TONTS. - Matrescence Festival with Amy Taylor-Kabbaz & Dr Winnie Orchard

Episode Date: October 5, 2025

Welcome to the fifth episode of TONTS. Season 5 Matrescence Festival edition, join us as we look back through our Melbourne festival from March 2025.In this episode we're joined again by the wonderful Amy Taylor-Kabbaz and Dr Winnie Orchard, who you will have heard earlier in the festival, as they discuss the restructuring of the brain during Matrescence, hormones, neurodivergence in parents and much more.For more from Amy, you can visit Amy Taylor Kabbaz or pick up a copy of her book 'Mama Rising'.For more from Claire you can head to: https://www.clairetonti.com/ or her instagram @clairetontiFor more from Lizzy you can head to: https://www.lizzyhumber.com/ or her instagram @lizzyhumberAnd to keep up to date with past and upcoming Matrescence festivals you can follow @matrescencefestival on instagram or go to https://www.matrescencefestival.co.ukOriginal theme music: Free by Claire TontiEditing: Maisie JGSocial Media: Surabhi Pradhan Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

I would like to acknowledge the traditional owners of the land on which I create, speak and write today. There are wondry people of the Kulin Nation and pay my respect to their elders past, present and merging, acknowledging that the sovereignty of this land has never been seeded. I want to acknowledge the people who have given birth on this land, raised children on this land for generations connected to country and spirit. Hello, welcome back to another special edition of Tontz, Season 5. I'm Claire Tonti. And I'm Lizzie Humber and we are the co-founders of Matrescent's Festival.

Listen along with us as we share live episodes from the Matrescence Festival Australia that took place across two days in March 2025. So we've just heard episode four from the cognitive neuroscientist, Dr Winnie Orchard. And we welcome Winnie back to have a conversation with journalist and author Amy Taylor Kavaz. In this episode, they discussed the restructuring of the mother's brain, brain efficiency, neurodivergence, impairments, hormones, instinct and intuition, learnt behaviour and hypervigilance and how it's hard to switch off.

This is a really meaty discussion. So tune in, get a cup of tea and we'll see you on the other side. So we can take some questions from anybody in the audience if you want to pop your hand up in a couple of minutes and ask Winnie anything about her amazing work. I feel like I have so many questions, but I also know that, like you said, the research is so new. There's so many things we don't know. So I'm just going to dive in with all the things I wish we knew, and you can just tell

us if it's actually known or not yet. I wanted to ask, one of the beautiful things you said, was there is like this moment with our brain changes and the raw vulnerability and massive changes. that we're going through, that it's either it's a moment of vulnerability or opportunity, which I think is the most incredible way to describe, even what I'm passionate about with, you know, learning about metrescence. It's either a vulnerability moment or an opportunity. Can you, do we know what are some of the things that make that one way or the other? You mentioned support, but can we go a little bit further into what we know about what makes

it better? Yeah, absolutely. It's one of those things where, it's all sensitive periods like this. So just like adolescence is a vulnerable period and a period for an opportunity for growth. It's that both and

so it's not that some people are vulnerable and some people have an opportunity for growth necessarily but it's that in these periods where the brain is undergoing structural change or restructuring is that it's really open to experience.

and I mean we can come to sort of models of stress and coping as well as history of psychopathology so we know that if people have had an experience of depression or anxiety before their parenthood they're more vulnerable to have that sort of experience in their parenthood as well but also things like financial stress social support as we mentioned and these sorts of things are really important important. And so in understanding that the transition to parenthood has the potential for being more vulnerable, if we can put supports in place, then that's really important. So I hope my basic layman's questions are kind of what everybody wants to understand. So if she's stressed and she doesn't have the support she needs and she's maybe isolated, I know so many of you

had babies during COVID, for example. Does that actually mean, Winnie, that the brain changes don't, they're not as strong as they would be? Like, what happens to the, can you help me picture, what happens to the actual brain if she's not supported? Does the change not be completed? Like, how does that work? Yeah, so this is one of the things that we absolutely need to, to figure out, and that is a theory at the moment that people are working on. But one thing I can speak to in that space is the fact that stress and reward have, and parenthood, have these very overlapping circuits. So the, yeah.

So it's the same regions that are being activated when we're in reward are also being deactivated in times of stress, which is why sometimes when we're feeling overwhelmed, we're not necessarily getting that same joy. yeah joy and that came up earlier in Melanie's talk is that if we're in fear and we're in stress that it's much more difficult to access joy and so that that might be relevant wow I don't know about any of you

but when you mentioned that in the third trimester in particular verbal memory recall I was like oh my god so that's why that happened I remember being specifically at the supermarket and just not being able to literally use my tongue like the words had gone. So when that happens to help us understand it as a mum, you said that some parts sort of get smaller in a way

and then other parts get bigger. So is it just this pruning like you said and that obviously comes back, right? But in terms of understanding all of these changes I think it would be so helpful for women to, like you said, instead of this self-opting into, there's something wrong with me now, how do you think that we could explain this to women? I mean, that's what you're doing,

but how can we help ourselves, not judge ourselves, for that feeling of being dumb or stupid in that moment? Well, one of the brain regions that does do this change is the hippocampus. And the hippocampus, as some of you might know, is really involved in learning and memory. And the hippocampus has decreases through pregnancy and increases in the postpartum. And so that, whilst we don't have studies that have said

how much your hippocampus is changing is directly related to how much your cognition is changing, it's a very crucial area for learning and memory, so we can assume that that connection might be there. But in terms of, yeah, communicating it to new parents is I would really like to focus on how much change is happening. and to provide some sort of grace for the fact that change is quite attention-grabbing. If you're undergoing a massive transformation, it's actually really distracting too.

So aside from the neuroscience of it all, we're paying attention to something that is incredibly salient, incredibly important in our life, and there's a reprioritization that happens, and that that reprioritization is, in fact, very very important. adaptive, that it's important that we're shifting focus away from things that are perhaps less important and some things slip through the cracks. But reminding us that, like Melanie said, with the balls and the things that drop is a sense of self-trust that the balls that are

dropping are the balls that are of lowest priority. And maybe we could hold all those balls and could juggle them and that there is a certain level of choice that the things that need to get done get done and sometimes not everything can and that doesn't necessarily feel good but it might actually be the most adaptive thing because I think about often in my work we talk to workplaces and there's this conscious and unconscious bias around pregnant women pregnant mothers. They assume that they're less productive, they're distracted, they're more emotional, and then you hear research like yours and you're like, oh, it's kind of true. Like, you know, she's maybe not as she might forget some things, but we want to be able to frame this not as a

negative, but actually she will return stronger, more, like the abilities she'll come back to work with are what we need to focus on there, I would think. Totally, totally. And so that renormalisation that happens when we don't we no longer see cognitive differences sort of a year or more is that that that difference is gone again and what does that mean in a work context if people are more fine-tuned more efficient you know they always say give a job to a busy person and who's more busy than a new mum and if you've got five minutes, if you've got half an hour and you're, okay, I'll just, I'll just do that thing, I'll just do, you can almost get more done in a day than previously. And so I think

from a workplace perspective, if you can get your eight-hour day done in five hours, we'll hire a mum. Amen. Would anybody like to ask a question? As somebody who has discovered a lot about her own brain of late, I didn't realize I was quite so spicy, apparently. You know, I'm a fantasia. I mean, like, I can't make pictures in my mind. I'm prosopagnasi, which means I don't remember faces very well. My executive function is up shit creek without a paddle.

I was wondering about these changes are they uniform? Are you seeing them in everybody or is it a continuum? You know, I'm listening to Amy earlier when she's told, just follow your instinct and she's, I don't have any, you know? Whereas I found when I became a mother,

oh, this is my jam, you know? This I can do. There's lots of other things I'm not very good at. And I'm just wondering, you know, whether we actually need to identify those people who have a lesser growth in those areas and need to build pathways to support them more, very specifically.

Great question, and I think there's two questions in there at least. And one I'm pulling out is about executive functioning and neurodivergence, perhaps, which I'll talk about also, but also this idea of instinct and intuition. and I like to think about instinct and intuition as two separate things and I don't have the neuroscience to back this up but well a little bit

there is maternal instinct we can think of as vigilance as threat detection as protection as that thing that rises when your child is at risk. There is something that comes over new parents to rush in and do protection.

We can think about that as instinct, right? Flipping the car sort of instinct. Whereas intuition takes time. Intuition takes learning. And so that trial and error of learning your baby, learning what it needs, is a slower process. and I think that it's a different part of the brain.

It's that learning rather than that primal area. That's what I was just thinking. I'd never seen or held a baby, not that I hadn't seen, but I'd never held a baby before my baby. So there was no neural pathway? Not yet, yeah. It has to start from scratch. Wow.

I think that we're now in sort of the first time ever that people are holding a baby for the first time that's their own and how scary that is to not have done some of that learning beforehand and to feel comfortable with the skills and the tasks, even to see somebody else do it, even if you've never done it, but you've watched somebody else do it, it feels a lot more intuitive. And it may have looked like it came naturally to you,

like you had this instinct, but it's still learning, it just happened before, yeah. possibly. And so to your second point, which was actually your first point, but it's my second point, about executive functioning and neurodivergence is something that's coming up as we're learning more and more about parental cognition and what is stretched in that time. Executive functioning is coming up is really important. That ability to plan and organize and keep everything that's swirling in some sort of structure. And so for people that do struggle with executive functioning,

so people who might have some neurodivergence, that those skills are stretched even further. And for some of our qualitative work where we're talking to people about their experiences of parenthood, it's coming up again and again. It's saying, I'm really struggling with executive functioning. I was struggling before parenthood, and this has made it that much harder. And now I need more structures, more like lists and other mechanisms to get through.

We have another one over here. Thanks, Vicki. Thank you. I just want to maybe preface the question first with obviously honouring the importance that you said before of acknowledging research that's just focused on women's health. And also wanted to ask, can you speak a little bit to the changes? that we may see in the parental brain just so that we don't then add to the load

of, well, your brain changes to do this job, so it's all yours. Yeah, yes. Great question, and we will go into this in-depth tomorrow in the talk that I'm giving tomorrow about more about the difference between hormones and biology versus caregiving and learning as this process that's ongoing. There is a fair amount of research to suggest that it is a dynamic caregiving experience

that is involved in this learning process and that anybody that is engaged in parental caregiving, so any gestational relationship, any sex or gender identity, if you are doing the acts of caregiving, then your brain is responding to that. So yeah, great, great point. It's always important to reiterate that this is not. yeah it's not just it's not just a woman's role yeah thank you

do we have time for one more quickly in the audience hello I'm interested in the hypervigilance and anxiety and how you can help use what you've learned to soothe or calm that can you speak to that at all a little a little

hypervigilance is an interesting one because we're drawing that line between what is normal and natural and healthy hypervigilance and what is anxiety is hard, hard to find. And so we want to encourage new parents to not be anxious to be relaxed in their parenthood whilst also understanding that the neurobiology is heightening all of those things and so it can really predispose anxiety disorders in, well some people are experiencing anxiety

for the first time in their life in this period and it's really understandable why because we really care about the health and well-being of our children And one thing, and this is not sort of from my research necessarily, but one thing to help manage that can be gratitude. And so the tackling what can be this foreboding joy or when you're holding the child and there's a feeling of joy that's also tainted, not tainted, but like it's murky with this,

I love this little being so much and then that goes straight to what if, what if, what if, what if, what if. And so that leap from joy to fear can be combated with gratitude for the present and it's not perfect and it's not really my area but for one thing that can stop that leap it's staying grounded in what is true right now.

I love that. Can I just finish by asking one tiny little thing. I once heard, and I don't know if this is neuroscience-backed or whether it's just an idea that I've latched on to, that when we're talking about that hypervigilance and those massive changes at the beginning, they are meant to naturally peter off so that when we get to school age and then teenage years,

we are like, okay, you can go now. I often find when I work with mothers that that's actually a really, really hard thing to do because it's almost like the natural hypervigilance that our brain and our hormones did becomes then like a learnt behaviour hypervigilance. This makes me a good mother, so I'm going to double check on everything.

So do we know when that should naturally, like do we understand about that? Am I right? It's meant to peter off, right? And then... Yeah, look, as we're going, we're meant to gain more trust and confidence in ourselves. when it's things like now we're going off to school

there's again this trust and confidence in the community and in the environment as well so that might be the first time that there's that sort of separation I can't speak from a neuroscience perspective there but yeah but it's not meant to stay at that heightened level well yeah yeah I guess yeah thank you yeah

Well, that brings us to the end of episode five. What an interesting and rich discussion. As always, thank you to Maisie for editing this episode. You can head to at Claire Tonte to find out more about me and my music and all the bits and bobs I do. You can head to at Lizzie Humber on Instagram to find out more about Lizzie and everything that she does. And to follow along with this show and also any upcoming Matresson's festivals, head to our Instagram. Matresson's Festival. Alrighty, we'll talk to you soon.