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

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As a woman that has suffered from chronic illness, including endometriosis for 15 years, this book was always going to speak to me. One of the problems being that from month to month a woman's premenstrual symptoms may vary in length or severity. Most purchases from business sellers are protected by the Consumer Contract Regulations 2013 which give you the right to cancel the purchase within 14 days after the day you receive the item. Deep, thoughtful, and eye-opening, this book teaches us that the more we know about hormones, the more we can manage our lives.

We've been very successful in Western medicine in treating heart disease and that's because the heart is like a pump. She offers no firm answers or miracle cures, and is careful to remind us that, when it comes to mental illness, no two cases are the same. A PhD who directs the Evolutionary Psychology Lab at UCLA, Martie Haselton knows her stuff, and presents study after study to describe how hormones affect women at nearly every stage of life. She appeared to take her trousers down, unwrap the tampon’s packaging, position her body and push the thing up herself in one dainty movement.

Yet beneath the tentative conversations of liberation, the bottle is still full of mystery, ignorance and stigma regarding our bodies. I was aware of the shift in his gaze towards me in a way that I absolutely did not have the language for. 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. Any anatomical accuracy was dispensed with in favour of a vague, hairless triangle that only flashed into view for a second.

I was shocked to learn that , for many of these women, in that room with the psychologist was the first time they had disclosed past sexual, physical or emotional abuse. In sum, while I did not feel empowered after reading this book and it did not change my thinking on the subject, I had a new appreciation for evolutionary psychology and great respect for the ground breaking work being done by Dr. going to keep seeing if i can get an endometriosis diagnosis, keep trying the pills i’m on, but maybe also will try to change my diet a bit.He understood shell shock as a form or hysteria that had affected all these men and was very clear that the officers did not suffer from hysteria, nearly as much as the soldiers. There may be times when we have more extreme hormonal fluctuations and really feel like there's a 'chemical' nature to our mood (I know I've felt this) but those may also be times when things are difficult in our lives anyway. It spent the majority of its pages discussing pregnancy, childbirth, and how every other hormone we experience in any other stage of life is directly related to pregnancy, childbirth, and finding a suitable mate to facilitate all these things. Knowing why this is still the case in so many areas of society gives us something to work with and rally against. If you are looking for a book that discusses what hormones actually do and how they may have the potential to sway our behaviour, you're better off reading a book about biology, where facts are presented, and not opinions disguised to look like scientific evidence.

The inability to acknowledge that yes, we ARE like other animals, men with higher testosterone levels do commit more violent crimes, women who are pregnant DO get emotional, and PMS made her quit her job (again)--these are hormonally based behaviors but again, for reasons that go beyond bizarre, we are not allowed to talk about this—that our hormones influence our BEHAVIOR and in rather strong ways, because WE ARE ANIMALS. It was indeed quite interesting, especially reading about the results of studies, which gives it a bit more substance.As someone critical of evolutionary psychology (not evolution) I was pleasant surprised by this provocative book. I would have thought women interested in hormones would like more scxience and less history lesson of popular views on women as hormonal. One girl vomited all over her desk in a maths class and started crying before being led to the nurse’s office, the teacher’s hand gently holding the small of her back.

Essential reading for anyone with, or living closely with someone who experiences, a menstrual cycle.After an entire adult life spent negotiating with anxiety of varying colour and shape, along with studying the human mind, I know full well that the notion of there ever being an exact reason for a period of low mood or anxiety is an anathema. I felt she was simply validating her condescending male colleagues' point (about women being "hormonal") by behaving in the exact same manner one would expect of a "hormonal" female: overly emotional and not in the least bit credible. At times, I did start to find the book repetitive and so skimmed some parts of it, however, I recommend this book to anyone wanting to learn more about evolutionary psychology, especially from a self-proclaimed Darwinian feminist. Overall, I found myself going “wow, that’s a crazy thing our bodies and hormones do without us knowing! If we continue to root the entire blueprint of our personality, what makes us us, in our reproductive system, we're neither being kind nor smart.