Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology
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How does birth control change women's brains and behavior?
We dive into how the pill can alter sexual desire, stress response, emotional sensitivity, and even influence the type of partner you're drawn to. It may even affect your mental health and motivation in ways most women aren't told. So whether you're using birth control or just curious, this is an eye-opening conversation that will change how you think about hormones and your identity.
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We have Dr. Sarah Hill on the podcast today, who is an evolutionary psychologist. By the way, I want you to tell us what that is. But she is someone who talks all about hormones, the effects of birth control. You wrote a whole book on this. And mating, which is, again, I love all your stuff. So I'm so happy you're here today. Thank you. I'm so excited to be here. And I will tell you what an evolutionary psychologist is. Please. 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.
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. Yeah, that's it. That's a great summary of what you do. But then you wrote a book about birth control. But you wrote that book a while ago, but it's been seeming to get a lot of traction recently. 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.
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, 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
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Chapters
6 chapters
1
How does birth control change women's brains and behavior?
0:24–7:52
2
What are the effects of hormonal birth control on partner selection?
7:52–15:26
3
How do natural cycles influence women's attraction and mate choice?
15:26–28:02
4
Do men prefer women who are naturally cycling?
28:02–31:11
5
What are the differences between hormonal and non-hormonal IUDs?
31:11–54:42
6
Why might there be a mating crisis in modern society?
54:42–1:16:32
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