If you’ve ever wanted to know more about the role of hormones in women’s health, keep reading. Or even better, read Eleanor Morgan’s book Hormonal: A Conversation About Women's Bodies, Mental Health and Why We Need to Be Heard...

In her book, she explores how we might be better at talking about mental health, but we’ve got a long way to go when it comes to talking about periods, miscarriage, endometriosis, and menopause. And given all of these experiences are linked to our mental health, it’s time we start talking. 

 Here, we discuss our search for emotional stability, how PMS can impact our lives (and why it’s important to stand back and look at what’s really going on in your life), and how she came back from a personal breakdown.

 Purchase Hormonal here 

In your book Hormonal, you wrote that ever since your first period, they've always been a slog. I just love that line because I feel exactly the same. Tell me what you meant by this?

I just love that word. It's onomatopoeic, it implies that you are carry a lot around. The main thing for me, is that they’ve always been very painful. At the beginning of last year after the book came out, surgeons found endometriosis, which explains a lot. It took a long time for them to find it and it explains the deathly periods. But by a slog, I mean physical pain. When I was a teenager, I used to be so sick. I’d vomit, miss school, faint. There’s also the emotional side of it as well - experiencing intense pain is massively emotional, it's exhausting. Then there’s all of the emotion that goes with not being able to do the things you want to do and PMS and that feeling of vulnerability. I feel incredibly porous and sensitive. So yes, it has been a slog, it still is. But all of the research and learning I’ve done, and now knowing what my body is doing, and being able to have some idea of when my hormones are behaving in different ways, and how I might feel, it's like I can be a witness to myself, rather than feeling like I'm hijacked.

I get such PMS rage, and I can especially feel it the two days before my period. It's just this horrible rage that​ is let out of a cage, and it's awful. Do you feel angry in the lead up to your period?

The thing that I feel is irritability, and my tolerance for things just drops. I'm not a very angry person, it takes a lot to make me very angry, but in that period of time (I usually have a 28-day cycle), from day 21 I can feel irritable. This is the period when your hormones start to shoot up again before you have your period. They go back down again before your period. 

I become very intolerant of a lack of thoughtfulness in people. And I can take things very personally. But I've also done a lot of therapy, I'm training as a therapist, and I've learned so much more about emotion, and triggers. The thing that I've developed over time is knowing that the days where I feel kind of taut with emotion and anxiety, that it is going to pass. I think that's the thing that I never really used to have, because I was just clueless, it would just happen to me.

In the book,​ you talk about an obliterating breakdown of sorts - tell me about your anxiety, and that breakdown?

I've experienced anxiety since I was 17-ish, mostly in the form of panic attacks, but you can't get to the point of having a panic attack unless there is a churning level of anxiety beneath it. They started for me when I went back to school after a long recovery from my appendix rupturing. I was really ill, I nearly died. My home life was quite difficult at that point, so it was a perfect storm.

For me, all of the anxiety manifests in such a profoundly physical way. It’s like my body just explodes. I think for various reasons I was really unsatisfied in my job, I was feeling very emotionally unmet in my relationship, and I do feel like a breakdown is the word that makes sense to me, because I broke down, I couldn't function properly. But in hindsight, I had to get to that point, because it meant that I finally, after many years of keeping this thing inside me, I let it out. I'd barely spoken to anyone about it. It was this web of concealment, and I finally started engaging with therapy. I've learned a tremendous amount about myself, about how the body holds trauma, and the idea that if you hold onto intense emotion, it will come out at some point.

In the book,​ you talk about your quest for emotional stability. Tell me about what you learned writing the book about women who are constantly searching for emotional stability?

We're all looking for a feeling of evenness, not feeling like we're so beholden to our cycles, or feeling more in control of our moods. But over time, the thing that I've really taken in, and both from many conversations I've had with women in clinical work, in my journalistic work, is actually, what are we looking for? I've sort of changed the question with myself, because it is absolutely impossible to be on an even keel all the time, that's not how we're supposed to be. We have these incredibly complex brains that are taking in information from inside the body and outside the body every second of every day, we react to things, we're supposed to react to things, we're hugely emotional, we're built to connect with each other, and that's a positive thing, but it also means that we can be hugely affected by other people.

Over time, the thing that I've really observed is that women talk about feeling like they're not in control, or that feelings happen to them. You talk about anger, that they feel like they can't control their anger, or resentment towards a partner, or a colleague. This is a psychotherapist answer, but I would always encourage a gentle but deeper inquiry of,‘what is it about? Is it not okay to be angry? Is it not okay to feel wounded by someone? And if you are feeling something very acutely, what is that actually about? What does that say about you? What does that say about your experiences? What does it say about how met you are in your relationships?

The reality is, and this is a really key point, in all of the research I did for the book, and all of the journalism that I've done since, scientists and doctors don't know exactly how our fluctuating hormones throughout our cycle affect our mood. They don't know why exactly that happens. There is not any definitive theory about how sex hormones interact with various brain circuits. From that perspective, we can't just blame everything on our biology, we can't just blame everything on our hormones. They're a part of the picture, no doubt, because I feel it, I know it, but there's more emotional understanding that needs to happen.

In the book I use the phrase ‘truth serum’, it's almost like, and I've felt this, in the premenstrual phase, that lack of tolerance that I feel for people being shit to each other, or crap men basically, who is to say that those feelings aren't justified? And could it be that for the rest of the time I'm holding onto my feelings, because I'm a woman, and I feel like I don't have the place or space to put it out there? It's easy to blame everything on biology, because it gives us a hanger to put everything on, and it sort of implies that we're not in control. I would always encourage everyone to go to therapy, because I am a therapist. Finding a therapist that understands this stuff, for me, has been life-changing. It's like learning how to give yourself the permission to feel what you feel.

At the very beginning of the book, I say if we hold onto emotion, it finds a way out. Whether it's some kind of physical malady, ailment, pain, skin thing, hair, or it will come out in bits in our interpersonal relationships. Societally, we have a lot of learning to do about emotion, and what women should or shouldn't do with it, because the big problem is all of this historical conditioning and ideas. The idea that if we are angry, tearful, upset, shouty, we’ll be labeled as mad, hysterical, "Oh, have you got your period?" - all of that pejorative stuff.

There is still this idea that if we step into that place, we're going to be labeled as X, Y, and Z, and so we hold onto it even more. It's not good enough, because it will then come out somewhere else. that is one of the biggest pieces that I've learned in my clinical training and all of my work, the business of emotion always finds a way.

How do you deal with PMS each month?

For me, I try and bring everything back to my body. This is a truism that holds for many of these ideas, if you can calm your body, you can calm your mind. We need to start thinking about body and mind as one and the same, it's not separate. Emotions are felt incredibly physically, thoughts affect our feelings, which affect how it shows up in our body. I do think about myself as a body, and I make sure that I am outside a lot, walking. I'm a big believer in people eating what they want, when they want, but there is a decent amount of evidence that shows that when you are premenstrual, at that point in your cycle, that we are more sensitive to drops in blood sugar. So, it's not that the sugary stuff is actually doing us harm, it's that we will feel that big drop after we've eaten something, like a cake. Blood sugar shoots right up, and then we feel the drop much more.