The Ultimate Guide to the Female Brain: Neuroscientist Reveals How to Boost Mood, Energy, & Focus

Mel Robbins (00:00:11):

Dr. Sarah Mackay is a brilliant neuroscientist and author. She got her master's of science and doctorate in neuroscience at the University of Oxford. Dr. Mackay is an expert in how the female brain works, puberty periods, sex, pregnancy, menopause, hormone replacement therapy, and dementia. You're never going to look at yourself or what's possible the same way again. Is it true that female brains are wired for emotion and that the male brain is more logical?

Dr. Sarah Mckay  (00:00:42):

False, false, false. False.

Mel Robbins (00:00:44):

One of the things that I read in your book is that a woman gets her period about 450 times in her lifetime. What is happening in the female brain when you're going through your menstruals cycle?

Dr. Sarah Mckay  (00:00:56):

Oh gosh, this is like we could do hours and hours on this one. Mel, what does the pill do to your brain? One of my favorite topics, Mel. So...

Mel Robbins (00:01:06):

I can't believe you just said that. What is going on in our brains when puberty hits?

Dr. Sarah Mckay  (00:01:12):

Brains go through puberty too, and the really wild thing is

Mel Robbins (00:01:16):

How does pregnancy change the brain?

Dr. Sarah Mckay  (00:01:19):

We see this enormous structural reorganization

Mel Robbins (00:01:22):

Really?

Dr. Sarah Mckay  (00:01:22):

And rewiring of the brain through the course of a pregnancy.

Mel Robbins (00:01:26):

What happens?

(00:02:21):

I want to point out that you have people in your life who care about you and they want you to understand the truth and the science about how your brain works and how to work with it. Or they may have sent this to you to validate some of the experiences that you've had or that you may be dealing with now and to give you some tangible things that you could change in order to make your life better from one of the leading neuroscientists in the world. Isn't that pretty cool? So thanks for hitting play. Dr. Sarah Mackay is a brilliant neuroscientist and author who has flown over 10,000 miles all the way from Australia to be here in our Boston Studios for one reason, she's here for you. Dr. Mackay has spent 30 years studying the brain with a specific focus on how three factors impact the development of the female brain and the male brain. She got her master's of science and doctorate in neuroscience at the University of Oxford, which is the number one ranked university in the world. The entire world.

(00:03:22):

Dr. Mackay is an expert in how the female brain works in every stage of life, from utero to puberty periods, sex, pregnancy, menopause, hormone replacement therapy, and dementia. We are going to walk through every single one of these stages. You're going to learn what's happening in the female brain during each and every one of those stages today. And if you're a guy who's listening, I'm so thrilled you're here because you're going to learn a lot about your brain too. Dr. McKay is the author of three bestselling books on brain health, including the Women's Brain Book. And here's what she's going to tell you. Your brain is not broken. It is powerful beyond what you can believe. It is adaptable. In fact, it's always adapting. And once you understand this and you understand the three factors she's going to teach you about that you need to know that impact how your brain adapts. You're never going to look at yourself or what's possible the same way again. So please help me welcome Dr. Mackay to the Mel Robbins Podcast, Dr. Sarah Mackay. Thank you, thank you. Thank you for jumping on a plane flying 10,000 miles to be here in our Boston Studios. I'm so excited to meet you, to learn from you. Thank you.

Dr. Sarah Mckay  (00:04:39):

Thank you for the invite. I'm so excited to be here. It's cool.

Mel Robbins (00:04:43):

We have so much to learn from you. Now, you have been a neuroscientist for 30 years. You have written three books about the female brain. You speak and teach about the female brain to audiences around the world. Could you speak to the person who is with us right now and share with them how might life be different if they take everything that you're about to teach us today to heart and they apply it to their own life?

Dr. Sarah Mckay  (00:05:11):

I would like them to know that their brains are not broken. There's a real focus it seems, on things like brain fog and baby brain and burnout, and we are forgetful and there's always a focus on what goes wrong. But when we think about the course of our lives and what neuroscience is actually showing us, it's teaching us that our brains aren't broken. They're adaptable and resilient, and that's the main message.

Mel Robbins (00:05:39):

Is it fair to say, just for the person listening, that when you talk about male female brain, you're talking from neuroscience and a biology standpoint? We're not having a conversation about gender.

Dr. Sarah Mckay  (00:05:49):

No.

Mel Robbins (00:05:49):

Okay.

Dr. Sarah Mckay  (00:05:50):

Yeah, and we can talk about gendered experiences, the experiences of being a person in the world who is a girl who is a boy, or perhaps the identity that you have. But typically where neuroscience is focused is looking at brain biology.

Dr. Sarah Mckay  (00:06:14):

Okay.

Mel Robbins (00:06:15):

Is it true that female brains are wired for emotion and that the male brain is more logical,

Dr. Sarah Mckay  (00:06:22):

False, false, false. False that there's a male brain that's wired like this and a female brain that's wired like that? I mean men feel emotions and I'm quite logical. I'm sure you are too Mel. So false.

Mel Robbins (00:06:34):

And that female brains are wired for intuition and the mother instinct, is that a thing that we're hardwired for?

Dr. Sarah Mckay  (00:06:44):

I think intuition is a human phenomenon. It's not male or female, and that's really based on experience and wisdom, and that's not the sex-based difference.

Mel Robbins (00:06:56):

How about women make rash decisions? We're very emotional decision makers

Dr. Sarah Mckay  (00:07:03):

That's really feeding into that stereotypical myth that because women have a menstrual cycle or our hormones change and fluctuate, that that's kind of what's driving us. And I don't think that's the case. I mean, I feel like quite a logical, rational being.

Mel Robbins (00:07:20):

I feel the same way, but I can get really pissed off and emotional too.

Dr. Sarah Mckay  (00:07:23):

But I mean I think all males can too. I think perhaps we've been socialized perhaps to express those in different ways, but the idea that women are so emotional and irrational and that somehow emerges from our female pink brains from Venus is just false.

Mel Robbins (00:07:42):

Let's talk about math.

Dr. Sarah Mckay  (00:07:44):

Yeah, I think math or maths, as I say, I add the 'S' on this is one of these stereotypes which is pervasive. It's all around the world. It starts quite young and it extends right through this idea that males are more brilliant. It's this real stereotype. And males are also very confident about their brilliance or the apparent brilliance versus women who are a whole lot more humble. And I think even this idea that boys are brilliant and girls are perhaps less brilliant, but they're hardworking, starts really young. And so this is another piece of research that I always like to discuss. It came from a research group in New York, and we can put it in the show notes. So the researchers went in and they were looking at children in those first few years of elementary school. So they went in and talked to kids who are about five and six and said, Hey, who do you think out of these two people in these images here are going to grow up are super smart.

(00:08:41):

There's a picture of a male and a picture of a female, and they ask them five and six year olds, and the girls pick the woman and the boys pick the man. And then they say, who wants to play the game for super smart children? And all of the girls put their hands up and say, me and all the boys put their hands up and say me. Then they go back a couple of years later and the kids are seven and eight and they say, who of these people is smart? The man or the woman and all the boys go the man and all the girls go the man. And then they say, who wants to play the game for the super smart kids? And all the boys go me. Some of the girls still go me, but lots of the girls go, oh, that's the game for the boys. The boys are the smart, brilliant ones. And that starts to emerge. And they've gone and they've looked at this in different parts of the world that kind of by about ages seven boys think that they're brilliant. And the girls have started to recognize, well, it's the boys that are brilliant. Being clever and good at maths is a boy thing.

Mel Robbins (00:09:39):

So how do you explain that as a neuroscientist? Is that because of the images you see in the media and the people that are in elected office and just the world reflecting back to you? And so subconsciously your brain is recognizing a pattern and it starts to go, oh, people who look like that do things like this, I look like this, which means I don't do things like that. Is that kind of what's happening?

Dr. Sarah Mckay  (00:10:05):

I think it's all of the things. It's everything from TV to books to even the way we talk about it. And I think we can be incredibly well intentioned as well and perhaps give a bit of implicit messaging. And there's some phrases I think people use and I always try and pull 'em up on it. They might go, oh, well girls can do maths too, or Girls are just as good at maths as boys. And that's kind of implying that boys are the reference point. And then girls can also do that, or boys are the maths people, but girls can be maths people too. So I think we almost need to be really careful about the implicit messaging. We're inadvertently sending little girls by saying, girls can too. Perhaps we should be saying there is no difference in ability to do maths between boys and girls. Start talking about what the science actually shows.

