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Published by Rose Soffel and Bianca Bass
Matrescence Unfiltered is LIVE, a new podcast exploring motherhood, career, identity and ambition. ✨ We made this for the woman who loves her career and may be dreaming of becoming a mum, expecting, or already raising little ones. For the woman who couldn't find content that spoke to both motherhood and ambition at once. We're Bianca and Rose. A Chief Marketing Officer in her third trimester and a coach, consultant and organisational psychology researcher specialising in matrescence and sustainable high performance. We've been friends since we were teenagers, the first of the great neurological shifts of a woman's life, as it happens. Matrescence is the transition into motherhood. It is as neurologically significant as adolescence. And it is almost entirely absent from the professional conversation. That's what this podcast is about. 💡 Motherhood isn't a hindrance to your career, it's a accelerator. Research proves it's a neurological upgrade. 💡 Each episode, we take one thing about motherhood and work that doesn't hold up under scrutiny and break it down properly. Research, lived experience, and honest conversation about what it actually means when your identity is shifting in the middle of everything else. If this helps even one woman feel a little less conflicted and a little less alone, it will have been worth every second.
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We're back from summer, and we're doing things differently: for the first time, we're answering your questions. This episode moves through the six-week check and why the conversation stops at exactly the point it should start, trad wives and what that fantasy is actually offering, Rose's summer project born from a chat outside the vet, and a stretch of listener questions that gets more honest than we expected. Six weeks after a C-section, you're signed off and sent on your way. Bianca got behind the wheel that week and found out exactly how ready she wasn't. We're retiring another term this episode: postpartum recovery is out, postpartum transformation is in, because recovery implies heading back to a previous version of yourself. Bianca also brings the August research on care beyond six weeks, making the case that the six-week appointment is asking the wrong questions entirely. We get into trad wives via Yesteryear, Caro Claire Burke's novel about an influencer who wakes up in 1855 and has to actually live it. Bianca has worked out what she'd genuinely want back from that era, and it isn't what the algorithm keeps offering her. Rose has her own theory on what those accounts are really selling. Rose spent her summer finishing her dissertation, then fell down a rabbit hole after a conversation outside the vet with a woman called Joan, who wanted a cat. That became 75 Comfortable, her answer to the 75 Hard challenge, and it's the first time she's talked about it on the show. Then, your questions. Is it realistic to study within three months of giving birth? How do you hold on to a sense of self while breastfeeding, in what's the most honest stretch of the episode? And what do you do if you're not ambitious after becoming a mother, when everyone assumes you should be? Send us a question for the next one at hello@matrescenceunfiltered.com , or find us on Instagram at @matrescenceunfiltered. Mentioned in this episode: Rose's Substack: soffelhaus.substack.com Our episode with Gemma Folkard of Shape Pilates (17 June 2026) on reconnecting with your body Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke
We're back from our summer break. And to ease back in, we've made a mini episode: our four favourite terms to retire, played back to back for the first time. If you're new here, every episode we take a word or phrase about motherhood that isn't working and give it a proper send off. This one gathers the best of them in one place, and heard together they make a bigger point than any of them do alone. We start with baby brain, the phrase that tells women they're losing it right when the research says the opposite. The maternal brain isn't shrinking, it's specialising, and by midlife it can actually look younger than it did before. This is not baby brain. It's neuroprotection. Then baby blues, which Bianca calls out for what it really is: the fastest hormonal crash in human biology, dressed up as something cute. There's honesty here about the day three drop and what it actually feels like from the inside, plus the line that matters most, that anything lasting beyond two weeks deserves real support, not a shrug. We take on the village next, the myth that community just appears when you need it. It doesn't. You build it, from a WhatsApp group, a nursery run, a partner who flexes, and every piece of that patchwork costs something. And we finish on maternity leave, the word that frames one of the biggest transitions of your life as time off. It isn't leave. It's becoming. This is a short one to tide you over. We're back next week with a full episode and a new structure that includes your questions, so if there's something you want us to answer on the show, we want to hear it. Come and find us on Instagram at @matrescenceunfiltered, and if you've got a question or just want to say hello, email us at hello@matrescenceunfiltered.com . If this one gave you something, send it to someone who needs to hear it.
Your working day was built around a hormone cycle that resets every 24 hours. Yours doesn't. So why are we all still measuring ourselves against it? Sophie Cliff is the author of The Hustle Cure and Choose Joy, a coach and the founder of The Joyful Coach. Seven years ago she walked away from a corporate career because she could see the trade-off coming: be ambitious, or be present. Pick one. She decided not to. Today she runs a growing business on three days of childcare a week, went back to work 10 weeks after both of her babies, and has the positive psychology research to explain exactly why it works. We get into why almost every productivity book she picked up in pregnancy was written by a man with someone else handling his life admin, and what happens when you stop trying to work like one. Sophie explains the 24 hour male hormone cycle the entire working world is built around, what your own cycle actually means for when you do your best thinking, and why waking up at 5am is not a moral achievement but simply the length of a piece of DNA. She also tells us about the nap she takes during work hours and the moment she stopped apologising for it. There is honesty here too. Sophie burnt out at the start of this year while writing a book about burnout, and she talks openly about what that taught her. We cover how she and her husband divide the mental load through explicit conversations rather than assumed ones, the shoulds she has shed in motherhood from parenting camps to the myth of having it all together, and why prioritising joy is not selfish at all but the thing quietly fuelling your resilience, your relationships and your career. If you have ever felt like the game is rigged, it is. This one is about playing it your way. A note from us: we're taking August off for a summer break, and we'll be back with more brilliant guests in September. You can find Sophie at sophiecliff.com , over on Instagram at @sophiecliff, on her podcast Practical Positivity, and in her book The Hustle Cure.
Last episode, we named the cost. This one, we do something about it. First, Rose goes solo through It's a Rich Man's World, the book from the founders of Female Invest that reframes the whole thing. Why the person you marry is the biggest financial decision of your life. Why women live longer but retire poorer and sicker. Why motherhood still costs women almost everything. Bianca joins for the practical half. The exact accounts they use. Pensions, and why they might be the most powerful tool you are ignoring. The tax-free childcare most parents never claim. And how to start investing when every app feels built for someone else. Not financial advice. Just two women telling you what has actually worked. Part two of two.
Nobody hands you the invoice. But becoming a mother has a price, and it is bigger than you think. The cost of raising a child to eighteen. The 42% drop in a mother's earnings. The nearly £100 billion the economy loses every year when women step back. This episode puts numbers on the things that usually go unspoken. And as always, we flip the story. This is not about what women give up. It is about what the economy takes for granted and never pays for. Rose brings the data. Bianca brings the reality of doing this maths for the first time, in real time. If the sums have never quite added up for you, they don't. And it is not your fault. Part one of two.
In this episode, Bianca and Rose break down what's actually happening inside a new mother's brain in those first twelve weeks known as the fourth trimester, and why "baby brain" is one of the most misunderstood phrases in motherhood. Because your brain isn't failing. It's remodelling, the same kind of major neuroplastic shift as adolescence, trimming and strengthening the connections that make you sharper at reading emotion, detecting threat, and keeping a tiny human alive on almost no sleep. They get into why everything suddenly feels louder. Why your nervous system and your baby's are, for a while, essentially one shared system learning to divide. And why the guilt so many new mothers carry, for needing help, for feeling depleted, for not bouncing back, might be less about personal failure and more about a species that was never designed to do this alone. If you've ever looked in the mirror in those early weeks and thought, "why don't I feel like myself," this episode won't fix your sleep. But it might change the story you're telling yourself about why.
Women are using AI about 25% less than men. Lauren Ingram is on a mission to close that gap before it sets. We sit down with the founder of AI Girl Gang to talk about the skills gap no one has named yet, and why mothers have the most to gain and the most to lose. Lauren tells us how she built her whole career from her phone on maternity leave, newborn under one arm, talking to tech leaders at 2am between feeds. She shares the early pregnancy loss that sparked a strange creative renaissance, and the name AI Girl Gang itself. And she makes the case for trading the fear of being left behind for curiosity, play, and opting in. Honest, warm, and a proper nudge to stop watching from the sidelines. Find Lauren AI Girl Gang: aigirlgang.tech Substack: aigirlgang.substack.com LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/ingramlauren Instagram: @laurennextbigthing
Your brain didn't break when you became a mother. It got an upgrade. Clinical psychologist Dr Rosanna M joins us on compassion-focused therapy and the three systems that run how we feel: threat, drive and soothe. Motherhood sharpens two of them. You hear the cry before anyone else does. You hold a hundred things in your head at once. The one that quietly slips is soothe, the rest and the steadiness that hold it all together. So we get practical about getting it back. A grounding exercise you can do mid-feed. The five percent shift. And why a treat is never just a treat. Warm, clever and genuinely useful. Find Rosanna on Instagram at @DrRosannaM. Resources: Guided breathing exercise (diaphragmatic breathing with Sophie, Nuffield Health): https://247.nuffieldhealth.com/videos/diaphragmatic-breathing-with-sophie Values vs goals, getting a sense of what matters to us again (video): https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC-sMFszAaa7C9poytIAmBvA The Happiness Trap Bull's Eye worksheet (PDF): https://thehappinesstrap.com/upimages/Long_Bull's_Eye_Worksheet.pdf More from Rosanna, Becoming Mum resources: https://becomingmum.co.uk/resources/
This episode is about the body. We spend a lot of time on this show on the neurological side of matrescence, but the physical transformation gets far less honest airtime. This week we change that. Rose brings her research and coaching background, drawing out the link between movement, the nervous system, and identity. Bianca joins three weeks postpartum, asking the questions she is living through right now. And our first ever guest, Gemma Folkard, brings over a decade of teaching and a down to earth way of talking about the postpartum body. Gemma is a Pilates and strength trainer, a mother of three, and the founder of Shape Pilates. We talk about why she does not see ambition the way she was taught to, how she built a business around her family rather than the other way round, and why she is wary of the phrase bounce back. She makes the case that softness is not weakness, that most postpartum healing happens where you cannot see it, and that breathing, not the gym, is where new mums should start. For this episode's term to retire, we get into baby brain and bounce back, and why both deserve to go. Whether you are in the newborn fog right now or further along and still making sense of it, there is something here for you. Where to find Gemma Instagram: @shape_pilates App: Shape Pilates London (Apple App Store and Google Play) Website: shape-pilates.com
Sensitivity note: this episode discusses birth trauma, emergency caesarean, and the emotional aftermath of a birth that didn't go to plan. If you're currently pregnant or in early postpartum, please listen with care. You write a birth plan before you know what birth actually does. Bianca's didn't hold. Episode eleven is about what happens after. Two weeks on from her son arriving, Bianca sits down with Rose to talk honestly about her emergency caesarean and the shame that followed it. Why she felt she'd failed at something her body was supposed to just do. Why that feeling landed so hard. This one isn't Rose explaining the science. It's Rose listening, asking, trying to understand it alongside Bianca, using some data along the way. One study found 65% of women reported feelings of failure after birth, and they pointed all of it at themselves. Then they get into the words. Why "natural birth" carries so much, what it quietly says about every other kind, and why they want it gone. This is for anyone who has grieved the birth they planned for while loving the baby they got.
