 Harper Audio presents Healthy Brain, Happy Life, a personal program to activate your brain and do everything better by Wendy Suzuki, PhD, with Billy Fitzpatrick. This is Wendy Suzuki. Introduction One day I woke up and realized I didn't have a life. As an almost 40-year-old award-winning world-renowned neuroscientist, I had what many considered everything. I had achieved my lifelong dream of running my own successful and highly respected neuroscience research lab at New York University and had earned tenure as a professor. These are both feats that are extremely hard to achieve for many, many reasons. Too many of my female friends from graduate school, where the ratio was 50-50 male to female, had drifted away from science. The reasons were in some ways common for women in any profession. Their husbands got a job in a place where there wasn't a job for them in science, or they took time off to have kids and found it hard or impossible to come back. They might have become discouraged by the ultra-competitive grant-writing process, or they just got tired of the long hours and low pay and found other outlets for their talent and creativity. The women like me, who soldiered on in science, were few and far between. Specifically, women now make up an average of 28% of the science faculty at most major US research institutions. The roller coaster-like drop from 50% women in graduate school to an average of 28% women at the faculty level works like a big flashy neon warning sign to women saying, beware, life is mighty challenging in this neck of the woods. Despite the depressing statistics, I kept moving forward. I published many articles and prestigious scientific journals and won many prizes for my work on the anatomy and physiology underlying memory function in the brain. I was a role model for women scientists and highly respected by my peers. On paper, I had a stellar career and an impeccable track record, and I loved doing science. I really did. What could possibly be wrong? Well, everything else. To be honest, my life was pretty depressing. Well, I had created a dream career for myself. I had no social life and no boyfriend in sight.