Mel Robbins (00:10:55):

Is that what the science shows? There's no difference between a boy or a girl's ability to do math.

Dr. Sarah Mckay  (00:11:00):

If we've got any boy and any girl just randomly pick them. We couldn't see differences in math scores. Some studies some of the time if feel like we were to look at like 10,000 boys age nine and 10,000 girls age nine, there might be a few extra boys scoring at that sort of the top, top, top marks, but like a teeny tiny amount. And that's perhaps where that gendered stereotype comes from, but what no one's ever saying, although perhaps people might have come across that if we were to do the same perhaps with verbal ability or reading ability, there might be a few girls right at the top there as well. And there's this other crazy study, I believe this was published in the New York Times where they looked at Google searches and they found there were twice as many Google searches for, is my son a genius than is my daughter a genius? But people were more likely to search for is my daughter fat or is my daughter ugly then is my boy.

Mel Robbins (00:11:56):

Now if you dial down though, Dr. Mackay to the neuroscience implications of this, if you're seeing by the age of seven or eight a belief system and patterns that get reflected back to little boys that say you're smarter or you're this. And then the pattern that gets reflected back to the female brain referring to the experience and the development of a brain inside the little girl's body, how does that messaging change the wiring and the firing and the connections that happen in the brain? Do you see what I mean? The beliefs and the patterning start to create patterns of beliefs and behavior that then lock in and change the development of your brain.

Dr. Sarah Mckay  (00:12:46):

Yeah, I mean you've said it. That's precisely what happens. And once children start to believe something about themselves, then they will choose to opt in or opt out of certain activities and behaviors or perhaps not try. We do start to see little girls start opting out. I used to do some work on one of my, I've got two sons who are now teenagers when they're at primary school. I used to go and help out in their classroom, and I remember one little girl asking me what I did as a job and I said, oh, I'm a scientist. She says, oh, well I really love dolphins, but I can't be a scientist because I'm no good at maths. And I was like, oh, I nearly cried. I was like, we need to sort of stop these messages because as soon as you start believing about that yourself, even when you're a tiny child, you're going to start opting out and you're not going to have the enriched experiences, which is what a little brain needs. And we see this all around the world and we see this permeating all the way through the lifespan.

Mel Robbins (00:13:40):

That is amazing. And so I think it's really important that as you're listening that you actually take away, there is no difference. Boys and girls are both good at math. They're both capable of being good at math. They're both capable of developing the skill of math. But this is an important thing to hover on because what you're pointing to is that the messaging and your life experiences start to shape the way that your brain wires up and the beliefs that you have, which then impact how you move through the world. I want to back up and ask you a question because I'm just curious. If you open up somebody's head and you take a brain out, would you be able to tell whether it was male or female?

Dr. Sarah Mckay  (00:14:24):

No, just by looking at that, if you were blinded to the human that you took it out of and a brain surgeon wouldn't be able to open it up and look at it and go, well, that's male and that's female on average, male brains are maybe like five to 10% larger than female brains. But part of that is accounted for by body size and scale size. That brain is kind of driving a bigger body around the world, but even then, you're not going to be able to look at a single brain and go, that's male or that's female.

Mel Robbins (00:14:52):

The reason why I'm asking this question is because I think already what I'm realizing is the mistake that you make when you hear female and male brain is thinking that structurally the brain itself is completely different, and what you're here to say is no. But because of neuroscience and because of neuroplasticity, the brain is constantly changing, adapting and rewiring. And so when you say the word female brain, you are basically saying that the female brain adapts and changes differently than the male brain based on the fact that the experience of being female and the hormones that you have and the way that your body changes, impacts the development of the brain. Is that what you're basically saying and is that the right way to think about it?

Dr. Sarah Mckay  (00:15:41):

Yeah, that's one way to think about it. And another way I think about it is often we think that biological sex is the biggest difference between two people. So I've got this study I can tell you about that I think kind of helps explain what I'm trying to say here. So this study was published in 2023 and they had nearly 8,000 MRI scans of healthy young humans who are in their twenties and thirties. And an MRI scan is when you put a human in their brain in a brain scanner and you kind of take a photo of the brain structure. And then they gathered them from 29 different countries in the world, and then they ranked those countries based on gender equality. So they looked at things like access to education or work opportunities, et cetera. And so countries that would score really high in gender equality would be like the Scandinavian countries like say Denmark and Sweden.

