How I Fought Brain Fog, Fatigue, And Fear Of Decline

The calendar flipped to 2026 and the internet shouted “new year, new you,” but quick fixes don’t quiet the fear that hits when your thoughts disappear at the doorway. I talk candidly about the moment brain fog felt less like a joke and more like a warning, and how I refused to accept a slow drift into mediocre health. Instead of vague advice, I walk through what actually changed my day-to-day: getting real labs, addressing iron deficiency, stabilizing mood with SLIND, and building a supplement stack that keeps me clear, steady, and present.

We get specific about what to prioritize in your 40s as hormones shift: protecting bone density with vitamin D and calcium, feeding your brain with omega-3s and B12, and using magnesium glycinate to support sleep, nerves, and—unexpectedly—reduce severe period pain linked to endometriosis. I share the backstory of nearly pursuing a hysterectomy, the surgical risks that gave me pause, and the surprising relief that came from consistent magnesium instead. If you’ve felt trapped between “just deal with it” and major interventions, this is the practical middle path.

We also dig into a topic that doesn’t get enough airtime: vaginal and urinary health during perimenopause. Hormonal shifts change pH and microbiome balance, raising the risk of UTIs and yeast infections. I break down how a targeted women’s probiotic and cranberry support can prevent recurring issues and protect quality of life. Throughout, the focus stays on what you can control—testing, evidence-backed choices, and a plan that matches your body rather than internet noise.

If you’re tired of feeling 60% human, press play and build your own maintenance plan for brain clarity, mood stability, and everyday strength. Subscribe, share this with a friend who needs real answers, and leave a review to tell me the one change you’re making this week.

Chapters

• 0:00 New Year Resolutions And Reality
• 0:37 The Hidden Fear: Brain Changes
• 2:47 Medical Steps And Mood Stabilization
• 4:05 Anemia, Fatigue, And Refusing Mediocre
• 5:10 Strategy: Control What You Can
• 5:42 Supplements For Bone And Brain
• 8:17 Endometriosis Story And Magnesium
• 12:38 Vaginal Health, UTIs, And Prevention
• 14:15 The Long List And Why It Matters

