will say, when I was doing all my lab research, I did it on humans. I was always looking at lab animals. I worked in spinal cord injury research, and my PhD was all about development of the visual cortex and how neurons kind of wire up in the visual cortex based on nature, nurture type stuff. And I never recorded the biological sex of an animal. Maybe I wrote it down in my lab book, but I certainly never analyzed the data based on that, not because I was like, I’m going to exclude the females. It was just didn’t seem relevant. And look, to be honest, I don’t think the primary and the visual system, the inputs, what you see, I think probably it wouldn’t have made a difference if we had analyzed by sex. But we don’t know, because we don’t have the data, because we didn’t, we didn’t record it, so it wasn’t excluding. It was just sex seemed irrelevant to what we were doing. So, you know, it’s easy to tell a story that it’s it was all done on purpose, but I think a lot of it was, it’s just kind of how it’s folded out. I’m the eternal optimist. What. I say is now we know so now and now the women are ready to do the research, because they’ve got the positions and the fundings there, and so like, let’s celebrate what we are finding out. That’s always, I’m always, I’m always a bit optimistic. I don’t like this whole let’s be angry about it, because there’s really good stuff being done. And I think if we focus on being pissed off about what wasn’t done, we’re not giving credit to the amazing work that has been done. And there’s some amazing women out there who aren’t on social media, who aren’t like, shouting from the rooftops about their science, they’re just in there, like grinding away, and they’re the ones who need the credit.

Courtney Townley 15:38
Yeah. So you did this deep dive. You wrote these two books, just for to be clear for listeners, the first book, The Women’s Brain Book, was out in 2018 is that right?

Dr. Sarah McKay 15:50
That’s correct, yep, early engagement. So I wrote it during 2017

Courtney Townley 15:53
Yep, got it. And then Baby Brain was written after that.

Dr. Sarah McKay 15:57
That was, yeah, that was published. So April, 2023 so I wrote that during 2022 because I was like, there has been so much stuff on just how women’s brains change during pregnancy from the days of, oh, we have baby brain or not, and I have so many thoughts on it that I thought of this, I’m gonna, like, write a whole book on this topic. Yeah, probably write another whole one on menopause. Exactly, if I do or don’t, I don’t know, I’ll wait a few years, because there’s some really interesting data coming through that I think is different to what the current narrative is. And what

Courtney Townley 16:28
you said before we started recording is that you’re now doing a second edition of the women brain book, because there is more research available. So can you give us very much more? Tell us a little bit about what surprised you in in your research, I know, I’m sure you learned so much. I’m sure there was so much that that, because you sound like a very like, you’re really into your career, which I love so much, the enthusiasm is so clear. What was a big surprise to you? Like, what do you think really stood out?

Dr. Sarah McKay 16:56
It’s so interesting. I was talking so the research I was speaking to last night, it was Anne Marie de Lange, who’s, she’s, she’s Norwegian, but she splits her time between she runs the Femi lab and in a Swiss Research Lab, which is essentially looking at women’s brain health. And she splits her time between there and Oxford, where she works in the brain imaging group there. And I said to her, and we were kind of going through all of this data last night, and she works looking at these large biobanks. And this is, like she said, it’s almost like a new discipline. It’s changed research, neuroscience research, even within the last five years.

Dr. Sarah McKay 17:30
Because once upon a time, and earlier in her career, you used to have a brain scanner, and you’d recruit people in and if you you know, you might get 20 or 30 people, and you’d scan their brains. She said, if you got 200 you were doing really well. Well. Now what we have is shared data sets, so people from different labs all put all of their data in, so we can have 1000s of people in a data set. We’ve got longitudinal studies where we’re following like 1000s of people through we’ve got these, say, the UK biobank that she works with has got 1000s and hundreds of 1000s of people’s data, whole body scans, and their entire like medical history, from the prescribing, from their doctor, through to their autobiograph, where they went to school, in their exam marks, you know, at university sort of thing. They’ve got all of this data and and that’s what has just trend. So we’ve got, like, power in numbers now where we couldn’t say anything for certain before we can say with more certainty, because the data and the statistics have revealed a whole lot more power that said. And I said this to her last and I said, this is not popular. She said, I know. I said, when I wrote my first book, I thought this is going to be a book about hormones.

Dr. Sarah McKay 18:38
I thought it’s all going to be about how hormones shape and sculpt the female brain, because that’s the story we have from puberty and through our menstrual cycles and pregnancy, and it’s all about hormones. Hormones as if they are the the driving the car, they are the loudest voice in the crowd. And I, and when I was doing the research for that book, at every stage in life, that is not always the strongest signal puberty, and we can talk about the state of puberty, pregnancy, mesocycle, etc, what is often the determining factor in someone’s experience, whether that be an experience of an emotion or a cognition, or, you know, this thing of baby brain, or what happens at menopausal dementia risk. There are so many other factors in there, and yet we seem to focus in on this one sort of hormonal signal. And when we’re doing that, we’re acknowledging its importance, but we’re almost giving it more importance and statistical significance than the data is showing when it comes to the brain, and that really surprised me.

Dr. Sarah McKay 19:43
And then I said to Anne Marie, when we’re going through she’s got all of this biobank data looking at things like, you know, exogenous hormones, whether you’re taking the pill, whether you’re taking menopause, hormone therapy or not, you know, your age at going through menopause. The only data signal that shows any clear correlation. With brain aging and dementia risk hormone therapy is not in these biobanks with these 1000s of women’s studies. It’s not showing anything there. The only thing that is showing is actually pregnancy and having babies here is to be a data signal that we can pick up later on.

