The Upgrade

The New York Times bestselling author of The Female Brain explains how a woman's brain changes for the better in midlife, inspiring and guiding women to unlock their full potential.

When Louann Brizendine published The Female Brain, it was a game changer for its profound scientific understanding of how women think, communicate, and feel. Now, Brizendine uses her unique ability to make science approachable to offer an empowering vision of the years in a woman's life that have too often been ignored or misunderstood and creates a positive new framework for this life stage. She never uses the words perimenopause or menopause, with their suggestions of obsolescence. She guides women to become more of who they are and who they want to be in their second half of life.

After analyzing the latest research, Brizendine has found that in midlife the inclination to cater to the needs of others relaxes, allowing women to become more centered while retaining their gifts of perception. The change in ratio of estrogen to testosterone makes women more direct and able to speak out. There's also a drop in anxiety that allows the female brain to flip its attentional style from multitasking to focusing on one thing at a time. The upgraded female brain is centered, direct, validated, focused, fearless, expansive, and free.

In this sweeping look at the second half of life, Brizendine dives deep into the microscopic workings of your mitochondria one moment and zooms out to the bigger picture-family, relationships, identity-the next. With clear prescriptive advice, she also offers specific ways women can fend off dementia, increase longevity and well-being, and find their best selves at this stage of life. Ultimately, The Upgrade amounts to a celebration of how women step into their power and an entirely new-and radically positive-understanding of aging.

About the Author

Dr. Louann Brizendine, MD, is a clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco and the author of The Female Brain and The Male Brain. She is founder and director of the Women's Mood and Hormone Clinic and the Teen Girls' Mood and Hormone Clinic, and she lives with her husband in the San Francisco Bay Area.