Bianca recorded this episode two weeks after giving birth. On the same day, as it happens, that the UK appointed its first ever National Maternity Advisor. It is a meaningful step. Michelle Welsh MP will work with families, the NHS, and ministers to push for safer, more compassionate care. It happened because women like Louise Thompson and Theo Clarke refused to stop pushing. But the announcement said nothing about what happens after the hospital door closes. The identity shift of matrescence did not feature. The neurological rewiring did not feature. The return to a workplace with no framework for what just happened to you did not feature. Bianca is living all of it in real time. And the research backs her up: the brain changes of matrescence are not temporary. They are lasting adaptations. The support infrastructure for them does not exist. This episode is for anyone who has felt the drop-off. From the moment the hospital door closed behind them to the moment they were expected to function as if nothing fundamental had changed.
This is the episode about what happens when the greatest love of your life arrives in the same 72-hour window as the biggest hormonal crash your body can survive. Day three: she started crying and didn't stop. Sobbing on the sofa at midnight, leaking milk, howling into a pillow so she wouldn't wake the baby. By day four it shifted into anxiety. Day five, the crying came back. She describes feeling like a stranger to herself at the exact moment she needed to be most capable. Rose brings the science. Your placenta has been acting as a second endocrine organ for nine months. When it leaves, your hormonal system crashes to baseline in 48 hours. No wind down. Just gone. Eight in ten women go through this. The midwife calls it "being a bit teary." This episode calls it what it is. If you're in it, about to be in it, or love someone who is: you are not losing your mind. This is the beginning of the fourth trimester. You deserve more than "it'll pass."
Last episode we laid out the career penalty. The stats, the systemic failures, the cost of becoming a mother in a workplace that wasn't built for you. This episode we flip it. What if being pushed out of the linear path isn't the end of the story? What if it's the beginning of a bigger one? We get into the science behind why motherhood is actually a leadership accelerator, the power of portfolio careers, and why monetising your own expertise might be the smartest move you make. We talk practical steps. Consulting, fractional work, buying a business, building income streams alongside your job. Plus how to network in a way that actually works when you're exhausted, pregnant, or juggling a thousand things at once. This isn't a consolation prize. It's a capability shift. And the women who are getting creative right now aren't opting out. They're building something harder to dismantle.
Bianca spent 15 years engineering her career around the possibility of becoming a mother. Getting to CMO level before she could even think about it. Checking her AMH results. Sitting in an egg freezing clinic surrounded by career women in their late 30s. Doing the maths on when, where, and whether it was safe. Women working full time earn 83p for every pound men earn. Men's wages rise by 8 to 14% when they become fathers. Same life event. Opposite career outcome. Five years after a first child, a mother's earnings drop by an average of 42%. And fewer than one in five mothers return to full-time work in the first three years. This is the career penalty. And you feel it in every decision you make before a baby even exists. Rose is mid-research and what she's finding is specific: the patterns around redundancy and settlement agreements, and the moment women realise they've been managed out rather than supported through. She's mapping when it happens, how it's framed, and who it's happening to. If you've ever sat at your desk pregnant, working harder than you've ever worked, knowing exactly why, this one is for you. Part two is coming soon and it's a power story.
You’ve planned everything. The hires, the handover, the keeping-in-touch days. And still, somehow, nothing feels settled. This episode goes inside the pre-leave period - the weeks when you're still delivering, still performing, still in it - while quietly carrying the weight of everything that's about to change. Bianca shares what it feels like to prepare to step away from the only version of yourself you've ever known. The surrender that feels entirely unnatural. The grief of watching your partner's career accelerate while yours pauses. Rose brings the research: why the brain's heightened threat response during this period isn't anxiety, it's neurology. What the data shows about the coping strategies women use to protect their professional image - and what they say about it years later. And why the line manager, not HR, is the single biggest factor in whether this experience breaks you or holds you. If you've ever stood on the edge of the biggest transition of your life and thought, I have no idea who I'm going to be on the other side, this one’s for you.