Courtney Townley 20:16
What is that just like? What is that telling you?

Dr. Sarah McKay 20:19
So one of the so now, I mean, I don’t want to just talk about Anne Marie’s data, so sure. I mean, I guess so, just to sort of sum up what I your your initial question for us start ranting and raving about the other data was that if we look at puberty, and we look at girls going through puberty, we tend to go, oh, this, sort of emotional instability during puberty, or whatever we got all its hormones, and we don’t have data to support that, because what we see is the strongest signal is that the sort of the pace at which someone goes through puberty based on their friendship group, and it’s different for boys and girls. So boys who go through puberty earlier than their mates like rise in social stature and perform better academically than boys who go through puberty later.

Dr. Sarah McKay 21:04
Girls who go through puberty earlier don’t do as well because they’re more vulnerable because they see themselves as being different from the group. It’s they don’t rise in stature within their social group. They feel more vulnerable than girls who go through puberty the same or later. It’s not the hormones, it’s the experience of puberty, the sort of the socio psycho experience of puberty. Same with with pregnancy and baby brain, we see these enormous neurological shifts that we experience when we go through pregnancy. And women talk about this, this experience of baby brain. But the correlation isn’t with hormone levels. The correlation. It’s not your brain that is letting you down. It’s the cognitive load and the emotional load and the lack of well being that you experience, which comes from trying to do everything you did before do all of this new stuff you’ve got to do when your brain is primed to care for your baby. It’s not about cognitive dysfunction, and it’s not about hormones here, it’s about the ecosystem in which you’re trying to learn to Mother, I love that it’s not your brain.

Dr. Sarah McKay 22:05
We’ve been told it’s our brain sitting us down. It’s not our brain sitting us down. And then there’s this data from, you know, with there’s so much, so much information out there on social media at the moment around menopause, hormone therapy, HRT, we’ve got good data that it treats symptoms. We know we’ve got all of that coming in, but there’s this push, push, push to talk about it being a risk reduction factor for lifespan health, yeah, and when it and I’m not as familiar with, you know, heart cardiovascular disease as I am with the brain data, and maybe I’ll change my tune if more data comes in. But right now, we don’t have any data saying it’s going to prevent dementia, or, you know, assists with cognition later in life. We have, we don’t, we’ve got data saying it probably doesn’t cause it. We’ve got, you know, and the date the data is very, very mixed. I think overall, if you look at it, it’s kind of neutral. S

Dr. Sarah McKay 23:03
o take your menopause hormone therapy to treat your symptoms in the now, don’t take your menopause hormone therapy thinking it’s going to prevent dementia, which is a story that’s being told now that the data is not showing that, and the more data we get in from these large biobanks with and we’re using machine learning and AI, the signal’s still not there, and that’s okay. That is okay. And that’s what I discovered in my first book, was that every phase of life we would like to think or just turn hormones on or off, and that’s like the answers, they’re good or bad or whatever, go up or down, or roller coastering. They’re the ones that are agitating us. Brains don’t work like that. Brains are receiving 1000s of data, signals, yeah, from from our bones, from the food we’ve eaten, from our posture, from how much we’ve slept, all of this data coming in from our biological bodies, status, streaming in from the outside world, what we see, what we hear, the social media algorithm.

Dr. Sarah McKay 23:58
This is now this data stream kind of feeding us yes and and, you know, we’re filtering that through our learned experiences, the words we use to describe our expectations. So we’ve got this biological bottom up, I call it outside in. There’s the people, but there’s the place that we live in, and then we’re filtering that through our top down psychology, and that is how a brain reacts and responds and creates an experience. We’ve got to look at our lifespan and everything that’s got us to this point and our context, and if all we do is focus in on the hormones, they are important, but they’re not always the determining factor, absolutely. And if that was how brains worked, they probably wouldn’t work very well, because and women, they do kind of fluctuate, and I’m getting deeply concerned. And this is not a popular opinion, and you say this in social media, and you get shouted down that our. Focus in on solely hormones, means that we lose focus on all of the other things. And I’m a massive fan of talking about biopsychosocial perspective when it comes to the brain. I’m not an expert on anything else, but I know how brains work, .

Courtney Townley 25:13
And it’s multifactorial Is what I’m hearing you say, like loud, 100% and when I 100% I so walked away with that message that the thing that, one of the things that I had written down was that there’s so many contributing factors to what sculpts your brain, right? Like, absolutely clear,

Dr. Sarah McKay 25:30
absolutely sculpt our brain, yes, our expectations. That’s what a placebo effect is, and a nocebo effect is. I’m not saying women are making stuff up, that that’s not what I’m saying. And I’m not saying don’t take hormone therapy, or don’t take the I think, take them all, knock yourself out, you know? But, but don’t take it based on one, one kind of data set. Yeah? Brains, brains can are considering multiple, multiple sources of of data and information, and we see that through the lifespan, and there’s all of this, like remarkable data out there. I could go on and on. Maybe I should let you ask me some questions before I love I’ll continue our lecture

Courtney Townley 26:13
all day. Well, let me ask you this, because I think it’s really relevant to where we’re at in this where I work with the population of midlife women, which, by the way, I love, love, love your definition of midlife. I think it’s so good. You say midlife is the old age of youth and the youth of old age.