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

Hello everybody, this is Still Roses Podcast. This podcast was created for women by women to elevate women's voices. I hope everyone is having a wonderful start to 2026. You all know, obviously, January comes around and immediately everybody gets on the whole resolutions bandwagon. Most of the resolutions are health and wellness, right? Everyone's at the gym at 5 a.m., the first month of the new year, right? I almost fell for that trap, by the way. I was tempted to make that resolution myself, but I know better because I'm not gonna do that. Anyway, something I am actively doing though, and something I do want to share with you is health and wellness in your 40s as a woman. What does this mean for you? What are some things that you can do to help yourself out? Now, I have to tell you, when you start to Google things for health and wellness for women in their 40s, um, my immediate reaction, my initial reaction to a majority of the advice is that I get really pissed off. Mostly because at the top of the list is always take a walk. Now, this is particular pertaining to like obviously I always look up like parimenopause, menopause, like what does this mean? What are the earlier stages? What do you do? How can you address things? Nine times out of 10, up front, it's you know, make sure you get enough sleep, drink a lot of water, practice mindfulness. Reading the words actually makes me want to punch someone in the face. So I'm not gonna go there because it really irritates me. But I do want to talk about something incredibly tangible. So I had um, it freaks me out the whole not being 40, not being in my 40s. What freaks me out the most about getting older and having these hormonal shifts in my life is what it's doing to my brain. Now, this is something that I don't think is really highlighted that much because again, I had to dig to really find what I found. What I started to see happen more and more frequently with myself was that, and everyone's gonna laugh when you hear this because we all kind of laugh about it, like, oh, it is part of getting older. I'll think of something that I was gonna say or do, walk into the room to do it, and then I'm standing there for five minutes trying to remember what the hell I was thinking about. I don't know about anyone else, but that frightens me. Uh now, not in a sense of like, oh, I'm panicked. I need to go to a neurologist. Not in that sense quite yet, but it frightens me because it's like a hint at something. Now it's like a scratch of the surface. My hormones are shifting, the rest of my body is going through things too, but my brain specifically worries me because this is the only brain I'm gonna have, right? This is our one body. And so we should be able to try and protect it. Just slowly declining into, well, I'm old, this is what happens. You don't have to do that. You can actually make a choice for yourself and decide is that really the path that I want to take? I just want to slowly decline into old age, or do I really want to actually live my life and continue to be as prosper prosperous and as sharp as I've always been? Hell yeah, I want to be as sharp as I've always been. So, me personally, you all know I work in pharmaceuticals. I went right to the source initially and was looking for hormone replacement therapy. They said, I'm too young. I went at that um request several times. They still came back and said, No, you're too young. We don't want to do that just yet. Let's try some other things. So I had to bite the bullet a bit. Now, you guys already know in terms of mood and um, you know, not getting depressed, not letting the anxiety take over, not letting depression take over, not letting mood swings take over. That's a huge that was a huge problem for me in 2025. I was able to address it by getting on SLIND. So it's S-L-Y-N-D. That has completely changed my life. And I no longer have those dark cloud months. So that's one thing out of the gate. I did initially go right to medical for resources here because this is my life. And it scares me that there were some shifts happening. So that was step number one. Now that I have that under control. What I started to look at too was obviously the brain fog. I work full-time. I need to be sharp for my clients. I need to be sure I'm on top of things. I always deliver. So at the risk of sounding like I never really want to fail anyone, I had to go deeper because the brain fog and fatigue, those things were starting to kill me a little bit. Uh, again, last year, all in 2025. In terms of fatigue, I eventually had gotten some blood work done and I found out that I have an um an iron deficiency. So I'm anemic. So the iron supplements helped address that. So that was that. Now I'm giving you the really short version. For those of you who've been following for a really long time, you know that this has taken months, almost a full year, for me to actually figure all this out. So I'm consolidating because I need you all to hear this. No one needs to be living 60 or 70% or 40% of your life feeling good. You should feel good all the time. If somebody said to you, oh, this is a toilet in your house, but it's only gonna work 50% of the time. The rest of it, it's gonna get clogged, it's gonna be slow, it's gonna smell in here, it's gonna be really awful, it's gonna back up on you, it's actually gonna overflow and cause a huge mess. But don't worry, 50 or 40% of the rest of the time, it's gonna work really well. Who's gonna accept that? Toilet popped into my mind first because I was just cleaning. Anyway, but that's the point. Why accept mediocre? Why should we accept mediocre? We shouldn't. So, on that note, I got my slind, I got that under control, I got my anemia under control, hooray, hooray. But then came along still the brain fog. That's normal with hormone shifts. However, it's not something that you have to just accept. Now, your hormone shifting, we can't control that, right? Like that's a natural part of our process. But what we can control is what are we doing with the lives that we're living that is exacerbating the symptoms from the hormonal shifts? Or what's gonna what are we gonna do to help the symptoms of the hormonal shifts? Outside of the medical true pharmaceutical intervention, I went home holistic. And so I started doing a bunch of research on different supplements and things that I could take to help just my overall wellness and help keep me me. Now, I have a heavy duty list here. So starting up at the top of vitamin D and calcium for bone density. Now, if you did not exercise a lot in your youth, you're in the same situation as me where you are, you do have to actually start thinking about you're gonna lose bone mass at some point or you're starting to lose bone mass. What can you do now? Now, at this point, I'd have to look it up, to be perfectly honest with you. I'd have to look it up. I don't know that we can do anything now to enhance, but I think we can do things to maintain. And that's where the vitamin and vitamin D and calcium come in. Now, if you're listening to this and you're in your 30s still or in your 20s, and you're like, I want to do something about this, any impact that you're putting on your foot. So if you're jogging or speed walking, anything exercise related where you're constantly putting pressure and impact at the bottom of your feet, that's actually meant to increase your bone density. And as that happens in your youth and your younger years, in your teens, 20s, 30s, it helps build you up more. So when you do get to your 40s and you start to lose bone density, well, guess what? You actually had a little bit more to lose. So it's gonna put you in a better position. So that's like a tip that I had picked up along the way here. Magnesium, huge life-changing supplement. Huge. Magnesium changed my life. That sounds insane. Magnesium glycinate specifically. Again, one of my health journeys last year that I was on, part of it was addressing endometriosis. So I was going through this endometriosis journey, and um I was diagnosed with endometriosis when I was 26. Um, I was getting these really horrendous cramps, and um, they thought it was a cyst on my ovary. So they went in to get the cyst, and when they went in for the cyst, they found that I had endometriosis everywhere. Now, endometriosis is when your uterine lining does not come out with your monthly cycle. It actually starts to grow on the inside of your body. It grows on the outside of your uterus, it grows on your other organs, your kidneys, your intestines, it grows everywhere. When they cleaned me all out, the doctor said, You're all good. We did the surgery, cleaned you all up. And then he put me on, I was on birth control and he said, just take it continuously. Do not allow yourself to have a period, taken continuously. I didn't ask any questions at the time. 26-year-old Jenny, very different from 42-year-old Jenny, 26-year-old Jenny just did whatever the doctor said and said thank you and walked away. I didn't know why I was on continuous birth control. I thought it was just something that was going to help me not have a period and I could just have fun all summer. Legitimately, that's what I thought. In reality, though, what that doctor did saved my fertility. Because had I not been on continuous birth control and had I let endometrium grow in my body from 26 all the way to when I got, you know, when I conceived when I was 31, I might not have been able to conceive. That was a miracle to me because I had no idea it was happening, but it, you know, retained my fertility. I was able to have my kids. Now, that was a really long-winded history to get to the point of taking magnesium. Now, last year, when I was going through my whole exploration of perimenopause, menopause, what does this mean for Jenny? What should I do? I started taking magnesium for other reasons. So I took it for muscle function, sleep, mood, heart. Majority of us are magnesium deficient, like majority, which is the wildest thing ever. I started giving magnesium supplements to my kids because I actually sent there was that helps them with like ADHD and things like that. So there's more to it, right? So I take start taking magnesium for perimenopause, thinking, oh, this is great. It's gonna help the perimenopause. And I'm taking it for a couple of months and I noticed that my cycles are no longer incredibly painful. Now, this was something that just sort of occurred to me one day. I was like, huh, you know, it hasn't been painful for a while because prior to taking magnesium, I was still having really painful periods. Not on birth control anymore, I'm not gonna have any more kids. At that point, I wasn't on birth control, wasn't obviously wasn't planning to have any more kids. This is all last year, and I was considering hysterectomy because of how painful my periods were getting. Now, hysterectomy was frightening me a little bit because of the other abdominal surgeries that I've had and because of the two C sections, there's too many, there's too much scar tissue in my abdomen to be able to do any surgery laparoscopically. Now, laparoscopic surgery means if they make a tiny incision and they use a tube to go into your body to do the surgeries. That's my preferred method of surgery. Without being able to go laparoscopic, the doctor did tell me we will have to open you up. That scares me. Opening you up on the table is one thing. It's not that I didn't trust the doctor and I didn't trust what was gonna happen, but what was scary to me about it was that there was some unknowns there. She said she didn't know what she was gonna find when she got in there. Yes, she can clean the scar scar tissue out, she could help with other things, she can take, you know, do the partial hysterectomy. But again, she wasn't really sure. Do you know? She's like, there's really no way to know until we get in there. Again, the unknown. I don't like that. So I kind of walked away from the appointment a little bit nervous, to be honest with you. And I I just was on the fence about the whole thing. Not to mention the fact that the insurance that I had at the time was horrendous and I would have not been able to afford the surgery in general. So I walk away feeling like I have no answers here. I'm just gonna have these really horrible painful periods for the rest of my life until menopause kicks in. So anyway, flash forward, I'm taking magnesium. I start to notice my painful periods have stopped. When I dug deeper into magnesium, it actually helps to reduce the symptoms from endometriosis. There's probably more to it. So if you have endometriosis or you have really painful periods, I would recommend magnesium glycinate. Do your research, take a look at it though, make sure that it's something that you are okay to take. I would never tell anyone to just take something blindly. Always look it up yourself. Since it has improved my life so much, I have actually recommended it to three other people. They all started taking it and had the same results. You're gonna have them too. You gotta trust me on this, but do your research. So magnesium was a big one. Omega-3, specifically fish oil for brain function, two a day, take it every single day. I'm trying to maintain my brain as much as I can. Vitamin B12 for energy again and brain function. These next ones, specifically for vaginal health, probiotics and cranberry. A fun fact that I happen to find out now, going through what I'm going through, is that when you do start to have perimenopause and menopause happening in your body, you are actually more prone to urinary tract urinary tract infections and yeast infections, as if we don't have enough to deal with. So the probiotics, the hormone shift actually changes the microbiome of your lady parts. And thus, in doing that, the shifts, it's gonna cause yeast infections. So you wanna stay ahead of that. I know I don't want to have those all the time. So the probiotics for vaginal health, big deal. Cranberry for vaginal health, for urinary health, huge deal. I have unfortunately chronically had UTI, so I can feel it as soon as it's happening. As opposed to waiting around anymore, I just take the cranberry pills. Helps tremendously. I haven't had issues be doing that. One thing that I bought, but I have not started taking yet is ginkgo. Ginkgo is actually also supposed to be helpful for your brain and for making sure, you know, we're prefending off that brain fog that we none of us need. But I read the, as I said, always do your research. I looked up what the side effects of ginkgo were, unfortunately, after I bought it. And one of the side effects is constipation. So I am waiting on that one because unfortunately for me, all of the holiday festivities and the food that I don't usually eat has caused quite the backup. So I am working through that at the moment. But that's the list. That's the whole list of like the items that I've been taking. Personally, it sounds like a lot. And now that I'm reading it out loud and I see it listed like that, I'm embarrassed to say it is a lot. Um, also take my antihistamines. I take omeprazol for my stomach. What else am I taking? And then the iron, well, iron already mentioned. I do actually take, I guess I'm taking around 10 items every single day just to keep myself going. Now that's not to say like if you're in your 30s, you need to take all of it, but you should start taking something because the more that you can do, the younger that you can do it, the better off you're going to be when you get older because you're basically priming your body, exercise, eating well, like making sure you're treating your body the way that it's meant to be treated and not like an amusement park like how I did is really the way to go because this is the only body you're getting. We can't trade this in. I was talking to my husband about this the other day because I said I'm like, it's really just not fair. I'd love to have my 23-year-old body back and then going from there because that's not fair. The youth is so wasted on when you're younger and you don't realize how valuable it is. So that's my little health and wellness like spiel with these vitamins. Upcoming episode, I actually do want to dive a little bit more into diet and the natural things you can eat that will actually still will also protect you as a woman and protect your brain and everything. So stay tuned for that one. I hope again, you all are having a great 2026. Thank you so much for being with me today, and I will catch you on the next one. Take care.