The Psychological Impact Of Hormonal Birth Control - Dr Sarah Hill - #555

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Hello, everybody. Welcome back to the show. My guest today is Dr Sarah Hill. She's a psychologist and professor at TCU, whose research focuses on women, health and sexual psychology. Women ovulate, and this changes their behavior across the cycle, unless they take hormonal birth control, that is, in which case their behavior changes even more dramatically in ways that no one anticipated. And there is evidence to suggest that this might not just be temporary. Expect to learn why hormonal birth control can make women prioritize wealth in men. Why women who come off are less sexually satisfied with partners they chose when they were on birth control. The relationship between taking the pill with anxiety, depression, bisexuality and stress. Whether it's a good thing for women to have sex with men who they wouldn't marry. And much more. This is probably one of the most important conversations I think I've had this year. Obviously, it doesn't directly affect me. But then actually based on some of the stuff that Sarah taught me today, maybe it does. It's absolutely insane how wild the psychological impacts are of hormonal birth control. And I think it is nothing short of crucial that every woman is aware of just what happens and what the options are and what some of the risks are and what some of the ways to mitigate all of this is.
It's a mess. It's a really complex situation and I hope that you take tons and tons away from this episode. I found it fascinating, kind of terrifying, pretty insightful. So yeah, I really hope that you enjoy this one. Also don't forget that you might be listening but not subscribed. And over the next month, I've got some of the biggest guests that I've ever featured on the show. It is absolutely ridiculous. And if you're not subscribed, you're going to miss those episodes when they go live. So if you want to support the show and if you want to make me happy and if you want to ensure that you're never missing an episode when it goes up, just press subscribe. I thank you very much. But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Dr Sarah Hill.
How did you get interested in studying birth control?

**Dr Sarah Hill** (2:32)
Well, I spent most of my career studying women's sexual behavior and made attraction and partner choice. And I've even done some work looking at women's sex hormones and the way that influences women's motivation and choice of dress and other things to that effect. And so I've always had an interest in women's psychology and the different sort of biological components that contribute to sort of what it means to be a contemporary female. But it was really going off of the birth control pill that got me interested in studying its effects on human psychology.

**Chris Williamson** (3:08)
What is the way that you would describe to a non-birth control taking person like myself the difference in your subjective experience of the world?

**Dr Sarah Hill** (3:19)
For me, it felt like I woke up. So about three months after I discontinued using hormonal birth control, I started to notice that I just had been feeling different recently. I had more energy than I had before. I was going to the gym again. I was noticing men and I was interested in sex in a way that I hadn't been in a really long time. I started downloading new music on my playlist for the first time in more than a decade.
I thought to myself, I just felt like I woke up. I thought, well, this is a crazy way to respond to going off the birth control pill. I kind of chalked it up to just being me. It just must be something else that's going on in my life that's making me feel this way. But then I started to really start to dig down into the research and it turned out that my experiences weren't all that unique and that there's been research that's been done now for several decades detailing the different ways that hormonal birth control can influence women's psychology in ways that are very much consistent with the experiences that I had.

**Chris Williamson** (4:27)
Okay, so before we get into how the pill affects behavior, what do we need to know about hormonal changes and how that influences behavior normally across a woman's ovulatory cycle?

**Dr Sarah Hill** (4:38)
Right, well, yeah, and I think that having some background in that can be really useful. And there's been research that's been done now for, I don't know, three or four decades that's really looked at women's ovarian hormones having a really profound role on the way that women experience the world and even the activity and structure of the brain. So research in neuroscience, for example, has shown that as ovarian hormones change across the cycle, that actually changes the amount of functional connectivity in the brain. It changes the number of dendritic spines on our neurons. So our brain is this very plastic organism within our body that sort of changes its structure and function over the course of the cycle. And behaviorally, what the research finds is that during the time in the cycle when estradiol is high and the dominant sex hormone, there's a lot of research indicating that women have an increased desire for sex. They tend to engage in more sexual behavior at this time. They tend to exhibit a heightened preference for cues related to men's masculinity at this time. And so during the phase in the cycle, which is what researchers usually characterize or call the periobulatory phase of the cycle, which happens usually between days like 9 to 14 on average, if you're talking about a 28-day ovulatory cycle, you know, the 28-day cycle.