Episode 1 - Gold Stars, Burnout, and Smelly Cat: The Science of Female Brilliance

This week on Call Her Brilliant…

• The weird habit I heard about from Spanx creator Sarah Blakely and why all brilliant women should start this too

• The instagram post I made as a neuroscientist studies brains for a living that had Boomer men racing to mansplain why I was wrong

• My fellow millennials → Is creatine the magic elixir that’s going to keep us Margaret Atwood sharp and Michelle Obama fit into our 40s and 50s? I share the real answer in a segment called Neuroscience Fact or Fluff

Transcript

This week, on Call Her Brilliant, a strange habit I heard about from Spanx creator Sarah Blakely, and why all brilliant women should start this too.

I share about the Instagram post I made as a neuroscientist who studies brains for a living that had boomer men racing to mansplain why I was wrong.

My fellow millennials, is creatine the magic elixir that's going to keep us Margaret Atwood Sharp and Michelle Obama fit into our 40s and 50s? I share the real answer in a segment called Neuroscience Fact or Fluff. Let's do this.

Welcome to Call Her Brilliant, the podcast for ambitious women building businesses and lives that refuse to be average.

You got the gold stars and turned that grit into step-by-step success, but you're ready for more if only your capacity wasn't the bottleneck. You want focus, freedom, and a brain that can actually keep up with your ambition.

That's more than mindset, more than strategy. From athletes to entrepreneurs, we're trading burnout for peak performance science, so you can create a life that's brilliant by design.

Welcome to the first episode of the all new Call Her Brilliant podcast. I'm Dr. Nicole, Neuroscientist, High Performance Coach, and your guide to unlocking your brain so brilliance becomes your baseline.

Confession. I bought the domain, Call Her Brilliant, September 9th. I checked.

That was the day. It is now December, as I record this first episode. What happened was, I had this super exciting idea for this new podcast.

But I'm the responsible one. Stay tuned for more on that in a minute if you're a fellow overachiever. So there was all this other stuff on my to-do list that I felt like I should be doing.

I had clients and other projects I was working on, and even just keeping up with the day-to-day stuff of running a business, like emails and figuring out the Instagram algorithm and ads and all the things, right?

It's hard for me as an overachiever and lifelong hard worker to do something just for fun. Or to do something because it's interesting for me.

Or something that I'm not sure is going to have a direct outcome on my business and my bottom line, like start a new podcast, because it feels like there's never enough time.

But I've also spent the last decade working with brilliant women who have burnt out. And for brilliant women, from athletes to entrepreneurs to artists to leaders, I know time is rarely the real problem. It feels like it's the problem though, right?

If only I had more time. If only I could add five more hours to my day, I'd get so much accomplished. And yeah, you probably would.

But what I've discovered after spending the last eight years working with brilliant women who've burnt out, time isn't that simple, because it's really an interaction between yourselves, your habits and your wiring.

And all three of those levels matter. That's why when I hired more help, I was more exhausted and cranky than ever. It's why when you finally take that vacation, you reliably get sick, right?

And no matter how many hours you had in your day, if you're being honest, you'd still feel behind. Until you understand how to access the parts of your brain that make those hours worth more. That's what Call Her Brilliant is for.

Because I know brilliant women don't always think they're brilliant. It's not your fault. That interaction between yourselves, your habits, your wiring can help you bend time around your brilliance.

But it can also leave you feeling stretched thin, behind and exhausted. That's my goal with this podcast. To really highlight the new science of female brilliance.

Because brilliance, it's not unitary. There are so many ways women are brilliant. It's neurological, which means that it's something you can build.

You can train your brain to access once you shift that wiring.

On future episodes, I'm going to be sharing interviews with brilliant women where they share not only how they found their unique brilliance, but what they do when they're feeling more meh than genius.

How they train that brilliance so it becomes their standard. But first, we need to understand how we got here. Why you feel less than brilliant lately?

Because understanding your unique brain, your patterns, your rhythms, your zone of brilliance is crucial if you want to be able to access the ideas that actually change everything.

