Kristyn Hodgdon
Everything you’re feeling, but didn’t know how to say.
The Hearing-Loss-and-Dementia Connection I Never Saw Coming
After nearly a decade in women's health, I thought I'd heard it all. And then a video stopped me mid-scroll and genuinely blew my mind.
It turns out, hearing loss is one of the largest known risk factors for dementia.
I've been thinking about brain health a lot lately: my grandmother had Alzheimer's, and honestly, it scares the crap out of me. I started taking creatine because I'd read it supports cognitive function. (I stopped because the bloating was extreme and I am not built for that kind of suffering.) But the intention was there.
What I had never once considered, in all my reading and researching and late-night Googling, was my hearing. Not as a vanity thing or an aging thing, but as a brain thing.
The research is wild. A landmark study published in The Lancet found that in older adults at elevated risk for cognitive decline, treating hearing loss with hearing aids slowed cognitive decline by nearly 50%. A more recent study in JAMA Neurology went even further: people who addressed hearing loss before age 70 had a 61% lower risk of developing dementia than those who left it untreated.
Once you understand it, it tracks. When your brain is constantly working to fill in missing sounds, it's borrowing resources from other cognitive functions. Over time, that borrowing has a real cost.
I have never had my hearing tested as an adult. Apparently, most people haven't.
The more you know — and apparently, there is always more to know.
I Keep Starting Books and Ending Up on TikTok (Send Help)
I feel like the theme of this column is that I am one giant, walking contradiction. A couple of weeks ago I mentioned that I always need a book in my head — that it's basically a mental health requirement at this point — and then, as if the universe heard me and decided to have a little fun, I fell into the most stubborn book slump of my life.
It started with Christina Applegate's memoir, which, listen, I wanted to love it. I just think I wasn't quite the demographic. And then I picked up The Secret Lives of Murderers Wives, which had everything going for it on paper: a juicy title, a premise I was fully ready to commit to. Except it turned out to be a lot of character development and not nearly enough, well, murder. Down it went.
Since then, nothing has stuck. I'll read fifteen pages, put it down, pick up my phone, and somehow end up watching a video about botched lip filler at midnight instead. (We've been over this.)
I do wonder if it's partly the weather: there's something about actual sunshine that makes sitting on the couch with a book feel slightly criminal when a patio and a margarita exist in the world. And if I'm not doing that, I'm watching Big Mistakes on Netflix, which is so good that I'm not even a little sorry about it.
If you have a recommendation (literary or contemporary fiction, please!) send it my way, because left to my own devices I will simply keep watching reality TV until the sunshine runs out and I remember who I am.
Ask Clara:
"What are the signs of ADHD in women?"
In Defense of "Easy IVF"
When our friend Abbie posted a video about her "easy IVF journey," I braced for the comments. And look, I get it. For a lot of people, those two words in the same sentence feel like a contradiction at best and a gut punch at worst.
But here's the thing: she's not wrong.
I've had two completely different IVF experiences. The first time, I got pregnant with twins on my second transfer with untested embryos. The second involved multiple failed transfers, two miscarriages, and a moment where I genuinely almost gave up. I've been on both sides of this thing, which is maybe why Abbie's video didn't bother me at all.
Because what I always come back to is this: for a lot of people, IVF isn't actually the hardest part. It's everything that comes before it. The timed intercourse. The IUIs. The Clomid (oh my god, the Clomid). The months of trying things that feel less invasive but somehow take more out of you, because you're doing them while still holding onto the idea that maybe you won't need the big thing.
And then you do the big thing, and sometimes you find out you're stronger than you thought.
IVF is brutal for some people. Really, truly brutal. I know that firsthand. But giving someone a reason to hope that maybe — just maybe — it'll be easier than they feared? That's not toxic positivity. That's just leaving the door open.
We could all use a little more of that.
Zoom Dysmorphia Is Real, and I Have It Bad
Are we looking at ourselves too much? No, like, that's a serious question.
Maybe it's the fact that I'm in my "late" 30s now. Maybe it's four hours of Zoom meetings a day. Maybe it's both. But I genuinely did not care this much about my hairline — or my eleven line, for that matter — before the pandemic and, let's be honest, social media.
Because before we even get the crust out of our eyes in the morning, we're already watching seventeen videos of creators who are simply glowing. Do they have a filter on? Probably. Does that make us any less self-conscious? Absolutely not.
And the numbers back it up: cosmetic procedures in the U.S. have grown 19% since 2019, with liposuction, breast augmentation, and tummy tucks leading surgical procedures, and Botox and fillers dominating the non-surgical side. And then there's the TikTok rabbit hole of botched procedures: people dissolving filler, reversing lip jobs, genuinely grieving the face they had before. Jessi from Secret Lives of Mormon Wives comes to mind. It's a lot.
I think about my daughter watching me look at myself on a screen and wondering what I'm looking for. I don't know what the moral of the story is here, but I will say this: you're perfect the way you are, and maybe we all just need to go touch some grass — not for our nasolabial folds, but for all the girls who came after us.
Ask Clara:
"What is body dysmorphia, exactly?"
The New Cholesterol Guidelines Changed the Conversation — Here's Mine
I was 13 when my grandfather died of a massive heart attack. The kind that doesn't give you a warning, doesn't give you time. One of those moments that rewires something in you — not in a way you can explain at 13, but in a way you carry forward every time the word "cardiology" comes up.
I'm 37 now, which still feels young until you start doing the math.
The American College of Cardiology and the American Heart Association just released their first updated cholesterol guidelines since 2018, and a few things stopped me. Screening is now recommended starting at 19(!). Risk assessment begins at 30, and it now calculates your 30-year risk, not just 10, which changes the conversation entirely when you're sitting across from a doctor who thinks you're "too young to worry." For people with a family history, earlier medication is on the table. And there's a new test most of us have never heard of: Lp(a), or lipoprotein(a), recommended once in every adult's lifetime. It's mostly genetic, highly predictive, and almost never brought up unless you ask.
That last part is the one that gets me. About 1 in 4 adults has elevated LDL cholesterol, and most don't know it. Heart disease is still the number one killer of women, accounting for roughly 1 in every 5 female deaths. And yet the default is still to wait, to monitor, to revisit it later.
My grandfather didn't get later. So the next time I'm at my doctor, I'm asking for the Lp(a) test, and I'm not apologizing for it.
Ultra-Processed Foods and Fertility: On Controlling What You Can Control
There's a specific kind of obsession that sets in after enough failed cycles — the kind where you start reading ingredient labels like they contain the answer. I know this because I lived there. Secondary infertility has a particular cruelty to it: you've done it before, your body knows how to do this, and yet. So you find the one thing you can actually control, which is everything you put in your mouth, and you grip it.
I worked with a registered dietitian. I cleaned up my diet in ways that felt both genuinely meaningful and slightly unhinged. I have opinions about gut health now. I became, briefly, a person who read studies for fun.
So when two new ones dropped this week linking ultra-processed foods to lower fertility — women with the highest intake were significantly less likely to conceive; men eating more UPFs took longer to get their partners pregnant — I felt the old reflex. Not guilt, exactly. More like, of course. One more variable to add to the list.
Worth noting: both studies are observational, meaning they show a link, not a cause. Researchers suspect it's not just poor nutrition, but chemicals like phthalates and BPA leaching from packaging (known hormone disruptors) doing damage in the background. According to the CDC, Americans get about 55% of their daily calories from ultra-processed foods, which is a lot of packaging.
Here's what I know, though: I did everything right, and it still took everything I had. The pantry audit matters. It also doesn't save you. Skippy was never leaving my house, and somehow, eventually, it worked anyway.
Ask Clara:
"What should I eat to support fertility?"
The Podcasts Keeping Me Company Lately
Nobody warns you that your 30s are basically one long lesson in letting go of the plot you had in your head. Mine have included infertility, IVF, pregnancy loss, a chronic illness diagnosis, and three kids who arrived on their own timeline, not mine. I came in thinking if I just did everything right, things would go the way I planned. I was wrong, repeatedly, and somehow that turned out to be the education.
The through line in all of it — grief, IVF, motherhood, the insurance calls that will live rent-free in my brain forever — is that control was always an illusion. You can optimize, advocate, prepare, and still end up somewhere you didn't plan. That's not failure.
What I've found, especially lately, is that the things that actually help aren't the ones that promise to fix anything. They're the ones that keep you company inside the uncertainty, that meet you where you are instead of telling you where you should be. Good information helps. Honest conversation helps. And sometimes, genuinely, a podcast that makes you laugh until something hurts helps more than anything else.
My current queue does all of it (women's health, financial health, the hard stuff, the funny stuff), and I wrote up the whole list here.
Some weeks you need the science. Some weeks you need someone to just tell you you're not alone. Most weeks, honestly, you need both.
It's Everything Shower Season (And I Have Thoughts)
My friend texted me last week: "I just shaved my entire body." I responded: "Wait, I'm literally about to do the same thing." We didn't plan this. We didn't need to. It's that time of year, and somehow our bodies knew it before our calendars did.
If, like me, you're Italian and had a unibrow until you were 14, you know this isn't your average shower. This is the "everything shower" — the full spring production, the fresh razor purchased in advance, the prayer you make it past the left knee.
I've been thinking about this more than usual since watching the America's Next Top Model documentary, which sent me spiraling in the best and worst way. Watching those episodes back, what struck me wasn't the drama; it was how completely unremarkable it all felt at the time. Women being assessed, corrected, and ranked by the inch, all of us at home absorbing it like it was just TV. It wasn't just TV. It was the water we were swimming in, and most of us didn't notice until years later.
We grew up steeped in that: the before-and-afters, the "flattering" cuts, the understanding that our bodies were permanent renovation projects. Now we're in our late thirties, rolling our eyes at all of it, and also blocking off ninety minutes before sandal season to handle the situation.
What can I say — women contain multitudes. You can see exactly how you got here and still need to get your eyebrows threaded every two weeks. Both things, forever.
Somebody Please Tell Me What Products I Actually Need
Somewhere between my postpartum scalp freakout and my third Google search about whether I should be exfoliating or not, I had a realization: women's wellness doesn't have an information problem — it has the opposite problem. There's so much information, from so many directions, with so many conflicting opinions, that by the time you've read enough to feel confident, you've also read enough to feel confused again. Congratulations, you're back at square one, but now you know what "moisture-protein balance" means.
Take haircare: I never thought much about it until my hair started shedding postpartum, and suddenly I was deep in Reddit threads about scalp pH, protein overload, and whether silicones are the enemy or just misunderstood. Every answer led to three more questions. Is this shampoo non-comedogenic, because I also have acne-prone skin and apparently that's a whole separate consideration nobody mentioned? Is my stylist recommending this because it's right for my hair, or because it's what's sitting behind her desk?
Skincare is somehow worse. Should I be exfoliating? With what? How often? Is my barrier compromised or am I fine? Every influencer has an answer and also (conveniently) an affiliate link. Nearly half of Americans say social media has influenced them to spend more on beauty products than they otherwise would, with millennials averaging $2,670 a year on beauty — which makes sense, because the information is designed to make you feel like you're always one product away from having it figured out.
And yet, every time I actually make it to the dermatologist, they tell me CeraVe is fine and I'm doing great. I believe them. And then I open Instagram.
I don't think this is accidental. Women's beauty and wellness spaces have always monetized confusion. The more overwhelmed you are, the more you buy, and the more you buy, the more overwhelmed you get. It's a very elegant trap, and I say that as someone who is absolutely still in it. Godspeed, my friends.
Age of Attraction Got Me (Then My Uterus Had Questions)
Something else you should know: I am, despite my better judgment, a hopeless romantic. I have watched almost every season of The Bachelor. I have cried at the finale. I am not immune to a love story, and I never have been. So when Age of Attraction showed up on Netflix — a dating show where people build connections without knowing each other's ages — I was in, immediately and completely. What I didn't expect was to spend half the show thinking about fertility.
The premise: singles date without knowing how old anyone else is, reveal ages when they're ready to commit, then decide whether to move forward. It's hosted by Nick Viall and Natalie Joy, who have an 18-year gap themselves — which is either genius casting or a lot to unpack over cocktails (probably both).
But then the fertility warrior in me shows up, the one who spent years in waiting rooms counting follicles and learning odds, and she has a different question entirely. When a woman who's 54 is falling for someone who's 27 and they're both all in, nobody on that show is asking out loud — does he want biological kids? Does she know whether that's still possible for her? Because the science is what it is. By 40, about 1 in 10 women will conceive in any given cycle. By 54, that conversation looks very different. Has it happened in the Promise Room, or are they just hoping love will be enough when it surfaces later?
It will surface. I say that not as someone who thinks it's a deal-breaker, but as someone who knows that the gap between a romantic decision and a reproductive one is real, and that reality TV, by design, stays on the romantic side of it.
I sit on my couch knowing what they haven't asked yet, rooting for them anyway.
Photo source: People