Kwik Brain Episode 93: Decoding the Female Brain with Dr. Stephanie Estima

Welcome back, Kwik Brains. So the question— and we've gotten this question in our private Facebook group. We have tens of thousands of people in this group, the Kwik Brain Podcast community. And the question that we're going to talk about today is decoding the female and the male brain. How many people realize that when you're talking to men and women, it's a different communication? Raise your hand. Right? And some of it has to— And you're thinking like, you know, is our men's brain, are they really from Mars and women's brains really from Venus and how does that work? Because we're individual, right? We're different. So I want to have that conversation and I'm excited about this because your episode that we did on getting a shredded mind was one of the most popular episodes.

Awesome.

I mean, really, how to get a shred— who doesn't want like— everyone wants shredded bodies, but imagine having a shredded Ripped Minds, right? And I love this because your background makes you perfectly suited for this. You are, in our community, we call you our Wellness Wonder Woman.

Oh.

Because this is like about superheroes, right? And the love for superheroes. And you and I, we geek out a lot about neurobiology and neuroscience and brain optimization. Is really, is it a myth? Are female brains different than male brains?

Yeah.

And the reason why we want to talk about this is because You know, these are— how many people have a— know a man or a woman? Raise your hand. Or a boy or a girl, right? How many people know a human being?

Human being, yeah.

So this affects everything.

Absolutely. And this is also— we're going to talk about this, if we can, in the context of intimate relationships, but we can also talk about this in the context of our interactions with our family, in the workplace, because this really does— and there are, you know, to answer your question very simply, absolutely differences. There are differences between the male and the female brain. So I just want to maybe back up for 2 seconds just so everybody has a working knowledge of what we're going to talk about here. So very— I'm going to paint some broad strokes. But very generally, we have 2 sides or 2 hemispheres, 2 halves of the brain, right? We have the right side. We have the left side. When we think about how our brain develops, it typically develops right to left. So any mothers or fathers in the audience can also attest to the baby starts off with more gross motor skills, which is more attributed to the right side. And then eventually, 2 or 3 years old, He's able to or she's able to hold a pen and then we start seeing left-sided fine motor skills. When we look at the brain's development, it goes from right to left. When we think about the left side, typically we see the left side is more mathematical, it's more linear, more strategic, more analytical, more linear in its origin. This is typically called the Male side of the brain. And of course, that's not to say that women can't be mathematical or strategic or linear. It's just classically called the, the male side of the brain. And there's a very important neurotransmitter or hormone in the brain, a neurotransmitter called dopamine, that lives there. Who's heard of dopamine here before? Okay, so dopamine is our motivator, right? It's the thing that keeps us passionate, it keeps us engaged, it keeps us motivated to continue doing the things that we love to do, right? So if you've ever had a to-do list How excited do you get when that one thing on your to-do list, you get to tick it off? Yes or yes? All of you or all of you, right?

Yes.

So that's dopamine. That keeps us engaged and motivated and passionate. The thing to remember about dopamine is we control our own levels of dopamine. So when we do a to-do list, for example, we can raise our own levels of dopamine by going through that checklist. Okay? Now when we flip over to the right side of the brain, we see a little bit of a different story there. So the right side of your brain is more sensual. It's more creative. it's more passionate, typically called the female side of the brain. And of course, I'm not saying that men cannot be sensual or creative or passionate, but it's just kind of classically called the right side. The right side is typically called the female side of the brain. This is where a neurotransmitter called serotonin lives. Who's heard of serotonin? Everyone, right? So this is like our happy hormone. The really important difference here between serotonin on the right and dopamine on the left is your serotonin, you don't raise your own levels of serotonin. You get— you raise your serotonin levels from your external environment, meaning the people that you love around you, your boss, your friends, your family. When they give you positive reinforcement, that will drive up serotonin, and in turn, when serotonin gets high, it will drive up dopamine. So when you get positive reinforcement from your boss or your wife or your husband or your family or friends, serotonin goes up. Serotonin comes up, and then that drives your dopaminergic pathways. OK? So why this is important. So that's kind of like a general working understanding. Everybody's with me so far?

Yes.

Left side dopamine, you do it yourself. Right side serotonin, you need it from your external environment. So the difference when we look at male and female brains, the biggest dimorphism, or the biggest difference between the left and the right side when we look at men and women, is that men have twice as much serotonergic receptors, meaning they have twice as much receptors for serotonin in their brain than women do. So what that means is our women who have now half as much, we need twice as much—

Twice.

Positive reinforcement from our environment to drive up the same amount of serotonin to drive that dopamine. So let's talk about this maybe in, in like a real life, like a work life or a relationship example. So a positive way that you can drive up serotonin— for me, I mean, this is my home. This is what I— this is my second home, my clinic. So every single day I get positive reinforcement from the people that I help, or my online nutrition program. I have people telling me all the time, I've lost so much weight with you. I now— my headache, my chronic headaches are gone. My baby can now Turn her head to the side to breastfeed. So I get all this positive reinforcement all day long. All day long, pardon me. So my serotonin levels are always jacked. Right? So that drives my motivation to show up the next day and do it again. Right? I am now, because I'm receiving all of this positive feedback, I am getting motivation to be the best doctor that I can be the next day. That would be like a positive example, a synergistic, the way that we always want things to work with serotonin and dopamine. Okay? Now, a negative example in the terms of— and we'll use like the, you know, a context in terms of relationships. So you all know Giovanni, my partner. Now, this is hypothetical.

Oops.

So imagine— it's a hypothetical example. But imagine, you know, one day I said, you know, I just want to create a beautiful experience for me and my partner. I want to, you know, I'm going to get all dolled up. I'm going to, you know, create a beautiful experience for us to have. And, you know, hair is done, nails done, makeup's on, all that good stuff. And he comes home and he says, you know what, I just had like a terrible day, I'm tired, I just want to watch sports. Now you know that this is not true because he doesn't watch sports at all, but like for the context of this example, neurologically that's devastating to me as a woman, right? Because my— I need twice as much, I already need twice as much feedback from my environment than my male counterpart does. And when we think about a relationship in its entirety, the cumulative effect of those experiences, So maybe that happens 10 times or 20 times or 100 times over the course of a relationship. This may be a neurological explanation for the divorce rate in our country, right? And when I— and we're going to kind of pivot a little bit and talk a little bit about— you can't really talk about superhuman relationships or healthy relationships without talking about sex. So when we talk about sex in the context of relationships, that is the big— that's like if we talk about positive reinforcement from our external environment, when we think about the intimacy, the trust, the vulnerability, what it means to connect with someone, you know, if I were to ask you guys who— men and women— if I were to ask you guys who needs the sex more, who do you think it is?

Women. Women.

Women, right? Because we need twice as much stimulation, those serotonergic receptors, than our male counterparts do. So, Jim, I completely reject the idea that men, all they want is sex, and women, all they want is chocolate, right? I don't subscribe to that at all. Because when we look at that neurologically, if a woman feels loved and honored and cherished and safe, She's going to be chasing sex like the animal that she is because she needs that serotonergic stimulation from her partner. And this is true for both men and women. When we see men and women having— engaging in regular sexual activity with each other, we see the— in terms of brain health, we see the cortex light up like it's, you know, it's December, like it lights up like a Christmas tree, like your memory, your cognition, blood flow to the brain, when we think about heart rate, like I actually don't think healthcare professionals are talking about sex enough. When we think about it in the context of your health, like all your vitals, like your heart rate, like I said, blood pressure, we activate something called your parasympathetic nervous system. So parasympathetics, rest, digest, heal, sleep. When you're— I mean, how many, you know, we have an orgasm and we go right to sleep, right? Because your parasympathetics are activated. So engaging in regular sex, and the data suggests at least once a week, but 2 to 3 times a week for optimal brain function and all those vitals, are what we should be aiming for when we think about female health and male health, when we think about it in terms of the cortical benefits that we have. But for women in particular, and I know there's some little like smiles happening here, but it's important for females to feel safe and feel trusted and to be engaging in regular sexual activity because of that serotonergic— because of the serotonin activation that we require from our external environment.

That's a mouthful.

Yeah.

So I wasn't completely sure if we're going in this direction.

What is the connection? Probably should have cleared it up.

This is very different than the previous 100 episodes we've done. So, so it's— what you're saying is that the brain is a sexual— could be a sexual organ, or the most important sexual organ.

Yeah, 100%. And even if we, if we even just take out the, you know, the talk about intimacy, when we talk about this in the workplace, right, if you are somebody who works with another woman, you know, getting the best out of her in terms of her performance and her productivity would be to encourage her twice as much as you have to encourage the men that you work with because men are more autonomous, right? Like, we all know a guy can kind of go into his bat cave and emerge with like everything done, right? A female needs more encouragement along the way. Men can be more, like I said, more autonomous, more independent. Females are more communal in that way. They need more of that positive reinforcement from their environment. So this can be, you know, obviously you can take this in, you know, personal, in terms of your personal relationship and how you can optimize and love your You know, the woman in your life if you have a partner who's female. But this also can be applied for your relationships in the workplace and your family members as well and your friends.

So it's kind of like we're not necessarily logical, but we're biological.

Absolutely.

And so we're talking about dopamine, we're talking about serotonin. What about oxytocin?

So oxytocin, when we think about the— when we think about, like, the 4 main neurotransmitters, Dopamine, as you said, as we talked about, serotonin, oxytocin, and I like to call them dose, so endorphins, right?

Endorphins.

So oxytocin is like the big bond. Like, it's the, you know, when we think about a new mother and she's nursing her baby, there's oxytocin that's being released that bonds her to the baby. When we think about it in the context of sex and an intimate relation— and an intimate relationship, there's also a massive amount of oxytocin that's also released as well, which bonds the both of you together. Yeah.

Okay. And then going back to the 4th then, when we're talking about endorphins, what role does that play?

Well, we think about how happy and joyful and, you know, elated we feel when we are, you know, in even— we think about like new relationships, like there's that, you know, that high that we all have.

How many people feel like feeling happy and elated?

Raise your hand. And all of you. Yeah. So these are when we think about where those emotions come from, it comes from an area Right behind your forehead. It's called the prefrontal cortex. So happiness tends to be— like, the emotion of happiness tends to live on the left side. Joy tends to be on the right. So the endorphins will elevate and upregulate both of those feelings.