The Life Of Bryony - 29: "Be Curious About Yourself" Eleanor Morgan on How Understanding Your Hormones Can Change Your Life

Episode Date: January 6, 2025

Welcome to The Life of Bryony, where we explore life’s messier moments. MY GUEST THIS WEEK: ELEANOR MORGAN This week, I’m joined by the brilliant Eleanor Morgan—psychotherapist, journalist, and author of Hormonal: A Conversation About Women’s Bodies, Mental Health, and Why We Need to Be Heard. Eleanor shares her insights into the connection between hormones and mental health, tackling the stigma and systemic barriers women face in healthcare. Together, we explore why understanding our bodies is essential, how tracking your cycle can transform your relationship with yourself, and why it’s time to start questioning the ‘shoulds’ that hold us back. Whether you’re looking to understand your own mental health better or want to support the women in your life, this conversation is full of practical advice and profound insights. Let’s Stay in Touch 🗣️ Got something to share? You can text or send me a voice note on 07796657512—just start your message with LOB. 💬 Or use the WhatsApp shortcut - https://wa.me/447796657512?text=LOB 📧 Prefer email? Drop me a line at [e-mail] If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with someone who might need it—it really helps! Bryony xx Presenter: Bryony Gordon Guest: Eleanor Morgan Producer: Jonathan O’Sullivan Executive Producer: Mike Wooller A Daily Mail production. Seriously Popular Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome to The Life of Briny, where we embrace life's messier moments. Today, I'm joined by Eleanor Morgan to ask how controlled are we by our hormones and just how much do they affect our mental health? I've wanted to do this episode for so long, and I am so glad that I get to launch the new year with it. The fluctuation of hormones, how they interact with the rest of our chemistry, actually it's kind of a truth serum. That period of time is when we are the most alive to what we really need to do and say.

Eleanor's work unpacks the connection between our hormones and mental wellbeing, while also tackling the stigma and silence that often surrounds women's health. So if you've ever felt unheard, dismissed or simply confused by what's going on inside your body, this conversation is for you. Hello everyone we've had a bit of a break don't you've noticed three weeks no life of briny because I've been away on holiday I've been in Dubai I'm actually recording this from by the pool... can you hear that? On my last day of my holiday. Were you listening to that episode with my family just before Christmas? As you know we're really go in big time for traditional family Christmases but this

year I took myself and my daughter to Dubai with my best friend and that is because we wanted to be somewhere very very very not Christmassy and I'll explain a little bit why so my best friend Laura her husband very tragically died in the autumn of bowel cancer I hate that disease I really hate it and yeah maybe in time I'll talk more about that, but I don't feel able to right now. But Laura, who I've known since I was a teenager, she did not want to do a traditional Christmas.

Quite understandably, she couldn't bear it. So we decided to come to the most un-Christmassy place on the planet, which is Dubai. And you know, grief doesn't go away. There was a great phrase that a friend said to me which was wherever you go, there you are. So we often talk about pulling geographicals where we try and escape our worst feelings

by running away from them and going somewhere different, somewhere tropical. And we were really aware and Laura was really aware that that was not gonna be the case. You know, you can't escape the unfathomable grief of your husband dying. But what we wanted to do was at least create some different memories around Christmas, you know? A not very traditional family Christmas. And I think we managed to do that.

It's been full of laughter with the kids. It's just been a very different experience, but really special for it. And I guess my takeaway and what I've realized about that is that I feel it as well on New Year's Eve. Now I'm sober, you know, where I don't have to go out on New Year's Eve. I don't have to do what I'm expected to do. None of us do.