Dr. Sarah McKay 26:30
I think I read that somewhere, well, but

Courtney Townley 26:32
regardless, I’d never heard it before, and I think it’s just such a great deal

Dr. Sarah McKay 26:36
I like more than you the well, it’s but because youth is in there both times, right? Yeah, especially, like, I’m turning 50 at the beginning of January, um, 1975 baby. I don’t you know, we all know this, I still feel the same as what I did and my teenage sons now. I’m like, I still, I don’t feel like a teenager, thank goodness anymore. I’m not that angst and kind of shy and scared of the world. But you know, I still feel as cool as I was in my early 20s when I met my husband. Hey, men, men, age, you know, he’s got that whole Silver Fox thing going right? Very unfair. So

Courtney Townley 27:15
I work with a lot of women who arrive at mid age and they there’s some things that they want to change, right, about how they’re living their life, or how they’re showing up in their life. It’s really behavior change we’re talking about. Yeah, and a lot of times I’ll hear this declaration that this is just who I am, right? Almost like, there’s no possibility of changing how I operate. Like, how would you? How would you confront that, like, how would you speak to somebody who was saying that, that this is just who I am, in the sense that I can’t change my behavior because I’ve always done it this way.

Dr. Sarah McKay 27:53
I suppose it would depend what that behavior is and the intention for change. Yeah. So we, I mean, we do carry our past with us, and that is those, as I said, those inputs, the bot. You’ve got the bottom side and the top down. We have got our past. We have got our experiences and our expectations and even our future thinking like projecting and imagining what’s going to happen in the future is is influenced by our past. Yeah.

Dr. Sarah McKay 28:19
So what would really be, are we looking at, you know, like a very simple health behavior we want to change, or is it, is it more of like a belief or a pattern of thinking? And it can be hard to change beliefs or patterns of thinking. If we’re looking at, you know, do I need to start? Do I need to change my diet, or do I need to exercise more? We’ve got strategies and kind of tested methods that can assist that, yeah, patterns of thinking can change, and we know that people’s belief systems can change. I will say it’s hard to change your mind using your mind only, sure, very hard you can’t. It’s very hard to think your way out of a thought or to change.

Dr. Sarah McKay 29:00
You know, what we need is new data. And you know, our brain needs new information coming in. And often, brains are kind of run on context and run on sort of situation. And if we think about what we understand about habits, which are simply automated behaviors that we do over and over again, like from a true kind of habit perspective, it’s an automated behavior within our brain. It can be really hard to change an old habit, an old unwanted habit. We can’t, like, unwire it in our brain, but what we can do is understand the trigger or the kind of the kind of the cause of that behavior, and either shift shift that trigger and or find out if we can create a new behavior in its place. We understand like, if you move like a brain and a person and a body to a different place, let’s say if you move house, or even if you like to move workplace or whatever, that’s a really, really good place.

Dr. Sarah McKay 30:00
Yes, to embed a new behavior or to change a thinking pattern, because there’s a whole lot of information coming into the brain that’s new and different, and the brain isn’t using the previous cues, yes. So we know it’s possible, but we have to strategize very carefully and thoughtfully about what is this behavior, not just I need to change my behavior, be very precise and concise. What you know? What is this behavior that I like or don’t like and I want to change? What is leading me to perform that behavior or think that thought? And what can I what you know? What do I want to do? Do I want to perform a new behavior? You can’t just stop thinking a thought by thinking not thinking.

Courtney Townley 30:40
That’s, I mean, it’s kind of in line with because a lot of people want to focus on stopping a behavior. And really, what I hear you saying here is, it’s, it’s more on focusing on what you want to start a little bit, 100%

Dr. Sarah McKay 30:54
Yeah, we need, we need to. What’s the cue? Yeah. Can you remove the cue? Is the cue? You know, could be a horrible work place. And so you can, you know, change if you’re in the situation where you could change jobs, and then your particular behavior probably will fade away, because you’re not in the situation. It could be something where you can’t change the queue. So you’re like, Well, I have to do a different behavior in its place. We have to identify the new positive behavior. Be very careful about identifying the cue, and then sort of practice and perform and stack that new behavior in its place. So if we were to talk about something super simple, just to sort of place it in the real world, you wanted to start doing this is kind of a classic sort of advice from a physio. You’ve got a bad back, you need to, like, improve your posture. The physio said, Well, one way you’re going to start doing this is going to start doing squats every day, and you’re like, think about doing 10 squats every day.

Dr. Sarah McKay 31:43
It’ll be like, what’s the behavior you do every day? Do you have a cup of coffee or tea every morning? Do you turn your coffee machine on and just stand there while you’re waiting for the coffee to brew every morning? Yeah, that’s when you do. You’ve got a habit. That’s when you’re going to do your 10 squats while you’re waiting. So there’s a new behavior tagged on to an old queue. Yeah, it’s easy to do. It’s easier to do that than Well, coffee’s a different thing, because you like chemically addicted to it, which is not a bad thing, because coffee is good for your brain.

Dr. Sarah McKay 32:12
But to stop making your coffee every day, you decided coffee was causing atrial fibrillation. It wasn’t very good for your heart. You needed to stop that. Were you needed to stop that. Well, you’re going to get rid of the coffee machine, you’re going to move that out of the house. You’re going to go through withdrawal. But yeah, so we’ve got to find a queue and then stack a new behavior on top, or remove the queue. Yeah, and that’s just sort of basic habit forming neurobiology. Yeah, doing it is how we can have all of the well, and all of the want.

