Dr. Sarah Hill
Appearances
Dhru Purohit Show
Birth Control Deep Dive: How it Changes Your Brain, Its Link to Autoimmune Conditions, and Why We Need Better Options with Sarah Hill Ph.D
And, you know, I thought, well, maybe, but, you know, that sounds crazy. And so I kind of filed it away in the way that women do. You know, it's like we have something that happens to us and then we assume that it must be all in our head since we've been conditioned to believe that that's true from doctors from the time that we're pretty small.
Dhru Purohit Show
Birth Control Deep Dive: How it Changes Your Brain, Its Link to Autoimmune Conditions, and Why We Need Better Options with Sarah Hill Ph.D
And this is this tendency for different people. bands of research to just live within their own little research fiefdom, and then never to get outside of that fiefdom. So for example, neuroscience lives in one silo, right?
Dhru Purohit Show
Birth Control Deep Dive: How it Changes Your Brain, Its Link to Autoimmune Conditions, and Why We Need Better Options with Sarah Hill Ph.D
And so people who study the brain and study behavior, all of our research is published in these journals, and we read each other's journals, and we talk about each other's research. But we don't look at the research in the other silos, right? So we cardiac health, right? We don't look at the research in cognition. We don't look at the research in development, right?
Dhru Purohit Show
Birth Control Deep Dive: How it Changes Your Brain, Its Link to Autoimmune Conditions, and Why We Need Better Options with Sarah Hill Ph.D
It's like we look at this research over here in neuroscience. Medical science is the same way. So within the field of medicine, people who study medicine and clinical practice, they tend to look at medical research journals. And most medical research, when they're looking at the effects of pharmaceutical drugs, are interested in two questions. Safety, is it going to kill you?
Dhru Purohit Show
Birth Control Deep Dive: How it Changes Your Brain, Its Link to Autoimmune Conditions, and Why We Need Better Options with Sarah Hill Ph.D
And then efficacy, does it work? And these are obviously incredibly important questions when we're talking about drugs. We want to make sure that every drug that we take is safe and that it works. But there's a lot more to it than that. It's like the psychological effects of a medication are a big deal. And that tends to be in the field of neuroscience.
Dhru Purohit Show
Birth Control Deep Dive: How it Changes Your Brain, Its Link to Autoimmune Conditions, and Why We Need Better Options with Sarah Hill Ph.D
Neuroscientists study this stuff and psychologists study this stuff. And so that research is published over here in these journals. that most doctors have no familiarity with. Because the fact of the matter is, you know, medicine as a practice was something that was developed, you know, long before people realized that there was no mind-body split.
Dhru Purohit Show
Birth Control Deep Dive: How it Changes Your Brain, Its Link to Autoimmune Conditions, and Why We Need Better Options with Sarah Hill Ph.D
You know, it used to be thought that, you know, the body lived over here, right, and followed these sets of rules, and that the mind was this, you know, product of the soul and lived over and had these other sets of rules. And because of that, medicine has never really been integrated with psychological experiences.
Dhru Purohit Show
Birth Control Deep Dive: How it Changes Your Brain, Its Link to Autoimmune Conditions, and Why We Need Better Options with Sarah Hill Ph.D
And this is why you have a lot of medications that have psychological side effects. But that's all you get, right, is this will cause psychological side effects. It's like, what the hell does that mean? You know, it's like, there could be a personality change. That could be that you have no conscience anymore, which I've heard happens to some people on some antidepressants.
Dhru Purohit Show
Birth Control Deep Dive: How it Changes Your Brain, Its Link to Autoimmune Conditions, and Why We Need Better Options with Sarah Hill Ph.D
I mean, it could be a whole range of effects. And so what you get in your little birth control pamphlet is because people just put this down as a side effect, is, you know, any range of things, including, you know, lack of libido and things like, you know, inability to regulate your emotional responses or inability to cope with stress.
Dhru Purohit Show
Birth Control Deep Dive: How it Changes Your Brain, Its Link to Autoimmune Conditions, and Why We Need Better Options with Sarah Hill Ph.D
All of those are just put into a thing like sexual side effects and mood. You know, and so sometimes sometimes women are told about that. Sometimes they're not. And when they are told about it, it's usually in a very blanket way, like, oh, this might affect mood. But like, what does that mean?
Dhru Purohit Show
Birth Control Deep Dive: How it Changes Your Brain, Its Link to Autoimmune Conditions, and Why We Need Better Options with Sarah Hill Ph.D
And so they're not really told about this whole, you know, rich body of other research because their doctors aren't reading it. Right. And it's not because their doctors are terrible people who don't care. It's just that this is the way that things have been done in science since science has been, you know, something that people did.
Dhru Purohit Show
Birth Control Deep Dive: How it Changes Your Brain, Its Link to Autoimmune Conditions, and Why We Need Better Options with Sarah Hill Ph.D
But then flash forward, it was about a year later, and I was in a research talk where a researcher was talking about how the birth control pill leads women to have a blunted cortisol response to stress. And it was at that moment that I was like, oh, duh. Yeah. hormones affect everything. You know, it's like hormones are part of what our brain uses to create the experience of who we are.
Dhru Purohit Show
Birth Control Deep Dive: How it Changes Your Brain, Its Link to Autoimmune Conditions, and Why We Need Better Options with Sarah Hill Ph.D
And the result is that many women, when they're making decisions about going on birth control, don't have all of the information. Like, they don't actually understand the tradeoffs that they're going to be made. And again, you know, I do think that the drug companies are very...
Dhru Purohit Show
Birth Control Deep Dive: How it Changes Your Brain, Its Link to Autoimmune Conditions, and Why We Need Better Options with Sarah Hill Ph.D
intentional in trying to make sure that all of the messaging around birth control is about the positive things that it does, which it does a lot of really positive things. I mean, people go on it for a reason. It prevents pregnancy, it can clear up your skin, and it makes it where you don't have to worry about period problems, right? Because it suppresses your HPG axis.
Dhru Purohit Show
Birth Control Deep Dive: How it Changes Your Brain, Its Link to Autoimmune Conditions, and Why We Need Better Options with Sarah Hill Ph.D
But there's a lot of things that go along with that, you know, that don't make those trade-offs necessarily something that most women or, you know, even many women want to make.
Dhru Purohit Show
Birth Control Deep Dive: How it Changes Your Brain, Its Link to Autoimmune Conditions, and Why We Need Better Options with Sarah Hill Ph.D
Yeah. So, I mean, I think it is still incredibly common. So I have a I have an 18 year old daughter and it's very much in her cohort. It's still very common for her peers to have been on birth control now for years. And they go on it for reasons like they have problematic periods.
Dhru Purohit Show
Birth Control Deep Dive: How it Changes Your Brain, Its Link to Autoimmune Conditions, and Why We Need Better Options with Sarah Hill Ph.D
And I do think that many doctors will give this to their female patients without understanding the impact that giving girls hormones during periods of brain development have. Like, I think that most doctors, if you walk them through the following questions and you said, do hormones, like, tell me about the role of sex hormones in brain development.
Dhru Purohit Show
Birth Control Deep Dive: How it Changes Your Brain, Its Link to Autoimmune Conditions, and Why We Need Better Options with Sarah Hill Ph.D
So our brains affect or our hormones affect our personalities and our hormones affect other hormones like cortisol and hormones affect sexual desire and they affect who we're attracted to and they affect our energy levels. And like, of course, I felt different when I went off the pill. I was a different version of myself when I was on it.
Dhru Purohit Show
Birth Control Deep Dive: How it Changes Your Brain, Its Link to Autoimmune Conditions, and Why We Need Better Options with Sarah Hill Ph.D
I hadn't really thought of that because, you know, they're not really it's not something we think about. Like I said, I studied women's hormones and the way that they affect motivational states. And I was on the pill for 10 years and never thought about it. It's just like we have such a disconnect with these things. And I think a lot of doctors are having that disconnect.
Dhru Purohit Show
Birth Control Deep Dive: How it Changes Your Brain, Its Link to Autoimmune Conditions, and Why We Need Better Options with Sarah Hill Ph.D
And so I think the doctors do think that they're doing a big service to their female patients by removing their period problems. You know, the pill is really good at removing period problems. It, you know, it makes you not have a period by suppressing your HPG axis.
Dhru Purohit Show
Birth Control Deep Dive: How it Changes Your Brain, Its Link to Autoimmune Conditions, and Why We Need Better Options with Sarah Hill Ph.D
And then you take that sugar pill and you get a little bleed just to let you know that everything's okay and that you're not pregnant again. And it makes that part of your, you know, sort of menstrual experience very positive because you tend to have fewer cramps. Your periods aren't heavy because they aren't real periods. They're just a little withdrawal bleed.
Dhru Purohit Show
Birth Control Deep Dive: How it Changes Your Brain, Its Link to Autoimmune Conditions, and Why We Need Better Options with Sarah Hill Ph.D
And so I think a lot of doctors do this because, you know, it helps their patients and it is an easy thing. And I think that, you know, I think the medical community has become a little bit jaded. And I don't know if this is because of the public or if it's, you know, because of how they're being educated in medical school. But I think that there is a tendency for many physicians to believe that.
Dhru Purohit Show
Birth Control Deep Dive: How it Changes Your Brain, Its Link to Autoimmune Conditions, and Why We Need Better Options with Sarah Hill Ph.D
that people don't have the stomach for lifestyle interventions, right, and that people just aren't going to do it. And I think that their view of, like, what people are willing to do is pretty cynical. You know, it's this idea that people don't want to change their diet and people don't want to – don't take steps to improve their physical activity or don't want to take steps to get better sleep.
Dhru Purohit Show
Birth Control Deep Dive: How it Changes Your Brain, Its Link to Autoimmune Conditions, and Why We Need Better Options with Sarah Hill Ph.D
And that the only thing that people are looking for is a quick fix and looking for, you know, a medical solution, even if it comes with a long list of side effects. And so I think that, like I said, I think that many doctors believe that what they're doing is what their patients want, but it's not necessary, right?
Dhru Purohit Show
Birth Control Deep Dive: How it Changes Your Brain, Its Link to Autoimmune Conditions, and Why We Need Better Options with Sarah Hill Ph.D
Because as you noted, there's a number of different ways that you can deal with menstrual issues that are natural and don't require suppressing your own hormone production and suppressing your cycles and, you know, can fix many of the problems that women deal with like PCOS and endometriosis.
Dhru Purohit Show
Birth Control Deep Dive: How it Changes Your Brain, Its Link to Autoimmune Conditions, and Why We Need Better Options with Sarah Hill Ph.D
And so it was at that moment that I had this really embarrassing epiphany. And I say that it's embarrassing because I've been studying women. You know, I've spent my career as a research psychologist studying women and studying the effects of different biological influences, including hormones, on motivational systems and the way that our brains work.
Dhru Purohit Show
Birth Control Deep Dive: How it Changes Your Brain, Its Link to Autoimmune Conditions, and Why We Need Better Options with Sarah Hill Ph.D
To talk about what the brain does on the birth control pill, I think that we first need to talk about what the brain does off of it. And for a naturally cycling woman, each month is characterized by a waxing and waning of two primary sex hormones. Right. The first is estrogen. And that is the hormone like on the first day of your cycle.
Dhru Purohit Show
Birth Control Deep Dive: How it Changes Your Brain, Its Link to Autoimmune Conditions, and Why We Need Better Options with Sarah Hill Ph.D
Levels of both hormones, estrogen and progesterone, are very low. And the first day of your cycle is the day that you get your period. And on that day, both levels of hormones are low. As you move into the early part of the cycle, so say around day five, estrogen levels start to increase. And they increase in response to the fact that your egg follicles are being stimulated.
Dhru Purohit Show
Birth Control Deep Dive: How it Changes Your Brain, Its Link to Autoimmune Conditions, and Why We Need Better Options with Sarah Hill Ph.D
Because when hormone levels are low, the brain tells the ovaries to start stimulating new egg follicles because it needs to ovulate. And so the brain is stimulating the ovaries, the ovaries are releasing estrogen, and estrogen levels begin to climb.
Dhru Purohit Show
Birth Control Deep Dive: How it Changes Your Brain, Its Link to Autoimmune Conditions, and Why We Need Better Options with Sarah Hill Ph.D
And then as a dominant follicle takes over, so of all these egg follicles that are being stimulated, one becomes the one that's allowed to fully develop and is going to be released. that follicle begins to develop really rapidly and the other ones wilt away. And when that one begins this period of rapid development, it leads to a big surge in estrogen.
Dhru Purohit Show
Birth Control Deep Dive: How it Changes Your Brain, Its Link to Autoimmune Conditions, and Why We Need Better Options with Sarah Hill Ph.D
So estrogen levels really start to take off right around day nine of the cycle and they stay really high until the point of ovulation, which if we're talking about a 28-day cycle, occurs around day 14. So ovulation generally happens about two weeks after the first day of your period. Prior to that time, estrogen levels are rising.
Dhru Purohit Show
Birth Control Deep Dive: How it Changes Your Brain, Its Link to Autoimmune Conditions, and Why We Need Better Options with Sarah Hill Ph.D
Estrogen is a hormone that is related to things like sexual desire, sexual attraction, sexual behavior. It is associated with increased energy levels. You eat less, you move more. We're more sensitive to things like scent-based cues, to things like testosterone levels. We notice men's testosterone levels in men's voices and faces and behaviors to a greater extent than we do outside of this period.
Dhru Purohit Show
Birth Control Deep Dive: How it Changes Your Brain, Its Link to Autoimmune Conditions, and Why We Need Better Options with Sarah Hill Ph.D
And the reason for all of these changes in response to estrogen is that its release coincides with a period in the cycle when sex can lead to conception. Because sex can lead to conception for about five days prior to ovulation. And then up until 24 hours after ovulation has occurred. And during this period of time, estrogen levels are very high.
Dhru Purohit Show
Birth Control Deep Dive: How it Changes Your Brain, Its Link to Autoimmune Conditions, and Why We Need Better Options with Sarah Hill Ph.D
And estrogen levels shift the body into a state that's optimized for conception. So essentially, it is getting your whole body to conspire to look, feel, right? It's sexiest. And we're also most able to discriminate among potential partners at this point. And so you get this increased sexual desire. Women feel sexier. They dress sexier. They move sexier. They smell sexier.
Dhru Purohit Show
Birth Control Deep Dive: How it Changes Your Brain, Its Link to Autoimmune Conditions, and Why We Need Better Options with Sarah Hill Ph.D
So it's like women have all of these experiences that make them feel really good. They have more energy. And they're also more attuned to men. They notice men more often. They're more easily distracted by the presence of men. They prefer the scent of men who have higher levels of testosterone at this point. They prefer testosterone markers in men's faces at this time.
Dhru Purohit Show
Birth Control Deep Dive: How it Changes Your Brain, Its Link to Autoimmune Conditions, and Why We Need Better Options with Sarah Hill Ph.D
And I never put two and two together with the fact that I was changing my hormones with a pill. And then I felt so different. And so I had this embarrassing epiphany where I'm like, oh, my gosh, duh. You know, changing your hormones is going to change who you are.
Dhru Purohit Show
Birth Control Deep Dive: How it Changes Your Brain, Its Link to Autoimmune Conditions, and Why We Need Better Options with Sarah Hill Ph.D
And so it's like anything male they are into, right? And the more male, the better in some ways. And so what you see is you get this big shift in sort of gearing the whole body and brain together, sort of being focused on things related to conception.
Dhru Purohit Show
Birth Control Deep Dive: How it Changes Your Brain, Its Link to Autoimmune Conditions, and Why We Need Better Options with Sarah Hill Ph.D
Then, after ovulation occurs, the empty egg follicle that used to have that egg that was just released actually turns into a temporary endocrine structure. It's called the corpus luteum, and it starts releasing women's other primary sex hormone, which is progesterone.
Dhru Purohit Show
Birth Control Deep Dive: How it Changes Your Brain, Its Link to Autoimmune Conditions, and Why We Need Better Options with Sarah Hill Ph.D
And progesterone causes the body to shift gears away from being all about sex and sex and sex, and instead being all about implantation and pregnancy. And so its release actually coincides with a decrease in sexual desire, right, and an increase in fatigue, an increase in food intake. Women are hungrier, they're sleepier, and they have lower sexual desire than they do earlier on in the cycle.
Dhru Purohit Show
Birth Control Deep Dive: How it Changes Your Brain, Its Link to Autoimmune Conditions, and Why We Need Better Options with Sarah Hill Ph.D
And it's because the body is shifting its energy away from conception toward the idea of preparing for pregnancy, right? And this means doing things to try to prevent germs from getting into the body, which is why women's sexual desire decreases, is preventing inflammatory activity in the cervical area.
Dhru Purohit Show
Birth Control Deep Dive: How it Changes Your Brain, Its Link to Autoimmune Conditions, and Why We Need Better Options with Sarah Hill Ph.D
Women are tired, sleepy and hungry because they're conserving energy for the possibility of pregnancy. And in each cycle is sort of characterized by the waxing and waning of these hormones. You go through this period of time when you're optimized for sex and conception, and then you shift into this period of time where you're optimized for pregnancy and implantation.
Dhru Purohit Show
Birth Control Deep Dive: How it Changes Your Brain, Its Link to Autoimmune Conditions, and Why We Need Better Options with Sarah Hill Ph.D
And so, you know, for a naturally cycling woman, this is what life is like. You kind of go through these periods and you experience these, you know, hormonal shifts where you're about sex and then you're about sleepiness and, you know, and so on and so forth. And those, you know, lather, rinse, repeat. And for women who are on hormonal birth control.
Dhru Purohit Show
Birth Control Deep Dive: How it Changes Your Brain, Its Link to Autoimmune Conditions, and Why We Need Better Options with Sarah Hill Ph.D
The pill actually mimics that second half of the cycle, right? And so the synthetics that are in a hormonal birth control pill or any type of hormonal birth control contain a relatively high level of synthetic progesterone, which is called a progestin. And this progestin sends a signal to the brain that makes it believe that it just ovulated.
Dhru Purohit Show
Birth Control Deep Dive: How it Changes Your Brain, Its Link to Autoimmune Conditions, and Why We Need Better Options with Sarah Hill Ph.D
And because of that, it's not going to stimulate the ovaries. And this is how we prevent pregnancy, is because your brain is getting a message that says, we just ovulated, no need to stimulate the ovaries. And so the ovaries never get stimulated, an egg never develops, and then it never gets released.
Dhru Purohit Show
Birth Control Deep Dive: How it Changes Your Brain, Its Link to Autoimmune Conditions, and Why We Need Better Options with Sarah Hill Ph.D
And it was then that I went into the research literature and really started to dive in to try to better understand who do women become on the birth control pill. And that was what led me to write my book.
Dhru Purohit Show
Birth Control Deep Dive: How it Changes Your Brain, Its Link to Autoimmune Conditions, and Why We Need Better Options with Sarah Hill Ph.D
But the negative part of this is that when you're getting this daily hormonal message of a high level of progestin and then relatively low levels of estrogen is it prevents women from experiencing this range of effects that women experience as a naturally cycling woman.
Dhru Purohit Show
Birth Control Deep Dive: How it Changes Your Brain, Its Link to Autoimmune Conditions, and Why We Need Better Options with Sarah Hill Ph.D
And for a lot of naturally cycling women, the time in their cycle that they feel the best is during that estrogenic phase of the cycle, right? When you're feeling sexy and, you know, you're geared up for sex and you feel good about yourself and you've got a lot of energy and you don't need to eat a lot of food even because you're just so busy and happy.
Dhru Purohit Show
Birth Control Deep Dive: How it Changes Your Brain, Its Link to Autoimmune Conditions, and Why We Need Better Options with Sarah Hill Ph.D
And instead, you're stuck in the state of being kind of hungry and kind of tired and kind of, you know, moody and kind of sexually meh. And that leads, I mean, when you experience that for long periods of time, it doesn't necessarily feel good.
Dhru Purohit Show
Birth Control Deep Dive: How it Changes Your Brain, Its Link to Autoimmune Conditions, and Why We Need Better Options with Sarah Hill Ph.D
And on top of that, so that's like, you know, sort of the first level of the answer is that one of the reasons that we feel different on the pill is because we're not ovulating. Right.
Dhru Purohit Show
Birth Control Deep Dive: How it Changes Your Brain, Its Link to Autoimmune Conditions, and Why We Need Better Options with Sarah Hill Ph.D
And when we're not ovulating and we're not experiencing that sort of beautiful time in the cycle when estrogen is the one driving the ship, that leads us to not experience like this drive for pleasure, you know, like wanting, you know, beautiful things and beautiful men and beautiful food and, you know, and have our...
Dhru Purohit Show
Birth Control Deep Dive: How it Changes Your Brain, Its Link to Autoimmune Conditions, and Why We Need Better Options with Sarah Hill Ph.D
senses stimulated with music and other things that, you know, kind of feel good and activate those same senses and sexual desire. And we don't feel as sexy. We're not as tied into like sort of dialed into all of that. So that's like one thing that happens when you're on the pill.
Dhru Purohit Show
Birth Control Deep Dive: How it Changes Your Brain, Its Link to Autoimmune Conditions, and Why We Need Better Options with Sarah Hill Ph.D
But then the other thing and the other sort of set of changes that happen in response is that these synthetic progesterone Molecules that are out there aren't derived from actual progesterone, and they're mostly synthesized from testosterone. And they have some really funky molecular properties that make them not have good binding affinity or specificity for progesterone receptors.
Dhru Purohit Show
Birth Control Deep Dive: How it Changes Your Brain, Its Link to Autoimmune Conditions, and Why We Need Better Options with Sarah Hill Ph.D
And so what that means is these funky little molecules, yes, they stimulate progesterone receptors, at least enough to a degree to suppress ovulation, right? So they're activating progesterone receptors in the brain, which is making the brain believe that it's just ovulated and that it doesn't need to stimulate the ovaries. But it also seems to stimulate things like testosterone receptors.
Dhru Purohit Show
Birth Control Deep Dive: How it Changes Your Brain, Its Link to Autoimmune Conditions, and Why We Need Better Options with Sarah Hill Ph.D
And sometimes it also seems to stimulate glucocorticoid receptors, which can put you in a state of feeling like you're in chronic stress. And so it has all these other funky properties that make it behave in ways that we don't fully understand yet, but are likely responsible for some of the side effects that we see in women today.
Dhru Purohit Show
Birth Control Deep Dive: How it Changes Your Brain, Its Link to Autoimmune Conditions, and Why We Need Better Options with Sarah Hill Ph.D
So, for example, some women on some formulations of hormonal birth control that tend to stimulate a lot of androgen receptors or testosterone receptors, they tend to have problems with breakouts or weight gain as a result of the fact that their testosterone receptors are being stimulated. And these are things that are known to be related to testosterone levels in women.
Dhru Purohit Show
Birth Control Deep Dive: How it Changes Your Brain, Its Link to Autoimmune Conditions, and Why We Need Better Options with Sarah Hill Ph.D
Yeah, I really had no idea that birth control was having any sort of an effect on me until I discontinued it. And because I was on it for, as you noted, besides the period I spent pregnant and lactating, I was on it pretty much nonstop for about 10 to 12 years. And while I was on it, I felt fine.
Dhru Purohit Show
Birth Control Deep Dive: How it Changes Your Brain, Its Link to Autoimmune Conditions, and Why We Need Better Options with Sarah Hill Ph.D
Or we also know that sometimes, you know, women will have this experience where they feel extremely psychologically just, you know, in despair when they start hormonal birth control.
Dhru Purohit Show
Birth Control Deep Dive: How it Changes Your Brain, Its Link to Autoimmune Conditions, and Why We Need Better Options with Sarah Hill Ph.D
And this potentially can be the result of some of the things that go on with these progestins stimulating the glucocorticoid receptors, where women, you know, if you're stimulating these receptors that normally pick up stress hormone and
Dhru Purohit Show
Birth Control Deep Dive: How it Changes Your Brain, Its Link to Autoimmune Conditions, and Why We Need Better Options with Sarah Hill Ph.D
and they're being stimulated for no reason, that can make women feel like life is terrible and they don't know why, and that can really put them in a state of despair. And this may be related to some of the mental health side effects that we know are very common in hormonal birth control.
Dhru Purohit Show
Birth Control Deep Dive: How it Changes Your Brain, Its Link to Autoimmune Conditions, and Why We Need Better Options with Sarah Hill Ph.D
And so when we consider the fact that hormonal birth control both suppresses ovulation and then suppresses our release of estrogen, which is related to a lot of these things that women love to feel,
Dhru Purohit Show
Birth Control Deep Dive: How it Changes Your Brain, Its Link to Autoimmune Conditions, and Why We Need Better Options with Sarah Hill Ph.D
And then also as being replaced, you know, we get this instead of progesterone, we get this funky progestin that not only stimulates progesterone receptors, but other types of receptors in the brain and body that can potentially lead to feelings of despair and distress. This, you know, potentially can impact, like I said, these mental health related issues.
Dhru Purohit Show
Birth Control Deep Dive: How it Changes Your Brain, Its Link to Autoimmune Conditions, and Why We Need Better Options with Sarah Hill Ph.D
you can have a whole lot of things that are going on from hormonal birth control, a lot of which have absolutely nothing to do with pregnancy prevention.
Dhru Purohit Show
Birth Control Deep Dive: How it Changes Your Brain, Its Link to Autoimmune Conditions, and Why We Need Better Options with Sarah Hill Ph.D
Yeah.
Dhru Purohit Show
Birth Control Deep Dive: How it Changes Your Brain, Its Link to Autoimmune Conditions, and Why We Need Better Options with Sarah Hill Ph.D
Yeah, well, there can be. So let me just start this by saying that this doesn't happen to most people, okay? So if you're listening to this, You don't need to like absolutely freak out. But this does happen and I have absolutely no doubt. I have zero doubt that the birth control pill in the cases where this happened played a role in what unfolded. And so here's the story that I hear from women.
Dhru Purohit Show
Birth Control Deep Dive: How it Changes Your Brain, Its Link to Autoimmune Conditions, and Why We Need Better Options with Sarah Hill Ph.D
I hear the story of I was on hormonal birth control. I chose my partner when I was on hormonal birth control. I went off of hormonal birth control and I'm not attracted to my partner anymore. And this can happen because when you're on hormonal birth control, it decreases the amount of effort that your brain is investing in some of the areas that our brain uses to assess partner preferences, right?
Dhru Purohit Show
Birth Control Deep Dive: How it Changes Your Brain, Its Link to Autoimmune Conditions, and Why We Need Better Options with Sarah Hill Ph.D
And so this includes things like testosterone levels, but also things like genetic complementarity, right? And some of these things are things that are communicated via scent, right? Some of these things are communicated via personality, right? Like, so is somebody kind of socially dominant or are they passive?
Dhru Purohit Show
Birth Control Deep Dive: How it Changes Your Brain, Its Link to Autoimmune Conditions, and Why We Need Better Options with Sarah Hill Ph.D
These are things that are communicated via facial features, so things like facial masculinity and so on. And, you know, many times when women choose partners when they're on the pill and then they go off the pill, Right. Right. Right. Right. Then it's lights out, you know, and you're not attracted to that person anymore. And that does happen sometimes.
Dhru Purohit Show
Birth Control Deep Dive: How it Changes Your Brain, Its Link to Autoimmune Conditions, and Why We Need Better Options with Sarah Hill Ph.D
You also get cases where women will choose their partners when they're on the pill. They go off the pill and then they're super attracted to their partner. And they're like, oh, my gosh. Like, wow, I had no idea what I had, you know, and then they go off of it.
Dhru Purohit Show
Birth Control Deep Dive: How it Changes Your Brain, Its Link to Autoimmune Conditions, and Why We Need Better Options with Sarah Hill Ph.D
And because all of a sudden they're getting that nice estrogen surge, you know, which increases how sexy women feel and it increases their, you know, their attunement to men and their, you know, and their attunement to sex and they become more sexually motivated.
Dhru Purohit Show
Birth Control Deep Dive: How it Changes Your Brain, Its Link to Autoimmune Conditions, and Why We Need Better Options with Sarah Hill Ph.D
and now they have this partner that has these qualities that they would have wanted when they were, you know, cycling anyway, they're super attracted to their partner. So you get it the other way as well, right? So sometimes when you go off the pill, you become more attracted to your partner. Sometimes when you go off the pill, you become less attracted to your partner.
Dhru Purohit Show
Birth Control Deep Dive: How it Changes Your Brain, Its Link to Autoimmune Conditions, and Why We Need Better Options with Sarah Hill Ph.D
And sometimes when you go off the pill, it's not a noticeable difference, right? And it's all about these little nudges, right? If you're in the middle, in terms of what you're attracted to and who you chose, you're probably not going to notice that much of a difference.
Dhru Purohit Show
Birth Control Deep Dive: How it Changes Your Brain, Its Link to Autoimmune Conditions, and Why We Need Better Options with Sarah Hill Ph.D
If you're on one of these two sides of the continuum, it can kind of nudge you out of attraction to your partner or nudge you into being really attracted to them in a way that you weren't when you were using hormonal birth control. How this is going to affect any one individual woman is going to depend on the hormones in her birth control.
Dhru Purohit Show
Birth Control Deep Dive: How it Changes Your Brain, Its Link to Autoimmune Conditions, and Why We Need Better Options with Sarah Hill Ph.D
It's going to depend on what her hormones were like when she's not on birth control, right? And it's going to depend on who she chose as partner. There's a whole lot of variables that go into play, which is why I say don't, you know, don't freak out if you chose your partner on the pill.
Dhru Purohit Show
Birth Control Deep Dive: How it Changes Your Brain, Its Link to Autoimmune Conditions, and Why We Need Better Options with Sarah Hill Ph.D
If you go off of it, you know, there's a chance that nothing will happen or there's even a chance that you might become more attracted to them. But yes, for some women, it does lead them to feel like... now this is just, this just isn't working anymore.
Dhru Purohit Show
Birth Control Deep Dive: How it Changes Your Brain, Its Link to Autoimmune Conditions, and Why We Need Better Options with Sarah Hill Ph.D
And, um, and in those cases, it's, I mean, that's a really heartbreaking thing to have to contend with, you know, which is why I tell women, if you don't need to be on the pill and you're looking for a partner, I would just, I would stay off of it just because it's safer that way, you know?
Dhru Purohit Show
Birth Control Deep Dive: How it Changes Your Brain, Its Link to Autoimmune Conditions, and Why We Need Better Options with Sarah Hill Ph.D
And then if you decide that you met somebody and you're interested in them and you want to have a sexual relationship and And the way that you want to manage your fertility is using hormonal birth control. Godspeed.
Dhru Purohit Show
Birth Control Deep Dive: How it Changes Your Brain, Its Link to Autoimmune Conditions, and Why We Need Better Options with Sarah Hill Ph.D
You know, I just, I do think that if you have a choice, all else being equal, I think that it's probably better and safer to choose your partner while you're naturally cycling just to prevent this from happening. Because even though this doesn't happen often, it does happen. I've also even heard from women who, and this is also really fascinating, who have little nudges in their sexual preferences.
Dhru Purohit Show
Birth Control Deep Dive: How it Changes Your Brain, Its Link to Autoimmune Conditions, and Why We Need Better Options with Sarah Hill Ph.D
What I know is far too little. And the reason I know far too little is because longitudinal research, looking at the impact of taking hormonal birth control early on in life and then staying on it for long periods of time is just not something that's being studied very much. And in fact, the number of studies looking at this particular question is teeny tiny.
Dhru Purohit Show
Birth Control Deep Dive: How it Changes Your Brain, Its Link to Autoimmune Conditions, and Why We Need Better Options with Sarah Hill Ph.D
When they're on hormonal birth control or not. And so where they will have spent their life thinking that they were bisexual and then they go off the pill and they realize that they are either completely straight or they're totally lesbian. Right. Or they thought that they were a lesbian and then they go on the pill and then all of a sudden they're bisexual. I mean, it's or the reverse. Right.
Dhru Purohit Show
Birth Control Deep Dive: How it Changes Your Brain, Its Link to Autoimmune Conditions, and Why We Need Better Options with Sarah Hill Ph.D
Where they thought they were lesbian and then they go out the pill and now they're bisexual. And so it's hormonal nudges, you know, because they impact so many different cells in the body and in the brain. It's like they have all these little nudging effects on all these different systems.
Dhru Purohit Show
Birth Control Deep Dive: How it Changes Your Brain, Its Link to Autoimmune Conditions, and Why We Need Better Options with Sarah Hill Ph.D
And sometimes these things, again, is for these people who are kind of on the border, you know, who are like, you know, because I wouldn't expect that like the most obligatorily obligatory lesbian thing. You know, who's just like, like, you know, has never even imagined the idea of sex.
Dhru Purohit Show
Birth Control Deep Dive: How it Changes Your Brain, Its Link to Autoimmune Conditions, and Why We Need Better Options with Sarah Hill Ph.D
I can't imagine that somebody like that would go on or off the pill and then all of a sudden become, you know, decide they're heterosexual because that's just not the way that hormones work. Right. But instead, it's these little tiny nudges. And for people who are kind of on one end of a continuum or another.
Dhru Purohit Show
Birth Control Deep Dive: How it Changes Your Brain, Its Link to Autoimmune Conditions, and Why We Need Better Options with Sarah Hill Ph.D
it can nudge you into a different category, which, again, it's really fascinating both in terms of understanding the impact of hormonal birth control, but then also just giving us new insight into the role of sex hormones in determining things like attraction and even sexual orientation.
Dhru Purohit Show
Birth Control Deep Dive: How it Changes Your Brain, Its Link to Autoimmune Conditions, and Why We Need Better Options with Sarah Hill Ph.D
There's absolutely a possible connection between hormonal birth control use and the development of autoimmune disease. And in some cases, there is some research evidence that suggests that it can increase the risk of certain types of autoimmune disease.
Dhru Purohit Show
Birth Control Deep Dive: How it Changes Your Brain, Its Link to Autoimmune Conditions, and Why We Need Better Options with Sarah Hill Ph.D
And just to give you an example of this, I believe it's either Crohn's disease or diverticulitis, but it's one of these autoimmune diseases that's related to hormonal birth control use and it's related to the gut. And there's evidence linking usage of hormonal birth control with that. And I think there's a couple of other ones at this point as well.
Dhru Purohit Show
Birth Control Deep Dive: How it Changes Your Brain, Its Link to Autoimmune Conditions, and Why We Need Better Options with Sarah Hill Ph.D
And there's every reason to suspect that this might be the case, that using the pill or using some other form of hormonal birth control will influence this, just because we have research evidence now showing that, one, hormonal birth control use is linked with changes in the cortisol response to stress.
Dhru Purohit Show
Birth Control Deep Dive: How it Changes Your Brain, Its Link to Autoimmune Conditions, and Why We Need Better Options with Sarah Hill Ph.D
And cortisol, and what this research generally finds, is that women who are using hormonal birth control tend to have a blunted cortisol response to stress, meaning that they don't release as much cortisol in response to a stressor.
Dhru Purohit Show
Birth Control Deep Dive: How it Changes Your Brain, Its Link to Autoimmune Conditions, and Why We Need Better Options with Sarah Hill Ph.D
Anything that I can tell you about this is going to be based on a very limited amount of research. Here's what we do know. We know that when women take hormonal birth control as adults, and I'm going to define an adult as being somebody who's about 20 or older, we know that the effects of hormonal birth control use are more or less, you know, sort of now you see it, now you don't, right?
Dhru Purohit Show
Birth Control Deep Dive: How it Changes Your Brain, Its Link to Autoimmune Conditions, and Why We Need Better Options with Sarah Hill Ph.D
which sounds like a great thing because everybody thinks that cortisol is a bad guy, but it's actually a terrible thing because we release cortisol in response to stress for a reason. And it's because it helps our body cope with stress.
Dhru Purohit Show
Birth Control Deep Dive: How it Changes Your Brain, Its Link to Autoimmune Conditions, and Why We Need Better Options with Sarah Hill Ph.D
And one of the things that it does is it decreases inflammation because another thing that happens to us in response to stress is our inflammatory response goes nuts. And it does this because stress historically has been a context that can lead to danger and the possibility of injury.
Dhru Purohit Show
Birth Control Deep Dive: How it Changes Your Brain, Its Link to Autoimmune Conditions, and Why We Need Better Options with Sarah Hill Ph.D
And so when we're stressed out, in addition to releasing stress hormones, our body also starts to release inflammatory activity, getting the immune system ready for a battle, right, just in case you end up getting injured. And so cortisol actually can turn the volume up and down on inflammatory activity in the body.
Dhru Purohit Show
Birth Control Deep Dive: How it Changes Your Brain, Its Link to Autoimmune Conditions, and Why We Need Better Options with Sarah Hill Ph.D
And so having a blunted cortisol response to stress can lead to exaggerated inflammatory activity in response to stress, right? An exaggerated inflammatory activity is one of the hallmarks of autoimmune disease. And another piece of evidence linking the possibility of the development of autoimmunity and hormonal birth control use is research that comes from my own research laboratory.
Dhru Purohit Show
Birth Control Deep Dive: How it Changes Your Brain, Its Link to Autoimmune Conditions, and Why We Need Better Options with Sarah Hill Ph.D
And we did a study specifically looking at the differences in inflammatory release in response to stress between women who are using hormonal birth control and then women who are naturally cycling. And what we found is that in response to stress, and so we bring women into the research lab and then we stress them out.
Dhru Purohit Show
Birth Control Deep Dive: How it Changes Your Brain, Its Link to Autoimmune Conditions, and Why We Need Better Options with Sarah Hill Ph.D
We make them give a public speech, like an impromptu speech about their dream job. And then we make them do backwards math equations. We make them count backwards from steps of 13 from like 1,124. And they have to count backward in steps of 13. And anytime that they mess up, they have to start over again. And so it's this really stressful research paradigm.
Dhru Purohit Show
Birth Control Deep Dive: How it Changes Your Brain, Its Link to Autoimmune Conditions, and Why We Need Better Options with Sarah Hill Ph.D
And then we take their blood and we looked at the release of different types of inflammatory markers or pro-inflammatory cytokines for the science nerds who like to listen to this. And what we find is that for women who are using hormonal birth control, they have a different inflammatory response to stress relative to women who are using or women who are naturally cycling.
Dhru Purohit Show
Birth Control Deep Dive: How it Changes Your Brain, Its Link to Autoimmune Conditions, and Why We Need Better Options with Sarah Hill Ph.D
And in particular, what we find is that the stress response for women who are using hormonal birth control, and we looked at just women using combination hormonal birth control pills, and their response to stress was characterized by the release of a cytokine called TNF-alpha. And whereas women using hormonal birth control, it was more dominated by IL-6. It's interleukin-6.
Dhru Purohit Show
Birth Control Deep Dive: How it Changes Your Brain, Its Link to Autoimmune Conditions, and Why We Need Better Options with Sarah Hill Ph.D
And this is noteworthy because, A, so IL-6, this inflammatory cytokine that tended to really get released in higher levels in naturally cycling women, It's both pro-inflammatory, but it's also anti-inflammatory in the body.
Dhru Purohit Show
Birth Control Deep Dive: How it Changes Your Brain, Its Link to Autoimmune Conditions, and Why We Need Better Options with Sarah Hill Ph.D
So it has these pleiotropic effects that are sort of nice where it's like your body's preparing for inflammation, but it's like, you know, it's this kind of soft inflammatory response. TNF-alpha, which was the inflammatory response or the sort of cytokine signature of women who were using hormonal birth control, it's a little bit more gnarly.
Dhru Purohit Show
Birth Control Deep Dive: How it Changes Your Brain, Its Link to Autoimmune Conditions, and Why We Need Better Options with Sarah Hill Ph.D
It's a more inflammatory, like uniformly, unilaterally inflammatory response to stress. And not only that, it is one of the sort of hallmark cytokines that's known to be indicted in the development of autoimmune disease, right? So we know that
Dhru Purohit Show
Birth Control Deep Dive: How it Changes Your Brain, Its Link to Autoimmune Conditions, and Why We Need Better Options with Sarah Hill Ph.D
So while you're on it, you have the effects, you go off of it, and then within, you know, and sometimes it can be several months. So if you've been on it, say, for example, 10 years, and It might be a couple of months before your hormone receptors are kind of back to where they were because our hormone receptors change in response to hormone levels in the body.
Dhru Purohit Show
Birth Control Deep Dive: How it Changes Your Brain, Its Link to Autoimmune Conditions, and Why We Need Better Options with Sarah Hill Ph.D
Exaggerated release of this particular type of inflammation is something that's linked to the development of autoimmune disease, and it is what we see is characterizing the inflammatory response to stressful situations in women using hormonal birth control.
Dhru Purohit Show
Birth Control Deep Dive: How it Changes Your Brain, Its Link to Autoimmune Conditions, and Why We Need Better Options with Sarah Hill Ph.D
And so we think that this is potentially something that could ultimately lead to the development of autoimmunity in women who use hormonal birth control. And that is that their stress response, their inflammatory response to stress is different and characterized by different cytokine release or different types of inflammation.
Dhru Purohit Show
Birth Control Deep Dive: How it Changes Your Brain, Its Link to Autoimmune Conditions, and Why We Need Better Options with Sarah Hill Ph.D
In response to the stressful situation, which then in turn, when you have that repeated over time, because of course, we're all exposed to stress multiple times a day, you know, and then of course, over the course of the lifespan, then can lead to the development of autoimmune disease.
Dhru Purohit Show
Birth Control Deep Dive: How it Changes Your Brain, Its Link to Autoimmune Conditions, and Why We Need Better Options with Sarah Hill Ph.D
Right. I mean, my thought, if it was my child and we had a history of autoimmune disease in the family, my inclination would be to steer away from things that are going to suppress regular endogenous hormone production. And that includes hormonal birth control, just because there's a lot with women's naturally cycling hormones that are very anti-inflammatory hormones.
Dhru Purohit Show
Birth Control Deep Dive: How it Changes Your Brain, Its Link to Autoimmune Conditions, and Why We Need Better Options with Sarah Hill Ph.D
that are very positive in terms of preventing autoimmune disease. And I'm sure in your conversation with Dr. Moscone, you talked a little bit about some of the roles of hormone because she studies this in menopause. And you see in menopause that a lot of women have these experiences of changes in autoimmune profiles.
Dhru Purohit Show
Birth Control Deep Dive: How it Changes Your Brain, Its Link to Autoimmune Conditions, and Why We Need Better Options with Sarah Hill Ph.D
And of course, you get the greater risk for Alzheimer's disease and all that sort of thing that goes on in response to these big hormonal changes. And hormones can be very protective in terms of protecting brain health and then also protecting the health of the immune system. And so my inclination would be to stay away from it.
Dhru Purohit Show
Birth Control Deep Dive: How it Changes Your Brain, Its Link to Autoimmune Conditions, and Why We Need Better Options with Sarah Hill Ph.D
And not because I have all this stack of evidence saying that it's bad, because I don't. And there's not a lot of research that's looked at long-term risk. I know with certain types of autoimmune disease,
Dhru Purohit Show
Birth Control Deep Dive: How it Changes Your Brain, Its Link to Autoimmune Conditions, and Why We Need Better Options with Sarah Hill Ph.D
And, and readers can, or listeners can go to my book, I actually described the ones that are out in the research science, if they don't want to look at the research themselves, which of the autoimmune diseases are known to be linked with hormonal birth control use, because there are some that have been well studied, and it's been documented.
Dhru Purohit Show
Birth Control Deep Dive: How it Changes Your Brain, Its Link to Autoimmune Conditions, and Why We Need Better Options with Sarah Hill Ph.D
And so it might take a couple of months for the body to kind of figure out what's going on again with the cycle. But given that the brain has been done developing by the time a woman started, chances are things should be relatively kind of quote unquote back to normal within some period of time. And like I said, for many women, it's within a month or two. For some women, it can be longer.
Dhru Purohit Show
Birth Control Deep Dive: How it Changes Your Brain, Its Link to Autoimmune Conditions, and Why We Need Better Options with Sarah Hill Ph.D
But it's not something that's been studied well enough where we understand the role of hormonal birth control and all the different types of autoimmune, you
Dhru Purohit Show
Birth Control Deep Dive: How it Changes Your Brain, Its Link to Autoimmune Conditions, and Why We Need Better Options with Sarah Hill Ph.D
But just based on everything that I know about hormones and their role in regulating the immune system and sort of tilting us toward an anti-inflammatory type of immunological signature, my inclination would be to not use hormonal birth control if possible.