(00:16:33):

And countries that scored lower in this study were places like Brazil and Turkey and India. And it turned out when they compared male and female brains in these countries with more equality, the brains were more similar In countries with greater gender inequality, male and female brains were more different, and the male brains everywhere were the same. It was the women's brains, the female brains in countries with gender inequality that were more different. And so the researchers think it was something to do with access to education and the stress of the whole living in this kind of society with structural sexism, et cetera. So we've got biological sex there determining this particular metric that they measured in the MRI scan. But you've also got the gendered experiences of people living in those countries.

Mel Robbins (00:17:24):

Dr. Mackay, based on the study, I just want to try to give something back to you to see if I am interpreting what you just shared correctly, what that study suggests, especially given that the male brains didn't change a lot, but the female brains did based on the inequity, the stress, the access to education, the messaging women in various parts of the world, that the differences that emerge between the male brain and the female brain have a lot to do with the external factors and social conditioning and the stress and trauma and whatever else that the human being with the brain is experiencing.

Dr. Sarah Mckay  (00:18:09):

I couldn't have said it better.

Mel Robbins (00:18:11):

What are some of the things that really impact the development of the female brain and the experience of the female brain that maybe a lot of people don't even stop and consider are impacting brain development?

Dr. Sarah Mckay  (00:18:28):

I think this study in particular, the researchers are very careful. We are scientists. We always like to be very careful to say they couldn't tell exactly what to attribute those differences to. But one overarching idea that we often talk about in this field is the idea of enriched experiences or enriched environments. So this is living somewhere obviously safe where they can explore when children can be educated, when there are opportunities to be able to explore the environment and learn and be shaped by it. And it seems that in the case where there is great gender inequality, the little girls in those parts of the world don't have as many enriched opportunities as the little boys do.

Mel Robbins (00:19:20):

That makes a lot of sense. It makes a lot of sense because I remember Gabor Mate was on the show and he was talking about health outcomes for women and was pointing to the rise in autoimmune diseases that are impacting women. And basic said, obviously there's biological factors, there's factors where people are more predisposed from a gene perspective, but that it is irrefutable that women experience more stress, they're the victims of more violence, they experience more trauma and in parts of the world are also discriminated against. And those adverse life experiences, which are not your fault, certainly impact your immune system. It impacts your nervous system, which in your research certainly also has an impact on that the brain develops.

(00:20:16):

And so that's just super helpful to kind of have as a backdrop only because when you talk about the male and female brain, a dummy like me is like, oh, she's talking about the difference between the male and the female brain. And there must be different. Like a woman has a vagina, a man has a penis, they're different. You are basically saying no, the experience of being is different and that can have an impact on the way things develop and function.

Dr. Sarah Mckay  (00:20:55):

Well, it's inspired by the bio-psychosocial framework, which is a really boring way to talk about things. So I like to talk about biology as being the bottom up. So our brain is receiving information from our bottom up body.

(00:21:08):

So that is everything from our hormones to the food we've eaten to muscle tension to sensations we can feel in our body to all of the signals that we wouldn't have. You wouldn't have a clue what your gut pH is at any moment in time. So your brain is receiving all of that data. Data is also streaming in from the outside world through our senses, through what we see, what we hear, and if something's close enough to us, we could smell it or taste it or touch it. And that includes everything from the rising and setting of the sun to other people in our interactions with them, to our lived environments, to what is streaming in on that phone that we are holding in our hand. And that's become a really big outside influence within the last decade or two. And the brain is then making meaning of what's happening in our body in the context of the outside world. But we've also got what I call top down, and that could be our thoughts, our expectations, our past experiences, all of which is kind of mixing up with the bottom up, the outside and in the top down. And each of these factors can influence others. So we know that perhaps an outside in influence could shape a top-down experience. So perhaps loneliness could shape the experience of depression

(00:22:30):

Or we know that something bottom up can shape something going on in our brain. So we know during pregnancy, for example, the hormones during pregnancy shape and sculpt our brain so that we interact with the outside in a baby in a particular way. So that's just how I like to simplify the complexity of all of the information that the brain is making meaning of at any one moment in time.

Mel Robbins (00:22:58):

Lemme see if I can give that back to you. So you have a three part framework, and the first one was bottom up, which basically the way I would put it is every single physical input data point that is happening in your body is messaging up to the brain.

(00:23:14):

And that's one thing that shapes your brain. It's one thing that impacts your brain. Second thing is you're getting flooded from the outside world through your senses, from the headlines to people's moods to all that stuff. And all of that actually also is input into your brain that changes and shapes your brain, how it functions, the patterns, all of it. And then you said top down, which is the thoughts, the messaging, the things that you're thinking about, that you're trying to make sense of is also impacting. And you're talking about the physical structure, the neuro connections, all of that.

Dr. Sarah Mckay  (00:23:53):

And the brain is kind of processing all of that information and then going, well, what should I do next?

Mel Robbins (00:23:59):

Well, what I love about this because it's very encouraging and empowering, is that if all of these three inputs the physical body, the outside world, the things that you say to yourself are actively shaping your brain, then if you get more intentional about all three of those things, then you can actively shape your brain in a positive way, particularly if you understand the developmental cycle that your brain is in and sort of the objective that it's trying to achieve. I would love to take a moment and really understand how the brain continues to develop throughout a woman's life. And so let's start at the beginning. Are there any other differences in terms of the way the brain develops between a baby boy and a baby girl?

Dr. Sarah Mckay  (00:24:44):

Not really. Typically when we are looking at that developmental trajectory of the brain from kind of birth through to puberty, little children's brains kind of develop along a pretty predictable trajectory, and there will be more differences in how children are raised or their life experiences they have or heaven forbid, adverse experiences they have. But then there would be between males and females. And so during that sort of first year of life, this is explosive brain growth. We've got new neurons being born, which are a type of brain cell, and the development in that first year of life is five times faster than the next five years. That preschool development is faster than the entire rest of your life. So by the time you start school, your brain is at an 80 to 90% of where it will be for the entire rest of its life.

Mel Robbins (00:25:38):

Wait, hold on a second. By the time you're in preschool,

Dr. Sarah Mckay  (00:25:41):

You're at primary school, primary school. So elementary school you would say. So by the time you're about five, your brain contains almost all of the neurons that we'll ever have. And what you start to see from then on is the connections between the neurons or synapse as we call them. We start to see them forming circuits, making connections, pruning and tuning. And most of the development we see through mid and late childhood up to puberty is not so much adding new neurons and getting bigger and bigger, but kind of refining the connections and streamlining the circuits in the brain so the brain can kind of get on with the business of learning how to be a little human.

Dr. Sarah Mckay  (00:26:39):

So I always like to say brains go through puberty too.

Mel Robbins (00:26:44):

Oh, I love that.

Dr. Sarah Mckay  (00:26:44):

Yeah. We think about it as being something that our body does, but our brains are going through puberty too. So if we just, let's just focus on female puberty, but male puberty happens to, and in fact, male and female brains follow a similar trajectory, but kind of almost kickstarted by sex hormones. So it doesn't matter whether it's the estrogen and the girls' brains or the testosterone and the boys' brains, they kind of follow a similar trajectory. In fact, just to kind of clarify that, we often, you might've heard this idea that girls' brains are more mature than boys' brains when they're going through the teenage years, but that's because girls on average tend to go through puberty about a year or so earlier than boys. And what we know is that brains are more likely to track along pubertal stage than chronological age.

Mel Robbins (00:27:40):

Oh

Dr. Sarah Mckay  (00:27:41):

Yeah. Because you think about all of the kids that you've ever known when they start going through puberty, and you could get a boy who's going through puberty quite young, perhaps he's six foot tall, his voice has dropped and he's got hair everywhere, and he's 12. Whereas you could have a little girl who's 16 who hasn't started her periods yet. Well, his brain would perhaps be at a later stage of development than hers would be. That's so cool. But we typically think that girls' brains are more developed than boys. But that's just because on average, girls hit puberty a year, a year earlier.

Mel Robbins (00:28:14):

No wonder middle school is so confusing because you basically may be sitting next to somebody who's got a 19-year-old brain, but you yourself have the 12-year-old pubal stage in your brain. Wow, that makes a lot of sense.

Dr. Sarah Mckay  (00:28:28):

So there's sort of like a biological clock sort of switches over in your brain saying, Hey, it's time to start puberty. And then that sends a message down to your ovaries, and then the ovaries sort of start that monthly cycle. It takes a while for ovulation to kind of set in as we're going in through puberty, but then we start to see the ovaries releasing pubertal hormones or sex hormones, primarily estrogen and progesterone. And what we see in brains then is a lot of the growth that happens during childhood in the brain, particularly the gray matter, which is kind of the wrinkly outer kind of covering of the brain and also some little subcortical structures, we see that sort of start to refine and streamline. So I said we've got all of the neurons, all the brain cells that we're ever going to have, but what we see is the connections between them kind of pruning and tuning. So we see the ones that we don't need almost being kind of pruned away, and the ones that we want to be, they kind of become tuned.

Mel Robbins (00:29:29):

What ones do we not need?

Dr. Sarah Mckay  (00:29:30):

Well, what determines what ones stay and what ones go are the experiences that we have. So the brain kind of goes into this sort of new phase of sensitivity to experiences.

Mel Robbins (00:29:43):

Really?

Dr. Sarah Mckay  (00:29:44):

Very similar to what we see when a little child's learning to talk. So their language centers of their brain go into this critical period, and those little people will seek out experiences of language. They're constantly pointing and asking why and wanting to get your attention. They're constantly wanting you to converse with them because the language centers in their brain need conversation to wire up when you're going through puberty and adolescence. A large part of that reorganization and pruning and tuning is in the social brain. And that's when we start to see those parts of the brain reorganize and shape. And what is kind of required, I think, fundamentally, to go from the family nest out into the world and build a new tribe of your own is courage. And one thing that we see is the flip side of courages bravado. So we've also got layered on top of all of the social brain development.

(00:30:41):

We've also got a lot of sensation seeking, wanting to kind of go out and have all of these experiences because that's kind of what courage to leave the family nest is kind of resulting in as well. It's like I need to go out and I need to try all these new things and I need to have these experiences and I need to do all of these things with all of these different people because the brain requires all of that to one rewire and reorganize to become an adult. But two, to be brave enough to become an adult.

Mel Robbins (00:31:11):

This is so cool because basically the brain has all of this programming ready to come online, and it's the hormones during puberty that are like, alright, it's go time. You hate your parents, your friends are important, you need a significant other. Your town that you grew up in sucks. And it's time to go explore the world. You hate everybody and everything and you think you know it all.

Dr. Sarah Mckay  (00:31:35):

Yes.

Mel Robbins (00:31:35):

That's basically the wiring in the brain.

Dr. Sarah Mckay  (00:31:38):

A hundred percent, a hundred percent.

Mel Robbins (00:31:39):

And is there a difference between the way that puberty for the male brain brings that online or the way that boys tend to respond to that change versus the way that the puberty hormones and all of that coming up and lighting up in the brain is different for girls?

Dr. Sarah Mckay  (00:31:59):

I mean, we do start to see some of the sex differences that we see in adulthood do start to emerge around puberty. And we can talk a little bit about perhaps mental health in a moment, but in terms of that developmental trajectory from a child's brain to an adult's brain, we all go through that. But the experiences that we are kind of seeking out are the same types of experiences and often there with each other of course. And we've got that. We see these behaviors sometimes play out differently. And part of that may be, particularly in young males, testosterone does drive a tendency towards some types of behaviors that sensation seeking in particular, which looks to adults like really dumb decision-making or risky behavior. Girls might be less likely to do the same kinds of reckless activities. But there are some things that girls can do that might not necessarily be to their benefit, but we might need to encourage them a little bit more, even if it's just to do something that might feel to them risky, like, I dunno, putting your hand up in the classroom and asking a crazy question. There's different types of risks that people take depending on what kind of peer approval they're going to be getting. So it's very hard to separate out the risk taking behavior there from that social aspect of peer approval.

Mel Robbins (00:33:22):

What I find fascinating is just that this is all in the brain ready to activate, and you can get very frustrated if you're a parent or if you're the older sibling, and we roll our eyes at those years without this recognition that actually this is part of what the brain goes through that is developmentally accurate and normal for somebody that age.

