Brain fog and perimenopause

Earlier this month BBC Tech Editor Zoe Kleinman was about to go live on TV to explain a global outage affecting dozens of websites and apps. Millions would be watching, but she kept forgetting a key technical phrase and had to resort to reading from notes.

The ‘brain fog’ Zoe experienced coincided with perimenopause – the start of the menopause and time in life for women where hormone levels are changing. She wrote about the experience on social media, attracting thousands of views and hundreds of supportive comments.

Zoe says that, at the time, she felt she had failed and her “professional pride had been dented.” We bring together Zoe with two women with similar experiences.

“I thought I was truly coming down with early dementia,” Shantaquilette in Texas tells us. “I was forgetting conversations, losing my train of thought in mid-sentence, and walking into rooms like a Sims character waiting for instructions, it scared me enough to start googling things I had no business googling.”

A recent report from the UK-based women’s rights organisation, The Fawcett Society, found that one in 10 women have even had to leave their jobs as a result of menopause. We bring together Katie in the UK, Karen in South Africa and Geet, an airline pilot in India.

Host: James Reynolds
BBC producers: Ben Davis and Ash Mohamed
Boffin Media producer: Richard Hollingham
Editors: Arja Haikonen and Harriet Oliver

An EcoAudio certified Boffin Media production in partnership with the OS team.

(Photo: Karen Nebe, a menopause coach in South Africa who features in this episode. Credit: Karen Nebe)