Dhru Purohit Show
Birth Control Deep Dive: How it Changes Your Brain, Its Link to Autoimmune Conditions, and Why We Need Better Options with Sarah Hill Ph.D
Right. So here's a few. And some of these might surprise you. So the first one will not surprise you. And that is like if you have severe PMS or PMDD. And this one actually goes both ways. Because if you have PMDD or severe PMS, some women respond super well to hormonal birth control.
Dhru Purohit Show
Birth Control Deep Dive: How it Changes Your Brain, Its Link to Autoimmune Conditions, and Why We Need Better Options with Sarah Hill Ph.D
So some of those women, because a lot of the symptoms are the result of that hormonal up and down that I told you about in the natural cycle. And so for women who are really sensitive to those hormonal changes and that's what triggers their symptoms, they may actually find hormonal birth control to be hugely beneficial. But for some women who have these syndromes, it can make it much, much worse.
Dhru Purohit Show
Birth Control Deep Dive: How it Changes Your Brain, Its Link to Autoimmune Conditions, and Why We Need Better Options with Sarah Hill Ph.D
And so for these people, if you have severe PMS and PMDD in the family, what I would say is talk to your doctor about hormonal birth control use. Be very careful with it and know that, you know, work with somebody who's used to working with women with this condition. Because, like I said, for some women, it's really helpful. For other women, it can, you know, it's really not helpful.
Dhru Purohit Show
Birth Control Deep Dive: How it Changes Your Brain, Its Link to Autoimmune Conditions, and Why We Need Better Options with Sarah Hill Ph.D
And so it has this very sort of divergent set of effects. And so this is just something where you need added caution, but maybe even some optimism for it being helpful to women who it's helpful to. And depression and anxiety.
Dhru Purohit Show
Birth Control Deep Dive: How it Changes Your Brain, Its Link to Autoimmune Conditions, and Why We Need Better Options with Sarah Hill Ph.D
We know that the women who are most likely to have mental health side effects who use hormonal birth control are those who have a history of that in their family or a personal history of that themselves. And so just being really careful in monitoring the mental health side effects of women who are using hormonal birth control.
Dhru Purohit Show
Birth Control Deep Dive: How it Changes Your Brain, Its Link to Autoimmune Conditions, and Why We Need Better Options with Sarah Hill Ph.D
If they have a family history of that or consider using different options, because we do know from research that women are at a greater risk of developing negative mental health side effects when that runs in their family. Alcohol and substance use.
Dhru Purohit Show
Birth Control Deep Dive: How it Changes Your Brain, Its Link to Autoimmune Conditions, and Why We Need Better Options with Sarah Hill Ph.D
So interestingly enough, progesterone, and this is some research that we're doing in our lab right now, but progesterone, as it's released in the body, when it gets broken down in the body, releases this really beautiful neurosteroid called allopregnanolone. And I say that it's really beautiful because it has this very calming effect on the brain.
Dhru Purohit Show
Birth Control Deep Dive: How it Changes Your Brain, Its Link to Autoimmune Conditions, and Why We Need Better Options with Sarah Hill Ph.D
It increases neuroplasticity, and it allows our brain, when we're keyed up, to be able to dial things down. It's calming, it's relaxing, and it stimulates the neurotransmitter receptors in our brain that get stimulated when we're doing yoga, when we're sitting in front of the fireplace, and also when we drink alcohol and use some other drugs of abuse.
Dhru Purohit Show
Birth Control Deep Dive: How it Changes Your Brain, Its Link to Autoimmune Conditions, and Why We Need Better Options with Sarah Hill Ph.D
It can even be a year or so until their bodies kind of figure out what's going on. But those effects should reverse and kind of go back to normal or go back to baseline. For women who take it during adolescence, so when their brain is not done developing yet, we don't know. There's only been, and I use the word handful to mean only maybe five or six studies. Think about that for a minute.
Dhru Purohit Show
Birth Control Deep Dive: How it Changes Your Brain, Its Link to Autoimmune Conditions, and Why We Need Better Options with Sarah Hill Ph.D
And so when you're taking hormonal birth control and you're not ovulating, so you're not producing endogenous progesterone, which releases this really beautiful neurosteroid that has all these calming effects on the brain, then you get a shortage of it.
Dhru Purohit Show
Birth Control Deep Dive: How it Changes Your Brain, Its Link to Autoimmune Conditions, and Why We Need Better Options with Sarah Hill Ph.D
So what we tend to see is that women who use hormonal birth control, which contain progestin, not progesterone, and progestins, these synthetic forms of progesterone, again, they're not synthesized from progesterone. They're synthesized from testosterone usually. When they get broken down in the body, they don't release this calming neurosteroid.
Dhru Purohit Show
Birth Control Deep Dive: How it Changes Your Brain, Its Link to Autoimmune Conditions, and Why We Need Better Options with Sarah Hill Ph.D
And so our research in our lab has been looking at whether women who use hormonal birth control, because they're lacking this calming, you know, sort of, you know, relaxing effect in their brain that's created by the release of allopregnanolone, we've been looking at whether or not women might be self-medicating and especially turning to things like alcohol to try to stimulate these same pathways in their brain.
Dhru Purohit Show
Birth Control Deep Dive: How it Changes Your Brain, Its Link to Autoimmune Conditions, and Why We Need Better Options with Sarah Hill Ph.D
And what we tend to find is that lo and behold, women who use hormonal birth control do have more alcohol cravings and they consume a greater number of alcoholic beverages in a drinking session relative to women who are naturally cycling, right?
Dhru Purohit Show
Birth Control Deep Dive: How it Changes Your Brain, Its Link to Autoimmune Conditions, and Why We Need Better Options with Sarah Hill Ph.D
And we're further going to be looking at this with respect to other types of drugs of abuse because oftentimes when our brain isn't getting enough calming activity, like the types of things that it needs to be able to dial down stress and sort of regulate our mood, not only does that lead us to seek out substances like alcohol, which will stimulate these same pathways.
Dhru Purohit Show
Birth Control Deep Dive: How it Changes Your Brain, Its Link to Autoimmune Conditions, and Why We Need Better Options with Sarah Hill Ph.D
But it can also lead us to seek out other substances that stimulate other types of pathways that make our brains feel good. And so if you are somebody who has a history of substance use or a particular, you know, based on our research, alcohol, you know, alcohol use or misuse, alcohol overuse, I would, you know, I would also be cautious about giving hormonal birth control to
Dhru Purohit Show
Birth Control Deep Dive: How it Changes Your Brain, Its Link to Autoimmune Conditions, and Why We Need Better Options with Sarah Hill Ph.D
Women in that category, given that some of our research is suggesting that it may lead to an increased craving.
Dhru Purohit Show
Birth Control Deep Dive: How it Changes Your Brain, Its Link to Autoimmune Conditions, and Why We Need Better Options with Sarah Hill Ph.D
It is very difficult to do this research, not only for the reasons that you specified, which is 100% true, but also because there's so much heterogeneity in the products that are out there. It's like really hard to like if you study like one type of pill, for example. We don't know that that's going to then translate to everything, every other type of pill that's out there.
Dhru Purohit Show
Birth Control Deep Dive: How it Changes Your Brain, Its Link to Autoimmune Conditions, and Why We Need Better Options with Sarah Hill Ph.D
And so it's just really complicated to do. The research is complicated to do, but it's not impossible, right? And so, like, we're doing some of this research. Other people's labs are doing this research. So it is possible, but it is challenging. Nonetheless, like, what do I think are the most important topics? I mean, to me, the thing that has been studied the least that has the most –
Dhru Purohit Show
Birth Control Deep Dive: How it Changes Your Brain, Its Link to Autoimmune Conditions, and Why We Need Better Options with Sarah Hill Ph.D
lasting impact is like what goes on developmentally so like what we really need are good developmental psychologists looking at the way that taking hormonal birth control in adolescence changes brain development and thankfully there are a handful of researchers that are now actually taking this question very seriously and they're starting to examine this and my guess is that within the next 20 to 25 years we're going to know a lot more about that than what we do now
Dhru Purohit Show
Birth Control Deep Dive: How it Changes Your Brain, Its Link to Autoimmune Conditions, and Why We Need Better Options with Sarah Hill Ph.D
Five or six studies. And this isn't all of science, you know. It's like in the whole body of all the science in the world. There's only about five or six studies that have really looked at what is the impact of hormonal birth control use while the brain is still developing on different types of outcomes over time. And there's just no way that it doesn't affect development.
Dhru Purohit Show
Birth Control Deep Dive: How it Changes Your Brain, Its Link to Autoimmune Conditions, and Why We Need Better Options with Sarah Hill Ph.D
The research that we do know now is starting to point in the direction that, surprise, surprise, changing women's hormone profile when they're still developing can have a lasting effect on brain development. And so I'm really looking forward to that.
Dhru Purohit Show
Birth Control Deep Dive: How it Changes Your Brain, Its Link to Autoimmune Conditions, and Why We Need Better Options with Sarah Hill Ph.D
having that research out there, because I do think that, you know, if I could wave my magic wand, it would, you know, and just like pick one thing that could happen as a result of, you know, the work I do and the work that my amazing colleagues do is for doctors of teenagers to just be more cautious in prescribing this to girls for reasons that aren't pregnancy prevention, right?
Dhru Purohit Show
Birth Control Deep Dive: How it Changes Your Brain, Its Link to Autoimmune Conditions, and Why We Need Better Options with Sarah Hill Ph.D
Like, I think that we can both agree that pregnancy prevention in teenagers is hugely important. And there might be other ways that teenagers can do this that don't involve hormones and a better way to do that, but whatever.
Dhru Purohit Show
Birth Control Deep Dive: How it Changes Your Brain, Its Link to Autoimmune Conditions, and Why We Need Better Options with Sarah Hill Ph.D
I would not take issue with a prescriber giving a teenage girl who's sexually active hormonal birth control for pregnancy prevention because that's just such an important thing to do that it might be worth the trade-offs. I do have an issue with this being given to girls for really minor issues like their skin breakouts and that sort of thing.
Dhru Purohit Show
Birth Control Deep Dive: How it Changes Your Brain, Its Link to Autoimmune Conditions, and Why We Need Better Options with Sarah Hill Ph.D
And so I just, I hope that physicians of young girls think twice or at least discuss with the families so that way the families can think twice about whether or not, you know, even just discussing the fact that there isn't all that much research.
Dhru Purohit Show
Birth Control Deep Dive: How it Changes Your Brain, Its Link to Autoimmune Conditions, and Why We Need Better Options with Sarah Hill Ph.D
Like in saying, hey, you know, sex hormones influence brain development and there's really not a lot of research on what taking these right now when your daughter's brain is still developing. Like we don't really know about what that does in the long term. I think many parents would be like, well, just tell her to wash your face more.
Dhru Purohit Show
Birth Control Deep Dive: How it Changes Your Brain, Its Link to Autoimmune Conditions, and Why We Need Better Options with Sarah Hill Ph.D
You know, it's like there are solutions to things like acne and solutions to other things that I think that parents would be totally willing to do. It's just that they haven't been given those, you know, because they haven't been really given all the information. And so...
Dhru Purohit Show
Birth Control Deep Dive: How it Changes Your Brain, Its Link to Autoimmune Conditions, and Why We Need Better Options with Sarah Hill Ph.D
To me, that's the thing that I think that I've, like I said, my magic wand would be that just because these young girls are being put on this without any information. And then here they are as adults and they're like, what happened to me? And it's just, that's just heartbreaking. And especially when they were on it for something like acne. And it's like, there's other solutions to that.
Dhru Purohit Show
Birth Control Deep Dive: How it Changes Your Brain, Its Link to Autoimmune Conditions, and Why We Need Better Options with Sarah Hill Ph.D
And I'm willing to bet that if the parents knew, and even if the doctor knew and the woman knew, that they wouldn't have made those same decisions.
Dhru Purohit Show
Birth Control Deep Dive: How it Changes Your Brain, Its Link to Autoimmune Conditions, and Why We Need Better Options with Sarah Hill Ph.D
We know that hormones play a really key role in the pubertal transition and all of the growth and development that goes on. During that sex hormone surge that you get during puberty and all of that that goes on through your late teens, early 20s. And so there's every reason to suspect that taking hormonal birth control could have a lasting impact on girls as they develop.
Dhru Purohit Show
Birth Control Deep Dive: How it Changes Your Brain, Its Link to Autoimmune Conditions, and Why We Need Better Options with Sarah Hill Ph.D
Yeah, no, I mean, my big magic wand, so my mini magic wand about what would happen with birth control is what we had just discussed. But my big magic wand is that all of these conversations that we're having lead to the development of new solutions, right? Right. I mean, I think we can all agree.
Dhru Purohit Show
Birth Control Deep Dive: How it Changes Your Brain, Its Link to Autoimmune Conditions, and Why We Need Better Options with Sarah Hill Ph.D
Like I it's you know, it's interesting because I've been I've had conversations with people all over the political map because I just said this is too important of an issue to be, you know, like choosing who I talk to about this. 100 percent of people I talk to, regardless of where they stand politically or religiously or whatever the question is, agree that we need more options.
Dhru Purohit Show
Birth Control Deep Dive: How it Changes Your Brain, Its Link to Autoimmune Conditions, and Why We Need Better Options with Sarah Hill Ph.D
It's like women's ability to regulate their fertility is hands down one of the most important issues that women have to worry about in their lifetimes just because pacing pregnancy allows us to be able to do things like build careers and achieve goals and support ourselves. Um, and we don't have a lot of good solutions.
Dhru Purohit Show
Birth Control Deep Dive: How it Changes Your Brain, Its Link to Autoimmune Conditions, and Why We Need Better Options with Sarah Hill Ph.D
I mean, the fact of the matter is knowing everything that I know now, I would probably still go on hormonal birth control at the time I went on it because I needed really good birth control. And, and that was kind of what was there. You know, it was like I, where I was in my life, I would probably still do it. And, and I know the trade-offs I'd be making.
Dhru Purohit Show
Birth Control Deep Dive: How it Changes Your Brain, Its Link to Autoimmune Conditions, and Why We Need Better Options with Sarah Hill Ph.D
And, um, and, and this is because this is how few solutions we have.
Dhru Purohit Show
Birth Control Deep Dive: How it Changes Your Brain, Its Link to Autoimmune Conditions, and Why We Need Better Options with Sarah Hill Ph.D
And there's some evidence that suggests that taking hormonal birth control during adolescence. So again, during this period when your brain is still developing. that this can lead to a heightened risk of major depressive disorder across your lifetime. So even after you've gone off of birth control.
Dhru Purohit Show
Birth Control Deep Dive: How it Changes Your Brain, Its Link to Autoimmune Conditions, and Why We Need Better Options with Sarah Hill Ph.D
But in terms of looking at other types of outcomes and even other types of age ranges, there's very little that's known. And so a lot of women ask, you know, is it possible that taking hormonal birth control, especially if they were taking it during adolescence, is that related to my pregnancy?
Dhru Purohit Show
Birth Control Deep Dive: How it Changes Your Brain, Its Link to Autoimmune Conditions, and Why We Need Better Options with Sarah Hill Ph.D
autoimmune disease or is that related to my sexual dysfunction or is that related to my dysregulation of my stress response and the answer to that is we don't know you know it's maybe because we just don't you know people really haven't taken birth control seriously and um and and when i say that i just mean that it's like you take it for this one specific cause and
Dhru Purohit Show
Birth Control Deep Dive: How it Changes Your Brain, Its Link to Autoimmune Conditions, and Why We Need Better Options with Sarah Hill Ph.D
You know, I didn't have any major mental health breakdown or anything else that you sometimes hear that happens to women. But when I went off of it, I realized that I was different. And I realized this because when I went off at about three months after the fact, I noticed that I had more energy. And I was interested in sex a lot more than I used to be. And I was, like, noticing attractive men.
Dhru Purohit Show
Birth Control Deep Dive: How it Changes Your Brain, Its Link to Autoimmune Conditions, and Why We Need Better Options with Sarah Hill Ph.D
You know, which is usually suppressing ovulation, so that way you prevent pregnancy. But ultimately, hormones have their fingers in the pot, you know, of almost all the systems in the body. And so it causes systemic effects. And nobody really spent a whole lot of time thinking about that.
Dhru Purohit Show
Birth Control Deep Dive: How it Changes Your Brain, Its Link to Autoimmune Conditions, and Why We Need Better Options with Sarah Hill Ph.D
You know, and they started putting girls on it for everything ranging from, you know, irregular periods to acne. And the result is that there are a lot of women with a lot of questions about what has this done to me? You know, and we don't really have a good answer. Like we don't know. You know, I do know that if you go on it as an adult, that you should go back to normal later.
Dhru Purohit Show
Birth Control Deep Dive: How it Changes Your Brain, Its Link to Autoimmune Conditions, and Why We Need Better Options with Sarah Hill Ph.D
But we don't even know that for 100% certain. Because the amount of research that's been done on all of these topics has been very minimal. And again, I think it's because people really just...
Dhru Purohit Show
Birth Control Deep Dive: How it Changes Your Brain, Its Link to Autoimmune Conditions, and Why We Need Better Options with Sarah Hill Ph.D
And I was...
Dhru Purohit Show
Birth Control Deep Dive: How it Changes Your Brain, Its Link to Autoimmune Conditions, and Why We Need Better Options with Sarah Hill Ph.D
cooking and I was downloading new music on at that point it was like and it was like when iPods were still a thing I was like downloading new music on my iPod and I was cooking and it was like doing all these things that just were pleasurable um and doing them to an extent that I hadn't in a while and I just felt more vividly alive and I was like like what is this what is this and I'm like I wonder if this is because I went off of the birth control pill and
Dhru Purohit Show
Birth Control Deep Dive: How it Changes Your Brain, Its Link to Autoimmune Conditions, and Why We Need Better Options with Sarah Hill Ph.D
The ability to safely and regulate or to be able to safely and effectively regulate our fertility has been the most important thing, like tool in women's equality and women's rights and our ability to achieve equality. financial and political independence from men.
Dhru Purohit Show
Birth Control Deep Dive: How it Changes Your Brain, Its Link to Autoimmune Conditions, and Why We Need Better Options with Sarah Hill Ph.D
And, you know, all of these, like, it's been so important to women and the forwarding of women's ability to, you know, take care of themselves. And I think that because of that, women are very protective of the pill and I don't blame them. I mean, it's like contraception for women is a big deal.
Dhru Purohit Show
Birth Control Deep Dive: How it Changes Your Brain, Its Link to Autoimmune Conditions, and Why We Need Better Options with Sarah Hill Ph.D
And this is particularly true in our current political climate where, you know, if you have an unexpected pregnancy, it can really be catastrophic because there are a few things that are better predictors of bad outcomes for women that than unexpected pregnancy, especially in your formative years.
Dhru Purohit Show
Birth Control Deep Dive: How it Changes Your Brain, Its Link to Autoimmune Conditions, and Why We Need Better Options with Sarah Hill Ph.D
Teenage pregnancy is the biggest risk factor for being in poverty as an adult that's ever been measured. And so keeping girls un-pregnant is like a really big deal. And so I think that women are understandably very protective of any type of contraception or access to these tools that are going to allow us to be able to regulate our fertility.
Dhru Purohit Show
Birth Control Deep Dive: How it Changes Your Brain, Its Link to Autoimmune Conditions, and Why We Need Better Options with Sarah Hill Ph.D
And, you know, these conversations are nonetheless important because even though, you know, the hormonal birth control and birth control in general is such an important tool for women's ability to do everything that they want to do and make plans and achieve education and, you know, build careers, it's not perfect. And I think that, you know, as a society, we are finally moving into a place where
Dhru Purohit Show
Birth Control Deep Dive: How it Changes Your Brain, Its Link to Autoimmune Conditions, and Why We Need Better Options with Sarah Hill Ph.D
where most people, not all people, if you look at the, you know, Instagram comments, you'll see that there's not, not everybody is in this place, but I think many people are in the place where we're able to recognize both the importance of birth control, right?
Dhru Purohit Show
Birth Control Deep Dive: How it Changes Your Brain, Its Link to Autoimmune Conditions, and Why We Need Better Options with Sarah Hill Ph.D
And how important it is to protect women's rights to access to this really important tool, but also being able at the same time to recognize that it's not perfect and being really open and honest and having those conversations about, about the potential trade-offs that you're making when you go on hormonal birth control.
Dhru Purohit Show
Birth Control Deep Dive: How it Changes Your Brain, Its Link to Autoimmune Conditions, and Why We Need Better Options with Sarah Hill Ph.D
And so that way, each woman has all the information that she needs to be able to make a decision about whether or not this is something that makes sense for her at this point in her life. And so, you know, we have to recognize the importance of maintaining women's access to birth control while also at the same time saying it's not perfect.
Dhru Purohit Show
Birth Control Deep Dive: How it Changes Your Brain, Its Link to Autoimmune Conditions, and Why We Need Better Options with Sarah Hill Ph.D
So I'll say this. I don't think that there is a big pharma conspiracy. Do I think that the drug companies do a really good job of promoting research that makes it look like birth control has absolutely no side effects? Yeah, 100% they do. I mean, it's like when you look at who funds many of these studies that find no side effects, it's usually the drug companies.
Dhru Purohit Show
Birth Control Deep Dive: How it Changes Your Brain, Its Link to Autoimmune Conditions, and Why We Need Better Options with Sarah Hill Ph.D
So I've no doubt that there is a hand in That's being played by the drug companies in terms of contributing to this. But I don't think that there's a widespread conspiracy. Instead, what I think it is largely is the result of the fact that, you know, science and, you know, and this includes medical science, tends to have what we call in science is the silo problem.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
Hi guys, it's Tony Robbins. You're listening to Habits & Hustle. Crush it.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
And so what tends to happen, and there's been research that's looked at, you know, what happens when we follow couples longitudinally. So over time, when they've gotten together, when the woman was using hormonal birth control, and then she discontinues it later on.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
And what researchers find is that if women chose their partners when they're on the pill, go off the pill, that it does lead to changes in attraction and sexual desire with respect to their partner. But for some women, it gets better.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
So if they just so happened to choose a partner who had those qualities that their naturally cycling self likes, that it's associated with an increased sexual attraction to their partner, more sexual desire, and they have more sex, But for some women, it leads to the opposite. And the women discontinue it and all of a sudden they don't feel attracted to their partner.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
Their sexual attraction to them decreases and then it causes relationship problems. And so essentially what it's doing is it's taking the blinders off. And so some of the time when you take the blinders off, you know, it's kind of like the show on Netflix, like Love is Blind.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
Yeah, it's like you choose a partner without, you know, with the little mask on. Yeah, the goggles on. You have no idea what they look like. And sometimes you pull off the goggles and it works. Sometimes you pull off the goggles and it doesn't work. And that's pretty much what is going on with hormonal birth control.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
It's because it's a little bit of a different version of yourself who is choosing that person than who you are once you're off of it.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
That's like such a fascinating question. And nobody's like, nobody's asked the question quite as you just asked it. Right. And that's a really interesting question. And like, and something that like, I'll totally have to go back to the lab and research.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
But what they have done is they have looked at like the extent to which women or pardon me, the extent to which men desire women who are either using or not using hormonal birth control. And what research generally finds is that, lo and behold, men are more attracted to women when they're naturally cycling, particularly when they're at a high estrogen part in their cycle.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
And one of the things I talk about in my book is this really brilliant study that was done, this was done several years ago now, that was done at a strip club. And they had all of the women who were working there as dancers keeping a diary. And they indicated whether they were using hormonal birth control or not. And then every day they just simply wrote, did they get their period today or not?