Dr. Sarah McKay 32:41
We can have the strategy, and we can have the motivation some it’s, it’s just finding a strategy in which we can perform it enough so it becomes automated, and it’s very hard. And if it’s a thought that’s sort of amorphous and hard to hold on to, like holding on to fog or something, and that’s, you know, that’s why we have therapists, and that’s why I have psychologists, and that’s why I have coaches to kind of help you work your way through thought patterns and understand them and step back from them and look at new and different strategies. Yeah, sometimes easier than thoughts.

Courtney Townley 33:14
Yeah, I’m really curious to know, because I’ve heard, I’ve heard this over years, I’ve read this, but when you’re when you develop patterns in your brain that do become habits, those strong neural pathways. Do you ever break a habit, like, does that pathway ever completely go away?

Dr. Sarah McKay 33:33
It’s really hard for a true automated behavior possibly not think about riding a bike, because learning to ride a bike, and then that motor program is stored in your brain in much the same way many habits are, and you don’t unlearn to ride a bike, even if you haven’t ridden a bike for 20 years, you kind of get on and you’ll reactivate that program when you’ve got the bike there in front of you and you’re riding when they carry the cues in place. So it is very, very hard. And that’s what, and and what, and what happens in our in our brain is say it’s unwant. I used to have this awful thought process that popped into my head all the time when my boys are very, very little. The you know, 18 months apart, we didn’t have family around. They all lived overseas.

Dr. Sarah McKay 34:17
My family was going through a natural disaster in New Zealand through earthquakes, everything was tough. My husband had this promoted partner at his work. He was hardly ever there because he needed to. It was just difficult. Everyone goes through tough times when they’re in early motherhood. And I was used to have this thing whenever I went to open and close the dishwasher and open the dishwasher to load it or unload it. And it was almost as if this voice lived in there, just like you’re just such a bad mother. You, you know, look at you. You used to be this career woman, and now you can’t even empty the dishwasher without crying. And it was really there was no grace in that voice. She was so mean and so nasty. She was mean. Yeah, and, and it was all related to kind of the. This the sort of dishwasher. And so for me, it was what it was really interesting when we moved house, that that voice never came back.

Dr. Sarah McKay 35:10
But what we because I was the it wasn’t actually the dishwasher with the dishwasher in that kitchen, because we actually moved dishwashers with the house. But what we know is that you and then I did a lot of work with a therapist, actually, who really kind of helped me kind of pull myself out of that. But when I was really tired or when I was really stressed, or when, like, things have been derailed, I went back, that voice came back. And that’s what brains do when we are in a highly stressful situations or things are chaotic, we haven’t had food or water. I always say, when the water’s low, the rocks will show habits come back, yeah, because habits are like that.

Dr. Sarah McKay 35:47
And that’s can be good if it’s a useful habit. Like, say, You’re a airline pilot, and you’ve trained and trained and trained, what’s doing an emergency, and then you’re an emergency situation, the habit, the habit should, like, you should just be able to fly the plane. That’s, you know, you’re not like, coming up with a creative solution when the plane’s crazy. Plane’s crashing, you’re following the systems and processes or your habits. And that’s what brains do. And so when the dishwasher voice used to come back, instead of me going, Oh, she’s still there, I would go, there must be why she come back. What’s the kind of the stress? Because when we go, when we’re stressed, we default to habits. Yes, we default to habits that are good and healthy. That’s great, yeah? Default to bad habits. So I learned that, and I suppose, like because the title of your It’s Grace That’s giving yourself grace, right? That’s, yeah, just being kind to yourself. Instead of going,

Courtney Townley 36:37
Oh, it’s still there, recognizing there’s

Dr. Sarah McKay 36:40
no, oh, I didn’t, I didn’t unwind that voice, after all, yeah, go. She’s come back because something else has got it’s like the canary in the gold mine. And then it was interesting that we moved house, but then my boys were older, and everything, you know, sort of switched up.

Courtney Townley 36:53
But let me ask you this, because you do talk in your book too about stress and the brain. What? And this is, it’s relevant to every human, especially living in modern times stress and resilience, but it is something that I find especially important for midlife women, because we are contending with hormones, sort of lowering our stress tolerance, and we’re also kind of balancing more responsibilities than we ever have. So what types of things help to make the brain more resilient to stress? Yeah,

Dr. Sarah McKay 37:25
I think. And we talk about stress as if it’s sort of one thing, and I don’t like the word, because when I’m trying to do some neuroscience and stress, we have the stress or so there’s this either external experience. It could be a spider on a wall, it could be covid. It could be this machine which is feeding the around the world and all this kind of stuff into us. Could be a thought. Could be a you could have a bleeding limb. You know, there’s lots of stress oars, and then we have our stress response systems within our body.

Dr. Sarah McKay 37:58
And there’s a couple of different, you know, sort of rapid response, and then sort of a slower response. And then they can be really quick, or they can be really long lasting. And then there’s our kind of perspective, or our perception of as my physiological stress response, and response to this stress, or making me feel stressed or not. So we have our perception, and that means, if I saw a spider crawl up the wall here, I mean, it might give me a fright, but I wouldn’t freak out as much as you know, an English tourist who’s never seen a Giant Australian spider before. So, you know, we might, we can have a stress response within our body that you could perceive as excitement and all it’s really going to run 100 meter race at the Olympics, you know, you got to have you kind of activated your stress response. It’s not necessarily a bad thing. It’s a good thing.

