Alcohol in Your 40s: What Every Woman Needs to Know About How It Impacts Fertility and Hormones

Are you an ambitious woman who also wants to have a family? Can you make time for motherhood while you’re busy building your resumé? Balancing the pursuit of a high-level career while being aware of your biological clock is a tough thing to navigate. And when you do have kids, how do you manage your work schedule while also trying to be a present, engaged parent? Can we really have it all? In this episode, Dr. Alicia Robbins and Dr. Lucky Sekhon are joined by Pilar Guzmán, Editorial Director of Oprah Daily, who has spent her career shaping the conversations women have about their lives, their identities, and the things that matter most to them. She’s also a mother, storyteller, and someone who’s had a front row seat to the changing conversations around women’s health. Pilar, Oprah Winfrey, and the team at Oprah Daily are launching The Book of Menopause, a science-backed guide that tackles everything from hot flashes and brain fog to intimacy, identity, and what it means to thrive in mid-life. Dr. Robbins and Dr. Sekhon are going beyond the book and hearing from Pilar herself about her own journey, career, motherhood, the ways her relationship with success has changed overtime, and what she’s learned from speaking with some of the most influential voices in women’s health. After experiencing menopause herself, Pilar became devoted to combining medicine and storytelling to help create language and understand this stage of life. Women deserve to feel informed, empowered and know that there is so much to look forward to and be optimistic about as they evolve. They should not have to wait until they’re struggling to learn about their bodies, and they certainly shouldn’t have to accept feeling terrible as an inevitable part of getting older. Pilar also shares her thoughts about what makes a good leader, how to hire the right people, and what advice she’d give to young, high-achieving women who struggle with the need to constantly prove themselves. Whether you are just starting your career and/or your family in your 30s, entering perimenopause in your 40s, or going through menopause in your 50s, this episode is for you.

Have you ever heard the term “pregnancy brain” or lost your train of thought mid-sentence? Do you ever feel like your brain isn’t working as well as it should after a bad night of sleep? Are you in your 40s and noticing that you’re not able to think as clearly as you once did? Brain fog is not a real medical diagnosis; it’s an umbrella term for what can be a constellation of many different symptoms, but it is real, it’s common, and it deserves a real workup. 2/3 perimenopausal and menopausal women report cognitive concerns, usually paired with other symptoms like hot flashes and night sweats. Most of the time it’s a part of the transition, and it does not continue, but there can be signs that something more insidious is going on. It’s one of those invisible chronic symptoms that can sound like an excuse, when in fact your cognition is impaired, and you can’t think as clearly as they once used to. In this episode, Dr. Alicia Robbins and Dr. Lucky Sekhon are breaking down what brain fog is, what causes it, when to worry, and what can actually help. They explain what happens to a woman’s brain during pregnancy and in her 40s, and also other common causes of brain fog because it can happen to anyone at any stage of life. Dr. Robbins also shares research from neuroscientist Lisa Mosconi who was the first person to map out the brain in real time as it responds to estrogen. By the end of this episode, you’ll know how to describe your brain fog so it gets taken seriously, the most common causes and the labs worth asking about, red flags that mean you need to be seen more urgently, and what actually helps and which supplements to skip. Dr. Sekhon and Dr. Robbins also share what the newest research in 2026 says about hormone therapy and Alzheimer’s, and what the data we have on testosterone says for brain health.

We plan our kids’ schedules, our careers, even our vacations down to the hour, and somehow holding our relationship together doesn’t get the same attention. Most marriages, when they end, don’t end in one big blowup —they end quietly; one skipped conversation at a time. Today we’re talking about connection and the stress that fertility issues, perimenopause, and postpartum can put on our relationship. By the end of this episode, you’ll know what quietly quitting your marriage really looks like, how the mental load of raising kids and caregiving quietly erodes connection, and practical tips you can start implementing today, or even tonight, to build that connection. You’ll also learn what the orgasm gap is, and what can actually close it. Our guest today is Dr. Rebecca Howard Eudy, an AASECT Certified sex therapist and author of Parents in Love: A Guide to Great Sex After Kids. She is also certified in Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT) and is the co-host of the Under the Hood podcast. Dr. Eudy helps couples navigate sex, desire, and connection in the whirlwind of parenting, even when life and kids make it feel impossible. She works with couples every day who love each other but have quietly drifted into something that looks more like a partnership than a marriage, and she’s here to tell us exactly how they find their way back before it’s too late. Dr. Lucky Sekhon and Dr. Alicia Robbins ask Dr. Eudy how she helps couples reestablish connection, her thoughts on open marriages, how she uses the biopsychosocial model to analyze low libido, and when should a couple seek out a sex therapist. Dr. Eudy also explains the difference between spontaneous desire and responsive desire and why it’s healthy for couples to talk about sex more than they have sex. If you take one thing from this episode, let it be this quote from Dr. Eudy: “You cannot pour desire from an empty cup. Rest, pleasure, and feeling valued are not luxuries, they’re conditions that intimacy requires.”

Breast cancer is one of those diagnoses that almost every woman thinks about at some point. Maybe you’ve had a mammogram callback, maybe you found a lump, maybe your mother, sister, best friend, coworker, or you have been diagnosed. Or maybe you’ve wondered, what can I actually do to lower my risk? But here’s the thing - most of what women hear about breast cancer focuses on finding it and treating it, we hear much less about everything that comes before and after, and the after can be enormous. What happens to your fertility if you’re diagnosed before you’ve finished building your family? What happens when chemotherapy or hormone therapy puts you into a state of menopause a decade before you expected it? Can you ever take hormones again? Is pregnancy safe after breast cancer? And after treatment ends, and everyone tells you “you’re cancer free - go live your life”…what does that actually look like? Our guest today has made it her mission to talk about these exact issues. Dr. Eleonora Teplinsky is a board-certified medical oncologist specializing in breast and gynecologic cancers. She’s the head of the breast and gynecologic medical oncology department at Valley Health System in New Jersey, and a clinical assistant professor of medicine at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, which is where Dr. Sekhon and Dr. Robbins met and trained together. Dr. Teplinsky is also the host of Interlude podcast, a passionate women’s health advocate and author of Beyond the Pink: Navigating Life, Health, and Breast Cancer. Breast cancer is so much bigger than wearing a pink ribbon. In this episode, Dr. Lucky Sekhon and Dr. Alicia Robbins sit down with Dr. Teplinsky to discuss what women actually need to know about their risk, prevention, diagnosis, hormones, fertility, and what happens when treatment is done, but you’re still figuring out how to live in your body again. Breast health isn’t just something that we should start thinking about after there’s a problem. We should be evaluating our own risk, better understanding our family history, knowing what screening we need, and knowing what changes in our body deserve attention, as well as taking care of ourselves in a holistic way outside of just actual breast cancer treatment. For anyone listening who has been diagnosed with breast cancer, or loves someone who has, we hope this conversation makes clear that you’re allowed to care about more than just simply surviving.

Doctor’s appointments can be intimidating. It’s a universal experience. And everyone wants to feel like their doctor is invested in them. As two doctors who are on the other side of things, we know how it feels when you walk into a sterile environment where you’re given a limited amount of time to be assessed and have all your questions answered. In today’s episode, Dr. Lucky Sekhon and Dr. Alicia Robbins are giving you all the hacks and practical tips on how to get the most out of your doctor’s appointments. It’s enough to be a patient dealing with a medical problem, but navigating the healthcare system and coordination of everything that needs to be done is no small feat and can leave you feeling overwhelmed and unsure. Most doctor appointments are 15 minutes, or even less, and we are here to help you be prepared to use every single moment of that visit wisely. Dr. Sekhon and Dr. Robbins share how you should prep for your appointment, what to prioritize when you’re actually there, and the questions you should ask before you walk out the door. This episode stresses the importance of knowing enough to be able to participate actively and proactively in your medical care. There are so many good doctors—you don’t go through years of grueling training without having a purpose or a reason behind it. Is it an optimal healthcare system? No. But this is all about being strategic, efficient, and maximizing as much as we can. You can get a lot more out of your experience and have better care if you are able to self-advocate, and today’s episode is really about giving you those tools. Plan it, be strategic, know your story, understand your options, speak up when something doesn’t make sense, and remember that your doctor has seen it all, so don’t be embarrassed to be vulnerable. And yes, crying IS normal! We hope this episode inspires you to take your health into your own hands. The best care isn’t a doctor dictating what happens to a passive patient, it’s a partnership.