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

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It was so quiet in that moment, apart from the pitiful cawing of seagulls (why do they always sound so desperate? Since I was a small child I have delighted in the details of a natural world: veins in the sand at low tide, the tiny silver bobbies and yellow cups in patches of lichen, the hot velvet of a horse's nose, the handsome redness of a rosehip, the baby's shoulder like fuzz on a fig leaf stem.

Glutamate acts as an excitatory neurotransmitter and when bound to the adjacent cells, encourages them to "fire" and send a nerve impulse. In this paradigm-shifting book, Martie Haselton explains how hormonal intelligence works - both its strengths and its weaknesses - and shows women how to track and understand their desires, fears and perceptions with a radical new understanding of the biological processes that profoundly influence our behaviour. The language I use when describing the way I feel with PMS is almost always definitive: I am sad Not I feel sad at the moment, recognising that feeling as a wave of emotion that will wash in and eventually wash out. I’m a cis woman who learned so much about how I interpret my own mind and pain and mental health from this book, but I think that it does the book a disservice to not at least acknowledge in the beginning that this is about cis women only. I honestly cannot tell to what extent that reflects the differences between the books and to what extent it reflects how I've changed in the past four years.Once I started tracking my cycle with the Clue app, being able to predict when I might feel crap, or, looking at it when I am feeling crap, being able to see that I'm ovulating or entering the PMS phase, was a big help.

It was indeed quite interesting, especially reading about the results of studies, which gives it a bit more substance.

That results in a lack of vital understanding for women, particularly as those processes are inextricably connected to our mental health. Obviously we learned more about sex hormones, puberty and reproduction in biology lessons (I even took biology as an A-level subject with a view of going to medical school) but until a few years ago when I had a sharp awakening regarding my fertility, I had forgotten a lot of it. Consequently, I found the discussion of women's mental health in history within Hormonal: A Conversation About Women's Bodies, Mental Health and Why We Need to Be Heard rather superficial compared with, say, Mad, Bad, and Sad: Women and the Mind Doctors. I am very interested in how society’s continued perceptions of women affect our perceptions of ourselves. With donor sperm bought from a bank in New York (I am a woman who sleeps with women: sperm is a little low on the ground around here), I ended up with five embryos ready to spend some time on ice.

I wonder though, if there is something wider we should be asking about how as a society we frame what women say and do when they are anything other than sanguine, nurturing and polite? Even if I could control certain symptoms of my premenstrual distress – low mood, for example – and a type of drug was the answer, on a much deeper level I wanted to know: what is the question?So many women shared the article with variations on ‘thank god someone is saying it’, and with details of how their own experiences had been diminished or stigmatised. It’s a scientific and fact based look at how behind the scenes our hormones are constantly directing our view of the world and making us better equipped to understand others and make choices that’ll lead to a healthy life for ourselves. Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) show that childhood trauma, neglect and structural oppressions 'come out' in later life not just in the form of mental distress like anxiety or depression, but in chronic physical inflammation, bodies stuck in high alert mode.