Dr. Sarah McKay 38:48
And your perception of that is positive versus, you know, that kind of rising panic you might feel, which could be an identical physiological response to the Olympic athlete. But it’s to a thought about an impending, you know, interview, you know, an exit interview with your boss or something. So we’ve got all of these different kind of components in there. And I think understanding stress dust doesn’t happen to us, and we have no agency over it. A large part of a stress process is our perception of this thing that is happening to us.

Dr. Sarah McKay 39:24
So our top down lens on that is incredibly important. We’ve got our one thing that lots of people don’t realize is that the more sort of physiologically fit and healthy we are, as in like cardiovascular fitness and metabolic fitness, doing all of the things that we know we’ve got to do at midlife that reduces our stress response, because something as simple, say as going from sitting to standing. The more cardiovascularly fit you are, the less your heart rate’s going to shoot up, the less you have to go into sort of a sympathetic drive to get your heart. Rate up, and your body then almost responds, going from sitting to standing in a more cool, calm and collected way than if you’re really unfit, the more times you’re having to activate your stress response system just to go about your normal day doing physiological activities like sitting and standing and walking and moving about, the easier your the more flexible your body is around that, yeah, and then there’s less data going into your brain, kind of putting you on alert mode, where your brain’s trying to make meaning of this constant activation.

Dr. Sarah McKay 40:34
This, I this is other whole theory talking about like midlife and menopause and hot flashes and night sweats. Yeah, night. Sweats are your body’s physiological response to your thermoregulation. Thermostat getting very narrow, and you get a bit hot at night, and your brain’s going, Oh, my God, it’s hot in here. It’s hot in here because the thermostats being dialed down due to lack of estrogen normally. So then it sends off a biological signal, sweat, dissipate heat, and then you’re under the covers, and you’re sound asleep. So it’s not working. So then your body has to and brain has to go, oh, we have to wake her up. So she behaves in a way, to throw the covers off. And so since this kind of burst of adrenaline sort of shooting through your body to wake you up.

Dr. Sarah McKay 41:20
And so women, like, kind of wake up, like you feel this adrenaline, like running through your legs, and you kind of wake up and and then you, oh, I’m so hot. And then you throw the covers off, and then you cool down. Now, when that happens five or six times a night, your body is your brain has literally woken you up. And we see the same thing happen in people with sleep apnea, because someone stops breathing, and they do this big sort of snort to wake up, and that’s stressing your heart. So we’re seeing poor cardiovascular health, and when your sympathetic nervous system is being activated for almost no reason, no reason, when you are asleep, that dials up your hyper vigilance.

Dr. Sarah McKay 42:00
That diet, it’s, it’s, it’s activating everything too many times, and what’s your brain then doing? Your brain’s going. I’ve, I must be anxious, like, what’s going? I feel really anxious. I feel really hyper vigilant. I feel really worried. Kind of got this, like, physiological anxiety response. Gotta make, me gotta make meaning of this. And so when you’re when you’re physiologically hyper vigilant, your brain perceives that as worrying about something. And then when you just got generalized, and I’m not saying you have generalized anxiety, but someone with generalized anxiety, then just, it’s like whatever hook they can kind of hang their anxiety hat on, like they’re just, you just kind of grabbing for anything. And then that dials you up even more.

Dr. Sarah McKay 42:41
And then the next night, you sleep terribly, and your sympathetic nervous system keeps waking you up. So it’s almost like this kind of spiral. And then you’re adding on top of that, poor cardiovascular health getting worse and worse. So it’s almost like this, you know, we really need to take this. We have to absolutely take this fundamentally holistic approach to not just stress at midlife, not just batting off the things out there, but also approaching how we manage stress physiologically, building for it, building our capacity for resilience and flexibility.

Dr. Sarah McKay 43:17
We’re not going to not activate our stress response, not going to active. Not activate our sympathetic nervous system. My sympathetic nervous system will be very activated right now because I’m speaking, and it needs to activate when you go from sitting to standing, because you have to increase your blood pressure so you don’t faint. We just want it to be flexible and to be able to come back down. We don’t want to not activate it. We need it to. We need to have the capacity and the resilience within ourselves. One of the best ways to do that is to improve your cardiovascular fitness.

Courtney Townley 43:47
is there a because there’s so again. I mean, the internet is riddled with advice on cardiovascular protocols and all kinds of things. But when, when you say cardiovascular like training or using cardiovascular exercise to help the health of the brain. Is there like, parameters for that?

Dr. Sarah McKay 44:07
Like, what would you, I mean, I’m not a fitness expert or a sports scientist, so I will say I’m not, I’m not entirely sure, because sometimes it’s, you’ve got to do head training and strength training, sure, others like, you’ve got to be in zone two. You know, you’ve got to do all the things. You know, you should run a marathon, shouldn’t run a marathon. I’m not familiar with with that data. We do know that your cardiovascular health and your brain health are fundamentally tied together.

Dr. Sarah McKay 44:34
Everything that you do that you would colloquially have heard for a healthy cardiovascular system and good metabolic health. You know, you don’t want to have diabetes, you don’t want to have even high blood sugar. You know, you don’t want to be kind of going down the path towards poor metabolic health and all of those sort of syndromes, all of those have negative consequences for short term and longer term brain health. I mean, we know that. I like to think about.

Dr. Sarah McKay 45:00
If you know anything about diabetes or heart disease, you know that it starts to impact not just your heart, but your cardiovascular system and all of those really fine capillaries that feed organs, like your kidneys, like your fingers and toes. People with, you know, really serious diabetes have to have fingers and toes amputated because the blood flow isn’t getting to them, so they sort of start to, you know, rot away. So it affects your retina, so people start to see, you know, vision loss. It affects all of those end organs.

