Mind Over Midlife: Brain Health Tips for Midlife with Therese Huston, PhD (Episode 227)

Hit Play Not Pause

Health & Fitness, Education, Self-improvement, Mental Health

4.9 • 696 Ratings

🗓️ 21 May 2025

⏱️ 68 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

As estrogen drops, our midlife brains go through a lot of changes. The activity in our dopamine network declines, which can leave us going from highly motivated to “meh.” We can experience bigger cortisol spikes and have elevated levels of the stress hormone longer. We can end up feeling constantly stressed out and in a doom spiral we can’t quite escape. And it doesn’t exactly help that many of us are also firmly entrenched in the most demanding period of our lives. This week’s guest, cognitive neuroscientist Therese Huston, PhD, is coming to the rescue with a host of simple–and quick–ways to boost our dopamine, keep cortisol in check, and help our midlife brains be their best.

Therese Huston, PhD, is a cognitive neuroscientist at Seattle University and the author of four books. She’s always asking, “How can we remove the pesky obstacles that get in the way of smart people?” Her latest book, Sharp: 14 Simple Ways to Improve Your Life with Brain Science, offers science-backed actionable strategies, many of which take 5 minutes or less, to help you make the most of the brain you’ve got. Therese received her MS and PhD in cognitive psychology from Carnegie Mellon University. She completed a prestigious post-doc in cognitive neuroscience at the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition and earned a degree in Organizational Leadership at Oxford University. She frequently gives talks and runs workshops for organizations like Microsoft, Amazon, Morgan Stanley, Strava, and the Cleveland Clinic. She also loves a good 5K, especially when the rain takes a pause in her hometown of Seattle. You can learn more about her, her work, and her books at www.theresehuston.com.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	You are listening to Hit Play, Not Pause, a feisty menopause podcast for active performance-minded women.
0:14.6	I am your host, Celine Yeager. Each week, I bring you advice from athletes, scientists, researchers, and other experts to help you feel and perform you best, no matter what your hormones are doing.
0:25.0	This show is a production of Live Feisty Media.
0:30.8	Hello, strong feisty women.
0:33.2	I hope you all are well.
0:35.7	So before we get to it, I just wanted to take a minute here, up at the top, and thank everyone
0:41.5	at Thompson Bike Tours, who helped make our feisty Gerona gravel camp such an incredible success.
0:50.2	The riding in that part of Spain is astronomically out of this world,
0:55.0	and we were able to be way off the beaten path with barely any cars besides the ones that were supporting us.
1:02.0	And wow, what a week it was.
1:06.0	Our goal when we put it together was to give midlife women a chance to bond and challenge themselves and just
1:12.3	have a week of reflection and introspection. And while it just did not disappoint, I feel like we all
1:19.4	learned and grew and just had one hell of a good time. Definitely a trip of a lifetime. So thank you,
1:26.2	Thompson. And thank you to the feisty team,
1:29.0	especially my partner out there, Catherine Taylor, who is along with us in Gerona, for making
1:34.2	it such a special week. All right. So this week on the show, I have a really great conversation
1:43.0	on cognitive health, which is something that comes
1:46.1	up a lot in our community, as women often struggle with word recall and stress and brain fog
1:52.4	and low moods and all the stuff that comes along with our changing hormones in midlife and
1:57.7	menopause. So I sat down with Dr. Therese Houston, who is a cognitive neuroscientist
2:03.9	and author of four books, including Sharp, 14 ways to improve your life with brain science.
2:10.4	And we just get into it, what's going on with our brains right now and all the ways that she
	...

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