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
And how much money did they earn? And so they were able to look at all of the dancers, their tip earnings over the course of two menstrual cycles. And then they were able to divide the women up based on whether or not they were using or not using hormonal birth control.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
And what they found was that for women who are naturally cycling, so again, experiencing their own hormones, you get this really sharp increase in tip earnings that are corresponding right around high fertility. So they're earning more money when estrogen is high in the cycle than they are when estrogen is low in the cycle.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
And these women are out earning the pill takers whose earnings were relatively flat across the cycle. They were out earning them by several hundred dollars a shift. And so just going to show that even, you know, we don't know what it is about that. Like, was it something about the way the women work? were moving because they were feeling sexier? Is it something about the way that they smell?
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
Because we also know from research that men prefer the scent of women at high fertility compared to low, suggesting that men can pick up on estrogen levels by scent, which doesn't really make a whole... It's not very surprising because many cells in the body express estrogen. And so we would expect that this would be the case. But men do seem to pick up on the scent of estrogen.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
And so it could be that. It could be that the women are dressing...
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
sexier when they're dating i mean we just have no idea um exactly what it is but men seem to be picking up on it and they prefer that and so those women earn more money than the women who are naturally who are using hormonal birth control because men are dialed in to cues of fertility right and again evolution by natural selection would have it no other way than for a man to be most turned on by women at times when conception is possible
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
Because men who had that tendency, they would have passed down a greater number of genes because those are the women that they would be sleeping with.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
So I don't know. In different age brackets? In different age brackets. So by far, the most frequent users are women in their early 20s. You know, like 20 to 30 is like the big age range. 20 to 25 in particular is like really hot. And in some cases, I've seen population estimates as high as like 40% or something. It's very, very high. And then it falls off.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
And this is the group of women who's usually most motivated to avoid pregnancy. I mean, a lot of these women are in college or trying to build their careers or, you know, just trying to avoid parenthood for other reasons. What about IUDs? How about that? Yeah, well, so it depends on what IUD you're talking about. There's two, the copper one. The copper one doesn't have the hormonal effect. Right.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
And so that is definitely one that I would recommend for women who are willing to try it. I know it sounds really scary and barbaric. And so not everybody is like game to want to have that put in. And doctors are getting better about it. They used to not want to give that to women who hadn't had kids because they're like, oh, you know, really?
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
But they're getting they're getting over that position, thankfully. So yeah, that is a non-hormonal option that is obviously incredibly effective. Besides, you do tend to get heavier cramping and bleeding with that. But other than that, it has a very manageable psychological sort of profile of side effects. And so that's one that I like as an alternative to something hormonal.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
The hormonal IUD also has a lot of these same effects that we've been talking about.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
I know. No, amen.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
Yeah, no, I honestly, I have no idea. And so some people might say, well, you know, you can avoid copper toxicity because you do, it does create an inflammatory experience like down in your cervix to have that there. But it really is minor. And most women, it's not anything to worry about. And they've done a lot of safety tests on it.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
And I think that there's a lot of myth around the idea of copper toxicity with that.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
Like 20 years.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
Yeah. No, they're great. Yeah, no, that's like, that's definitely my favorite because it does allow you to cycle and experience your normal, you know, state of your amplitude of being. Whereas with the hormonal IUD, it's like, you know, most women who are on it and here's, there's a few funky things about it.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
So one is that most women who are on it when they're first on it for like the first year or so. The copper one? No, this is the hormonal one. Oh, the hormonal one. Yeah, it's like the women don't ovulate, right? And so it's like the hormones are released to such an extent that they're telling the brain not to ovulate.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
And so doctors will tell women like, oh, it's locally acting hormones, which is bullshit. because there's no such thing as a locally acting hormone. Hormones go into the bloodstream and they go everywhere that blood travels. And the last I checked, that's everywhere. And that includes the brain. And so the idea that somehow they managed to just circulate down there is the biggest bunch of crap.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
To sell stuff or to like... It's so frustrating because a lot of, you know, I've talked to so many women who've had the experience of feeling like they're totally crazy because their doctor is like, well, you know, I've been so depressed since I started this and, you know, and unable to even get out of bed because of my depression.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
And I feel like it was this IUD, but the doctor said the hormones act locally. And I'm like...
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
that's that's like malpractice totally right it's just crazy there's no such thing as a locally acting hormone and so you know most women aren't ovulating and when they're on it but then a lot of them about halfway through the five years that they're on it a lot of them will start ovulating so then the hormones are in there but they're not um the brain is like up to there's kind of figured out what's going on and so because the levels are low they keep it very low and
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
And so the brain is like, all right, these levels aren't very high and ultimately will start stimulating the ovaries to ovulate again. The question I've always had is if you are able to protect yourself from pregnancy with the hormonal IUD, without suppressing ovulation. So, right. So not turning that off. Why do you need the hormones in there at all? That's what I just said.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
Like, it makes no sense.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
Well, so I've heard people, so I've heard people get the hormone one because it's plastic and they're like, oh, I don't want the metal in my body. Okay, fine. But this plastic one clearly doesn't need the damn hormones or else, you know.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
Well, it's not really covering it, but it is putting something there. And so your body is like, no, thank you. I'm not getting pregnant.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
So pheromones are essentially like anytime they have a chemical signal that's affecting another organism, right? So if you smell my estrogen levels, then we call that a pheromone if that influences your behavior.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
And so with a naturally cycling woman, you do get these kinds of pheromonal effects, as I've noted, since men, when they smell the scent of ovulating women, it tends to increase their testosterone levels, right? So men actually get a little increase in testosterone in response to the scent of ovulation and without knowing what it is, right?
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
They'll like smell t-shirts worn by women who are ovulating and they prefer the scent of the ovulating women compared to t-shirts worn by the same women at different phases in the cycle when estrogen is low. And so, yes. So having, like taking the pill, for example, can disrupt this, right?
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
It can prevent, because women aren't in this nice estrogenic state at any point in their cycle, that's going to decrease some of these attraction-related molecules that women might already release otherwise. And it also seems to decrease women's ability to pick up on male pheromonal cues, right? So we know...
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
From research that especially at high fertility, when estrogen is high, women are really good at being able to detect metabolites of testosterone. So when men's bodies are breaking down testosterone, it releases different types of compounds that shed in the skin. And women are really good at being able to pick up on it when estrogen is high.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
Thank you. I'm so excited to be here. And I will tell you what an evolutionary psychologist is.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
Their brain is like, you know, like I smell a man, right?
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
Yes. And like are really, it's like it's attracting to them, right? They're drawn to it. They like that. And for women who are using the pill, no.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
It's just blunted. Yeah, it's just blunted. It's that blindfold from like we've been talking about from that show, Love is Blind.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
So I'm a psychologist. And the thing I'm really interested in is trying to study behavior and motivation. So I'm really interested in why people do things that they do. And the lens that I use to do my research is that of Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
Okay. Yeah. And obviously, when I answer this question, it's going to have huge error bars around it because there's so much idiosyncrasy in everybody's partner choice.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
But just, you know, like there are some things that men and women tend to desire sort of in equal measures. And so like men and women both want a partner who's, you know, kind and understanding and a partner who's in good health. And these are things that men and women are both looking for in ways that men and women on average tend to differ in terms of their partner choice.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
Women, a naturally cycling woman likes to strike a balance between what in the evolutionary sciences we would call direct and indirect benefits. Direct benefits are all of those things that you get yourself from your partner. So for example, if they are a good provider, that would be a good direct benefit. And that's one that we know that women desire in their partners.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
We also know that women are interested in a long-term meeting context with partners who exhibit cues related to being a good dad. So somebody who's going to be caring and be able to help care for children. And so those are direct benefits. Anything a woman gets herself. Indirect benefits are essentially good genes.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
And all that that means is that I use the tools from evolutionary theory to make new predictions about why people do the things that they do and think the things that they think and feel the things that they feel.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
So this is where we're looking for qualities that are related to genetic quality in a partner that we want for our children. And obviously this usually goes on unconsciously. These tend to be the qualities that our brain just happens to find really sexy. right? So something like having testosterone related cues. So we like men who have a nice chiseled jaw, right?
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
Broad shoulders, deep voice, you know, a dominant sort of personality. These are cues related to testosterone and testosterone is what we call a good genes marker. Simply because men who were able to release high levels of testosterone during development, that indicates that they probably had a high quality immune system because men's immune systems get traded off with testosterone in a way.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
that men's bodies will not produce high levels of testosterone if they have an immune emergency to deal with. And so the idea here is that only men who are in good health during development are able to release really high levels of testosterone during development because there is this trade-off between immune system functioning and testosterone levels.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
And so one of the reasons that our brain finds testosterone related cues sexy in men is because only men who had relatively high functioning immune systems during development were able to release that and form those types of features. And so, yeah, so that's like one type of a cue. The scent of genetic compatibility, that's another set of sort of genes that we're looking for.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
And we tend to pick this up by way of scent, right? Sort of picking up on some of those cues that somebody might have different immune genes than your own. which are generally the ones that we find most attractive. And for most naturally cycling women, what you see is that when we're choosing a partner, it's generally brokering that trade off.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
You know, it's like sort of understanding you want the sexy qualities that are going to, you know, just like really attract you and make you physically drawn to somebody. But then also as a long term partner, somebody who's going to be, you know, sort of a good provider and, you know, be a good parent and so on and so forth.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
And, you know, so for naturally cycling women, what you generally see is that there is some sort of trade-off, right, where they're making decisions about, you know, this person has to be somebody I'm attracted to, but also has to have these other qualities. And then you find the person who best, you know, matches that set of criteria.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
For women who are using the pill, it seems like all that, you know, what we call indirect benefits, that genetic compatibility and cues of, you know, immune system quality because of testosterone and all that, it seems like all that just gets shut down. It's just like the light switch goes off.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
And it's just, it's focusing exclusively on these other partnership qualities, which again, isn't necessarily bad, right? It's just different.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
It's going to get you a different partner probably than what you would get if you were striking that balance between what, you know, who you're most physically attracted to and then, you know, who's going to be a good partner and, you know, good at provisioning. And so that's, you know, men tend to be, you know, in a sort of natural state of things.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
Men are also brokering that same balance, you know, but for men, there's a whole lot of emphasis placed on cues related to fertility and what we call reproductive value. And fertility, of course, refers to the probability that a woman will be able to have a child with an active sex. And we know that for women, fertility peaks at the very young age of about 25 and then starts to decline.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
And of course, it declines pretty rapidly after a woman's in her late 30s, mid to late 30s. And men, of course, are dialed in to cues that have historically been related to fertility because, again,
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
You know, over the course of evolutionary time, those men who just so happened to find women most beautiful when they were able to reproduce, they would have passed down that preference to a lot of sons, right? Whereas if you have a man whose preference tended to focus on qualities related to older age, they wouldn't have passed down that preference to anybody, right? Because no, those...
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
Absolutely not. That's the only thing that matters. No, no, absolutely not. No, yeah, there are so many things. I mean, men's partner choices are just as complex as ours in a lot of ways. And what you tend to see is that if men are just choosing like a short-term sexual partner, you know, then it's like, you know, looks and all the superficial stuff.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
Yeah. Yeah. So I did. So I wrote the book in 2019. It was published in 2019. And I spent my research career studying women and trying to understand especially sexual motivation. That has been sort of my bread and butter in research is trying to understand women's motivational states with respect to sexual relationships.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
In addition to the cues related to fertility, but let me just make sure that I, that's really, that really is important to men's attraction. I mean, whether we like it or not, it's like, you know, it's huge. Yeah. Youth, youth and youth is related to fertility. Yeah, exactly. It's confounded. Yeah.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
And so those things are, tend to play a really important role, but men are also like some of the things that they're most important that they find most important. Like when you ask men to rank order, like how important are all these qualities? Well, loyalty, kindness, right? So some of these, you know, other types of qualities.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
I would completely agree with that. No, I think that it is. But in a lot of ways, I mean, for us, for women... Not for women, no. Well, no, so yes and no. So no, I don't think that looks are paramount for women. But I will say that for women, for us, what attraction is, is a lot more complex than for men. Attraction for men is generally... Physical attraction, right, based on physical cues.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
Women's attraction is a lot more complicated, right? Just meaning that it's like, for us, physical attraction, in addition to just being based on somebody's physical appearance, is also based on all kinds of things. Like, does this person have, you know, a take charge personality? Does this person, you know, say the, like, the right things? Is this person going to be a good provider?
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
And some of these other cues, I mean, it's like, women are the ones who get the ick for a reason, you know? You know, it's like the ick is essentially like somebody just violated something that impacts our very complex and nuanced version of attraction, which is about more than just physical appearance. But for us, attraction is just as important as it is for men.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
It's just that what feeds into attraction for women is more complicated than just physical appearance.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
Yeah. And you know, that's such an important question, because it's like, what is going to happen societally? Yeah, I mean, honestly, and you know, I think that the I think the answer is very complicated. I don't I don't know that I know all the answers. I think that one of the answers is just simply that, you know, we have the ability to regulate our fertility now with birth control.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
And then I went off the birth control pill that I had been on for more than a decade of my life. And when I went off of it, I felt like I woke up like I felt like I like went from like a black and white line drawing into like this full dimensional colorful reality. And I kept asking myself, like,
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
And for most of history, we did not have that ability. And the fact is there are a lot of people who now are saying, I don't want to have kids and I don't have to have kids. Right. And it used to be the case that that was never a possibility. Right. It's like if you liked sex, you were going to be a mother, like whether you wanted them or not. Right.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
Like the idea of like whether you want kids used to not be a question people could ask. It was about whether or not you wanted to have sex. And so I think that's one thing. But why are people not wanting to have sex? I think that there's a few things happening.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
One is that I think hormone or endocrine disruptors have lowered testosterone to an extent that it's making people just less sexually motivated. We know that testosterone is one of the big sexually motivating hormones. And that higher levels are related to more sexual desire. Lower levels are linked with less sexual desire.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
So that's one thing is that we have these endocrine disrupting compounds that are lowering testosterone. And I think that's part of the puzzle. Another part of the puzzle is hormonal birth control. And we know that hormonal birth control is something that's associated with lower libido. So it can really kill women's sexual desire and in a pretty significant way.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
And so women are feeling less sexually motivated and they're feeling less sexually motivated in part because of the endocrine disruptors because their testosterone also is being lowered and then birth control can lower sexual desire further. So I think that's also part of the picture. I think another part of the picture is that now, you know, we have internet porn available everywhere.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
And I think that men are like, why should I bother to do all of this work and have to jump through all of these hoops for somebody who's less hot than the person that I see on the computer screen? And so I think that men are like not feeling as motivated to do the types of things that they used to have to do in order to get access to sex. Just by sort of using a cheap alternative.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
And so I think that's also part of the picture. Another part of the picture is that birth control has allowed women to achieve more than they've ever achieved in their entire lives. In our entire history as a species, I mean, women are dominating. I mean, it's like we're getting more college degrees. We're getting more advanced degrees.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
We're going to law school and medical school at a greater extent than men. And women are hypergamous, meaning that they like to mate up. So they like to be involved in relationships with men who have at least as much education as they have themselves.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
So women are now in this position where they're looking up to find partners who have the same levels at least of education and career success that they have themselves. And there's just not a lot of men there because, you know, women are doing really well.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
Men are kind of like, eh, I don't really, you know, I can just look at porn and then I don't have to do all this work and get all these degrees and jump through all these hoops in order to get sexual access because my brain is being tricked into believing I'm getting sexual access by looking at pornography. And then the last one I think is online dating.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
there's something about those hormones that i was on that influenced me and you know it's funny because i had published in my research that i had done um you know throughout my career studying women and women's psychology published papers about weight the ways that women's hormones affect their motivational states and sexual desire and everything else and never even crossed my mind that these synthetic hormones that i was taking were then of course also going to influence the way that my brain worked and the way i felt and the way i experienced things
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
And I think that what that has created has made it really easy to find partners. And for men who are doing well, so men in this climate, like who have those really good jobs and have the types of qualities that women are looking for partners, they are now entering the marriage market from the dating market a lot later than they used to.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
And so what happens is because men are able to get access to dates, just like it's so easy. You know, it's so easy to find a date when you have a dating app. And so they're not settling down until they're like 40, you know. Even 50. Yeah, or 50. 50 is now the new 40. Yeah, that's what they say.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
That's what the men are trying to tell us.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
And so you'll have men who are hanging out in the dating market for a really long time. And then you have women who go into the marriage market from the dating market earlier where they're like ready to settle down because their fertility is going to decline. And so women then are up here in the marriage market, right?
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
There's not a lot of men around because they're mostly hanging out in the dating market. And then the women are also looking for people who are at least as educated as themselves. And I mean, it's really causing problems.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
Right. Yeah. It's like our brain. It's so interesting. So yeah, go ahead.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
Right. Well, and I think that there are some women doing that.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
Right. Yeah. So I've got two answers to that. So one is that I think that women are starting to do that more, right? So we see like, you know... But they're not having kids with them. No, they're not having kids with them, right? They're not having families with them. We're sort of seeing like the, you know, like the rise of the cougar, right?
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
Where you'll see older women dating and they're just, you know, they're not serious boyfriends. They're just like Yeah. Play things because the women are like, I have my own money. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. It's like, I've got, I've got my, I've got my own money. I don't need a man for that. I just want to have fun in my own terms.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
And so then they just like take a hot guy that they can parade around and, you know, and have a good time with. And, you know, Godspeed, men have been doing this forever. It's about time.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
So it's, It's just really about whatever traits get passed down or the traits that you're going to see, right? And so all that that means is that like, yeah, the tendency for older women to date younger men, they're not passing that preference down to anybody, you know, because they're not having any more offspring.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
But in the men aren't passing that tendency to want to mate with older women on to anybody either because there's no reproduction going on in that context. And so, like, I don't think that it's really disrupting anything, you know, just because nothing is really changing. Yeah, exactly. Nothing's really changing.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
But I think that there's not as much of that as there is for men because, you know, we spend most of our evolutionary history in a context, you know, living as hunter-gatherers. And women were very dependent on men for access to resources. And so, like, you know, getting access to food and protection, particularly during pregnancy.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
And because of that, we have inherited the psychology that tends to be more coy, right? So we tend to be more sexually cautious relative to men. And we tend to be more oriented toward long-term mating relative to men. Just simply because throughout most of our evolutionary history, there was no short-term.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
I mean, like if you're a woman engaged in like short-term mating, you could end up with a baby. Right. And so even if you're choosing somebody as just a casual fling, there's this tendency for women to get emotionally enmeshed in those relationships because we're wired that way.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
Yeah, we're just wired differently. It's like we faced different adaptive problems throughout our history due to the fact that we're the ones who get pregnant. And because of that, the costs of short-term sex and just being sort of casual willy-nilly are much greater than what they are for men.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
And so I went to the research literature to see what had been published on birth control pill in women's brains. And I saw that, oh my gosh, you know, there's all this research that's been around for like 30 years that nobody's ever told anything about.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
And so that's led to a divergence within our sexual psychology that tends to make men more oriented toward casual encounters without really developing any sort of strings attached. Whereas for women, it tends to be a little bit more complicated. Yeah.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
Yes, but in as much as they're attracted to them first, right? As you were talking about, I don't think that any level of professional success can make up for if a man doesn't feel that a woman is physically attractive.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
And what that can mean, though, is very broad, you know, because that doesn't mean obviously there's a lot of people that I think objectively we could say like this person is not the most attractive person we've ever seen in their life. And somebody is in love with them and thinks that they're beautiful.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
And so that's what ultimately led me into that research area to really begin to uncover what we know and don't know about hormonal birth control in the brain. And as you noted, I did publish this in 2019. And it's really, you know, in a lot of ways, it was a little bit before its time because people weren't really having these conversations yet about birth control.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
You know, so it's like we have to, you know, sort of also take that with a grain of salt or understanding the fact that there's for the most part, there can be some somebody for everyone.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
That's like beautiful. It's perfect.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
Yeah. Yeah. How's that for a depressing statistic? Right? Right. Yeah, they did a study where they were looking at different types of predictors for being able to transcend the social class in which you were born.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
And, you know, in this great meritocratic society that we live in, we would like to think that it would be something like your educational attainment or, you know, where you went to school or what you majored in, right? It might be something like this. But instead, what the research found is that
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
the strongest predictor for women for upward social mobility was their physical attractiveness, and that this played a greater role in their ability to transcend their social class of origin than their family's existing socioeconomic status, their education level, and their career choice.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
Oh, that's a really great question. I don't know, but I am willing to bet that it is probably either educate. I think it is some combination of like education that they get and then like their career choice is my guess.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
Totally different set of, yeah, no, it's not as physical attractiveness.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
Yeah, it's really funny because we did this really cool study where we had men who are kind of average looking. We had them photographed like looking like they were in a couple with women of varying levels of attractiveness. And what do you think as soon as women see kind of an average, you know, kind of kind of guy with a really beautiful woman, what do they think? He's rich. Yeah, exactly.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
Of course. And so what we did is we asked people about like different qualities, you know, that these men had.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
And just based on the virtue of the attractiveness of the women that men are pictured with, women infer all of these different things about like what they're like and including the fact that as we see a man with a beautiful woman who's like far more beautiful than he is handsome, there's this general assumption that we tend to assume that he is like financially very well off and, you know, probably rich.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
And it's really been in the last two years or so that things have really exploded. And women are really interested in trying to better understand birth. One, what do birth control pills do to their brain and the way that they experience the world? But then also, who are they off of it?