Dr. Sarah McKay 45:32
And what’s the what’s the organ in the body which has the most fine microvasculature going to it? It is the brain. Brain. All of the brain imaging that we do is looking at blood flow through all these fine microvasculature and you know that kind of, you know, blood’s going here or going there. Brain imaging is looking at blood flow, yeah. And so our brain is going to be massively impacted by that physiological health state that we are in. So you’ve got to, you’ve got to do the exercise that the exercise that works for you. I think people say you’ve got to go to the gym, or has to be CrossFit. We’ve also got some really good data and about the link between muscle health and brain health.

Dr. Sarah McKay 45:32
And for a long time, we’ve known that if you have good muscle health, and you keep your muscles, you know, going, yeah, there was a positive impact there on brain health, and we’ve even got some data. If we’re looking at elderly people who are starting to show mild cognitive decline, we can kind of start to reverse that slightly by doing strength training, by building the muscles up. We don’t really kind of know what the link is.

Dr. Sarah McKay 46:34
Now we’ve got some really cool data showing that there’s these the that muscles are almost like an endocrine organ themselves. When you’re using them, when you’re doing the strength training on moving about, they release this hormone, which is called a myokine. And then one of them is called, I love it. It’s called erison, named after the Greek god Iris, which is like the God of Goddess of communication. And it communicates from your muscles, and it makes its way all the way through your bloodstream, crosses the blood brain barrier, it goes into your brain, and it turns on this particular chemical in your brain called brain derived neurotrading factor, BDNF. And that’s a good it’s good for your brain. You want, you want some BDNF. And so that’s the link between like, your muscles and your brain. So all of those things that we are told to do do have a positive knock on impact on the brain. We’re just sort of starting to, like, find out what the like the little mechanistic biological pathways are.

Courtney Townley 47:34
I love it. You call it in your brain. You refer to it as future proofing your brain. Yeah, yeah. These are the things, right? But

Dr. Sarah McKay 47:40
I don’t think we always just want to be thinking about be thinking about risk reduction, because it’s very It feels like a bit like everything I’m doing now is only so I’m not going to get old and we’re all going to we’re going to all get old and die. We’re not going to live forever. I mean, knowing that their science, some of those science bros, you know, the ice bath boys, yeah, might think that they’re going to lift. Yeah, they’re not going to lift. They’re doing their thing in Silicon Valley or wherever they are. They can, they can do their thing. That’s not, it’s not going to like, save the planet, right? We’re not going to like, prevent, you know, low middle income countries, dementia rates continuing to increase. But so I always kind of, I feel like future proof is really good and really important, but sometimes I feel it’s a bit removes the focus in from what’s the exercise I’m doing right now? Is it actually fun? Am I having a good time today? Is like today still a good old days? Am I still kind of and so we’ve got to choose things that we’re going to enjoy in the now, if we only focused on future proofing, which is important, that’s also kind of miserable, yeah? And it’s the only reason I’m the only reason I’m doing this is so one day I might reduce my dementia risk by 7%

Courtney Townley 48:49
right?

Dr. Sarah McKay 48:52
So it’s, you’ve got to have, like, a good a bit of fun now, like, we’re still, you know, still, yeah, today, the good times while you’re doing, though, and so I, I do all kinds of exercise. Like, I’m I’m so lucky where I live. Like, ocean swimming is a massive thing. We can all go and swim in this, like, kind of little marine park, and there’s little baby sharks, and there’s all kinds of stuff going on in the water, and everyone’s up at 6am at the beach, and I’ve got, like, a dance class I go to, oh, good for you. Yeah. I’m, like, in a musical theater group, but I’m like, the camera. I like that thing. I can’t dance. I’m uncoordinated, and I can even better, even better. And so we just have, like, our Tuesday night dance class, and we all learn a dance routine, and I’m useless, but we have so much fun doing it. I like going up to the I’ve got a gym really close. I’ve got an E bike so I can get down to the beaches, you know, I try and, like, have a little gonna have, like, some fun along the way, ladies, yeah, future, everything’s important, but in everything we do is so we might not get old, no? Well, we’re gonna get old, yeah?

Courtney Townley 49:53
And the only way we’re gonna maintain anything is if we’re having fun doing it right 100% Yeah. So I love this.

Dr. Sarah McKay 50:01
There’s a lack of, there’s a lack of kind of good times. Sometimes, I think when we talk about health and well being, it’s very serious, I know, and it’s very and it feels very kind of draining, almost like it’s another thing on the on the tick list of life to do. It removes a bit of the sort of the lightness and the joy and, you know, like, still actually have, like, I’ve got all my book club coming over tonight, and we’ll probably all drink way too much wine, and my boys will complain that we laugh too loud. And I don’t care.

Courtney Townley 50:37
I love it so much, I’m just gonna do all of the things right. There’s that piece of it too, connecting with others. I love all of that. So much, so good. So I’d love, before we go, for you to touch on because I know this is at least the research that I’ve read, which is obviously nowhere near the circle that you’re in. But women are we are more predisposed to dementia and Alzheimer’s. Is Is that correct?

