Hormonal: How Hormones Drive Desire, Shape Relationships, and Make Us Wiser

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With Anxiety for Beginners: A Personal Investigation, I was pleased to find experiences of anxiety similar to my own described so well and found the reflections on recovery hopeful.

A PhD who directs the Evolutionary Psychology Lab at UCLA, Martie Haselton knows her stuff, and presents study after study to describe how hormones affect women at nearly every stage of life. One girl vomited all over her desk in a maths class and started crying before being led to the nurse’s office, the teacher’s hand gently holding the small of her back. GABA does the opposite and tells the cells not to 'fire' It is effectively our natural tranquilliser. The only real criticism I can make is that that some women may come away from reading this and assume that all standard HRT is equine -derived, which is far from the case. Could it be that, when the mantle of self-censorship drops and we are less caught up with fearing how we'll be seen, we're accessing all the historical oppression and in short bursts letting it go?

You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. Hormonal explores everything from contraception to PMS, in relation to anxiety, depression and taboos about hysteria and the 'hormonal' woman. Because the thing is that science surrounding whatever signalling changes happen in the emotional processing parts of our brain during the menstrual cycle is still imprecise. At no point does the book become preachy or political (quite a feat to accomplish in this modern age).

As evidence of the encoding that happened that day, now, on most occasions that I hear seagulls, I will have flash visions of lying on that sofa holding my young, tortured belly. Edgar Berman, who in 1970 was a member of the Democratic National Party's Committee on National Priorities, and said "Suppose we had a President in the White House, a menopausal woman president who had to make the decision of the Bay of Pigs, which of course was a bad one, or the Russian contretemps with Cuba at the time? But knowing that my biology is part of the picture, that a hormonal surge is a temporary thing, sometimes gives me a touchstone. The next time you hear—or say---those words, (she's hormonal), consider that “she” is a grandmother, a mother, a sister, a friend, a daughter. Aside from the overuse of the currently trendy terms “speak her truth” and “gaslighting”, the author provides an interesting (and first for me) glimpse into the world of women’s bodies and the hormonal changes that happen not only monthly but across our lifetime - puberty, pregnancy, breastfeeding, peri-menopause and menopause.

It’s a whistle stop tour through a lot of content, only really allowing the reader to play with an idea before moving on rather than submerging the reader in discourse.