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
Right? I think that there's an element of that that's very true. Yes.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
Yes. Multiple elements. Yeah. So, you know, with any resource that's desirable, there's only so many, right? Or else it wouldn't be desirable. Supply and demand. It's like there's only so many houses on the water. There's only so many attractive mates. There's only so many top positions in the job. And so there's always going to be an element of competition.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
And for women, especially when we're talking about mate-related things, one of the primary areas in which they compete is attractiveness. And so here you have women who kind of size each other up, right? And then they can be really terrible to one another when they're trying to compete in the same pool.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
And I mean, I've found, I remember when I was in my 20s and how much of that there would be, you know, this like rivalry and that sort of thing. And then like once I was married and had children, like it allowed me to have friendships with women in ways that I hadn't been able to. Right.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
You know, when I was in my 20s, because I think that, like, that people were paired off kind of took the pressure off of all of that. They didn't find you to be a threat. Right, exactly.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
Right. Yeah. Well, no, it's really interesting because I've also, I've been divorced and now I'm married again. And during that period when I was divorced, I mean, talk about a polarizing event in people's lives. Well, I mean, you know, when you are a person who is with a bunch of married people, right? You live in a community of married people who you spent a lot of time with.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
And then all of a sudden, you know, you're not a married person. You become very much a threat. Did they ostracize you? Yeah, there was a lot of that that happened. I kind of got shoved out. I got a little bit of the exit stage left. So then what happened then? Well, so what happened, I found my new community. I mean, you know.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
Yeah, it was mostly single women. And yeah, and it was a totally, you know, and it was a really freeing, you know, experience to go through that. It was terrible to lose. I lost some people that I thought were really good friends. But I think that, you know, it's like on the one hand, I understood it.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
Yeah, well, exactly. And so it's like, you know, I'd have, I didn't, um, at first I was, I was hurt and angry. And then afterwards I was, I had a little bit of reflection on it and it's like, you know, I under, I mean, there's two things going on there. It's like one, you know, you don't want to have this single person that that's a threat.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
And trying to better understand the role of their hormones and everything else in the way that they experience the world.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
Um, but it's also a threat to, I mean, marriage is kind of held together by bubble gum and shoelaces. You know what I mean? It's like, it's like a, it's like a It's a hard thing to do, you know? It's, like, really hard to do. And so the idea that somebody can just, like, walk away from it and be okay. Because I was. I, like, walked away.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
And, you know, and my ex-husband and I, in some ways, it's even more threatening. He and I are great. And, like, we're great co-parents. And we do Thanksgivings together. And, you know, we call it the web of love. How long were you married for? Like, 17 years. So I was married a long time.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
I want to say 12 and nine. Wow. Yeah. So yeah. And yeah. So, so, so to have somebody who we, you know, I walk away from a marriage and I'm okay. And financially I'm fine. Cause I've, you know, I'm taking care of my business and then to be able to get along well with my ex-husband. And I feel like that also feels threatening to marriage. Do you know
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
Because marriage is hard and horrible sometimes. And being somebody who's married again, it's like, and we talk about this. My husband was also formerly married. And it's like really hard to be married. I mean, it's like sometimes you're just like, this is terrible. Like, this is a really terrible thing. But you persevere. And the idea of like...
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
When you're having one of those moments of marriage being terrible, to see people walking away from it and being just fine, that feels really threatening. You don't want to go down that rabbit hole. Nobody wants to have to sit and think about whether their marriage is a good idea or a bad idea. It's a really scary thing. It was a hard decision.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
Well, right. And I think that that is I think that that was like, I think that's the biggest I think you just hit the nail on the head. I mean, honestly, it's like how many people are in in my ex husband and I had a pretty lovely relationship for the most part, we just kind of grew in different directions. Yeah. And so, like, there's a lot of people who are in marriages a lot worse than ours was.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
Yeah. And then, you know, and then to... And you're the one who got the divorce. Yes. And so I think that there was a lot of that too. So I, like I said, studying what I study, I have a lot of compassion for how everybody responded to me. And it was really hurtful at first, but I do feel compassion and I understand why that happened. Right.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
No. What's really interesting is no. And so with my really tight group of girlfriends, no. And we actually would trade no. It's like we had a spreadsheet. Yeah. We were dating. Really? Yes. Where I was like to make sure like, did you go out? And it's like, oh wait, I know I went out with him. No, he's great for you.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
And so like we would even like set people up on the side, like on side chat with people that we would go out with. And then, but they didn't match up on the app or whatever with the other person. I love that because you know what you're meeting these people.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
And in fact, one of our pictures that we had, it was all three of us together. Like, cause there was three of us that spent most of it. There was five of us, but there's three of us that were actively dating. And so we had a picture of all three of us. And then it was like, if it doesn't work out with one of us, you can have the other two.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
Yeah, that's such a great question. And I've always wondered it myself. I mean, I think it was a combination of You know, I think that the pandemic made us all look inward just in terms of our health and trying to understand our bodies. It gave us a lot more time because we had time on our hands during that time to try to educate ourselves.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
I love that. It's like a threefer. Yeah. And I think that there's something about, you know, because we were all in our, you know, we were all in our early 40s or late 30s, early 40s when we met. And I think that there's also something where as you get older, in addition to, you know, just like whether you're partnered or not.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
It's like I think there's a really a time that you can appreciate just how amazing female friendship is that I don't think you get when you're in your 20s.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
Yeah. So we've got a blended family of five kids.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
Yeah. No, and I say thankfully, but no, really, they're all wonderful. They're older. I mean, so like, you know, the oldest is, you know, about to graduate college. The second oldest is a freshman in college. And then, you know, our youngest are both freshmen in high school. So it's not like we have all of these, you know, like so much chaos going on in our lives.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
So I found the app. So it's funny because my first exposure to the apps was when I was in graduate school at UT Austin way back in the day. It was like 2001. I mean, I was actually writing a research paper on mate preferences and And it was before there were apps. It was like when like match.com was a thing. It was like a website.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
And so I remember going there and like, you know, I was doing a project looking at what are some of the qualities that men compared to women say that they're looking for in partners.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
And, you know, and then like did a quantification and lo and behold, you know, men were more likely to say they were looking for looks and women were more likely to say they were looking for financial stability or some version of that. And, and so that was like my very first exposure. And then, you know, and I was dating my, that my, what ended up being my husband during that.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
So I wasn't like on the app, you know, on that, but then. You know, because of the work that I do, I mean, I'm very familiar with what everybody is doing with the apps forever and sort of monitoring that because it's like something that I've been really interested in, you know, understanding relationships and sex and dating dynamics.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
And so looking at the apps, I mean, I wasn't like looking at the apps when I was married, but just having awareness of them and like what they were and what people were doing was something that I'd always had.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
It was like I had my finger on the pulse of it. And then when I got divorced and then when it was like, you know, I don't even, I'm trying to remember how I found out like what all the kids were using. You know what I mean? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think that I had, I feel like I read something. Like how wonky is this? I think I read it in like the Wall Street Journal. Yeah.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
So I think that there was a little bit of that where people were kind of trying to understand their bodies a little bit more during the pandemic because they were trying to keep themselves healthy in the face of this, you know, unpredictable kind of a virulent threat.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
like what people were using yeah yeah um and i think that that's how i found um like bumble is that what you used that's what i was on and then hinge for a little bit but then yeah and then i ended up dating um the person i mean i dated a few different guys but then i ended up in um the relationship with my now husband and so then it's all she wrote the rest is history are you happy now yes i'm very happy okay are you happy you went through the divorce
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
Yeah. It's hard to say that, right? So yes, it was the right decision. Do I hate it for my kids? Would I prefer for them not to have to visit both of us? Yeah, I would prefer that. I will say that I think that of anybody that I know who's in a divorce relationship, I think mine is incredibly healthy. And like I said, my ex and I, he came over for Christmas to my husband's house.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
Like, this is the way that we do things and everybody's cool with it. And I feel like my kids get the experience of being able to see that their parents still love and care for each other, even though they're not married. And so that's like, I guess, on the positive side. But and I can also tell myself, like, I think it's better for my kids to see me flourishing and not feeling like.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
You know, I'm in a in a bad spot. And like I said, it wasn't we didn't fight or anything. I just wasn't happy. And I think it showed and I was working all the time. So I didn't want to be you know, it was it was that was not good. And so yeah, I guess the answer is that yes, I'm it was the right decision. But it's hard to say like, yes, about something because I of course, it hurt my kids.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
And that was hard.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
Yes, exactly. And that's what they do. And would they prefer not to do that? Yes, they would. They would prefer if we were still together. Right, right. But that being
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
said they're also like you know they're learning some resilience with all of this and and like I said I think that of anybody I know who's got a divorce set up I think ours is really a nice one and I think that the kids have been able to learn a lot from it good answer thanks you're welcome
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
But I also think that just as the next generation of women has sort of started to, you know, phase out of the reproductive years and younger women have sort of moved into that space, this is a much more savvy population in some ways. Like, I'm a Gen Xer. And, you know, when I was growing up, if my doctor gave me something, I never thought twice about it.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
No, that's okay. Do you want me to start it off? Yes. Okay. So let's talk about some of the things that birth control does besides just influencing potentially partner choice. We also know from research that it affects sexual desire, which I think I alluded to. It's like it really can put women on sexual lockdown in a lot of cases. it increases the risk of developing depression or anxiety.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
And this is particularly true for younger women. So they've done studies where they look at the risk of developing major depressive disorder based on whether or not you're using hormonal birth control or not. And what you tend to see is that the risk is increased for everybody of developing one of those types of outcomes from using hormonal birth control. But it's especially great for young women.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
So women 19 and younger whose brains are still developing, the risk of developing a major depressive disorder and the risk of suicide risk attempt and successful suicide attempt are significantly greater for teens who use hormonal birth control compared to those who do not.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
There's also now research showing that if you're using hormonal birth control during your teen years, so again, 19 and younger, that this is associated with a greater risk of developing major depressive disorder across your lifetime, even after you go off the birth control pill, because it seems that it's probably influencing brain development.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
And so the important message here with depression and anxiety is one, if you go on hormonal birth control, Keep an eye on yourself. Have somebody that you love keep an eye on you. Because the fact is when we're depressed or anxious, our brain doesn't say like, gosh, you know, I'm depressed or anxious, but it's my drugs. Instead, what happens is we think like, God, my life sucks right now.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
Like my boss hates me. My boyfriend hates me. Like it's like we feel like all of these things are happening and we feel bad. We don't actually think, gosh, I'm depressed. Right. We don't acknowledge what's really happening. These are things that can tell you that your birth control might not be working for you in that way. And this is particularly true, as I said, for these young girls.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
And I think that it's smart to avoid going on hormonal birth control, if at all possible, until you're 20 or older, just because your brain is going to have most of its development done at that time, which means that it won't have a long-term lasting impact on you.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
But if you are going to go on it when you're younger than 20, really, really take care and make sure that somebody is keeping an eye on you just because the risk of developing a mental health related side effect is so high and pronounced in this group. So that's another thing that hormonal birth control can do. Another thing that surprises people.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
is that it can actually decrease your ability to put on muscle mass from weight training and this happens because it keeps your testosterone levels low and testosterone plays an important role in terms of prompting the biological cascade that allows you to put on lean muscle mass and so women who are doing weight training doing the exact same regimen compared to women who are naturally cycling they put on significantly less lean muscle mass compared to their naturally cycling counterparts
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
I didn't think about what was in my tampons. you know, I didn't think about anything. I mean, it was just like, okay, this is like what you take and this is what you put in your body. And you know what I mean? And the younger generation of women are suspicious of that. And they're like, wait a minute, like what is in these tampons? And you know, sure enough, it's a bunch of chemicals.
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Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
which is surprising to a lot of people.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
Right. That makes sense to me. potentially leaving you less able to be able to regulate your emotional responses to things and also being less able to cope from and learn from stress. And so there's research that shows, for example, that women who use hormonal birth control, that rather
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
having a big spike in cortisol that all of us get when we're feeling stressed out which um a lot of people you know give a bad rap and cortisol gets kind of a bad rap because it's you know if you have it chronic exposure to cortisol it's not good but having big bursts of cortisol when we're stressed out is actually very adaptive and it's like part of how our body helps to manage stress and cope with stress and so like when cortisol gets released it dumps fat and sugar into the bloodstream so we can make a quick getaway
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
It primes the birth of new neurons in our hippocampus, which is the brain area that helps us learn and remember things. And so it gets us ready to be able to recover from stress, to be able to learn from stress, and to be able to sort of move on with our lives.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
And research finds that women who are using hormonal birth control, that rather than having this nice big response of cortisol in response to stress, they have a really flat, blunted response to cortisol in response to stress. And this is something that we only tend to see in people who've suffered from PTSD or things like exposure to childhood trauma.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
They have these blunted cortisol types of responses. And you also see this in women who are using hormonal birth control.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
it suggests that it has some sort of dysregulatory pattern within the stress response and you know nobody knows exactly what it is um but what researchers think is going on is that the synthetic progesterone in birth control pills which is called a progestin it doesn't perfectly match the progesterone receptor which is the receptor in the cell that picks up the the hormone
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
And it also gets picked up by other things, including sometimes testosterone and including sometimes cortisol. And so what researchers think goes on is that these molecules are stimulating cortisol receptors and making the brain think that it's in a state of chronic stress, like chronic uncontrollable stress, and that that's causing the stress response to shut down. which isn't good.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
And now there's like labels on there and we know what's in them. And so I think as these women who are a little bit more suspicious of the idea of just put something in your body and shut up little lady, it Yeah, yeah, they're not willing to put up with that.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
It's not good for anybody. It's bad for emotional regulation. It's bad for mental health. And like I said, it's something that we tend to see in people who have PTSD. And so not something that's positive for women who are using hormonal birth control.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
I mean, yeah, as far as I'm concerned, you know, doing something, especially with a teenager that's non-hormonal is going to be the way to go. So copper IUD is a good one. I don't recommend the fertility awareness method for teenagers because, you know, just the idea of tracking your cycles and only using condoms, like the idea of a teenager trying to do that effectively, it just gives me chills.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
I just imagine. So, I mean, we just aren't left with a lot of options. And so one of the big messages from, you know, that I've wanted to really communicate with my book is not like, oh, you know, the birth control pill is evil and all this. Instead it's, we need more options, right? This is imperfect. This is imperfect, and we need to have more choices.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
Because the fact is, especially for young girls whose brains are developing and are very sensitive to hormones, we don't have a lot of good options.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
I was like, yeah, I felt alive and I felt sexy. And I just, yeah, it was just like, it was like an awakening in a lot of ways.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
Right. Yeah. And it's really interesting because, you know, people tend to assume that like, oh, you know, hormone therapy, like you must be anti-hormone therapy because, and I'm like, no, like I think hormones are great. Like I think the problem, you know, that with the birth control pill is that you're not getting exposure to hormones.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
And so I think that these younger generation of women in their quest to try to better understand what's going into their bodies has really begun to do a deep dive and trying to understand the impact of synthetic hormones and in particular the pill on the way that their bodies sort of experience the world.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
Yeah, you're suppressing them.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
Hormones are wonderful. They're a wonderful thing.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
On the studies of like... No, I mean, I definitely have awareness of this space. Like I know about the research in the space. And I can say that, you know, there's a lot of women who are being given birth control pills as a way to ease the menopausal transition. Instead of being given micronized progesterone and estrogen. Yeah.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
And which I think is I think is a terrible just because the synthetic progesterone in birth control pills that progestin isn't biologically identical to progesterone. the way that micronized progesterone is. And because of that, you don't get many of the really beautiful benefits that progesterone has for the body, including the release of this really nice neurosteroid called allopregnanolone.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
And it's something that gets released when progesterone is being broken down in the body And it stimulates these receptors in our brain that are known for making us feel calm and relaxed. And it's really good for us. It promotes neuroplasticity, which means that it makes our brain plastic and malleable and able to respond to things and not freak out.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
And it's associated with having better mental health and all these other really beautiful things.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
And women who are using synthetic hormones, you know, this progestin, that because it's made out of testosterone, it's not made out of progesterone, you don't get this beautiful metabolite that has all these wonderful benefits to the brain and benefits to mental health and also benefits to bone health because progesterone and estrogen work together to help to create new osteoblasts in the bone and help to strengthen bones and do all these really nice things.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
And I think that there's a lot of doctors out there who are just, you know, because they're comfortable with the birth control pill, they're just like giving women that to try to prevent them from not experiencing the symptoms of the menopausal transition, but the women that aren't getting all the benefits you get from actual hormones. I've never even heard that before. Oh, really?
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
Oh, my gosh. Yeah, no, I hear about this. So, you know, of course, women reach out to me about their questions. And one of the questions I get a lot is about the use of birth control in menopause and like whether or not, you know, that's recommended. And is it the same as using hormone therapy with, you know, biologically identical hormones?
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
And, you know, the answer is no, because you don't get all those great benefits. And it does, you know, tend to have this side effect profile that's really unfavorable to women.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
I think we talked about things I didn't even think we were going to talk about.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
Yeah, no, thanks for having me.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
Yes, of course. You can find me on all social platforms. And I'm at Sarah E. Hill, PhD. And that's Sarah with an H. So Sarah E. Hill, PhD. And my website is sarahehill.com. And my book, This Is Your Brain on Birth Control, is sold everywhere that books are sold. And you can also find my new book that'll be coming out in September called The Period Brain in September.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
Yeah, absolutely. So the first thing that we need to do is just orient ourselves to a naturally cycling woman. So this is somebody who's not using hormonal birth control. And let's learn a little bit or talk a little bit about what their hormones do.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
And so if you are a naturally cycling woman, meaning you're not on the pill but you're having cycles, the first day of your cycle is the day you get your period. So that's why your doctor's always asking, when was the first day of your last menstrual period? It's because that is the start of your cycle. And at that point, your levels of sex hormones are really low.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
So even though women get a hard time all the time about, you know, being hormonal because they're having that period, that is like literally the time in the cycle when our hormones are at their absolute lowest. And when our hormones are really low, that tells our brain that it needs to stimulate our ovaries to begin egg follicle maturation.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
So our brain tells our ovaries, start working on some eggs. And as those eggs are beginning to develop, that leads to the release of estrogen. And as the eggs are maturing and developing and getting ready to ovulate, estrogen levels rise, rise, rise, rise, rise.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
And so for naturally cycling women during the first two weeks of the cycle, it's characterized by this nice, beautiful rise in estrogen that corresponds to the period of time in the cycle when sex can lead to conception.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
And so it's not surprising that what we tend to see with research in estrogen is that when estrogen is high and rising, like getting close to ovulation, women experience increases in sexual desire. They feel sexier. They have more sex. They're more likely to have orgasms. They have more energy. They're more attuned to all things related to mating. So they notice men.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
They can decipher the scent differences between different types of men. They're cued into testosterone levels in men. And All of these things correspond to this big rise in estrogen that women get right prior to ovulation because this is the time in the cycle when sex can lead to conception, right?
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
And so it's like evolution by natural selection made our brain primed for mating and the ability to sort of distinguish between high and low quality mates at this time when estrogen is high and rising. So then you ovulate, and then that empty egg follicle actually becomes a temporary endocrine structure, and it starts to release a second sex hormone called progesterone.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
So the first two weeks are characterized by this high and rising levels of estrogen that corresponds to the release of the egg, women feeling gloomy. and happy and sexy and flirty and noticing men, and then all of a sudden their estrogen levels crash, and instead it's replaced by the second sex hormone, progesterone, which remains relatively elevated for the last two weeks of the cycle.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
And during this time, women are hungrier, they're sleepier, their energy levels are lower, they tend to be more emotionally a little bit all over the place. In psychology, we call it labile, right? It's like when you're kind of moving around a little bit. What's it called, labile? Labile. Isn't that a fancy word? for like being kind of all over the place.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
Yeah, a little emotionally sensitive. And so for naturally cycling women, you get this nice rise in estrogen, which is characterized by one set of states, usually related to sexual desire and attraction. And then you get the second half of the cycle, which is characterized more by emotional sensitivity and tiredness and hungry and all of that stuff.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
And so this is important to keep in mind because this is what the normal sort of state of affairs is for women. Okay. Now, what happens with the birth control pill is all of that gets shut down, okay? So you take this pill and it tells your brain, do not stimulate your ovaries, right? And so your ovaries never start maturing egg follicles. You don't release estrogen.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
You don't release an egg, which is why you don't get pregnant. You don't release progesterone. Instead, you take this daily synthetic set of hormones, which is comprised of level of the synthetic progesterone, which is called a progestin, right? And it is what fools the brain into not stimulating the ovaries. And then a relatively low level of estrogen.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
And so every day women get the same hormonal message. And that hormonal message is relatively high level of synthetic progesterone or progestin, low level of estrogen. And so this, of course, creates a state when you're getting the same message repeated every single day.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
This creates a very different state than that beautiful waxing and waning between sexual desire and feeling sexy and alive and energetic and then feeling a little bit tired and sleepier and hungrier. And instead, it makes the same daily hormonal message that is one that tends to be characterized by relatively low levels of sexual desire.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
low energy levels, more sleepiness, a greater risk of depression, and you don't get those big surges in feeling sexy or sexual desire or any of these other things that we tend to see in naturally cycling women. And instead, you get the same daily hormonal message every day. And so it creates a very different state.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
Right. We could. So here's what the research tells us. So one of the things that we know about estrogen when it's moving across the cycle for a naturally cycling woman is that when estrogen levels are high and rising, this is related to an increased preference in cues that are related to, for example, genetic compatibility.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
So women prefer the scent of genetically compatible men when estrogen levels are high, and they're not able to tell the difference between them when they're at low fertility. And so estrogen primes our brain to be more sensitive to these fine-tuned differences between men
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
And women are able to distinguish between genetically compatible and incompatible mates and are more dialed in to those that they're compatible with in a way that they're not at low fertility.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
We also know that when estrogen is high in the cycle, that women express a greater preference for facial, vocal, and behavioral masculinity in men, meaning that they prefer men with more masculinized male faces, with sort of more social dominance in their personalities.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
Yeah, when they're not on the pills. This is all women when they're at that high estrogen point in the cycle. Because your brain is primed for mating, and evolution by natural selection has shaped our brain to be sensitive to levels of estrogen. And when estrogen is high, it turns up the volume on all things related to being able to decipher between good and maybe less good mates.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
And it also increases women's attention. I mean, it just makes them more sexual. They are just like more dialed in to their sexuality, right? So that's what naturally cycling women. When women are on the pill and you're not experiencing this, so you're not getting that big surge in estrogen.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
You never experience that shift that's going to lead you to have a greater preference for, for example, masculinized male faces and voices and behaviors. You're not going to get that shift that leads you to be able to tell the difference between men who might be genetically compatible and incompatible based on their scent.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
You're also not going to be motivated to choose a partner based on sexual attraction because your sexual attraction and just sexual desire tends to be dampened. And so what we tend to see is that when women choose partners, when they're using hormonal birth control, they tend to de-emphasize the extent to which they value qualities related to sexual attraction, right?
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
They tend to prefer less masculinized male faces, and they tend to prioritize other cues that have absolutely nothing to do with sex.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
So for example, like a man's provisioning ability. So is he going to be a stable financially providing partner? Is this somebody who's going to be somebody that they see as potentially a good father? And obviously these are incredibly important things, right? Most women who are choosing long-term mates wouldn't look at that list of characteristics and say, this is a terrible decision, right?
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
It's terrible, but it's going to lead you to something a little bit different, right? And sometimes- Well, yeah.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
Yeah, more stable, more secure. Yeah, more feminine. And what's really interesting about this is that when the researchers have done studies where they looked at the divorce rate of women who chose their partners when they're on or off the pill, and women who choose their partners when they're on the pill are less likely to get divorced.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
But when they do get divorced, they're overwhelmingly the ones who initiate it, which is also really interesting. Right. Really?
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
And so it suggests that it does lead to more relationship stability in some ways, because you're sort of choosing based on your head, you know, not your heart, but that of course comes at a cost. And for some women, what happens when they go off of hormonal birth control is
Habits and Hustle
Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
and they do start cycling again, and all of a sudden they're going through these periods of estrogen surge, if all of a sudden they don't like what they see or what they smell in some cases, then it leads them to become less sexually attracted to their partner, and sometimes it can lead to relationship breakups.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
Right.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
No, I think that it's totally spot on. You know, men tend to be riskier and they tend to have a little bit more hubris.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
I mean, there's a tendency to assume that they're going to— and they have an exaggerated belief about how successful they're going to be because, in part, you know, I think it ultimately boils down to the differences in our mating psychology and then also the psychology of parenting itself. compared to provisioning.
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And I think that for men, you know, seeing the world in a way that's distorted in terms of assuming that things are going to be better than they are is going to allow them to be able to better attract mates, for example, because they're buying their own story. You know, it's like they're buying their own story about how great everything is going to be, even if it's not necessarily all that great.
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This leads people to take risks. And with big risks come big rewards. And historically, evolutionarily for men, those rewards could potentially translate into additional mating opportunities that have a direct impact on men's ability to pass down genes.
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For women, it's not so much because even if you have the best idea ever that's going to get you access to the greatest number of mates possible, the number of offspring that a woman can potentially have into the future is dependent completely on the limits of her own reproductive biology.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
So a woman with access to 10 partners can only pass down the same number of genes as a woman with access to one, whereas the same hasn't been true for men. For men who have access to 10 partners, this can lead to 10 times as many offspring as what they can have if they have access to one.
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And this creates an asymmetry in the potential benefits, fitness benefits, related to men and women from winning big. And so men's psychology is geared toward wanting to do things and having their brain tell themselves stories about how successful things are going to be, to act as a carrot that then leads them to want to pursue those types of things, even when it's highly risky.
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Yeah. Yeah. And that's actually there's an evolutionary biology. There's a principle behind that. It's called the Bateman principle. It refers to the fact that men's fitness can increase with each partner they have access to. And for women, it tops out after one. So the potential reproductive returns from having access to novel partners is greater for men than it is for women.
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And this does not mean that this is what most men do. Most men don't translate their increased status and their increased access to resources. By gaining access to an astronomical number of partners. But historically, that's something that men sometimes do, right?
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If we look at history, you'll see particularly in polygynous cultures where you have men who are able to have access to multiple partners at the same time. those men who have the most resources and have the highest status tend to have multiple wives, right? They tend to have a greater number of children, right? And we are the descendants of people who would sometimes make that decision, right?
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And so what we tend to see is that that has shaped men's mating psychology and shaped men's achievement motivation psychology in ways that helps to promote, you know, gaining access to resources in part because gaining access to resources is leads to a greater fitness return than what is available to women from doing the exact same thing.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
Right.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
Right, yeah.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
I don't think that it's something to be frightened of. I think that when we understand the tendencies that we've inherited, I actually think that it gives us greater appreciation for the kinds of decisions that we actually end up making. Why is it that, especially in cultures like the U.S. and I think about in European culture, why We're monogamously mating species.
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We form these long-term pair bonds. And so then we also have to ask ourselves, given that this is something that is possible for men to increase their reproductive output simply by gaining access to new partners, Why is it that most men don't do this? What are the benefits?
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Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
When you look at contemporary hunter-gatherer groups where humans are living in ways that are more similar to the way that our ancestors likely lived than what we do currently, what you tend to see is that those children who have an investing father around, their probability of survival is vastly higher than that of the children of women who do not have an investing partner around.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
One of the other parts of the answer is that women generally don't want to share, right? And so what you get is by men being willing to restrict their own what we call reproductive value, which just refers to the number of potential children that they can have into the future. That increases the quality of partner they're going to be able to have because most women don't want to share.
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And so if you are a woman who's of high value, meaning that you have a lot of the qualities that men desire in their partners, you can be really picky and say, no, I'm not going to share. And so if you want to mate with me, then that means that you're going to have to make some decisions.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
Because, you know, imagine that you're a man, and just based on all of the qualities that you have, let's say that your mate value is, and let's assume that mate value has a 1 to 10 scale. Okay, so there's a 1 to 10 scale, and you're a 7, right? Excuse me. All the qualities. I'm just, I'm not talking about you. I'm talking about the royal you. What have I got to do to be an 8?
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Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
The reason I'm making you, and again, I'm saying the royal you, a 7 is because, so I'm just... Bear with me here. Imagine that you're a seven, right? And you're a seven without being willing to, I know, without being willing, I know it sounds sad, but you just got to trust me here. Your value of seven is because you are not really willing to commit to a long-term relationship, right?
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So you have all these resources and you have, you know, and you've got your attractiveness and you've got your good genes and all the other things. I've got a dog. Right? Yeah, but you're not willing. Podcasts. Yeah, exactly. You've got a podcast. You've got all this, like, great stuff going for you. But you're not willing—you're not going to just, you know, commit your resources to one person.
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And you meet somebody who's just, you know, she's amazing, and she also has a podcast, and she's gorgeous, and she's a nine. You can increase your value to her just by being willing to invest. Right.
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Because women desire that, because women generally place a priority on somebody's willingness to stick around and to continue to invest resources in just her, you can increase your value from a 7 to a 9 or a 10 just by virtue of being willing to commit.
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Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
Right. Yeah. No, that's a really great question. It's really interesting because a lot of the qualities that men value in their partners, like for women, are things that are immediately available just based on physical appearance. Because we know that men have placed a priority on cues related to fertility and reproductive value.
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Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
And reproductive value is just essentially a person's reproductive shelf life. Okay.
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Uh-huh.
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Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
Is to help women understand themselves. And I think that part of that is doing the science that helps to uncover the insights that help women understand themselves, and then also being able to communicate that to women. I think that for a very long time, because of the way that medicine has been set up, the focus has been primarily on men.
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I would probably encourage you to play up your nice guy attributes and your willingness to commit and your willingness to, for example, an interest in things like having children, for example, because these are qualities that women desire in their choice of long-term partners.
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Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
And being able to have those qualities, I think, is something that can certainly give you a leg up in terms of mate attraction.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
I would say to be a nice guy.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
Nice guys do get laid. I think that nice guys are less likely to have short-term, you know, casual sex. They probably have fewer casual sexual partners than non-nice guys. But it'll certainly get you access to women.
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Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
Yeah.
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Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
No. So women's partner preferences and the types of qualities that women tend to prioritize in their choice of partners do change across the menstrual cycle. And this changes with our sex hormones. So during the early part of the menstrual cycle, both sets of sex hormones – so our estrogen and progesterone, which is our second primary sex hormone – They are low.
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And then as estrogen begins to increase, which is something that happens as eggs start to mature in the ovary, and as the eggs are maturing, they release estrogen. And as a dominant egg is chosen and begins to fully mature, so that way it will be released at ovulation,
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Usually estrogen really starts to surge right around day nine of the cycle, but it really hits its high point usually right around day 14, which is when ovulation occurs. So estrogen begins rising sharply around day nine of the cycle. And again, the first day of the menstrual cycle is the day that your period arrives. So that's day one.
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About day nine, so about a week and a half after your period started, most women will start to have a pretty dramatic increase in estrogen. Estrogen will climb, climb, climb, climb, climb. It will peak around day 14, which is when ovulation occurs. And this is when an egg, of course, is released and pregnancy is possible from sex.
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Yeah, until day 15. Day 9 to day 15 are usually, like, that's usually when we sort of bookend the fertile window. And during this time, not surprisingly, women experience a change in their sexual psychology. Right? So women become increasingly attuned to all things sex. So what we tend to see is that women's sexual desire increases right around that time in the cycle.
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Women have more sex during that time in the cycle. Women masturbate more during that time in the cycle. And women become more exacting about who it is that they desire as a romantic partner or a sex partner.
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Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
And in particular, what we tend to see is that as estrogen is increasing across the cycle, so too does women's interest in cues that historically have been related to high genetic quality or genetic compatibility within their choice of partners.
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And most of the things that we think that we know about health and functioning in the human body and brain is based on research conducted in men. And so it's taking that back and helping women actually understand themselves as themselves.
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So two of the traits that we know to be particularly pronounced in terms of women's interest near high fertility in the cycle are cues related to testosterone and masculinity and And the reason for this one is because testosterone is a known immunosuppressive, meaning that it has the effect of suppressing the immune system.
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And so people who have relatively high levels of testosterone, this is a cue that their bodies are in such good physical condition, right? Their immune system is so strong and robust that it can handle testosterone. being suppressed by testosterone. So people who have higher testosterone are believed to have greater immunocompetence relative to people with lower levels of testosterone.
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And what we tend to see is that, lo and behold, during that peak fertility time in the menstrual cycle when estrogen is high, that women exhibit a greater preference for cues related to testosterone in men. So we find, for more masculinized male faces, voices, and behavior at high fertility in the cycle compared to low fertility in the cycle.
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You test this by looking at what it is that women are looking for and you look at it over time. So just to give you an example of one of the sort of most robust studies that's been done looking at this phenomenon, researchers had a group of women bring home a bunch of little plastic tubes
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Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
in a freezer bag, and they had them spit into these little saliva collection tubes every day of the cycle across two menstrual cycles. On those same days when women were taking a saliva sample, they were also evaluating the attractiveness of male faces.
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And the thing that the women didn't know is that the researchers knew the testosterone levels of the faces of the men that they had them looking at because the researchers had men come into the research lab beforehand and took their morning testosterone levels over the course of several days to get an average morning testosterone level for these men.
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And so when they got all the saliva samples from the women, they assayed all of their saliva, and they were able to look at women's estrogen changes across the cycle, and then how it related to their facial preferences for men. And what they found was, first, that, of course, estrogen tended to increase and peak during this fertile window.
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Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
So days 9 or so to day 15, women's estrogen levels were high. And during this time, what they also found is that women's preference for testosterone levels in the faces of the men they preferred also increased. And so there was this really beautiful overlap between women's estrogen levels and their preference for testosterone going to show that estrogen loves testosterone.
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No, absolutely not. No, this is a conversation for women, for women's partners and those who love women. Right. And so I think that it's a conversation for everyone.
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Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
So women during this estrogenic phase in the cycle have a heightened preference for cues related to facial masculinity. They also have a greater preference for vocal masculinity. So women at high fertility in the cycle also like the sound of more masculinized male voices.
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They tend to like more social dominance in terms of behavior relative to what we tend to see when women are at low fertility in the cycle.
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I think that voice right there that you did, I think it's going to get you all the girls. I do. I would try that one out at the bar tonight.
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Yeah, so we know from research that not only do women desire testosterone in their partners, women choose men with higher levels of testosterone as their partners. So they've done studies looking at whether or not men are partnered over time. based on what their testosterone levels are at time one, and then looking at whether or not they're married at time two.
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And what we tend to find is that lo and behold, men with higher levels of testosterone are more likely to be married at time two, suggesting that men are probably more likely to be chosen as partners when they have higher levels of testosterone relative to when they do not.
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Isn't that fascinating? Like, the exact mechanisms, I don't know exactly what they are, but the connection between the brain and the rest of the body, I mean, it knows everything. I mean, it knows everything. And what the research finds is that, yes, when men get into a long-term relationship, for example, men's testosterone decreases a little bit, right?
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And we tend to, you know, culturally, we have this narrative about testosterone where... It's like more is better, right? And it's always seen as something that men should have a lot of. And you see there's testosterone clinics on all these different corners because, you know, this idea that men need lots of testosterone and to have low testosterone means that you have a problem.
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But it doesn't always mean that at all. And what we tend to see is that when men get into a long-term relationship, testosterone takes a little dip. And when men have children that they're caring for, testosterone takes another dip. And the reason for this is that it's not always in a man's best interest to have their foot on the gas pedal of sexual desire and attraction all the time.
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It's just not necessarily the best thing to do. If you're a man engaged in a long-term relationship or you're a man who's caring for young children, it would be better to take some of that effort. They'd be spend, you know, looking at the next door neighbor and, you know, looking at her shorts or whatever it is that you're looking at.
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And instead, using that effort to channel it toward caring for your children, caring for your partner.
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So nice guys might not get laid as much. And when you look at short-term casual sexual behavior in particular, we tend to find that the ones who are more successful with that as a mating strategy tend to be men with higher levels of testosterone. There's just no question about that.
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Nonetheless, being somebody who's willing to invest and willing to have long-term relationships with women generally is going to get you in a good position to be able to find a partner. And this is something that anybody can do to increase their value to women. And so you could be somebody who has low testosterone, right?
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You're lacking these cues to high genetic quality or even genetic compatibility, right? Like let's say that you're immune genes, which is one thing that women also pick up on at high fertility is they tend to pick up on qualities related to somebody having different immune genes than themselves.
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Men who are lacking these things completely can make themselves desirable to women simply by virtue of being the type of person who's willing to invest in a committed relationship because it is something that women value.
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Right.
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Yeah. So and you're totally right about that. I mean, the fact is attraction is idiosyncratic and finicky. Right. So all of us, when we think about the things that we find sexy and attractive, there's going to be a lot of ways that you're going to disagree with other people. Right. Like you're going to think that somebody like is so sexy to you.
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And other people might say, yeah, you know, she's all right, but it doesn't really do it for them. And there is an element to our attraction that is very person specific and idiosyncratic, right? And might there be some evolutionary roots behind all of that? Maybe, right? So it could be, for example,
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That the kinds of qualities that you find, you know, just really attractive in another person that make you feel so attracted to them might be cues that they are a really compatible mate for you. And maybe that's why you have a very sort of you-specific response to that person. But there are also dimensions that are shared, right?
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So we know, for example, that men tend to place a greater emphasis relative to women on cues related to physical attractiveness. And that physical attractiveness tends to be related to things that have historically been related to fertility.
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Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
So, for example, having an hourglass body shape, we know that this is something that's related to a woman's level of sex hormones and that women with higher levels of estrogen, for example, are more likely to put on fat around their butt and their thighs and less likely to put on fat around their waist relative to women with higher or lower levels of estrogen as estrogen levels decline when women age.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
their bodies become more straight up and down than they do hourglass. And this has to do with changes in estrogen. And so we know that that's something that men generally desire to a greater extent than women, right? We also know that men tend to place a greater emphasis on cues related to youthfulness, right?
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
So the cues that are related to maturity in a face, that's something that women tend to have a heightened preference for. So if somebody has
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
sort of an older you know an older face um they they tend to be seen as more attractive like so like 50 year old george clooney seems more attractive most women think that that looks more attractive than you know 25 year old um george clooney and and we see that because our brains have inherited this tendency to find cues related to wisdom and status
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
and resource acquisition, all of which come with greater age, women have inherited that preference for those kinds of qualities because that would have given them a mating-related advantage relative to preferring a more youthful face. Conversely, for men, they would have been penalized. if they had a preference for maturity in the face of a potential partner.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
Because if you like women who have signs of maturity and wisdom and resource acquisition ability, you'd probably choose somebody who's approaching menopause, right? And that's not going to lead to any gene transmission at all, right? And so we tend to see that men have a heightened preference for cues related to youthfulness in faces.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
And so even though, yes, there are differences between individuals and there is some idiosyncrasy that tends to characterize human mate choice, there are a lot of things that we can actually make some pretty strong predictions about too. So there are some overall themes that tend to characterize men's and women's partner preferences.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
I mean, for me, it's really fascinating to consider the way that hormones influence who we are. And then to think about something like the birth control pill, which almost all women are on at some point in their life. And understanding that this actually, by changing women's hormones, has the impact of kind of fundamentally changing some really important things about themselves, right?
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
I do know that research finds that men don't place as much of a priority on that compared to women. But I don't know that they penalize them exactly, right? If you had somebody, if you show a man a photograph of a woman who's dressed like a CEO and she's gorgeous, and you show a man a picture of a woman who's dressed like a Burger King service person, right? And she's drop-dead gorgeous.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
Men are going to find her similarly attractive in both conditions. It doesn't matter. The woman could be doing – it doesn't matter what the woman is doing. And there's been research that shows this. They'll show men and women photographs of people in different types of outfits. And the men's ratings of how attractive the women are has just everything to do with how attractive the women are.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
For women rating men – It all depends on what they're wearing, right? Do they show cues to resource access? Do they not show cues to resource access? And women tend to modulate how physically attractive they find men based on whether or not they have these cues related to provisioning ability.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
So I don't know if there was a really attractive, and there are a lot of really attractive, females in positions of power.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
Men will find them just as attractive as they do somebody who's not in a position of power, although they may be, you know, potentially less likely to choose them as a long-term mate, you know, if there's issues related to power dynamics and that sort of thing that they don't want to mess with.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
I mean, the competition when you have cases where there's an asymmetrical sex ratio and like we do on college campuses, I mean, women are very competitive amongst one another for access to the men that are available.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
And oftentimes the way that this, like the form that this tends to take is that women become increasingly likely to be willing to do whatever men want of them in order to be chosen as a mate. And what we've tended to see on college campuses is because men are more oriented towards
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
toward casual sex and non-committed relationships than women are, what we tend to see is that short-term hookups and casual sex tend to be very common on college campuses. And in part, this is the result of the fact that women are competing for access to mates.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
And one of the ways that they can compete for access to mates is to be willing to do whatever it is that men want in terms of providing the structure of their relationship.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
And if men are only looking for casual sex, even though women tend to be more oriented toward long-term relationships, they're going to be more inclined to just give in to whatever it is that the men desire as a means to be able to get a partner.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
Oh, women are more competitive with beautiful women. I mean, there's just no question about that. And the reason for this is that given that this is something that men desire in their partners, this is the primary dimension by which women compete for access to partners, right? And so this is the big one. Given men place a really—
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
pretty strong priority on physical attractiveness in their choice of partners. And in fact, one of the biggest predictors of a woman's upward social mobility in the U.S. is how physically attractive a woman is. And in fact, that's a bigger predictor of a woman's upward mobility than her education level or even her socioeconomic status of origin.
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Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
I mean, this is really huge. And this has consequences for everything ranging from who women are attracted to and might be choosing as partners to women's mental health, right? And it could end up having consequences on the shape of the world around us. We already know that... that birth control has had an impact on women's ability to do things like go to school and get advanced degrees.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
I mean the ability to transcend the social class in which you were born. So if you're somebody who is working class or middle class or upper class, your ability to transcend those ranks of socioeconomic status is more strongly predicted by physical attractiveness than a woman's education level. And that's like a tough thing to have to – that's a tough nut to crack, tough pill to swallow.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
Yes. And one of the ways that women compete against one another is by derogating their competitors, right? And derogating their competitors just meaning saying mean things about them or saying mean things to them. And a lot of times those mean things that they have to say have to do with a woman's attractiveness, right? They'll try to downplay how attractive she is to other people.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
by saying things like, you know, oh, she's had a lot of work done, right? That's the thing that you'll hear women say about each other or to men about other women. And this is something that's done to try to manipulate other people's perceptions of that woman's value.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
But because attractiveness plays such an important role in terms of a woman's ability to successfully attract a romantic partner, this is a dimension in which women are fiercely competitive. even when they don't want to say that they are and want to pretend that they're not, right?
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
I think that the Barbie movie was, you know, sort of got at some of these kinds of issues and just this idea that women want to pretend like none of this stuff matters, right? And that it's not that important and that we don't value this stuff. But nonetheless, this is still a very important domain of competition for women. Always has been. I think it probably always will be.
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Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
Yeah, so this was – I have one of my former – this is digging deep. So one of my former students was really into – and so he's a gay man. And just to set the stage for all of this, he became really interested in the – friendship that tends to form between gay men and straight women, which is actually, you know, there's a, this is something that happens everywhere.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
So having like the gay man and the straight woman friendship is something that's not just, you know, something that we see in Europe and the U S it is sort of cross-culturally ubiquitous. And he was trying to understand this relationship. And one of the things that he noted in his research is that, um, The people who tend to form friendships most frequently with gay men are beautiful women.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
It's like attractive women who are more competitive and potentially may perceive more competition on the part of other women. And they form these friendships because... Gay men can provide them with really important information that's relevant on the mating market that is not colored by one intersexual competition, right? So if you say to these pants, make me look fat, right?
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
And we see this played out when we look at college classrooms that are becoming increasingly female. And one of the big reasons for this is the birth control pill. It's like by allowing women to know with almost perfect certainty that they're not going to get pregnant,
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
Your gay man friend isn't going to tell you, no, they look great, even though they make you look terrible because they're trying to send you out and look terrible, right? So there's no thread of competition in that relationship. And there's also not the fear that this person's just trying to get you in bed. And so there's this really nice trust that women can have with gay men.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
Yes.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
I chose to write this book because I was on hormonal birth control for more than a decade of my life. And I'm a psychologist who studies women and women's brains. And I had absolutely no idea that any of the things that the birth control pill does to the brain were happening to me. And so I went off of hormonal birth control after being on it for more than a decade straight.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
And when I went off it, I felt like I woke up. It was like I had this moment. It was about three months after I discontinued it where all of a sudden I realized that over the last three months, like I had been feeling things more deeply. I'd been interested in sex in a way that I hadn't been in a long time. I was exercising and going to the gym again.
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Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
I was downloading new music onto my what was then an iPod for the first time. I know. It's like an archaic iPhone, people. I was like downloading new music onto my phone and my iPod. I was cooking. It was like I was just interested in pleasure. I had more energy. I was feeling things more deeply. And I thought, what is this? And I was on it, you know, during the time that I was on birth control.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
I never had any issues with it. Like I wasn't one of those people who had negative mood related side effects. And I didn't know that I was experiencing any side effects at all. And it was only after I went off of it and started to realize how much more alive I felt. that I started to dig into the research behind the way that hormonal birth control changes women.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
And it was then that I learned that people had been studying this, in some cases for 30 years, on the way that hormonal birth control changes the way that women think, feel, and experience the world. And it was then that I knew that I had to share this information with other women because here I was as somebody who's on the pill, studies women, studies women's brains.
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Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
This has allowed women to make plans, which means that they can dream bigger and achieve more than most of us would have ever dreamed possible like 50 or 100 years ago, right? And so the pill changes everything, right? By changing women, we change the world. This has implications for women. This has implications for their partners. And this has implications for society around us.
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Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
I'd even published papers on the effects of women's changing hormones over the cycle and the way that they influence women. And it never even occurred to me that my birth control was changing me. And I knew that if I didn't know that the birth control pill was changing me, that nobody else knew it either.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
And so that led me to dig into the science behind hormones, hormonal birth control, and how that changes women. And I put together that book to tell everybody the things that I learned.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
It can seem like a dangerous subject matter to take on, and for good reason. Hormonal birth control and having a reliable way to prevent pregnancy has been by far the biggest game changer that women have ever experienced in history. There's been nothing that has been more instrumental to women's ability to be able to achieve political and economic independence for men than the birth control pill.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
And because of this, saying anything that is critical of the birth control pill can be seen very dangerous, right? Because it's like, oh no, don't say that too loudly or else they're going to take our birth control away. Or oh no, don't say that too loudly, like what else are we going to do?
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
But this book was really important to me to be able to present to women all of the different ways that hormones influence us And the surprising ways that hormonal birth control can change who we are and the way that we experience the world and then give that information to women.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
So that way, when they're making decisions about whether to be on or off of hormonal birth control, they have all the information about the tradeoffs that they're making. And this will allow them then to make decisions about whether or not to be on it. depending on what's going on in their own lives.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
Because everything that I've learned about the way that the birth control pill changes women means that the answer that you come to when you're asking yourself the question, do I go on this or do I not go on this, is going to be very woman-specific, right? For some women, the decision is still going to be, yes, I'm willing to make these trade-offs.
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Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
There's been nothing more instrumental to women's ability to be able to achieve independence than the birth control pill. And so we're very cavalier in just giving it to people. Oh, well, you should go on it for this and you should go on it for that. But it has huge costs.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
And for other women, the answer is going to be no, I am not willing to make these trade-offs. And whether or not we make those sort of where we land on that is going to differ depending on where we are in our life and so on and so forth.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
And so it was really important to me to present this information as a way to really empower women to be able to make informed decisions about who they want to be, right, and how they want to regulate their fertility.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
To me, the one thing, and then we can kind of dive down into what this all means, but the thing that... What have really made a difference to me is that your hormones make you who you are. And when you change your hormones, you change who you are, right? So the birth control pill is going to change you. It changes the version of yourself that your brain creates.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
And so if you're going to be going on this, you need to understand what that does. So this, of course, begs the question, what does it do? And there are several things that the birth control pill does. And there's at least five different things that the birth control does to change who we are. It changes our sexual desire and who we're attracted to. It changes our emotional states.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
It can affect our moods. It can affect our ability to regulate and to manage stress. It influences sexual desire and sexual function. It influences our ability to be able to put on muscle mass and affects our nutrition and fitness goals. It affects all of us.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
And not knowing all of that and not knowing the potential risks of having side effects related to mental health and libido, all the way to everything, to who a person is attracted to, I wish I would have known that. That probably would have impacted, again, decisions that I would have made about staying on it when I didn't need to.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
Because there's no reason to change who you are if you don't need the contraceptive benefits.
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Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
Well, so mechanistically, the way that this happens has everything to do with the hormonal changes that are initiated by the birth control pill. And so just to talk about the mechanics of this first and then talking about the downstream effects of it next, mechanically, what goes on when you take hormonal birth control is you are suppressing ovulation.
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Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
And the way that birth control does this is it does this by giving you a combination of hormones or a single hormone that tells your brain not to stimulate the ovaries and not to ovulate. And it does this by way of a synthetic progesterone called a progestin.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
And progestins, which are in all forms of hormonal birth control, when they get picked up in the hypothalamus in the brain, that sends a signal that the brain should not stimulate the ovaries and should not lead to egg maturation and egg development. And when this happens, when the brain is not stimulating the ovaries, this means the body is not producing estrogen, right?
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
So estrogen levels are kept really low. And instead, you get this daily dose of a synthetic progesterone or progestin that is supplanting that, right? Many forms of hormonal birth control in addition to having that synthetic progesterone or progestin that turns off the brain's communication with the ovaries. It also has a relatively low level of estrogen that is also added.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
So combination hormonal birth control pills contain progestin and a little bit of estrogen. But the estrogen levels are kept really low. And the progesterone levels or the progestin levels are the dominant hormone. And you get that same hormonal message every day.
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Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
When you do that, what happens when you flatline a woman's own production of hormones and replace them with a daily dose of synthetic progesterone, this does a few things to women's sexual psychology. The first thing that it does is it turns off that estrogen surge that you get right prior to ovulation that's related to a heightened preference for sex and
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
You know, like that estrogen surge is related to an increased preference for testosterone markers in mates, right? It's related to women's interest in sex. It's related to sexual function. All of those things that increase right prior to ovulation that help to promote reproduction, sexual reproduction, all of those things are turned off on women on hormonal birth control.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
Because instead, they're getting the same daily message in which progestin is the dominant hormonal message and estrogen levels are really low. So that's the first thing that happens.
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Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
Yes, I mean, they still will have sex and they still want sex, but many women report experiencing a real decrease in their libido when they're on hormonal birth control. That's a very common response. And the reason for this is twofold. One, one of the things that's a big factor in promoting women's sexual desire and libido is is estrogen.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
And as estrogen is rising in the cycle, because when estrogen is rising, this is a time in the cycle when sex can lead to conception, this is something that's known to fuel the female sexual response. So women's sexual response and their sexual desire all increases with estrogen levels across the cycle.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
So when you take hormonal birth control and that's flatlined, which is what it does, this means that sexual desire is kept more constant across the cycle. So you do tend to find that women who are using hormonal birth control tend to have fewer peaks and valleys in sexual desire than naturally cycling women do, but on the whole it tends to be lower.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
The other thing that happens on hormonal birth control that can lead to a decrease in libido is that all of those synthetic hormones that are in hormonal birth control they tend to lead to an increase in what's known as sex hormone binding globulin, which is a real mouthful. But what it does is that this is something that's released by the liver and it binds up free testosterone, right?
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Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
So it binds up testosterone and makes it inactive in the body. And testosterone, even though we tend to think of it as like a guy thing and like this is a male hormone, it's actually really important in terms of promoting women's sexual desire. And women who are on hormonal birth control have levels of free testosterone that are about 60% lower than that of their naturally cycling peers.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
And so what this means, again, is that you have another, you know, blow to women's sexual desire when they're on hormonal birth control. Those low levels of estrogen and then really low levels of free testosterone, those two things work together to suppress... sexual desire in women.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
And it can also change attraction because as we noted, when women are approaching ovulation, their estrogen levels increase. And this is something that research finds to be related to women's interest in testosterone markers in men. Researchers more recently said, If that's true, you know, what happens when you put women on hormonal birth control? And estrogen levels are kept really low.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
And what they find is that lo and behold, women who are using hormonal birth control do seem to have a dampened preference for cues related to masculinity and testosterone in partners relative to what's observed in naturally cycling women.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
A guy who has really masculinized features. So for example, if you see a face that has high levels of testosterone, generally men will have like more deep set eyes. They tend to have a wider jaw. And in the bodies, they tend to have broader shoulders and a more narrow waist. Men with more deep voices, men who have behavioral cues to social dominance, that's also something related to testosterone.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
And what the research finds is that women who are using hormonal birth control do prefer a less masculinized male face relative to what is observed in naturally cycling women.
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Yeah, no, there's actually, there is an issue there. And in fact, there have been people, including my former mentor, David Buss, who have talked about this idea that there's a mating crisis going on.
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Right, yeah, no, and that's a real important question. I mean, it's very provocative because what does that mean? And there have been some research studies that have looked at that exact question. And one of the best studies that's looked at this question is one that was a longitudinal study of married couples.
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They followed women who were using hormonal birth control at the time that they met their partner, and then they just followed them over time to see what would happen when women discontinued the pill. What happened when they discontinued was that there were real significant changes in how attracted women were to their partner, depending on whether they chose them using hormonal birth control.
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But what was interesting about it is whether the women became more or less attracted to their partner depends on how attractive their partner was. And so what the researchers found is that women who were partnered to attractive men
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When they went off hormonal birth control, they were more attracted to their partner and were more sexually attracted to their partner and more sexually satisfied within their relationship relative to where they were beforehand. But for women who were partnered with less attractive partners, they had the opposite effect.
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So when they went off hormonal birth control, they became less attracted to their partners and reported being less sexually satisfied with their partners than where they were beforehand.
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And so this suggests that, yes, it is a very real possibility that if you have a partner who chose you when you're using hormonal birth control, that this can change attraction within the context of the relationship. But whether that's good or bad probably depends on a bunch of other dimensions that you need to take into effect, including partner's attractiveness.
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Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
Run for the hills. No, I mean, honestly, it's one of these things where you can really quickly become alarmed with this, right? The good news is this, and that is most women who choose their partners when they're on hormonal birth control go off of hormonal birth control, and then there's really not a huge shakeup in their relationship, right?
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And that women who are becoming increasingly college educated and, you know, getting access to resources of their own, that they do continue to exhibit an increased preference for partners with resources online. women are what we call hypergamous, right? Which means that we like to mate up in terms of achievement and educational attainment.
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And the reason for this is the way that hormones influence us is they kind of nudge us a little bit one way or the other, right? They kind of nudge us toward preferring this type of mate or that type of mate. It's generally not these big sweeping changes where all of a sudden it's like the wool comes off your eyes and you're like, what in the world was I thinking? These are little nudges.
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It's just that for some people who are teetering on the edge of not necessarily being attracted to their partner, going off hormonal birth control can tilt them out of attraction. The same is true for – I've talked to people who've had the experience.
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of feeling like they were lesbian and all of a sudden they feel like they're bisexual or women who are bisexual and then they go off of the pill and all of a sudden they realize that they're not interested in women anymore.
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I mean, it's like sexual orientation, attraction of all sorts, whether it's, you know, who you're attracted to in terms of the sex you're attracted to or who you're attracted to in terms of the specific partners that you're attracted to. All of those things are influenced by sex hormones.
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And, you know, when sex hormones kind of nudge you this way or the other way, depending on where you fall in that distribution of, you know, sort of where you are in terms of sexual orientation or am I attracted to this mate or that mate, those people who are on the tails can get nudged into a place that puts them into the uncomfortable situation where they realize that they're no longer attracted to the person they chose on the pill.
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So there is evidence that suggests that women are more attractive to men when they're naturally cycling relative to when they're on hormonal birth control. And so chances are if you have a partner that you are attracted to when she's on hormonal birth control, when she goes off of it, it's actually going to lead to an increase in attraction.
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So there's a ton of research that finds that men find women sexiest. They think that they smell better. They think that they look more attractive. Men will tip women more at strip clubs when the women are at high fertility across the cycle relative to low fertility across the cycle, meaning that men are cued into estrogen levels. How?
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scent, you know, visual appearance, and even just the way that women act and move. So they've done studies where they have men looking at women moving, just seeing their silhouettes move like behind a sheet, right? So they'll see women walking or dancing, and they have them walking or dancing at high or low fertility across the cycle.
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And men find the women more attractive when they just see their outlines moving and at high fertility compared to low fertility. So men's brains are wired to pick up on estrogen cues. And this makes perfect sense when we consider the evolutionary process that designed us, right? Because over the course of evolutionary history, men who were really dialed into women's estrogen levels
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they would have passed down more genes than men who didn't really pay attention to those cues because estrogen across the lifespan is linked with fertility and estrogen across the cycle is linked with fertility. It's linked with fertility no matter which way you look at it. And so men who are really cued into estrogen levels, they would have done really well.
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And when you have a populace like we do in the US of women who are now on average more educated than men, it makes it more difficult to find a suitable partner. If you're a woman with an advanced degree and you want somebody who has at least as much education for you, that's gonna lead to a more narrow pool of mates.
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And so if you are a man, your partner chose you when she was using hormonal birth control and now all of a sudden she starts cycling again, My guess is that most men will experience an increase in attraction to their partner, particularly at high fertility in the cycle, because there's so much research that suggests that this is exactly what should go on.
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That's a fascinating question, and it's one I'm super interested in. So I actually was just – I just had this conversation not that long ago with my graduate students in my lab. There is research that suggests that men's testosterone levels increase in response to the scent of fertile women, right?
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So when women are at high fertility, if men sniff T-shirts that they were wearing, or in one study they actually had men sniffing the air that was being – piped through a nebulizer that had a woman's panty liner in it that was either worn at high or low fertility, so smelling women's vaginal secretions.
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Both of those things have been shown in research to be related to an increase in testosterone levels in men. So it increases men's testosterone levels to be around these cues to high fertility. So what happens then when men are spending their time or are partnered with somebody who's on hormonal birth control, right?
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So given that estrogen levels can increase testosterone, does a lack of estrogen presence lead to lower levels of testosterone on average? And this is a question that we do not have a research answer to, but it's one that's incredibly fascinating because here we are, 2024, almost 2025, and we have a testosterone crisis on our hands.
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Men's testosterone levels are much lower than what they used to be even 50 years ago. And it's possible that one contributor to this is the fact that so many women are using hormonal birth control And when you have, on average, lower levels of estrogen in the population, might this then also predict lower levels of testosterone in men? And the answer to that is we don't know.
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Another possibility with that, by the way, and one that I think is so interesting, is we talked about kids. And we talked about the fact that men's testosterone levels will decrease when men are in long-term relationships. And then they'll decrease a little bit more when men have children that they're caring for.
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And another possibility for men's lowered levels of testosterone, I mean, in addition to all the, you know, trash that's in the water and, you know, all the chemicals that we're exposed to, is the fact that men are now responsible for more caregiving, you know, than they ever have been in history, right?
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With many women, you know, being in the workforce, men are having to also do more in the home themselves. than they ever did before.
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And so it's also possible that some of the differences that we see in testosterone levels that have changed over time may be the result of men, their bodies actually decreasing testosterone production in response to their changing roles in the home, which is also sort of a fascinating possibility.
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And in fact, what we see is that there are an increasingly large number of women who are just choosing not to get married and are choosing to stay single. And in fact, there's a wonderful book called All the Single Ladies that is about this very phenomenon. And women are increasingly choosing to opt out of long-term mating if they're not able to find the relationship that they want.
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Gosh, you know, I have thought about that. I don't – I can't spend – you know, it's like if you talk about something like that, it almost sounds like you can take the next step and say that it's everybody's, you know, obligation to reproduce and that women need to be having more babies. And so I hasten, like – If I say yes, I do think about that.
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I hasten to add that that is not women's responsibility to make sure that they're having babies. But I do wonder what's going to happen because people are not reproducing the way that they used to. And there's a lot of people now who are choosing not to have children at all. And so what is that going to do? I have no idea, but I don't think it's necessarily going to be good.
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I do.
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How old is he? He's 15.
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Right.
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Yeah, yeah, no, yes. I think there's room for masculinity. And honestly, sex demands it. I mean, so I teach a class called Evolution, Sex, and the Brain. And one of the things that we talk about is just how problematic, you know, sex has become because there's so much of a dance with like seduction. You know, it's like everybody knows when sort of, you know, masculinity has gone too far.
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It's like you know it when you see it. When somebody is seductive, You know, like touching a woman when she's asking not to be or is harassing somebody. It's like we all know what that looks like. But then there's also, you know, seduction requires, like, I mean, the whole idea of seduction is this idea that men... can lead women into sexuality.
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And so trying to have a conversation with my son about, you know, it's like everything has to, you know, he has to make sure that if he's interacting with girls that there is consent and that it's consensual, any sort of a physical touch that goes on. But at the same time, You know, like I would never at the – I can't imagine thinking, you know, is it okay if I touch your breast?
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And when I started to dig into the research, I found there's at least five different things the birth control pill does to change who we are. And these risk factors, they're swept under the rug by their doctors who are prescribing it. First, the changes are emotional states with increased risk for developing anxiety and depression. And then it influences our ability to put on muscle mass.
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You know, like I can't imagine that. I can't imagine living in that world. I mean, it's a really tricky world to be in. Being a male is hard. I mean, that's like a hard line to toe because on the one hand, you don't want to do something that's obviously going to be detrimental or hurtful to a woman or violate her in some way. But on the other hand,
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You know, you can go too far with the permissions in a way that can be really bad for sex. And because attraction and sexual desire is all about sort of the push and the pull of the masculine and the feminine.
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Right. We know that women are dating upwards because that's what women express a preference for, and it's also who women tend to marry. So when you look at, for example, data looking at the education levels of people who get married and the age of people when they get married, women generally will marry somebody who's older. And generally earns more money than they do themselves.
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Right, yeah, that's probably true.
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Right, well, yeah. I mean, if a woman is looking for sex, it's not hard to find. Like any woman who is listening to this right now, if she decided to go and have sex tonight, she'd probably be able to find a taker.
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Oh, yes. No, that's a wonderful study. So that's a classic social psychology study that was done at the University of Florida a number of years ago. What the researchers did is they had a male and female model, so a really attractive person, approach strangers on campus. And they would introduce themselves.
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They would just say, hello, I've been noticing you around campus and find you very attractive. And after they made this introduction, they would then follow this with one of three requests. It would either be, would you like to go on a date with me? Would you like to go back to my apartment with me? Or would you like to go and have sex with me?
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And then they simply made note of what the person said. Did they say yes or did they say no? And what they found was that for both men and women, 50% agreed to the date. So I've been noticing you around campus, I find you very attractive, would you go on a date with me? 50% of men, 50% of women said yes. After that, the sexes diverged in pretty marked ways.
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What they found is that very few women, almost zero women, said yes to go back to the apartment with the person. And a full 0% of women said that they would go back and have sex with the person. This isn't what they found for men, right? For men, what they found was that men were more likely to agree to go back to somebody's apartment with them than they were to the date.
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And men were most likely to agree to just have sex. Almost 80% of men agreed, yeah, I would love to go and have sex with you. And the men who said no... usually were in a relationship, right, or noted that like their parents were in town and they wouldn't be able to go back to their apartment.
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And so this goes to show some real differences when it comes to men's and women's sort of tendency towards sexual opportunism. And the fact is, you know, historically, women have had huge costs related to sexual behavior just simply because women to reproduce have a minimum investment of nine months' time in pregnancy and then subsequent time spent breastfeeding.
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And so for women who were sexually opportunistic, in other words, willing to consent to sex without strings or investment, women would have been penalized for that. Because throughout most of our evolutionary history, that could result in a pregnancy, and it could result in a pregnancy for which you have no one to help co-invest.
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And, you know, this is something that isn't specific to the U.S. This is something that we tend to find cross-culturally that women tend to express a preference for this. And, yes, it has become more common for women to be open to partnering with people who earn less money than themselves, for example. or have less education than themselves than what it used to be.
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For men, on the other hand, being willing to consent to sex without commitment, that's an evolutionary win, right? That's a potential gene transmission opportunity because short-term sex, of course, can lead to pregnancy. And if there is no expectation of further investment, it's very low cost, right?
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So the costs and benefits related to short-term casual sex are vastly different depending on whether or not you have a male or female body.
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Right. Then I would say go to the gym and be a nice guy. Well, I mean, honestly, you know, be a nice guy. Well, no, but nice guys can form relationships, right? If he's looking for a girlfriend, I think one of the ways that you can get a girlfriend is by being willing to be willing to invest in a woman.
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Like, if you're a jerk, you know, you're going to have a harder time even if you're an attractive jerk. If you were, like, an attractive nice guy, you'd probably do better as long as you're not too nice, right? Because that might give off, like, low testosterone cues. I'm not really sure.
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But that's like despite the fact that they're bad boys. I mean, so it depends on how we're defining bad boys.
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Yeah, yeah. So a lot of those are cues related to testosterone, right? So having, you know, being risk tolerant. So being willing to do things that are really risky and, you know, and being a little bit arrogant because you know you're always going to succeed. seed. I mean, those are cues related to status and related to sometimes testosterone levels, right?
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And so we know that women like both of these things and their partners. And so because of that, those men will tend to do pretty well on the mating market. For men who, you know, don't have those qualities, so men who are not, you know,
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risk seeking and are not arrogant um that's not necessarily going to not do them favors unless that also is you know an indicator that they have other qualities that aren't working for them you can have somebody who's very successful right and has high testosterone who's not a jerk right and that guy will do pretty well why would you tell your son to go to the gym
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I would tell my son to go to the gym because it's like one way that you can naturally increase your testosterone levels is by building muscle. And also another thing that that does is that muscle mass is related to reductions in anxiety. And the reason for this is because if you're a big dude, it means that you're going to be able to protect yourself.
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And so your brain makes the adjustment and it makes you more confident and less anxious when you have some muscle mass. And so I would say go and do those things and then also doing the things that you can to get access to resources and status, right?
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So study and work hard because ultimately people who do that tend to do well and people who do well financially and do well in terms of, you know, ascending the status hierarchy, they tend to also do well in the mating market if they're men.
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I sure do.
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Right. Yeah. No. So for my daughter, then I would say, then you just need, you need to wait. Right. You are probably, you are probably in the wrong, you are probably in the wrong mating pool, would be my, would be my advice to her. Why? My advice—well, because—so a few things.
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But it's still not what it would be if women were actually more willing to make that trade-off. What we see is that instead of choosing to marry down, what many women are choosing to do is simply not get married at all.
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So many of the things that women sort of possess that men desire in their choice of partners are things that women don't have that much control over, right? It's like a woman's, like, youth and reproductive value and these things related to fertility.
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Yeah, I mean, researchers found when women who were partnered to attractive men went off hormonal birth control, they were more attracted to their partner. But for women who were partnered with less attractive partners, they became less attracted to their partners and reported being less sexually satisfied.
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I mean, I guess I might tell her to hit the gym. It would probably make her feel better. But I don't think that I would tell her, like, you know, you should probably go and get your hair done and, you know, I'm trying to think. Oh, well, go off the birth control pill so that if she was on the birth control pill, which she is not.
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But I'm just thinking in an abstract way like what I would tell her, like things that women can do to increase their attractiveness to men. I mean it's like, okay, go be more beautiful. Like what are you going to say? And so like I said, my real advice if my daughter said this, I would say you like probably need a different pool of mates.
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If she was 35, hmm, good question. So if she was 35, what would I recommend? Like, is this, like, what I would actually recommend to my daughter? Or are you trying to get at, like, what should a woman do? Because here's—I have two different answers, right? So if a woman is just, like, looking for—if you want me to write—
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
a pamphlet called 35-Year-Old Woman, Here are the Things You Need to Do to Find a Partner. I mean, it would have a whole list of unsavory, like, things that, you know, I mean, it would be like, consider Botox. Men are attracted to women who have features related to youth and fertility. consider having a Brazilian butt lift because men are also interested in this.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
Why don't you also consider, you know, spending time on your hair and makeup? But I don't think I would write that book. You know, that's not the advice that I would give.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
Right.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
Yes and no. So women who are seen as more confident, like that is seen as more attractive, for example, like somebody who has some self-assurance of themselves instead of, you know, sort of like kicking their toe in the ground. Generally, people find that attractive, both men and women. But the degree to which that is prioritized is hugely different between the sexes.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
I think yes and yes, right? I think that they're making that choice because there aren't good options. So I think that many women feel the constraint of the fact that there's not as many partners available that have the qualities that they're looking for in a long-term partner.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
And if you are a woman and you sort of go out and exude those cues related to like social dominance, for example, and social status, that's not going to necessarily get you a mate. And in some cases, it might actually detract from your attractiveness as a mate because people seem to view women who are in positions of power more negatively than how they perceive men.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
And women who are in positions of power, they're sort of a... There's definitely a double standard there. And this is something that has been fairly well studied where they find that there's nobody more polarizing in the world than powerful women. So, for example, somebody like Kamala Harris who is running for president, people seem to either really love her or really hate her.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
So there's this polarization that happens with powerful women. This happens for anybody who's run for any political office that is a female. You get these sorts of issues. And women who are confident and direct and assertive are seen as being cold and, you know, like we call girls bossy. When they have these kinds of qualities, whereas if it's a boy or men, it's like leadership potential.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
And so there is a double standard in how we tend to perceive this. And it's not – over the course of evolutionary history, women did well when they chose high-status men. That would have given them preferential access to resources for themselves and their children. We don't get that same kind of a pattern for men choosing women, right? Men who chose women who were, you know, high in status and –
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
you know, socially dominant, that doesn't necessarily translate into anything that's going to correspond to increased reproductive success.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
Yeah, no, there absolutely is. And so when I say this, you know, daddy issues just simply referring to the fact that women whose fathers are not invested in them or absent during childhood, that these women will tend to have more unrestricted or precocious sexual development and sexual behavior problems. relative to what we see in women who grow up with investing dads.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
And as a result of that, they're just making the choice when it's between that, like, you know, just staying single and not partnering with somebody that they desire, or partnering with somebody who has fewer resources than they do or less education than they do themselves. They're choosing the former.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
So just to give you an example of some research that's been done looking at this, research finds that women who grow up in a household without an investing dad, so dad is either gone or dad is there, but, you know, in name only. So he's not really investing in the family. Those women go into puberty significantly earlier. Than do girls who grow up in two-parent homes with investing fathers.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
They also tend to have an earlier age at which they begin having sex relative to women who have two dads in the home. And they tend to have a greater number of sexual partners sort of over time relative to girls who grow up with two parents in the home.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
That's a really great question. And there is some evidence that suggests that there may be a decrease in ovarian reserve that might go on, but there hasn't been anything linking that to menopause just yet.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
I have not seen any research that has looked at that. I've seen some research looking at whether women prefer partners who are kind of similar to their dads.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
And they do seem to, which is interesting in its own right. But I do not know anything about men and their preferences and whether or not their sons then tend to emulate those preferences. That's an interesting question.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
Well, the research finds that when women are on hormonal birth control, that they have a blunted cortisol response to stress. And cortisol is a stress hormone, right? And we all know it as this bad guy, right? This idea like, oh no, high cortisol. And that's seen as something that's bad because when you experience high levels of cortisol for a long period of time, it actually is bad, right?
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
So chronic stress causes all kinds of problems, right? It makes you put on visceral fat. So it makes you put on belly fat. It dumps fat and blood into your bloodstream in ways that can raise your triglycerides and put you at a greater risk for heart and cardiovascular problems. It's not good. But having dynamic spikes in cortisol in response to stressful events is actually incredibly adaptive.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
They're instead choosing to be single instead of having to partner with somebody who doesn't, you know, sort of meet what their exacting standards are.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
And it's something that allows us to be able to regulate cortisol. manage and cope with stress. There's a reason we experience cortisol in response to stress. And what research finds is that for women who are using hormonal birth control, that you get a blunted or absent cortisol response to stress. And this is the sort of thing that we tend to see in people who've experienced PTSD
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
or trauma because people who've experienced PTSD and trauma, their stress responses get shut down by their bodies because they've experienced so much stress that their body is like no more cortisol release for you because cortisol in the long term is not good, right? It is detrimental to the body.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
And so what research finds is that people with PTSD and people who've had trauma, they have a blunted or absent cortisol response to stress because their body just doesn't allow them to release it anymore because it's chronically being released. And we see the same thing in women who are using hormonal birth control. So they experience a blunted or absent cortisol response to stress.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
And this is something that can lead to dysregulated responses in everything ranging from their immune system, which is regulated in part by cortisol because that helps to regulate the inflammatory response that we have both to stress and also injury. And it can lead to things like our ability to regulate our emotional responses because we know that cortisol has something to do with that as well.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
And we know from so much research now that women who are on hormonal birth control, that they have dysregulations in emotional responses oftentimes with these women being at an increased risk for developing things like anxiety and depression, right? And this may, in part, have something to do with the differences that we have in cortisol.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
Yeah, you know, that's a good—so sex is down. Like, sex is trending downward. What we tend to see is that people are having a lot less sex than they used to. They're having sex later. They're having less—fewer people are not virgins. That's a double negative. More people are virgins when they're graduating high school and college than there were in the past. This is becoming increasingly common.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
Yeah, it's pretty stark. I mean, there are some real risk factors that come up when women are using hormonal birth control. And these are things that oftentimes are swept under the rug by their doctors who are prescribing it. The fact is, especially for teenage girls, going on hormonal birth control can significantly increase your risk of developing a or being successful at suicide.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
And this is something that's absolutely necessary, especially for mothers of young girls and young girls who are being put on these pills because they're the ones who asymmetrically bear the burden of the increased risk of mental health-related problems. And the thing about these girls is that we don't know whether or not these patterns are reversible.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
because the teenage brain is still developing. And to go into a teenage brain that's still developing and suppress normal hormonal variation that occurs across the cycle and instead replace it with synthetic hormones, we have no idea what this does to brain development.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
And this is an important question because brain development that occurs during the pubertal transition, that is when the brain is remodeling itself from its child version of itself into the grown-up version of itself, that remodeling job is being coordinated by sex hormones.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
And so the idea that we're going to replace that, you know, these naturally occurring variation in sex hormones, and replace it with synthetics and that it's not going to have any impact on brain development doesn't seem realistic.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
17.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
I mean, for me, it's all about weighing the risks and the benefits. And so for me, the first risk and benefit question is, is there a risk that this person is going to get pregnant? And so if she's not in a sexual relationship, I don't have to worry about it. It's a no-brainer. You're not going on hormonal birth control. If she is sexually active, then the question becomes,
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
Is there a way that we can protect her from pregnancy that doesn't introduce these exogenous hormones, these synthetic hormones that are going to shut down her own hormone production and potentially impact brain development? Thankfully, there are options. So there's not great, right? And they're not for everyone. But for example...
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
There's a copper IUD, which is an intrauterine device that prevents pregnancy without changing women's sex hormones. And so I think that's a really good option for sexually active teenagers.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
Yes, it's the coil. It's the copper coil because there's two different types of coils.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
It goes up into the cervix.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
Sits there for a long time. Sits there for like five years is how long it can stay in there without having to be replaced. And it's a really great option for women to be able to protect themselves without having to think about it. And that's really important when we're talking about teenagers because a lot of times they don't make the best decisions.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
And their frontal lobes are not done developing. And because of this, they don't always plan and they don't always think things clearly, you know, think things through clearly. And so for a teenager who's not necessarily going to be all that on top of things when it comes to using things like condoms, which is a barrier method that requires that you actually use the condom.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
It's also really interesting when you consider that in face of the fact that we have something like hormonal birth control, where we have birth control where you have an opportunity for men and women to be able to have sex without having to have the fear of pregnancy, and yet people are having less sex. And that's a very complicated issue.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
You can't just have them and then protect yourself from pregnancy. Or something like the fertility awareness method, which is where women keep track of where they are in their cycle and then abstain from sex or use a barrier method when they're at high fertility. And then they don't have to worry about it at low fertility.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
I don't necessarily recommend those highly for teenagers if possible just because it requires a lot of thought and And like I said, teenagers aren't always great at thinking through things.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
Yeah, so that is the implant. So that's here in the U.S., the one that people are on is called Nexplanon. And that gives a daily dose of a synthetic progesterone or a progestin. And that daily dose of that hormone is, of course, keeping the brain from stimulating the ovaries. And so it's keeping hormones flatlined.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
And so that is something that, yes, is incredibly effective, and yes, it is brainless because you don't have to think about it, which is great because the best birth control is birth control that you don't have to think about. But you're getting a daily dose of this hormone that's shutting off your ovulation.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
And so you're going to experience all of the changes that women experience when using hormonal birth control when you're using that, right? It can change who you're attracted to. It can change your sex drive. It can change your mood. It can change your ability to regulate your stress response. It can change your ability to put on muscle mass from working out.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
There's some new research that finds that women who are using hormonal birth control, who are doing the exact same exercises as women who are naturally cycling over a 12-week period, put on less muscle mass, and had lower levels of testosterone relative to what you see in the women who are naturally cycling. And of course, that's what they find.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
Because women who are using hormonal birth control, their testosterone levels are kept suppressed. And this is one of the big stimulators that we know of muscle growth. And same with AMPK levels tend to be high when estrogen is high. And that's also something that promotes muscle growth. And that's lower in women who are using hormonal birth control relative to natural cyclers.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
And so, you know, it also can influence that. It influences everything. And so the idea that You know, hormonal birth control is the answer for women when it comes to regulating fertility. I just don't think that it is. You know, it's an answer, and it's one that we need to make sure all women have access to it who need it.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
But, you know, my whole message with everything with my book and everything else has always been we need more answers. Like, we need better answers. And it seems like things might be moving in that way. There's more research being done on things.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
That, you know, male contraception and not just male hormonal contraception because I don't think that's the answer either because the idea of suppressing men's hormone production to such an extent that they no longer produce viable sperm, which is how they're looking at it, by the way, I don't think that's the answer. That's just shifting.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
Isn't that crazy? I know. No, I don't think men would sign up either. I'm like, who would take this? I'm like, this is madness. But that's what they're working on. And it just shifts the problem. You know, it shifts it onto men. But there are some really interesting things that are happening in terms of, like, for example, there's –
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
issue that requires a lot of untangling to get to the bottom of. But one of those factors is the fact that it's harder for, you know, imagine that you're a college-aged woman and you are looking for somebody who at least is, you know, on par with you in terms of their educational attainment. Most college campuses are like 60% female.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
No. No, I don't. I think some men would, but do I think most men would take that? Absolutely not. No way. No way, Jose.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
Yeah, no, I don't know anybody. Honestly, I don't know any men who'd say, yeah, sign me up for that. I mean, the fact is, like, if you look anywhere.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
Women take it because we have no choice. Okay, because you're going to bear the... It's like we're the ones who get stuck with the pregnancy. You know, for men, their other option, like if they say, no, I'm not going to take this, is that their partner will be on the pill.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
Yeah, if the partner's not on the pill, then they've got to figure something else out. But a lot of times what ends up happening is the women end up going on the pill. And it's because for women, pregnancy is so costly that it's hard for us not to be the ones who are bearing the price of birth control. Because the fact is we're always the one who end up ultimately having to pay the largest cost.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
Right.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
Right, yeah. Yeah, no, I don't want that. And I also especially don't want that when she's during this period in her life when her brain is still developing. Because like I said, there has been hardly any research that has looked at what happens to brain development when you introduce synthetic sex hormones to women when their brains are developing.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
And the research that does exist looking at this question doesn't paint a very good picture of it. It looks like it can put women on a long-term risk of developing major depressive disorder over the course of their lifetime, even after they've gone off of it. And so, no, I don't.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
The idea of having my daughter on hormonal birth control is not something that I want to have happen, especially when her brain is developing.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
I would feel like if that was the best, I mean, if she really couldn't tolerate the IUD, the copper IUD that doesn't have the hormonal side effects, then I would say better that than pregnant. The fact is teenage pregnancy is one of the biggest predictors of a woman ending up in poverty. And that's a much bigger deal than whether or not a woman feels like she's awake or asleep.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
And so sadly, that's where we are. And it's my hope that as we move forward and the more that we start to recognize that birth control as an issue for women hasn't been solved, right? And that we need more options besides just changing women's hormones. It's my hope that things are going to get better and that we push for more options.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
I mean, I think that it's so long been considered, you know, we think that birth control is solved and it's not. And so I'm hoping that there's going to be more options. And so that way, you know, later on my daughter's daughters and her daughter's daughter's daughters have more things to choose from than just change me or, you know, come at risk of a teenage pregnancy.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
The most popular email I get is thank you. I knew that this was going on. I had absolutely no language to describe it. You nailed it. That's what I get the most. And it's not like you nailed it, Sarah, wow, you wrote such a great book. But instead, I knew that this had to be happening to me. You know, I knew that I didn't feel the same and this is it. Like, of course, of course it happened.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
And just simply playing the odds, I mean, women are going to have a that they can get together with. And this is going to mean less dating for some of these women and less sex.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
I mean, I think for a lot of people, we have a blind spot with the birth control pill. I mean, it's like,
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
almost everybody goes on it and we don't think about the fact that our hormones are an important part of what our brain uses to create the experience of being who we are right and so we're very cavalier and just giving it to people it's like oh well you should go on it for this and oh you've got some acne you should go on it too and oh your period sometimes you spot between your periods you should go on the birth control pill it's like we don't think about the fact that when we're making those changes that's changing who women are and um
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
Yeah, so the most frequent thing that I get is like, thank you for making me myself again. Thank you for helping identify what I knew was going on when I was on it. And I didn't have the words to describe it.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
Oh my gosh, I love it.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
Right. Yeah. No, I totally know what you mean. No. And I think that that's, I think, yes, yes, yes, that.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
No, I love it. No, I love it. I think that especially with the birth control pill, it's like there's a tendency to fear that everything is permanent. And like if you go on it, that it ruins you and that it's going to break you. And the research just doesn't quite point in that direction unless you're a teenager.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
If you go on it as a teen, we don't yet know ultimately what that does to brain development long term. But if you go on it as an adult and then you discontinue it, you can go back to being the person that you were, right? And yeah, and that can include the recovery of your sexual desire, even if you think that it's lost.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
I want to make the world a place where women understand themselves and that women are understood as themselves and not as being some sort of a malfunctioning male.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
Right. Yeah. Well, you know, we have inherited this mating psychology from our distant ancestors who are very much more reliant on men for things like provisioning, resource access, and even protection than what contemporary women need. And this is because throughout most of our evolutionary history, we spent our lives, you know, having to be pregnant regularly.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
And it can also affect our sexual function because it turns off that estrogen surge that makes us feel sexier and makes us want to have sex. And there's more. But we also know that it affects men in two different ways. And this has implications for society around us. I'll tell you why.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
Right, yeah.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
No, that's also not true. No, men's hormones change dynamically across the day. And they're higher in the morning than they are later on in the afternoon. And they change in response to environmental cues.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
So beautiful women, you know, the win or loss of your favorite sports team, the win or loss your favorite political candidate, the presence of a weapon, all of these things can change men's testosterone levels. And so men's hormones change quite rapidly, like you know, rapidly and in ways that are more unpredictable than women's. Because women's hormones do cycle, but they cycle predictably.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
And if you tell me a woman's age and the first day of her last menstrual cycle, I can tell you with almost really high degree of certainty what's going on with her primary sex hormones. And the same is just not the truth for men.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
Well, no. Now it's called This is Your Brain on Birth Control, How the Pill Changes Everything. Oh, okay.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
I know. That's because they changed the subtitle when we went to paperback. Oh, okay. I know. It's all very confusing.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
Yeah, well, they can find me online at sarahehill.com. And that's Sarah with an H. And I am on Instagram as my most active platform. And it's sarahehillphd. And that's my handle.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
lactating, caring for young children. And we're very heavily dependent on the ability of our partner to gain access to things like food and the other resources that we're not able to get access to when we are very pregnant or dealing with young children. Like, I don't know if you've ever gone... hunting before or met a two-year-old, but the two things don't mix, right? The children are loud.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
They're not going to allow you to sneak up on a buffalo. It's not an ideal situation for women. So women historically have been very dependent on men for resources. And we've inherited that brain because over the course of evolutionary history, women who would have placed an emphasis on choosing partners who have these kinds of qualities
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
they would have been more likely to have surviving offspring who then passed that tendency or that preference onto their offspring who'd pass that preference down to their offspring. And so human, you know, contemporary human women, even though we're able to gain access to resources of our own, we still have that preference, right?
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
We've inherited that preference from our successful ancestors because women who had that preference would have performed better than women who didn't pay attention to that sort of thing.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
Oh, yeah, no, absolutely. Yeah, you know, and in fact, the patriarchy, which just refers to, you know, male control of resources, right? wouldn't really exist if women didn't desire resources in their partners. Because the reason that men tend to control a lot of resources is because women demand resource access on the part of their partners.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
And if women didn't care, then men wouldn't work so hard to get access to them. You know, there's this really great quote by Aristotle Onassis where he once said, without women, all the power and money in the world would be completely meaningless. And I think that there's a lot of wisdom in that.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
Men work so hard to control the resources, not because men together are banding together and trying to hoard the resources and keep them from women. I don't think that that's really how the world works. And I think if you have a look around, we'd see that that's not really how the world works.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
Instead, it's an epiphenomenon of the fact that men are competing amongst whoever else has access to resources to get resources of their own. And because women value this in their choice of partners, oftentimes men will go to greater lengths to get them.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
One of the reasons, not the only reason, but certainly one of the reasons that we see that more men tend to be in positions of being a CEO, for example. is because oftentimes men are more willing to make the trade-offs that you have to make to get into those positions because men are wired that way, right?
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
And the reason that they're wired that way is because they've inherited these tendencies to want this despite the costs because it would have paid off in terms of being able to attract better partners, a greater number of partners, right, and then being able to have your children do better. And so the patriarchy, yes, that is something that exists.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
Let's dive down into that. First...
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
We do tend to see that men tend to control resources more frequently than women in most societies around the world. But this isn't because men are banding together and trying to exclude women. Instead, this is just a product of men's evolved psychology trying to work as hard as they can to get access to resources, in part because women require them.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
Yeah, yeah. You know, I would think so, yes. And the reason being that it is about risk, right? And women oftentimes, again, you know, a lot of this has to do with the psychology that we've inherited. And throughout most of our history, women were caring for young children. I mean, this was, you know, kind of what our bodies made us have to do. It's like our bodies are wired for
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
having babies, right? And this doesn't mean that this is what women should do, right? Or what women need to do, or that, you know, that this is somehow destining women to do one, you know, this set of activities. But instead, throughout most of our history, we spent a lot of our time pregnant and caring for young children.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
And that has selected for our psychology to be very risk sensitive and risk averse. And what we tend to see is that women are more risk averse than are men. And we can see this play out in terms of things like gambling, right? We know that overwhelmingly. Men tend to be the ones who are gambling addicts relative to women. But also in terms of good risks, right?
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Oestrogen Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are...Would You Still Love Them If You Came Off It?! Oestrogen Makes You More Attractive!
Because you do see something like being an entrepreneur, for example, which is something that does come with a pretty big risk attached to it, meaning that, you know, there's a big boom and bust. But the risk associated with the possibility of a bust is something that women's psychology is a little bit less tolerant of relative to men's.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1131: Hangover Cures | Skeptical Sunday
Hormones affect the way that our brain does its daily business. And that includes things like attraction. You know, there's a lot of research that shows that for both men and women, it's like the cues that we tend to find is sexy and beautiful. And women are cues that are related to estrogen presence and fertility.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1131: Hangover Cures | Skeptical Sunday
Our sex hormones are part of what creates the experience of being who we are and all of it is helping to guide our behavior in ways that are actually really adaptive and functional. Estrogen loves testosterone and that's, you know, just kind of the way that it is. How does taking the pill change women's sexual psychology and how does that change their sexual behavior?
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1131: Hangover Cures | Skeptical Sunday
And I also think that there is a tendency to trivialize the types of side effects that we have from the pill. Because when you look at some of the most frequently occurring side effects, it's things like depression, like a complete absence of sex drive. I mean, it can really change behavior in ways that can not always be necessarily what we want.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1131: Hangover Cures | Skeptical Sunday
They're not one size fits all and everybody's going to respond a little bit differently. And so it's just important that you know that these things are possible so you know what to look out for them. There is nothing that will derail a person's life more than an unplanned pregnancy.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1131: Hangover Cures | Skeptical Sunday
And this is particularly true in our current environment where women aren't able to get safe legal abortions in many states. I am for you having all the information that you need to be able to make the decision that's right for you, because what is the right decision for you might not be the same decision that's right for me.