There's so many societal pressures on us, aren't there? To be a certain way, look a certain way, behave in a certain way at certain times of the year. And I guess what I've really got from this is that actually you do what makes you happy, you know? Like, I think that's what I want to say to you as I stand here under a palm tree in Dubai is that this year, 2025, you do what makes you happy. Don't worry about what other people think. You do what makes you happy or you do what makes you less sad. And that is what we've done by coming here. Yeah. I just wanted to give you a little update about where I've been and what's been going on. And, you know, I just wanted to give you a little update about where I've been and what's been going on and, you know, I just wanted to send you all my love from actually not that sunny Dubai. It's clouded over, guys. It was raining this morning and I am actually wearing

over my swimming costume right now. A cardigan. It's from Tesco. Love it. Get groceries delivered across the GTA from real Canadian Superstore with PC Express. Shop online for super prices and super savings. Try it today and get up to $75 in PC Optimum Points. Visit superstore.ca to get started. If you're enjoying the podcast, hit follow right now to stay connected and never miss an episode. I can guarantee you it'll be the best decision you've made all day.

It's January, in case you hadn't noticed, a time when a lot of people start to think about change, but not here at the Life of Briny, because we think you're bloody perfect just as you are. So this year, we're going to reframe the time and celebrate New Year, same brilliant you. So instead of resolutions and reinvention, we're focusing on embracing and understanding ourselves more deeply. And this week it's all about loving and understanding our bodies. I'm joined by the brilliant Eleanor Morgan, psychotherapist,

journalist and author of Hormonal, a conversation about women's bodies, mental health and why we need to be heard. Damn right, hormones shape so much of our physical and mental health, yet we often avoid talking about them, especially when things aren't going smoothly. From PMS to menopause and all of the struggles in between, Eleanor has made it her mission to shine a light on these critical issues. I really hope you enjoy my chat with her. So I started reading this book, Eleanor, because I in the last couple of years have become obsessed about the links specifically between my mental illness and my hormones. And I realized a couple of years ago just how intrinsically linked

they are. When I had in early 2022, I had this, I would call a mental health crisis and it felt like it came out of a clear blue sky and it confused me because I was like five years sober, I'd done a lot of work on myself. I had a kind of support network around me, of course it was during pandemic lockdown, there was all of that. But I had an episode of OCD, it verged on delusional.

So I was beginning to believe that things had happened that just hadn't. And it was really disturbing. I mean, I was able enough to get a grip on it. But someone said to me afterwards, you know, like, oh, maybe you're perimenopausal. And I said, oh, fuck off. Not everything is caused by the menopause. And I'm too young. I'm 41.

And they went, anyway, long story short, I went on HRT and within days I was like a Disney princess, like, la la la la la la la la la la la, you know, like birds tweeting around me. It was insane. And I can't remember getting to 11 o'clock in the morning and going, where's my despair? Where's the despair gone? And it was like, wow. But then when you're taking HRT, you then have to take the progesterone bit to protect your womb.

And just as quickly, the despair was there again. I was suicidal. And what we came to realize was that probably the first time that I really experienced what I would call a, you know, I think I probably had elements of obsessive-compulsive disorder for much of my childhood, but the first time it became unmanageable so that I couldn't leave the house was when I was about 12 and it was just before, obviously, my cycle, my first period came. And the doctor said to me, well, maybe you might have had PMDD, premenstrual dysphoric disorder. Anyway, it was fascinating to me. And we spent a year

or so trying to get progesterone into me in a way that didn't leave me suicidal. And it taught me a lot about my body. I was amazed that it had taken me to the age of 41, 42, to know any of this about myself. And I know that we live in a sort of age where we want to be able to go, okay, well, I had that mental illness because of my hormone. That is not the case. My mental illness is of my hormone. That is not the case. My mental illness is not caused by hormones. But it is a hell of a lot less easy to deal with depending where

they are fluctuating. And I realised that and I thought, God, this is wild. Like, why have I gone through so much despair? Your whole life. Not knowing any of this, you know? And anyway, I started to look into it and I started to read your book, Hormonal, the subtitle being a conversation about women's bodies, mental health,

and why we need to be heard. And we're meeting, Eleanor, just before Christmas, and MPs have released a report to say that the NHS is in some courses guilty of medical misogyny in terms of, you know, reproductive health, in terms of taking women's pain seriously. And you wrote this book in 2018. So did you think that in 2025, you'd still be kind of invited onto things to talk about it? Probably, yeah. It takes decades, centuries probably, for the ship to turn around. We're talking about medical misogyny. The medical establishment is still kind of rife with all of that historic conditioning about women's pain being kind