Dr. Sarah McKay 51:02
So it’s really interesting, if you look at and I’ve been digging into this data lately, because this is, yeah, two out of three cases of dementia are in women. That may be the case, but we’ve got prevalence, and then we’ve got incidents. So prevalence is just like, how many people are there in the population with a particular disease, at anyone, if we like, to count them, and if we look and it’s, first of all, it’s different in different age groups. And second, it’s different in different parts of the world. So you’ve got to, like, what is our population? We’ve got to look at look at the world, look at the planet, and look down, and then choose our country. And we see a different we see a different prevalence, like total count and different in different parts of the world and in different ages, so and healthy, wealthy countries here, we’ve got some more women than men that have dementia.

Dr. Sarah McKay 51:51
One reason is because women live longer, and so there’s more of them alive, and so there’s more of them with dementia. And the men, when they kind of get old and sick, they die quite quickly, whereas women kind of like, hang on, so more women than men have dementia, particularly in low middle income countries and parts of the world where, if you like, die your way all the way back to the beginning of the lifespan, women have had a much rougher start to life, more stress, more adversity, and less opportunities to build brain resilience through education and opportunity. So we’ve got, you know, even prevalence differs in different parts of the world when we start to look at things like incidents. So that’s like, how many new cases are being diagnosed in a particular year in a place in a certain age group. If we look at data here in Australia, for example, we’ve got a study here called 45 and up, which has got about a quarter of a million Aussies in it. We can look at each we look at people in their 70s and their 80s and their 90s. Rates of new diagnoses of dementia. Males and females are level pegging up until about age 90, and then the new cases above age 90, women are sort of slightly higher for Alzheimer’s disease only.

Dr. Sarah McKay 53:04
Dementia is an umbrella. There’s lots of different types of causes of dementia. Dementia is kind of a description of symptoms Alzheimer’s disease. Women are slightly higher in their 90s, but not in ages below that, as almost as if people born kind of before, sort of then, before 1935 the females there are carrying that burden of risk. Well, you’ve got people born in 1935 what was happening in the first 20 years of their lives, and males and females that may have changed that sort of incidence there. And we see and so what we’re actually almost also seeing and healthy wealthy countries like Scandinavia, Europe, Australia, some pensboro and the US, you look we’re actually seeing the incidence the new cases being diagnosed on the decline, which is really good. We’re actually seeing new cases falling, and that’s because we’re getting better at treating a lot of this risk factors, cardiovascular disease being one of them.

Dr. Sarah McKay 54:02
And we’re also starting to see those early life things that the protective factors of like education and opportunity, particularly in wealthy countries, males and females, are kind of level pegging the whole way through in countries like low middle income countries, where there’s enormous gender inequality and there’s much more poverty and much less treatment of things like cardiovascular disease. We see very we see prevalence going up, and we see incidents going up, and we see women kind of carrying the burden of that increased incidence.

Dr. Sarah McKay 54:32
And so the story that you hear all the time all its hormones, it’s menopause, lack of estrogen that’s causing the dementia. That’s not the case, because we’re all going through menopause everywhere in the world at about the same time. Biology isn’t shifting in different parts of the world and different age groups. It’s got to be other factors too. The hormones and the menopause might be one part of it, but that’s not explaining the difference in prevalence and incidence in different parts. Of the world in different age groups.

Dr. Sarah McKay 55:01
Yeah, so it’s very easy to throw this data out and sound this alarm bell when we’ve got to we’ve got to take a global and a lifespan perspective and be very, very careful. And because if we’re doing that, then we can decide what to hone in on and watch target. And if we’re seeing that some of this reduction in risk is coming about because we’re far better at treating cardiovascular disease, and we’re now understanding metabolic syndromes are an important contributor to this, and we’re now thinking,

Dr. Sarah McKay 55:33
Well, what can we do in midlife to reduce our risks? Of both of those, we might get massive bang for our buck there. Yeah, and lower middle income countries where we’ve already got data showing that gender inequality has an impact on healthy brain development and girls and women in those countries, not men and girls and women. Well, that’s showing the fundamental importance of having a good start to life, particularly for girls and for reducing adversity and inequality and giving girls and boys equal opportunities in countries where they’ve got equal opportunities, we see less differences so interesting, and it makes we have to, we can’t just throw these stats out, thank you. And they go, Oh, it’s because of the hormones. That’s not how you do. That’s not good science, no. And that’s cherry picking data to support your particular and story. And it’s and it’s far too simple. If it was simple, we would know the solutions, and we and we simply don’t. But I love it.

Courtney Townley 56:32
Yeah, this echo of it’s treating the whole human. It’s looking at the whole human. It’s not just honing in on and

Dr. Sarah McKay 56:38
not everyone is like a healthy, wealthy, white lady with access to Instagram, yeah. And, you know, depending on where you know us, is a bit different. Access to good, free healthcare, absolutely not everyone. And where I live in Australia, you know, I’m just like, I live in the most amazing part of the world, and we’ve got, like this, incredibly high rates of health and well being and wealth and opportunity. And everyone’s, you know, down at the beach at 6am doing their little swims and runs, and it’s and it’s a and it’s a very easy place to be healthy and well, not everyone lives like that. Not everyone has had the same opportunities, and we’re failing to address that inequality, and I think that that’s to our detriment, because then that blinds us to what we or could be doing as well,

Courtney Townley 57:33
absolutely. Well, I want to respect your time, and you know, I could, I could listen to you all day. I could ask you questions all day. But to bring this to a close, I have two questions for you. Number one, is there anything that you want to sort of close this with, in terms of like, maybe a reminder or a tip for people who are listening? And also, I want to make sure that you let people know where to find out more about you and how to stay connected.