Content note: this episode touches on birth anxiety and navigating pregnancy without a close support system nearby. It takes a village to raise a child. Everyone says it. But nobody really tells you that the village doesn't just appear. You have to build it yourself, often while pregnant, while working, and often far from the people who know you best. Episode five is about what that building actually looks like. The patchwork of support that most women are quietly stitching together on their own. And what happens when pieces of it fall through. Bianca shares what she's been doing in her third trimester. Working with a doula who insisted on meeting her partner before she'd even begin. Sitting in a pregnancy yoga class in a village hall where two minutes of conversation with other pregnant women did more for her than months of scrolling ever could. And the reality that so much of this costs money, and not everyone has it. Rose brings the research. Over half of new mothers in the UK report feeling lonely after having a child. One in five experience perinatal mental health difficulties during pregnancy or in the first year. And when women do have real community around them, the difference is significant, not just emotionally, but in birth outcomes, confidence, and the return to work. If you've ever felt like you should be able to do all of this on your own, this episode is a reminder that you shouldn't have to. And that building the village, as messy and imperfect as it feels, is one of the highest leverage things you can do before your baby arrives.
Congratulations, you're pregnant! And now you have to tell work. Telling work you're pregnant is one of the most anxiety-filled moments of a woman's career. Not because anything has gone wrong, but because something has irrevocably changed. This episode is about that conversation and practical things that can help. The rehearsing, the bracing, the relief that doesn't quite arrive the way you expected it to. Bianca shares what it actually felt like to say the words out loud as a senior leader. We get into what the data says, what helps, and what to do if the reaction is one of the bad ones. This episode is for every woman who has ever stood outside a door, taken a breath, and wondered how the next ten minutes were going to change everything.
Content note: this episode includes a brief discussion of baby loss and miscarriage. You're pregnant. You know. And for the next twelve weeks, nobody else can. Episode three lives inside the most neurobiologically intense period of the entire matrescence journey. And the one most women are expected to navigate entirely alone. The nausea, the exhaustion, the brain fog, the hypervigilance. All of it happening beneath the surface while you sit in meetings, hit your targets, and perform a version of yourself that no longer quite exists. Rose makes the case that the twelve-week rule, the social convention that asks women to conceal early pregnancy until the risk of loss has passed, is one of the cruellest contradictions in modern working life. Bianca shares what it actually felt like to be in it. The survival instinct that kicked in not despite the pregnancy but because of it. The doubling down. The determination to protect something that nobody around her even knew existed yet. If you've ever sat in a room full of people, carrying the biggest thing that has ever happened to you, and said absolutely nothing, this episode is for you.
Before the positive test. Before the announcement. Before anyone around you knows. There's a chapter of matrescence that almost nobody talks about - and it might be the most isolating one of all. Episode two goes back to the beginning. The deliberation of whether to have a child at all. The silence around trying. The questions you carry quietly - often alone, often whilst sitting in a meeting pretending everything is fine. Bianca shares her own journey - from burying the thought of motherhood throughout her twenties, to coming off the pill after fifteen years, to confronting what she actually wanted. Rose brings the research: why the data on fertility, careers, and workplace support is far bleaker than most employers realise - and why one in five people undergoing fertility treatment leave their jobs because nobody asks. Together, we're asking why one of the most universal human experiences is still something most women feel they have to hide from their employers, their colleagues, and sometimes even themselves. And we're retiring a word that's never done this chapter justice.
Matrescence, the shift into motherhood, is one of the most significant neurological and identity transformations of a woman's adult life. And it is almost entirely absent from the professional conversation. Your brain literally rewires. Your sense of self restructures. And the world around you acts like nothing happened, or worse, like you've lost something. This episode is where we set the record straight. What matrescence actually is, why the science has been so slow to catch up, and what it means to stop trying to bounce back and start asking what you're becoming instead. Consider this your orientation.
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Apple Podcasts rankings via the Mato Topic Intelligence Platform.
Observed September 13, 2026. Cached outside the daily freshness window; the positions keep the date they were taken on.
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