You're listening to the Driving Confidence podcast for drivers who want to be calm and confident on the road. We will be sharing tips, stories and advice to beat driving nerves and anxiety and build your driving confidence. Whether you are just starting out as a learner or have had your driving licence for years, if you want to transform how you feel about driving, this podcast is for you. While we're on a season break, we're sharing with you some bonus shorts from an old episode. Normally, we create one short for each episode, for this break, we focus in on one episode in particular, which is episode 73, Anxious Hormones, exploring the links between hormones and mystery driving anxiety, with guest Kate Muir. And we've clipped this into several small shorts, all around five minutes each. This episode is a perfect listen if you are someone or if you know someone who is experiencing symptoms of perimenopause or menopause.

We're delighted to have on Kate Muir, who's the author of Everything You Need to Know about The Menopause and the producer of two Davina McCall Menopause documentaries for Channel four, and her next book is everything you Need to Know about the Pill. So welcome, Kate.

Thank you for having me. On, and I'm very interested in the crossover between driving and menopause and perimenopause, having experienced it myself.

Yeah. Can't wait to come back to that story actually. So shall I pop a little bit of context in here? Yes. This is us continuing with speaking to people looking more into. Some of the mystery causes of driving anxiety, so those times when somebody has been driving for years maybe, and then all of a sudden, apparently outta the blue, not necessarily because of something that's happened with their drive-in that they say that they're hit by mystery anxiety, and that then goes on to become driving anxiety. And obviously we felt that. Hormones, perimenopause, menopause could be a really good candidate for this.

I mean, if you look at what menopause does to women, and, and I'll also explain it a little bit here, is that basically when your hormones run, Around the age of 51 in that period before that sort of 51 sort of empty moment, you've got the perimenopause and your hormones are shooting up and down, estrogen and progesterone. And progesterone in particular begins to descend. And that prevents anxiety in a lot of women. So when women have pro progesterone deficiency, they wake up at 4:00 AM in their late forties. Panicking about things they can't get back to sleep. They've got a big list of things in their head. They're multitasking. They're worried about their family, they're worried about their mom, they're worried about their work, and they're worried about their driving probably at the same time. So they've got this overload, they've got this anxiety, and they've got this hormonal loss. And we didn't understand, I don't think until recently and until we did all this research in the last few years. The extent to which hormones affect your brain. It's not just the hot flushes, it's far, far more. So we did a study I, I made the second Davina McCall program, sex Mind and the Menopause. So we looked into what happened in the mind in the menopause, and we did a survey of 4,000 women, which I think might be relevant to you guys because. A lot of it was about mental health. So these women all around Britain, diverse, bunch of women, not women who are talking about the menopause all the time. Just regular people. And they said 84% of us have got exhaustion or we're sleepless. They said 69% have got anxiety, low mood. Or depression. And this was just after covid. So I'm thinking that's probably worse than it actually is in life. But you know that that's true. And 73% had brain fog or memory loss. Um, and that's all to do with the hormonal changes in your brain. So I'm asking you guys, what do you think that's doing to your driving?

Thank you for listening. Find out about the different ways that you can work with us on our website www. confidentdrivers. co. uk and begin to transform the way you feel about driving.