What it’s like having Menopause Brain in a millennial office

Thanks to the actress Sarah Lancashire, midlife women like me know we’re not alone when it comes to brain fog, says Lucy Dunn, who’s still haunted by her menopausal mind-freeze moments

Author Lucy Dunn: ‘If you don’t realise that it’s just your hormones, it can make you feel like you’re going mad’ (Lucy Dunn)

Oh, Sarah Lancashire, could we love you any more? The award-winning Happy Valley star has just become a real midlife hero when at last week’s National TV Awards (NTAs) she admitted she was suffering awful brain fog. She described how she had gone shopping in Sainsbury’s when her mind went blank and she couldn’t remember what she had gone for. “It just comes over you all of a sudden.” She added: “I can’t remember things that happened 30 years ago either.”

It’s the everydayness of the situation – an ordinary supermarket trip – and the way she described it so matter of factly, which has struck a chord with so many. “Brain fog can knock women sideways,” says Ann O’Neill, co-founder of Adora Digital Health, a new app that helps support menopausal women in the workplace. “It’s the symptom that distresses them most.”

It’s also one of the most common symptoms – studies show that it can affect up to two-thirds of women going through the menopause. The condition is caused when two of the main female hormones, oestrogen and testosterone, start to fall during perimenopause and menopause. These play an important role in cognition, and as levels drop it can lead to problems with memory, concentration and focus.

And it’s at work when brain fog really comes into play. You go into meetings and forget what they’re for; you have difficulty recalling names, figures and facts; younger (more impatient) staff interrupt if you’re slow at finishing a train of thought. Then there’s the feeling of wishing the ground would swallow you up when you forget what you are saying mid-sentence (or, worse, mid-presentation).

Brain fog can sabotage a career: you can still do your job, you’re good at it – but your brain keeps tripping you up and making you look like you aren’t. At times you’re pin-sharp as you’ve ever been, other times you feel like you’re wading through treacle. It’s fine between girlfriends where you’re on the same wavelength and can have a whole conversation about “thingamabob” and “you know, that thing”, but at work not everyone is quite so understanding.

One of my most embarrassing brain fog moments was at a website start-up a few years ago. We were a very small, very close-knit team of mainly millennials and Gen Z-ers. Whenever the other grownups were out raising funds, I would be the oldest one by at least 20 years. Normally we would all rub along fine, I could match them in ASOS packages and Beyoncé trivia and knew my Google Analytics from my Google Ads as intimately as any tech-savvy millennial. But, one day, I let myself down.

“Could you send me a link?” I asked the video producer over the desks. She didn’t look up but, being a tiny, rather echo-y room, 20 other faces did. This was my cue to say her name, but my brain suddenly froze and it didn’t come. I should have just stopped there, styled it out, but instead I blundered on mindlessly, ”I’m so sorry but I’ve forgotten your name!”

The whole office looked at me aghast. This was someone I had worked with round the clock for three years! Did she mean that little to me? And if I couldn’t be bothered to learn her name, what about the rest of them?

It was the first of a few incidents that, looking back now, I should have put down to menopause. But if you don’t realise that it’s just your hormones, it can make you feel like you’re going mad or past your sell-by date, especially when you work with a bunch of whip-smart millennials. While Hormonal Replacement Therapy (HRT) and techniques like CBT can help, you first need to recognise it is a symptom. I didn’t and became good at hiding it – taking copious notes and surreptitiously googling on my phone under meeting tables. And I felt slow. In truth I felt old.

While it wasn’t a good look forgetting someone’s name, I should probably count myself lucky that I didn’t do anything worse: one friend admits that she’s called a junior her son’s name (she styled that out by pretending it never happened, which is the only thing you can do). Another friend has days when she finds it impossible to concentrate: when finishing up, she’ll find dozens of computer tabs open and emails unsent in drafts: work she started but got distracted and never finished.

Sarah Lancashire said she was suffering brain fog at this week’s National TV Awards (Getty)

O’Neill, who has held senior positions in big media businesses, recalls a humiliating moment when she went for a job interview and was quizzed on her CV. “I got my job history all muddled and it looked like I’d made everything up. But I knew the dates, it was just that my brain couldn’t access them at that particular moment. Then I had a hot flush and to my horror, my glasses started steaming up. It was my one chance to impress, but all I could think of was if the (much younger) interviewer had noticed.”

It’s only now we are having an honest conversation about what it’s like going through the menopause in the workplace. Businesses have never really given it a thought and women have been masking their symptoms – worrying that brain fog could be seen as a weakness. O’Neill spoke to hundreds of women, from teachers who worried they were letting their pupils down to lawyers who got others to check their work at the end of each day, so concerned were they that they would drop the ball. Many told her they’d gone to their GPs convinced they had Alzheimer’s.

“Incidents often happen publicly, and if businesses don’t support them, they lose confidence, reduce their work hours and then leave,” she says. She cites a 2022 study by the Fawcett Society and Channel 4 that found that an astounding one in 10 women have left work because of symptoms of the menopause.

So what needs to be done to stop this exodus? Dr Lucy Ryan has written a new book called Revolting Women on why older women were leaving the workplace in their droves. She says businesses and society need to be more understanding of menopause and its symptoms – not by ticking boxes and putting up a few posters in the loos, but by encouraging open and inclusive dialogue with their whole staff. If we can encourage everyone to be more accepting and patient, to laugh off midlife bosses momentarily forgetting names, the more we can clear the path for future generations not to suffer in silence. “What we need is for the discussion to be broadened to include more employees, younger women, and men,” she concludes.

Catherine Cawood (Sarah Lancashire, right) alongside younger colleague Ann Gallagher (Charlie Murphy, left) in ’Happy Valley’ (BBC)

According to O’Neill, the most important thing is for women to tell themselves that menopause is a temporary phase: “It will get better and the clouds will eventually clear.”

With my foggy startup days now a distant memory, I can see O’Neill is right – there is light at the end of the tunnel. And while I still have times when, like Lancashire, I do a Sainsbury’s shop and leave without getting the thing I came for, I am now more aware of my symptoms and no longer let them get on top of me. If there’s one thing that menopause has taught me, it’s that life is too short.