Most new mums have used the ‘baby brain’ excuse after putting the car keys in the freezer or completely forgetting an appointment. But new research has revealed mums don’t get ‘baby brain’, they’re just incredibly tired.

In a first, Australian researchers have found that new mums don’t actually get ‘baby brain’, but they may think they do because they’re overworked, tired and anxious.

And it’s not just new mums – about 80% of pregnant women report they have ‘pregnancy brain’, which makes them more forgetful. And while there’s been some research to indicate this may actually be true in pregnancy – there haven’t been many studies on memory in new mums.

So Monash researchers, led by Dr Winnie Orchard and Associate Professor Sharna Jamadar, from the Turner Institute for Brain and Mental Health, decided to delve into the minds of new mums. They studied cognition in 86 women – 43 of them were first-time mums with one-year-olds and 43 of them were non-mothers.

They tested verbal memory, working memory, processing speed and theory of mind – and the researchers found that the results were the same for the all of the women, whether they were mums or not.

However, the mothers in the group did report worse subject memory than the non-mothers. To try and work out the reason, Dr Orchard and Associate Professor Jamadar looked at the women’s relationships between subjective memory, objective memory and well-being.

“Essentially we wanted to test each woman’s actual memory, their belief in how well they remember things, and how it relates to their overall sense of well-being such as sleep, anxiety and depression,” Dr Orchard said.

The study found that despite the two groups of women not showing any difference on objective measures of memory like their capability to recall numbers and objects, the mothers in the group self-reported significantly worse memory than the non-mothers. Basically, even though their memory was just as good, the mums in the group believed their memory was worse.

The researches say the increased mental load on new mums is most likely what leads them to be more forgetful.

“For example, leaving the house with a one-year-old in tow requires a new mother to remember a host of items – nappy bag, dummy, a favourite toy, snacks, a change of clothes, a bottle – the list goes on,” Dr Orchard said.

The academics also said that new mums know that any lapse in their memory may also have greater consequences because they’re caring for a baby, so it may just be that they’re more attune to minor memory lapses they previously wouldn’t have even noticed.

“We speculate that the increased cognitive load of daily life in early motherhood represents a cognitive challenge, with higher consequences for memory lapses, which encourages mothers to evaluate and re-evaluate their subjective memory regularly,” said Dr Orchard.

In essence the study found that it’s a new mum’s own perception of her poorer memory, or ‘baby brain’, is influenced by a heightened awareness of memory lapses, as well as an increased mental load.

The research has been published in the Journal for Women’s Health.

What do you think about baby brain? Is it real or do we just think we have a worse memory after having a baby? Let us know in the comments below.