I know for me, I have not always felt brilliant and it was my fourth grade nemesis' fault. Okay, not really, but I obviously still have a grudge because this one experience changed my writing. My nemesis in fourth grade was this boy named Elton D.

We went to a smaller school, so there was really only ever two classes per grade. So we grew up with the same kids, right? The same 60 kids making up these two classes.

We all knew each other. Elton and I constantly battled to be top of the class. He would get the best mark on a book report, then I would get the top grade on a math test.

And back and forth we'd go. The most annoying part about Elton was that he was also cool. I was not.

I was the girl who was kind of awkward and really clumsy, and my hair was pretty red at the time, and I have freckles and I'm short, and I think I'm funny, but I'm not always funny to everyone else.

Elton was effortlessly cool even back when we were nine. He always had that perfect bowl cut, that Jonathan Taylor Thomas bowl cut that was really popular in the early 90s that they all had.

My hair was this disheveled mess that I had to shove on a ponytail all the time because I could never get it straight nor would it hold a curl. It just did whatever it wanted to.

He was really cool, effortlessly made friends, cracked jokes, and everyone laughed. I obviously felt like he was my nemesis. He probably did not think about me at all, but that's okay.

Things came to a head for me in fourth grade because there was a writing contest.

The winner of the school-wide writing contest got a chance to go to the special writing conference where one of the keynote speakers was none other than my idol, Stephen King. Yes, that Stephen King whose books I still love. What are we now?

30 years, 30 plus years later. I really, really wanted this. And at the time, I had this belief in my head that I was already starting to learn that if I just work really hard, I can be successful because it worked in most areas, right?

I study hard, I ace a math test, I work extra hard in the book report, I get an A. My story was awesome.

It was a story about this railroad heist and there was a female hero who was like the sheriff and she was going to save the day and there was tension and there was good character development. Elton won.

I don't remember what his story was about, but he beat me.

He got to go to the conference, he got to see Stephen King, I did not, and this was obviously life changing for me because I still remember it 30 plus years later because it made me think, maybe I'm not as smart as I think I am, or at least maybe I'm

just not a creative person. Maybe I'm good at math, I'm good at science, I can write a book report, I can be the responsible one, but maybe I'm not going to be the cool one or the creative one or the one that's going to be a writer.

Segue here, it's time for a segment I'm calling Neuroscience for 90s Kids. Neuroscience for 90s Kids. Where we unpack the brain science behind the beliefs that we all grew up with.

You know, the ones that told us success meant straight A's and achieving all the gold stars and never needing to take a break.

In this segment, we're going to separate what the 90s taught you about brilliance, success and time from what your brain actually needs. Today, we're talking about why friends made us all think we need to be Monica's.

Growing up, I loved those quizzes in magazines like Tiger Beat and Cosmo Girl. You know, the ones it was like, what's the perfect hairstyle for your face shape or who, which of your crushes are you going to marry?

And I would always go back and like adjust my answers over and over until I got the answer that I wanted. Reliably, on these quizzes, I was the Monica, the responsible one.

I was organized, even then I loved color coding, my notes and my duet hangs and my day planners. I still love doing all that. Monica skills are amazing skills.

They're mediated by the network in your brain called your executive control network. Responsible for things like organization, problem solving, being able to take big ideas and break them down into actionable steps.

The woman who gets stuff done has Monica skills. The one who loves a color coded calendar like me and a perfectly planned project. For me, a sauna is like my external brain, my own personal assistant.

It helps me with all the mental multitasking. I love to show how I break things down in a sauna step by step because it makes me feel good and gives me a little dopamine hit every time I check something off. Those are Monica skills.

But they're also the Marie Kondo skills, the Ruth Bader Ginsburg skills, the Amy Porterfield skills if you follow the online marketing world.

Because I'm an overachiever, a recovering perfectionist myself, I attract women to my world that are strong with this executive control network. Amazing skills, like I said. Monica skills build businesses.

The problem? They operate in direct opposition to your creative network, called your default mode network. Let me ask you this.

Have you ever had a brilliant idea in the shower? That's your default mode network. Then you get to your desk and you try to write and you've got nothing, totally normal, because that executive control system has taken back over.

Your default mode network are Phoebe skills. They're the ones that create fun things like Smelly Cat. Women in leadership though, tend to have a hard time accessing this network because it's not our default.

We've always been the responsible one. If you grew up in the 90s like me, probably you heard the message that the norm was to go to university, get a job, you work there till you retire, right? That's what my parents did, probably yours too.

I know my dad worked for the same company for over 40 years. So when I graduated with my PhD in 2013, I thought that was the path that I would take too. I got my dream job on a hospital neuroscience team, but a few years later, that wasn't working.

So I started my private practice. This is my second podcast. I then started a consulting and speaking business.

I wrote a book proposal. I got a contract with the NHL. I'm only 41.

If you're an elder millennial like me, raised with these beliefs about hard work, responsibility, those beliefs matter. We have been raised to emphasize Monica skills. Most women I work with, that's what they've been taught, right?

And it's a good thing, except it only takes you so far. It doesn't have to be one or the other. You don't have to be a Monica or a Phoebe, but we need to know how to activate those Phoebe parts of our brain, that default mode network.

Here are some fun neuroscience facts about that default mode network, that Phoebe network, those Phoebe level creative skills.

Your default mode network is sometimes called your do nothing network, because it's really active when you're doing nothing.

Like when you're standing in the shower and you get a great idea, or you're driving home and you get the most brilliant way that you should have responded to that client, but totally didn't in the moment.

These skills are activated when we're not intentionally focusing on specific tasks, like when we're letting our mind wander. Those of us high achievers, ambitious women, we don't spend a lot of time letting our mind wander.

And the thing is, is that those creative idea generating networks that default mode network operates in direct opposition to your executive control network.

So as soon as we start to intentionally focus or try harder, like when I sit down on my laptop, I want to push out that idea that I had five minutes ago, but now can't seem to think of for the life of me. Those executive control networks take over.

They inhibit the creative parts of your brain. Doesn't have to be that way. Okay, we can learn to toggle back and forth between the two.

This has been Neuroscience for 90s Kids. Neuroscience for 90s Kids.

Okay, here's a key I'm going to come back to over and over on this podcast. How your brain and your body communicate matter. Because what fuels a high-performing brain isn't linear.

There's this intersection of the mind and the body and it's magic. More than mindset, it's neuroscience. Here's an example.

You can trick your brain into burning more calories. There was a study done at Harvard. What they did was they had 84 female room attendants, housekeepers, at seven different hotels, and they divided them into two groups.

Group number one, they told them that the work that they do, the cleaning activities, they do every single day, is good exercise. And in fact, it met the Surgeon General's recommendation for an active lifestyle.

Group number two, that was the control group. So they weren't told anything. Then they tracked the two groups for four weeks.

Their behavior didn't change. They still had to do the same chores. So group one and group two were doing the same amount of activity, cleaning the same number of rooms, doing the same number of activities every single day.

But even though their activity level did not change, group number one, that's the group that was told cleaning is exercise, chores are exercise. They lost more weight. They had lower blood pressure.

They lost body fat. The waist to hip ratio changed. They had significant changes in their bodies.

Exercise is part, placebo. Interesting, right? Placebo broadly is when you take a sugar pill and you're told that it's medicine and you have benefits, right?

We've all heard of the placebo effect before. Usually, it's used as a control, right? So I give you the medication or give you the fake medication.

Are there differences? We can also use this placebo effect to our advantage because it operates at this intersection of mind and body. If I tell myself doing chores is exercise and I get stronger, yay, that's a good thing, right?

That mind-body magic even impacts things like how our bodies metabolize medication.

There's research, for instance, that when cancer patients are, they have stronger belief that their treatment is going to work, they're more confident in their chemotherapy. Same cancer, same chemo.

Patients who are more confident and believe the treatment is going to work see greater benefits. There was another study I read where patients were recovering from surgery.

One group, they had the nurse come in and say, I'm going to give you morphine. Morphine is a powerful pain reliever. Group two, she just came in and gave them the medication.

The first group, the one that was told morphine is a powerful pain reliever, reported less pain. They were given the same medication. Both got the morphine.

One was told that it's going to improve their pain. They did better. So why does this matter for you?

Why does it matter for your brain? Why does it matter for your brilliance and your business? Accessing the smartest, sharpest, most creative parts of your brain requires knowing how to integrate your cells, your habits and your wiring.

Let me give you an example. With a new segment, I'm calling Smart Women Doing Smart Things. Smart Women Doing Smart Things.

I borrowed actually the segment idea from a very brilliant woman who I love, Jessie Crookshank, who is a Canadian comedian.

I first fell in love with her and thought she was hilarious when she used to host the Hills After Show in like the early 2000s with Dan Levy. So funny together.

If you are looking for a funny podcast, if you are an elder millennial, especially if you are interested in what's going on in pop culture, but you have no time to actually follow what is going on with celebrities, listen to her podcast.

It's called Phone a Friend.

So funny. Anyways, part of what I love is she has segments like this. She has one called Hot People Doing Hot Things.

And so I totally borrow that for smart women doing smart things. And Jessie, if you're listening to it, I would love to have you as a guest on this show. You will be perfect.

You are brilliant. Let's talk about it. Okay, smart women doing smart things.

Sarah Blakely, creator of Spanx. If you don't know her story, here's a quick summary. In 1998, at the age of 27, she created Spanx in her living room.

She was broke. She was doing everything herself. If you follow her, she shares photos of her sitting in her living room, packaging all these Spanx and trying to convince people that they should invest in her business.

In 2000, Oprah named Spanx one of her favorite things and sales surged. The next year, she signed with QVC, which is a home shopping channel. And by 2012, she was on the cover of Forbes.

2021, she sold her company, valued at $1.2 billion with a B. Sarah Blakely is a great example of grit, determination, American dream, not my favorite part of her story.

My favorite part is a brain habit she shared on a podcast back in 2018 about her fake commute. So at the time, she shares that she was living really close to the Spanx office, but she found that she got her best ideas when she's driving, right?

That default mode network, when she's doing something kind of monotonous and easy and over-learned like driving, that creativity can fire. So what she did is she started leaving her house an hour early to aimlessly drive around and think.

Yes, creating Spanx and building it into a billion dollar brand took some luck, but that out of the box thinking, that story where she was annoyed with her pantyhose and she cut the feet off at a party and they rolled up her legs, but she loved how

everything felt shapely and she had this idea for Spanx. That type of thinking isn't created by efficiency alone. It's created with intentional and clever brain activation habits like going for a drive when you're stuck or need some idea generation.

Sarah Blakely, smart woman doing smart things.

Smart women doing smart things. Which brings me to an Instagram reel I posted recently that had a bunch of 55 plus balding men mansplaining how I was wrong. I meant it to be fun.

It was supposed to be funny. I started with my number one most unpopular opinion as a neuroscientist. Efficiency doesn't create brilliance.

And I explained how actually being super efficient can make your brilliance harder to access because when we're in efficient mode, that executive control network is dominant.

And we already talked about how that stifles, it pushes down your creativity when you're in that really focused, detail oriented, step by step problem solving mode.

So of course, all these old men had to jump on and tell me how their most creative ideas made them more efficient. Or when I'm more efficient, I have more space to creativity. Yeah, I know.

Thanks. I spent 13 years in university learning how our brains work. But sure, Dave, whose bio is a picture of him holding a fish, I will definitely take your criticism.

But yes, being efficient is obviously important. When we are more efficient, it frees up brain space for other things. I am all about efficiency.

I am a super boring person on purpose because I really believe that the more efficient that I am with the stuff that's not a priority for me, the more brain space and more brain capacity I have for other things.

Like my morning routine is boring and it looks exactly the same and it works. We meal plan every Sunday. We have kind of a rotation of the same like 10 meals.

It makes shopping easy. It makes planning easy. All of these things are one less thing my brain has to think about.

Less mental load on your brain is always a good thing. The problem is when we get into Monica energy all the time, when we're in efficient mode all the time, it blocks that creative ideation.

It blocks us from starting fun and exciting projects like this podcast that I have been thinking about for four months because my brain says, Nicole, that's not a responsible use of my time or I'm not creative enough anyway or no one's gonna listen.

Why would I put in all this work into something that's gonna be a bust and it's gonna take so much time? And everything I need to do needs to be hard work.

That wiring, that your value is tied to your to-do list, your productivity, how hard you work, takes over and shuts down your brilliance. That's what our brains have been conditioned to learn though, right? Not a bad thing.

It's probably what got you here. It's what got me here too, right?

It is the reason that I graduated close to the top of my class from high school, that I went to university and got my honors degree, got admitted as one of five students to a very competitive graduate program.

It's the reason I was the first in my class to graduate because I had a whiteboard with a checklist of everything I needed to do, and I was the one that was sitting in my dungeon of an office in the university arts building all summer where everyone

else was having fun. That's what built my business. It's probably what built yours too. Grit is not a bad thing, but you are not built for average.

You are built for brilliant, and that requires a different set of skills, a different set of ways of accessing your brain and your brilliance.

Let's play a quick round of what I'm calling Brain Fact or Fluff. Brain Fact or Brain Fluff. Where we separate neuroscience from nonsense, whether that viral brain hack is actually backed by any science or just Instagram glitter.

And of course, I'll bust a few wellness myths that your brain wishes you'd stop believing. Today, we're talking about creatine, the magic elixir formerly only used by bodybuilders, but now every wellness influencer over 40 is touting its benefits.

Even my husband actually sent me a YouTube video about why women should have creatine daily through perimenopause. Not sure if that should worry me, but I wanted to dive deep into the science. Is creatine all it's cracked up to be?

Is it worth your money and your time? Here's the science. So what is creatine?

Creatine is a naturally occurring compound in your body. Your body makes it already. It's not a steroid, it's not a hormone.

Your cells in your body run on something called ATP, or adenosine triphosphate. When you do intense physical activities like sprinting or lifting heavy weights, it uses up that ATP fast. Creatine essentially recharges your cell batteries.

It helps your body re-synthesize that ATP. Athletes knew this for years, right? They've been taking it after a workout and they know that it can increase lean muscle mass, muscle strength, and improve performance.

Most of your body's natural creatine is in your skeletal muscles. But there is an enzyme called creatine kinase that's produced in a brain specific form.

And we know that there are rare neurological syndromes where someone is naturally creatine deficient. Really rare, but it does suggest there is a link between creatine and our brain, right?

So the questions are, one, does taking extra creatine help your brain, or are you just giving yourself expensive urine because you're going to pee it all out? Two, does it help your body for the average woman who's maybe not a professional athlete?

Let's look at the brain research first. There's a 2021 review of studies on creatine supplementation. Nine out of 12 of the studies showed that taking a supplement of creatine shows up in your brain.

That's good. So when you ingest, when you eat or drink, whatever you do, creatine, it makes its way to your brain, which is good. That's one thing we want to know.

It's actually getting there. The effect is less strong compared to your muscles though. That creatine that you ingest shows up more strongly in your muscles than it does in your brain, but it's getting there, so that's good.

Does it actually impact cognition? What we see is there seems to be bigger benefits for creatine when your brain is under stress, under situations like oxygen or sleep deprivation. Then taking creatine seems to boost cognition.

It might also have an indirect role.

For example, one study found that taking creatine helps reduce fatigue when you're sleep deprived, but there is no benefit if you're not sleep deprived, which is okay, because to be honest, most of us who are listening to this podcast, most of the

women in my world, we're all sleep deprived, right? We're running businesses, we're leading families, we're leading in the community, we're not getting enough sleep.

So perhaps for those of us who are sleep deprived, some daily creatine in our diet, adding extra might be beneficial. In 2023, there was a randomized control trial. What that means is that participants are divided into two groups.

One group is given a placebo, so a sugar pill, right? One group is given creatine, but they don't know what they're taking. Then they test them to see if there's a benefit, okay?

What they found was that people who were taking the creatine pill showed some working memory improvements, which is good because working memory is required for skills like keeping track of what I need to get done today, being able to do a bunch of

mental multitasking, being able to pay attention to what my client's saying and come up with a creative response to get it out, keeping everything in mind that I want to say in this podcast without having to reference my notes a gazillion times. Good

skill for leaders, so maybe some benefit there. A more recent study in 2025 looked at an eight-week creatine supplementation study, again, with a randomized control study. So half the group got sugar pills, half got creatine.

They didn't know what they were taking. And they looked at perimenopausal and menopausal women specifically. Average age in the study was 50 years old.

What they found was that a medium dose of creatine, which is 750 milligrams a day, was better than a placebo at enhancing reaction time, increasing frontal brain creatine levels.

The frontal lobes of your brain are important for problem-solving, abstract thinking, all good skills. And it reduced severity of mood swings. Yay, right?

I want to be faster. I want to be better at problem-solving. I want to be less moody.

Good things there as well. Some studies though show that these creatine benefits might only be for individuals who aren't getting it naturally in their diet, such as individuals who are vegetarian or vegan.

A lot of our natural creatine comes from meat and fish. Older individuals as well tend to benefit more and women. Taken together, short-term memory, attention span, thinking speed tend to see the biggest boosts.

And you're likely to see the biggest benefits when you're doing tasks that have a high cognitive demand, like when you're sleep deprived, when you're doing high brain power activities under stress, that's when we're going to see the benefits from

taking creatine. So yes, maybe some benefits for creatine in our brain. More brain fact than fluff. What about our bodies?

Early research suggests that creatine can support muscle and bone health, especially for post-menopausal women, but only when it's combined with resistance training.

So you can't just take creatine and not exercise or workout and expect there to be any benefits for your muscle. You need to add some resistance training in there as well.

And again, there is some evidence that there's some benefit for perimenopausal women and mood swings from taking creatine. So what's the takeaway?

Yes, maybe some benefits for cognition for women, especially as we age, especially if we're sleep deprived, which honestly is most of us anyway. Maybe don't count on it to build stronger bones.

The energy and sorry seem to be more about building muscle rather than bone density. But when we have stronger muscles, we're less likely to fall, which is great for our brain and body health. And there doesn't seem to be a lot of side effects.

So if you can take creatine, if you can afford it and it's not annoying, give it a try. This has been Brain Fact or Fluff. Brain Fact or Brain Fluff.

Okay, I want to end this episode with something that's actionable. I really want this podcast to be something that's inspiring, that's fun, hopefully funny as well, but also actionable for you every week.

So here's your five minute brilliance booster. I want you to take my self-assessment, it's free, and find your brilliance archetype. It's not a personality quiz.

It's a neuroscience-backed tool that reveals your unique brain pattern. So you can take on your day sharp, focused, and fully on. Five minute assessment, learn how to tap into your zone of genius on demand without burning out.

You can head to drnicolebyers.com/brilliant to take that self-assessment for free.

And it's fun that you can, it's one story that you can download, like those Tiger Beat quizzes in the magazine, and you can change your answers and see if you get a different takeaway and see which one fits you best. So that's fun too.

Okay, here's your takeaway for today. When you align how you think, lead and create with how your brain is wired to perform your best, there are no limits. We're going to talk about time on this podcast, but about how time isn't really finite.

It's neurological, because your brain just doesn't process reality. It actively shapes it. When you shift from managing time to commanding it, that's how you focus deeper, you move faster, and what you can achieve becomes extraordinary.

That requires a new kind of brilliance. One that embraces your organized side and your imagination, intuition and creativity. So not only are you making an impact that you've been craving, your days are full of meaning again.

In this community, we know that brilliance isn't something you chase, it's something you access. And we're here to create a life that's brilliant by design. Thank you so much for joining me.

I'm Dr. Nicole Byers and this is the Call Her Brilliant Podcast.