of inflated that we should just be able to deal with what we have to deal with by virtue of having the organs that we have in our body. That is how we're designed and therefore... Our very purpose is to have children and go through labour. So surely we can deal with a little thing like... With a little bit of pain every month. Yeah. But to answer your question, I think maybe when I was writing the book and it felt like a kind of a mission statement, you know, like look around how many of us are in pain, how

many of us are in despair often and look what we don't understand. What we do understand tells us things that are really powerful. Like you were saying, we know that by virtue of having a cycle, a menstrual cycle, we have two massive spikes in hormones every month. That is going to have an effect on how we live in our bodies. I mean, how could it not? Well, one of the things which I thought was so brilliant in the book, and you say, is that our menstrual cycle is a vital site. It's like our heart rate, you know. And yet it's only recently that we as women have started to treat it as such, you know, with cycle tracking, with that kind of thing. But that is essentially what it is.

Yeah, of course, it's rhythm, the rhythm of life. There are so many of them. Yeah, breathing, heartbeat, all of these kind of automatic functions that happen below, you know, the horizon of our consciousness. They happen. And that doesn't mean that things can't go wrong. And if you get to know your cycle, as I found in my life and many people who have periods that I know have found, is that you become less of a stranger to yourself. You know what your body is doing to a good enough degree. And when you become less of a stranger to yourself and what's happening, I think there is more peace to be found in

accepting what's going on and to some degree being able to predict and have some sense of an answer. You know, I track my cycle but I don't do anything fancy with it. I'm lucky to have a really regular predictable cycle and I've used the Clue app for, I don't know, seven, eight years. Before that, I really felt like I was in the dark. You know, I'd have a rough sense of what was happening when, but I didn't really know anything about ovulation or what can happen that bit of the month. What can happen in that? So let's just, I mean, for people listening, because it seems ridiculous, doesn't it? Having to kind of woman-splain our own bodies. But ovulation...

Yeah, I had no idea about what actually happened during ovulation until I started researching this book. So, you know, into my mid-30s, not a clue. So a follicle forms on your ovary and the egg is in there and if it doesn't get fertilized then it has to disappear and that follicle pops basically. You know, that free fluid that comes out of that follicle is what can cause the pain that you get during ovulation. I used to get that and think, my period isn't due for ages, what is that? I later found out that I had endometriosis, so that explains that more. But there's this whole process that happens, and I was kind of ashamed of how clueless I was when I was researching this book. I mean, how many of us really know

what's going on? I mean, I don't even really remember what happened when I got my period. I remember my mum telling me that when I went to the loo there'd be blood and my brain at the age of like 11 or 12, I just imagined that I would start peeing blood. That was how my brain interpreted it. Obviously, that's not what happened. And then it was like... That's frightening. Yeah. And then it was like anything I learned about my period was from Just 17. It's the same. It was a teen magazine that came out every other week.

And I think I learned about the dangers of toxic shock syndrome, you know? Like if you keep a tampon in for too long, it might end up killing you. That was a real like pervasive fear. Yeah. Throughout my all girls school. Yeah, mine too. And actually the chances of it happening are... Very slim.

Very slim. But what I probably, I didn't really need to know about toxic shock syndrome. What I needed to know about was how my body was going to work and that, you know, for some people progesterone, your body starts to release progesterone in the last two weeks of your cycle and for some people that is very relaxing actually. If you are taking it as part of hormone replacement therapy, they tell you to take it at night because it can make you sleepy.

So I think it's something like, you know, the majority of women will have that but there are some of us for whom progesterone is like the opposite of sleepiness. It's, it's... Doomsday device. It's doomsday device. It's, it's misery. It's PMDD. But I had no idea of that. No. I feel like, I mean, we're a similar age. Yeah.

