We Are Our Hormones: What Birth Control Does to the Female Brain

If you are a woman, there is a good chance someone handed you a prescription at 15 or 16 and told you almost nothing. Maybe it was for acne. Maybe it was for cramps. Nobody sat you down and explained that it does not only turn off your ability to get pregnant, it turns off the hormones that were building your brain. We have never followed a generation of women long enough to find out what happens when you start at 13 and stay on it until you are 35. We just did it, and we called it health care. Dr. Terri sits down with Dr. Sarah Hill, a research psychologist and professor at Texas Christian University who has spent more than 20 years studying women's hormones and neuroendocrinology. She is the author of This Is Your Brain on Birth Control and The Period Brain. Her interest in the subject started personally. After more than a decade on the pill, she went off it and, within three months, felt like parts of herself were coming back online. She went to the research literature to find out why, and found a body of evidence almost nobody was talking about. This conversation covers what hormonal contraception actually shuts down, why the alternatives are less studied than most women are led to believe, and what a generation of young women walking away from it are walking toward instead. What you'll discover: What Dr. Hill noticed within three months of going off the pill, and why she went straight to the research [15:03] Why ovulation is not just about releasing an egg, and what stops when it stops [18:23] The cultural hypothesis about hormones, femininity, and how young women dress today [23:18] Why there is no such thing as a locally acting hormone, and what that means for the hormonal IUD [24:47] How synthetic progestins interact with androgen and cortisol receptors differently than your own progesterone does [30:49] The calming compound your body makes from progesterone that synthetic progestins never produce [34:19] What the research actually says about long-term birth control and fertility, including the caveat most women never hear [40:55] Dr. Hill's take on the growing number of premenopausal women being put on estrogen therapy [47:08] The percentage of healthy, regularly cycling college-age women in her lab's studies who are not ovulating, and the reason why [55:13] What we know, and mostly do not know, about starting hormonal contraception while the brain is still developing [1:01:47] The bottom line: We cannot make good decisions without good information. For an entire generation of women, the information was never on the table. The Dr. Terri Show is presented by EVEXIAS Health Solutions. For more, visit: https://www.evexias.com Connect with Dr. Terri: 📱 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/drterrideneui/ 📱 Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/DrTerriDeNeui 💻 Website: https://hormonehavoc.com/ Connect with Dr. Sarah Hill: 📱 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sarahehillphd/ 💻 Website: https://www.sarahehill.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices