Amy Thomson - Moody: A 21st Century Hormone Guide

Below is a non-exhaustive list of books to further your learning:

Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score

Melissa Hemsley, Eat Happy

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow

Giulia Enders, Gut: The Inside Story of Our Bodys Most Underrated Organ

Dr Anita Mitra, The Gynae Geek

Kimberly Wilson, How to Build a Healthy Brain

Dr Angela Saini, Inferior

Caroline Criado-Perez, Invisible Women

Charlie Howard, Misfit

Dr Philippa Kaye, The M Word

The Hotbed Collective, More Orgasms Please

Maisie Hill, Period Power

Jill Shaw Ruddock, The Second Half of Your Life

Dr Tara Swart, The Source

Dr Gen Gunter, The Vagina Bible

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First published in Vintage in 2022
First published in trade paperback by Square Peg in 2021

Copyright Amy Thomson 2021
Illustrations copyright Edinah Chewe 2021

The moral right of the author has been asserted

Cover design: Jo Walker

ISBN: 978-1-473-58165-4

This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorized distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the authors and publishers rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

This is dedicated to all the people in my life and work whove supported me, through good times and bad, you all know who you are. Life is a team sport.

Imagine if someone had sat you down when you were a little girl and told you that you had superpowers. That those superpowers hormones are responsible for all those big feelings that make you act in certain ways, and that they help shape your life through the decisions you make. That they will affect everything: from your body confidence (or lack of it) to your memory, energy and productivity, your emotional highs and lows, to the relationships you choose, and the people you fancy. That they are more important than the subjects you choose to study at school and the career you end up in because they influence all those decisions. But, crucially, that you arent hostage to these little chemical messengers. That you can listen to them, nurture them, and they in turn will help you live your best version of you. Wouldnt you want to learn more?

Every emotional action and decision has a chemical pathway, from brain to body, that is built up throughout your life. Every action has a hormonal memory and over time these become more prominent. These pathways can be good and bad: seeing a birthday cake, for example, will for many of us trigger a hormonal memory path, linking back to all the happy memories of previous birthdays and eating sweet treats. This is a reward pathway, and as we get older and become more exposed to stress, we can often crave these rewards more regularly. The trick is to build rewards into your life that can help support stress, but dont have high sugars and fats. Building a treasure chest of ways to help self-soothe in the inevitable low moments.

Throughout this book, I will give some of the chemical backstory for how and why we need these physical and mental rewards and how they can not only make us feel better in the moment, but support long-term health and wellness.

Over time, good and bad chemical pathways begin to become more set, so helping unlock the happy hormones with rewards is key and this is the science that lies behind self-care. Your body takes in stimuli from the outside and turns them into a response; when you tune in you can hear the signals and decode or understand that response. These internal signals determine when you feel hungry, happy, sad, sexy, sluggish or motivated. These moods, emotions and symptoms are the language of our body that no one has really thought to share with us.

What most people know of hormones comes from basic biology in school. That was certainly true for me. We are taught that estrogen is connected to women, periods and pregnancy and that testosterone is connected to men. From the various contraceptives I tried and tested, I went on to learn first-hand that hormones could make me moody. In my twenties, I learnt a little about serotonin, but mostly due to partying and the horrific emotional low you hit on the morning after a big night out. These (kind of basic) 101 introductions to hormones are commonplace for most of us.

What I would come to discover is less well known: not just how the hormones inside me worked, but how happy hormones are actually internal medicine and how when I understood them I could self-administer them when needed. I wish that someone had told me all about this earlier. It could have saved a lot of confusion.

When burnout came for me, and my periods completely stopped, the root cause, I would later discover, was stress. By that point I was twenty-nine and had never been told that stress could stop my periods. No one had ever explained to me that stress was not just a feeling. It was a chemical chain reaction triggered by external stress stimuli. The hormonal reaction to stress overproduction of adrenaline, cortisol and noradrenaline is your bodys internal caffeine, designed to push you through. If youve ever had one too many cups of coffee youll know its not a good idea to spend your life running on it, as it can make you painfully anxious. Similarly, stress hormones are your bodys response trigger to push you through danger. Have you ever felt the rush from adrenaline? It makes you hyperalert and your senses rush and tingle from the world around you. Its why it can often be very addictive. Living day-to-day with this powerful compound of internal fight or flight leads eventually to a knock-on effect and crash.

Hormones dont benchmark themselves against a cultural lens of what should or shouldnt be stressful or dangerous; they simply respond based on what your brain reports back as stressful or dangerous. Our brains have evolved into supercomputers: we deal with all kinds of complex emotional and environmental factors in the twenty-first century, but our hormones still serve as the internal response system to regulate our bodys rhythms.

Your body has an internal pharmacy of chemicals, being released in doses that are determined by your glands. Alongside your stress hormones, you also have your happy hormones, a combination of hormones and neurotransmitters which are chemical signalling molecules. They are essentially a set of superpowers you can learn to work with effectively and self-administer through wellness routines. They dont just make you feel good; they can help guide you through your day-to-day. These hormones have the power to make us all feel strong, seductive and supercharged. They can support energy, focus and memory. What do they consist of? Heres the rundown: