Your “Mommy Brain” Is Valid
A guest post for a Mental Health & Motherhood series
It is my pleasure to start our Motherhood and Mental Health series off with a dear friend of mine, who happens to be a parent and come from a psychology background.
Matthew Barrett started Brain Trainers Mental Fitness in 2008 to help ensure that clear, accurate, useful brain science is available to the public. He’s a former professor of psychology and human growth and development and has closed his brain training practice for now, but is still happy to chat about brain health (or do a guest blog for a friend!).
Is “mommy brain” real?
When the topic of mental health and motherhood comes up, I find myself thinking about PTSD.
No, not like that. Hopefully things aren’t THAT bad.
What I mean is, I think about how PTSD changed through the years. How vague ideas like “combat fatigue” or “war neurosis” combined with “soldier’s heart” and “shell shock” to become the official diagnosis we know of today.
This pattern is found all through mental health, as people collect more evidence for things that previous generations dismissed. This process isn’t exclusive to mental health (dyspraxia was originally “clumsy child syndrome”), but it’s more common when the symptoms are subjective and difficult to verify.
Speaking specifically of motherhood, I think the growth of colloquial “baby blues” into the diagnosis of postpartum depression is one of the great mental health achievements in modern times.
So what are we to make of “mommy brain,” the cluster of cognitive issues that make new mothers claim their baby must have sucked out some brain cells? When mothers compare notes, these issues frequently include trouble making and following plans–what brain scientists call “executive function.”
Is “mommy brain” real? If so, what causes it?
So far, tests of new mothers haven’t shown a decrease in their executive function skills, but there’s other possible explanations for the symptoms new moms describe.
When I taught classes in brain health and wellness, one common theme was that the two biggest killers of memory were stress and multitasking. Multitasking in particular diminished not just memory, but all cognitive abilities, and stress diminished executive function.
Stress and multitasking. Uh huh.
On top of that, I was speaking about healthy adults who had adequate nutrition and rest. If there was anything that would top Stress and Multitasking as killers of executive function, it would be Sleep Deprivation.
Stress, multitasking and sleep deprivation. Oh my!
Yes, that’s right: parenthood, especially new motherhood, means living with the ultimate trifecta of brain drainers. It would be hard to design a situation that would be better at distracting people. (Seriously, the CIA has tried, and blasting 24 hours of Justin Bieber to keep people awake is still barely on par with caring for a newborn.)
So, what’s a new mom to do?
First, remember that self-care is a kind of infant care.
You spend all this time taking care of your child, but how well are you taking care of your child’s mother? Just like how airlines tell mothers to put their own mask on, it’s not selfish to go first if you do so with the understanding that your child needs you at your best.
With that in mind, I recommend taking on sleep deprivation first.
Draw on your support networks to allow you to nap, if sleeping when your baby sleeps isn’t enough. When you nap, sleep until you wake up naturally, don’t set an alarm. Your body knows how much sleep you need, and will wake you when you have had enough.
When deprived of restful “REM” sleep, our brains can get a lot in a short period using an ability called “REM rebound.” Even if it feels like you will sleep all day without an alarm, it’s probably not the case…and if it does happen, just know that that’s really what you–and your baby–needed most at that moment.
Once you have filled your tank with REM, what next?
Getting restful sleep will diminish your stress, but there’s still plenty more to be said here. Whole books have been written about stress reduction, but they usually boil down to some combination of stress removal, acceptance and channeling.
The removal strategy focuses on the stressor–the thing stressing us out. If there was a block party you wanted to go to, but it’s just too much, there’s nothing wrong with removing it from your schedule. That’s not possible with other things like paying bills and going to work, but there we can use acceptance: change our reaction to the stressor rather than engage with it. For more on this, look into mindfulness and other forms of meditation.
Finally, remember our bodies are made to channel stress into higher performance–what scientists call good “eustress” rather than bad “distress.” Just twenty minutes of cardio can take the stress that was tearing down your body and channel it in the opposite direction. Many forms of work or hobbies can also help us channel stress into increased performance.
I leave multitasking for last because it's an inevitable part of parenthood, but even here there’s hope. Just like with “distress” vs. “eustress,” there’s good and bad forms of multitasking. Tasks don’t interfere as much with each other in the mind if they use different skills.
Two verbal tasks will interfere with each other, as will two spatial tasks, but a verbal and a spatial interfere less. It’s also good to know that the brain’s definition of a “task” changes with experience: years of practice have reduced driving home from 400 separate mental tasks (when we were first learning to drive) to a mere handful.
Mothers can take advantage of this by having regular routines for daily life that they do the same exact way every time. This allows the brain to put these tasks on a kind of autopilot, reducing the “friction” between tasks when multitasking.
If we manage sleep, stress and multitasking, have we conquered “mommy brain”?
To be clear, there’s still a lot left to understand in this space. It’s possible that some of the mental problems of new mothers are due to hormonal shifts, or physical changes in certain areas of the brain. It’s even possible that “mommy brain” will turn out to be a singular issue separate from all of this, and end up with its own diagnostic criteria and treatment.
In the spirit of ever-advancing science–and in deference to the wonderful mystery that is motherhood–I’ll leave you with one final thought.
Since 2010, scientists have tracked the migration of cells between mother and child in the womb, and have even found the child’s cells in the mother’s brain decades later.
This phenomenon, called "fetomaternal microchimerism," has been shown to boost the mother’s resistance to Alzheimers and other forms of disease. It’s far too early to say whether microchimerism is at all related to “mommy brain,” but it would at least appear that the gift of life is repaid in some small part in later years, and it would be ironic if such a loss of mental abilities could eventually be repaid…with interest.
Happy Mental Health Month to all the mothers out there!
I feel like this is my new "fascination" rabbit hole. Thank you for bringing this one up in your comments so I could read it! I read it last night and my mom brain felt very seen haha the body is truly WILD. Loved your analysis and commentary about it all, especially the connection to maternal mental health
This was a great read!