I mean, it was the absolute bare bones of, you know, putting a tampon in a glass of water, being like, look at it swell up, that's how much liquid it can take. Show it, I think we had our PE teacher came in and had a little egg cup and was like, filled it up and was like, this is how much blood you'll lose. Oh my God, the egg cup. Oh, that was the other thing, a teaspoon,

a teaspoon of blood, you will lose a teaspoon of blood while you have your period. Well, let me tell you. My God. No, maybe several teacups of blood. Like sometimes, I haven't had a period in a very long time, and thank fuck for that. But towards the end of my periods, there were points where I couldn't, like I just had to sit on the loo for hours because I was passing plots. You know, it was like, if I was to change my sanitary equipment, what does that mean? I mean, like, by which I mean, I mean, by the end I was just wearing, you know, period

pants. Like, mental, we've only just invented period pants, you know? And it was like, this is not a teaspoon full of blood. You're so right. And I think that was such a key part of all of the early conditioning around what it means to have periods, what normal looks like. Do you remember the adverts for like tampax or sanitary towels? And they were always like women rollerblading.

Always rollerblading. Always rollerblading. Or the body form one was... Skydiving. Yeah, incredible. Like, I didn't want to skydive not on my period, let alone on my period. But, OK, so remember the blood was always blue. ALICE Always blue. GEM Always blue blood.

ALICE Like poured really delicately into the middle of a sanitary towel. GEM That's only changed recently, hasn't it? ALICE Yeah. I think that was the kind of the gore and the viscera of periods was something that I really wanted to infuse the book with because that is our reality, gore, and that goes from, you know, the beginning of having our periods. And some people have a relatively okay time with having periods and don't suffer. Good for them. I mean, really, I mean that. I mean,

it's great. You can kind of live in your body relatively peacefully. But I'd wager that a good majority of us have to live with the gore of our bodies. By virtue of having periods and if you have any of the conditions like endometriosis, PCOS, the things that come out of you can be really, you know, like a slasher film. Yeah, or alien. Alien, right. And you have, it's not just the blood, it's the way it impacts your bowel, your digestive system, you know, period pooing is a huge topic of conversation among me and my friends and husband for a long time. I think this is interesting though as well, because I've always said that like, if men

got periods, like it would be the only thing we were allowed to talk about. You know how now we're talking more about hormones and we're talking more about menopause and stuff and some people are like, oh, that's enough. You know, I'm like, if men got periods, all we would talk about was their menstrual cycle. That is the reality. And yet here we are on this little podcast and you know, I'm like, I'm 44. And I'm like, what do you mean by period pooing? You mean other people go through that as well? Yeah but I like these moments of oh so you have that as well and the kind of relief yeah the

relief absolutely and the kind of but it opens up the dialogue around the reality. This book I Get the Sense was very much inspired by your own struggles, I guess. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I suffered with my periods from the very first one. The pain was biblical, horrendous. Every single period I've had in my life, far maybe a few, has been incredibly painful with all, you know, panoply of other symptoms, really unpleasant. And I've struggled with what, you know, I learned probably not until my 20s was PMS, some kind of pre-menstrual symptoms, anxiety, which I've, you know, lived with my whole adult life really, really kind of crushing low mood, irritability, all the great things, but a kind of gradual reckoning that there is a rhythm to these things that I live with. And

I got comfort in that, or maybe comfort's the wrong word, but I think it goes back to what I was saying before of being less of a stranger to my own body, to my own inner world. And I credit doing psychological work more than anything else really with coming to terms with all of this and obviously being investigated for the sometimes indescribable pain that I've lived with and it taking more than 10 years to be diagnosed with endometriosis. I mean you had to have several operations. Yeah, so it's a laparoscopy and they go in kind of keyhole. But I had two and they couldn't find anything other than a lot of

scar tissue which they thought my appendix ruptured when I was a teenager really spectacularly. They thought it might be kind of... Because of that? Yeah. But then a really experienced gynae surgeon who was an endometriosis specialist happened to be doing yet another kind of keyhole, what is going on. He was like, oh yeah, we did find endometriosis. Really, really deep. It's called recto-vaginal. It sounds lovely.