Dr. Sarah Mckay  (00:33:51):

All through childhood. If we were to have diagnosed anxiety, depression, boys and girls are pretty similar. And we do start to see divergence of puberty. Boys of course can experience anxiety and of course experience depression, but we do see a higher incidence in girls. And I think then the next question to ask is, well, what causes something like depression or what causes something like anxiety? And I always say, depression comes in many shades of blue, and there's as many shades of blue as there are causes of those shades of blue. And this is when I like to get back to my basic model of we've got this brain sort of sitting in a universe, it's sitting in our body. So there's all of this information that it's receiving from our body, everything from hormones, and we tend to just blame the hormones. But there's a lot going on in our biological bodies that we can do to take care of our brains, sleep, exercise, food, all of the things that we as mothers tell us to do.

(00:34:54):

So we've got our bottom up biology, which we could tweak and shape and shift to influence depression outcomes. We've got a lot of outside influences, education, family, do you have stable, loving relationships? So we've got all of that in the outside world. And if we are breaking friendships or we are lonely or we are stressed by social media, our brain is making meaning of that information, the outside in as well as the bottom up. And then we've got top down because we're humans. So we are constantly telling ourselves stories and making meaning of what's going on. So perhaps we are ruminating or perhaps we haven't learned to reframe into a more healthier way of thinking. And all of these pieces of information from the bottom up, the outside and the top down, our brain is making meaning of all of them. And there's going to be differences there between boys and girls.

Mel Robbins (00:35:49):

And by meaning you basically mean the brain is changing the way it's wired, creating new connections, ending old connections, locking in beliefs based on this kind of three-part framework of the bottom up, which is the physical environment that the body's in the outside world. And you use the word flooded, which I freaking love how it feels.

Dr. Sarah Mckay  (00:36:12):

It comes in through our senses, through our eyes and our ears.

Mel Robbins (00:36:15):

Yes. And then the top down, which is the things that you're saying to yourself as you're trying to make sense of all of this, all of which impacts the way your development operates and develops.

Dr. Sarah Mckay  (00:36:27):

And if something's not quite right, in many, many, many, many of those different kind of data inputs, any one of them could influence mood and depression and anxiety. So as I say, there's many shades of blue. So it could be someone's more depressed because maybe a girl is what we might say hormone sensitive. So we like to talk about hormones as being the cause for depression and the cause for anxiety, and that's why we start giving those girls that message from puberty and it's really damaging. But we do know that there are some girls and women who are what we might call hormone sensitive. It's not like they've got bigger highs and lower lows of hormones, it's that there's something about their body which makes them a little bit more sensitive or vulnerable to those shifts.

Mel Robbins (00:37:14):

Dr. Mackay, I should say that one of the reasons why I'm jumping on this term hormone sensitivity is because in the past I have absolutely blamed bad period cramps, menopausal symptoms, all kinds of stuff on just being sensitive to hormones. What I'm learning from you and what I've learned as the mother to two daughters in their twenties that have had issues with hormones is that we reach for the label, but you're teaching us that this is much more complicated than just a label. Because if you think about the three factors, there are things within your control, whether you're talking about are you eating healthy, are you getting sleep? Are you not drinking alcohol? Are you moving your body? Are you connected to positive friends? Look at some of these things in your control. Get a good night's sleep for a couple of weeks, stop drinking alcohol, reconnect with your friends, take better care of yourself and see if you're able to manage the ups and downs of life and your hormones a little bit better. I love that. And I love that you're making us smarter about the things that we can do.

Dr. Sarah Mckay  (00:38:25):

I think

Mel Robbins (00:38:25):

Why is sleep and getting more sleep, other than social connection for the male and female brain, why is sleep so critical for the female brain?

Dr. Sarah Mckay  (00:38:34):

And I think for the brain, for babies, teenagers, everyone, if we miss one night's sleep, everything is harder. It is so much harder to do all of the other things that we need to do both on our to-do list, but also to look after ourselves. So we all know how bad we feel after one night's sleep being disrupted.

Mel Robbins (00:38:53):

What are the repercussions? What's happening when you sleep, that's important for your brain health?

Dr. Sarah Mckay  (00:38:59):

So there's a whole host of different things that kind of go on. So we know that that's when our memories get consolidated during the day. Our brain's kind of sifting through and reshaping and moving our memories and our experiences and what we've learned from short-term storage into long-term storage. And we know that, again, poor sleep is a risk factor for poor mental health. For poor brain health increases your risk for almost every health condition. People who consistently have bad sleep have higher rates of mortality. So it permeates every aspect of our physiology and our psychology.

Mel Robbins (00:39:39):

Makes sense.