Dr. Sarah McKay 57:58
I think we need to remember, you know, the sort of two or three things that we know fundamentally make it easier to be healthy and well, and one of them sleep like if you haven’t got your sleep. That’s why I was talking about the anxiety and the hot flashes. Your TED talk on napping. Our TED Talk an afternoon naps, we’ve just got to just say whatever you can do to work on your sleep, and whether that’s taking menopause hormone therapies, you don’t get hot flashes so you don’t wake up at night with your nice sweats, whether that’s working on your exercise, whether that’s stopping your Sillies, the silly thing is so damaging, all of the things we know, all the things do, all of the things, whatever you can do to protect your sleep, because then you can build on top of that.

Dr. Sarah McKay 58:41
And when sleep’s disrupted, health is disrupted, short term and long term mental health, physical health, long term brain health, emotional other thing is, just like me and my we lost a family dog at the end of last year. We’ve got a new we loved him so much. We replaced him really quickly. Unfortunately, the old the new puppy responds to the old dog’s name because we didn’t have enough of a gap. But it was kind of fun, because we were sort of talking about how he’d been in the family since my boys were little, and my boys and our teenagers and and we were like,

Dr. Sarah McKay 59:10
Oh, the good old days. And we’ve got these Facebook memories of when the boys were little and the dog and then, and then I said, You know what? Like, in 10 years time, now it’s going to be the good old days, because we’re still here and the boys are still at home. God for that crying. And so we were like, now has to be the good we still have to have fun. And every we have, have to try and make every day still the good old days. And so we got a new puppy. We’re like, when this need life experiences.

Dr. Sarah McKay 59:34
And I think if we can think about all of these, these, this tick list of health and well being, I call them the ice bath boys, because I can call them the ice bath boys, the focus on optimization, I know, is so boring and serious and self obsessed good old time where you’re doing it all like get together with your girlfriends and drink too much wine, like that is so much. On and it is so funny, and just have laughs and just do silly things, because the older you get, the less you give a shit, and the more fun you can have. And so please just find a fun and funny group of people to, like, kind of enjoy these days with. Yeah, that’s that social tick box. So they’re the two social and sleep and just like, just try not to take it too seriously. Yeah, so

Courtney Townley 1:00:23
good, so good. And then tell us where people the best place for them to come.

Dr. Sarah McKay 1:00:28
Oh, yeah. So drsarahmckay.com is my website, kind of the portal through to all things. I’m doing quite a bit on Instagram at the moment, because I’ve got a bit more time and space at the moment, not writing a book. So I’m as I update the second edition of the women’s brain book. Each new, like, kind of, oh my goodness, this is so interesting paper, which I’m finding I’m coming across, like, the incidence, prevalence, dementia stuff. Yeah, I’m doing a little like, real. I don’t love doing real. I don’t love being on camera. I know. But you know you can shrink yourself down and put yourself in the corner, yeah,

Courtney Townley 1:01:04
that is true, and have research , yeah, yes.

Dr. Sarah McKay 1:01:07
So I’m so I’m I’m doing that because I want to not be arguing. I don’t want to argue. I don’t want to go, oh, that data you’ve shared is wrong. I don’t do that. That’s not my vibe. It’s just boring and annoying. I’d just rather like keep on sharing, doing what I do best, communicating good neuroscience and ways that are meaningful, and not telling anyone what to do. I don’t care how you live your life. You do you. But here’s some, like, interesting findings, some meaning. I

Courtney Townley 1:01:33
love that so much. And I don’t think we mentioned this, and I think it’s important, because it’s such an incredible resource. But you do a lot of courses for professionals and people. It mean, really, that’s kind of the meat of what you do now, yes, yeah, that’s, well, that’s,

Dr. Sarah McKay 1:01:46
that’s the, that’s the source of income. So, yeah, yeah. So I’ve got applied neuroscience and brain health courses. I’ve got one coming up in a couple of weeks. It’s a 12 week program called the neuroscience Academy, and you can get your CPD hours and apply to your various organizations. I teach that over two weeks. I’ve got another kind of second stage course of that that you find out after you’ve done the first one, and I have got a course that’s kind of on hold at the moment, on women’s brain health specifically, but that’s on hold while I do the book updates, so that when I next teach that I’m teaching where we’re at in 2025 it’ll be although I’m kind of taking a bit of a gap year next year as well, because

Dr. Sarah McKay 1:02:29
I’m turning 50 at the beginning of January, I’m going to go to Antarctica first, and then me and my husband are buying rap he’s turning 50s, while we’re buying around the world business class flights to go and visit all of our friends all the way around the world and have dinner with them. Yeah, have dinner with them. I’m just gonna, like, you know, I’m taking some speaking gigs in like, cool places, and I’m just having a really good time. I’m not going to be sad about turning 50. I’m going to like, go. I got here I had a very dear friend from childhood dive ovarian cancer last year, just after a 49th birthday, and so we all went to school together, so we’re all gonna live our best 50 year old lives for her Absolutely.

Courtney Townley 1:03:09
Oh yeah, well, I’m excited to watch from the outside you live that year. Thank you so much for everything you do and for making the time to be here today. I really appreciate it. Thanks.

Dr. Sarah McKay 1:03:19
Thanks for listening to my

Courtney Townley 1:03:21
Absolutely.

Courtney Townley 1:03:28
Thank you for listening to the Grace and Grit podcast. It is time to mend the fabric of the female health story, and it starts with you taking radical responsibility for your own self care. You are worth the effort, and with a little grace and grit, anything is possible.