Reclaim your brain

Attention span short? Thoughts foggy? Memory full of gaps? Brigid Moss investigates the latest ways to sharpen your thinking.

- 

Perimenopause made me realise that our brains need looking after. When my hormones changed, I found my attention span got scrappier, and I couldn’t finish a whole page of a book. Little did I know, oestrogen fluctuations can lead to brain fog. And the perimenopausal drop in progesterone impacts the amygdala, the brain’s fear-processing centre.

“That is going to make you more easily triggered, bothered by things and more likely to worry, too,” says neuroscientist Nicole Vignola, author of Rewire. If this sounds all too familiar, take comfort. Most women do recover from peri-brain fog once in menopause (and HRT can help alleviate it, too). But then, I also worry about dementia, which affects twice as many women as men.

“The thought of getting Alzheimer’s disease or dementia frightens people,” says Dr Sabine Donnai, who runs a brain-health clinic. “When you have dementia, you’re coming to the problem too late, but earlier in life there are things you can do to preserve your brain.”

Scientists don’t yet know everything about what causes neurodegeneration and the death of brain cells. But fundamentally, the brain’s needs are similar to the needs of a healthy body: To manage stress, sleep enough, exercise regularly – with some tweaks that make them better for the brain (see the Mini Mind Workout box, overleaf). And doing this will keep you happier, too.

“Brain health is mental health,” says Nicole Vignola. “If your brain is the hardware, your mental health is the software. Both need to be in good working order for mental performance.”