Doesn't it? Yeah. But I have found that my relationship to pain has changed over the years. And again, you know, I think the psychology of it has been really important to me and learning to give in and to do nothing when my body needs to do nothing. As I carried on reading the book,

I realized that actually the effects of hormones on our mental health is not just chemical. The effects of our biology isn't just in our bodies. Because some of the bad mental health we experience as women is because of our very womanhood in itself and all of the kind of prejudices and judgments that are made against us purely by dint of being born women. And you touched on there the kind of the notion that women should be able to just deal with pain in a way that we don't expect men to. And women are not believed as much. We know that women will typically have worst outcomes in terms of heart attacks because they are experiencing anxiety or stress. You

know, we are fundamentally not believed. Medical tests weren't done formally on women, were they, until sort of the 90s or something. So most medication is tested with male biology. There's all sorts of stuff in the book about the historical way that women have been treated because of the fact they are women. And I don't know if you could perhaps like talk us through some of the sort of Victorian things that used to happen to women. Oh, God. I mean, the story, it's such a rich story of pathologisation, i.e. you have a womb, therefore you are going to be mad. And we need to find whatever ways we can to make you less mad so you're easier to deal with.

Yeah, compliant. Compliant, but also not disruptive, not too difficult to handle, too mad to look after the children. But this is the thing, like what I find so interesting is this sort of theory that you posit that actually a lot of what we ourselves see as difficult behaviour and trickiness is actually, we sort of internalised that and is actually often a very appropriate response to what is going on in our lives and our bodies. Yes, and I think that is the main thrust of the book and that is what, through all of

the research and actually that I'm still kind of struck by again and again and again in my psychotherapy work with women is what we internal, like what we're conditioned by or what we internalise as a belief system around what we should feel, how we should act, how we should be in the world. And that's a lot of stories to attach to something like being in pain or feeling irritable or feeling angry. Anger is such a big important subject that I think we're only really starting to open up in relation to women's lives now and the amount that we hold onto. And we hold onto it because we have been conditioned

through all of this history of medical misogyny and misunderstanding or any understanding at all of what's happening within us. And I think a lot of the way we react to ourselves and all of this happens internally is narratives, is stories about how we should be in the world. Being in pain is a really good example, to be kind of racked with pain.

We have an internal reaction to that. What do I do? I should be able to deal with it. The tyranny of shoulds is a really common phrase in psychology. But that is our torture. I really, really believe that so much of our mental distress relates to shoulds, relates to the defences that we have. By defences I mean any of the unconscious processes we have to sort of maintain the phrase that psychoanalysts would use would

be like psychological homeostasis. Right, okay. To kind of be on an even keel. So if we are feeling angry about something, we might defend against that with people pleasing. One might do that. We might. It's one option. I probably would do that. We might. It's one option. I probably would do that. Yeah. And all of this work that happens internally to kind of take us away from the distress that we're feeling.

And I think we should be trying to reframe that as much as possible. And a really killer piece of literature that I came across in the research and that I think about all the time is these feminist psychologists in Australia have done these really kind of punchy studies around the fact that in that kind of pre-menstrual week or two weeks or, you know, can happen any time in the second half of the cycle when we feel anxious, sad, despairing, irritable, really fucking angry with everyone around us, you know, and we've, I know what that feels like where you're vibrating with rage. Rage. Absolutely. So they looked at this idea of whether hormones, you know, the kind of fluctuation of hormones, which we still don't

know a huge amount. We know in some, but how they interact with the rest of our chemistry and the rest of it, we have ideas. But that actually it's kind of a truth serum. And that that period of time is when we are the most alive to what we really feel or what we really see or what we really need to do and say. And I love that framing. When I realized that I always say this to women who are terrified of going through the menopause and they're terrified of, especially from a sort of mental health perspective, because I think for me, having gone through quite an early one, my confidence definitely, it was like I woke up one morning and all this confidence I'd

spent decades trying to build up had just been kind of whipped away from me. But I definitely feel, and I have really reframed it in the last couple of years, that there's a sort of witchy magic to menopause. It's almost like everything that gets brought up is like your body going, your brain saying, are you going to deal with this now? Because if you don't deal with this, the next 40 years of your life are going to be miserable. This is an opportunity to deal with all the issues you haven't quite got to over the last 40 years. So for me, it was very much self-esteem.

It was very much people pleasing. It was very much I had to kind of almost come undone, you know, to rebuild. And I think once I'd done that reframing about the kind of the hormonal piece, it was like, fucking hell, that is wild. That is healing. That is like it was challenging myself at like the very, the most sort of like core place. Yeah.

And it's not to say that the work is done, but I know that definitely when I feel those things and when I, I can know, I know in my body now when I'm, you know, progesterone, I'm like, oh, that'm like, oh, this is something that I need to deal with. But the other thing and going back to PMS, which I thought was really fascinating in your book, was you talk about the evolutionary purpose of PMS. That if we, back in the early days of humans,

when we lived on the wilds, in the savannas of Africa or whatever. If our partner wasn't impregnating us, it allowed us to be ragey and get rid of them so we could bring someone in who would impregnate us in the next cycle. Yeah. I think that is fucking brilliant. Don't you? It's so radical to think about, isn't it, that things could be that clear. Yeah. That this isn't actually a bad thing.

This is actually a really revolutionary kind of important thing that we need to do each month to be honest, to reset ourselves. Yeah. I think it's really getting at something. It feels like radical to say, which is mad, isn't it? But what it also points to is how tightly we're holding on the rest of the time to, so I was talking about defences, you know, anything that we do to kind of disavow or reframe or, you know, repress what we feel is a psychological defense. And if in that two weeks between

ovulation and bleeding, I don't know about you, but I've always found that once I start bleeding my mind is like... Clear. Yeah. Yeah. It's incredible. My mother and my grandmother went through menopause very early in their 40s. And I've been on HRT now for a couple of years, but I really am not at the mercy of my hormones anymore. And that is quite a freeing thing. There was something else I was thinking about, which was, you know, reading your book, I was really struck by the pressure we put upon ourselves to, you know, you talk about women who they, you know, we

were, you know, we don't want to go on HRT, you know, it has to be bio identical, you know, we sort of shame ourselves almost with these very good medical options that have been created for us to make our lives easier. So we do that in terms of menopause, but we also do it in terms of childbirth. And I was thinking back, you know, it's been a long time since I experienced childbirth, but I was thinking back to that whole process and how much we, you know, the whole, the run up to it is all about, you know, hypnobirthing and golden thread breathing. And I always remember as well going to like an NCT class and there were like 10 of us in the group

and I remember the instructor or whatever, she spoke about natural childbirth until, you know, she was blue in the face. Like she couldn't have spoken more about, you know, and then this will happen and that will happen and your body knows what to do. And I get that, I really do. It's like wonderful if your body can do what it's supposed to do. That's fucking brilliant. But we know that for many women that isn't the case.

And you know, I saw I put my hand up and I said, well, you're statistically one or two of us in this room are going to end up having emergency caesarean sections. So can we talk about that? And she said, well, we don't really want to end on a sour note. Those were her words. God's sake. I remember, I think I wrote about it at the time and I got, she took me off the mailing list. It was so funny. For being disruptive. Yeah, for being disruptive. But anyway, I was one of the people that ended up having

an emergency C-section. But you know, this is the thing. So what was so interesting was to me, and everyone has very different experiences of birth, and people have a lot of birth trauma as well, because we're not prepared for when things do go wrong, which they do. Of course they do. And this is where we need to talk about it. So it didn't go as planned, but I sort of

like I was very much I remember the doctor saying to me, I'm really sorry, but we're going to have to give you an emergency c-section. And I remember saying, why are you apologising? Just get this motherfucking baby out of me. Do you know what I mean? And get it out of me alive and keep me alive. And we're all good babes. Do you know what I mean? And did you say we're all good babes, do you know what I mean? And did you say we're all good babes? Probably. I remember saying, because I remember looking up and everyone looked so young, they all looked so young, I was like this is like Muppet Babies. It's like Muppet Babies doctors. And I started singing, I was singing the Muppet Babies. Muppet Babies will do the same for you. Do you remember the Muppet babies?

Cool. