I Wanted My Morning Brain in the Afternoon

I sleep well. I eat well. I exercise every day. I gave up alcohol almost four years ago. I take supplements, do ice baths, take regular holidays. I am meticulous about optimising my health and performance.

And for a long time, none of it was enough.

Let me explain. Every morning, I wake up sharp. My mind is clear, my decisions are fast, my thinking is crisp. I can hold five things in my head at once and move through them with confidence. Morning Michelle is the version of me I want to be all day.

But by mid-afternoon, often earlier, something shifts. The clarity starts to drain. Not in a dramatic, falling-asleep-at-my-desk way. More like a slow dimming. The edges of my thinking get soft. Decisions that should take seconds start taking minutes. I second-guess myself. I procrastinate on things that don't deserve procrastination.

And then I come home.

I have two kids, aged five and seven, and a husband I love having long conversations with. But on too many evenings, I'd walk through the door and feel like my brain had already clocked off for the day. I couldn't string a sentence together. I couldn't hold a conversation. Deciding what to have for dinner felt like being asked to solve a maths problem. My brain would just shut down.

"I was doing everything right. And I still felt like I was failing."

That's the thing that nobody talks about. When you're a working parent, and especially when you're the primary household decision-maker, the volume of decisions you process in a day is staggering. Not just work decisions, though there are plenty of those. It's the relentless accumulation of everything else: what the kids eat, what they wear, the school admin, the play dates, the groceries, the laundry, the training schedule, the social calendar, the mental load of keeping an entire household running.

I didn't have a word for what I was experiencing. I just thought I needed to try harder. Sleep more. Meditate more. Be more disciplined.

Then I Met Shawn

Shawn explained what was actually happening in my brain. That the afternoon shutdown I was experiencing wasn't simply tiredness, it was a limitation of the brain everyone faces. When you make decisions, any decisions, big or small, your brain produces glutamate as a byproduct. Under normal conditions, that glutamate gets cleared away. But when you're making thousands of decisions a day, the glutamate builds up faster than your brain can process it. It creates what's essentially a traffic jam in your neural pathways. Your cognitive function degrades. Your decision quality drops. Your brain starts to shut down non-essential functions to protect itself.

It has a name: decision fatigue. And it's not a mindset problem. It's a physiological one.

Relief, Then Focus

When Shawn explained this to me, I felt two things. First, enormous relief. I wasn't failing. My brain wasn't broken. I was simply running up against a biological limitation that nobody had ever told me about.

And then I felt focus. Sharp, clear, unmistakable focus. This was a problem I wanted to help solve. This was something I wanted to be a part of.

That's how I became CMO at Numin. Not because I was looking for a marketing job in biotech. Because I recognised myself in the problem. Because I felt it, deeply, personally, and because I believed that if we could help people understand what was happening in their brains, we could change the way they approach their entire day.

Why I'm Writing This Blog

This is the first in a series of posts I'll be writing for the Numin blog. I'm not a neuroscientist, that's Shawn's department. What I am is someone who experienced decision fatigue long before I knew its name. A working mum of two who makes thousands of household decisions on top of a demanding career. A marathon runner who understands what happens when your mind gives out before your body does. And someone who has spent 18 years figuring out how to take complex ideas and turn them into stories that actually resonate.

I'll be writing about decision fatigue as I experience it, in work, in parenting, in training, in life. I'll share protocols and strategies that help me manage it. And I'll translate the science into language that's useful, not academic.

Because here's what I know now: wanting your morning brain in the afternoon isn't unrealistic. It's a completely reasonable expectation. You've just never been given the right information to make it happen.

That changes now.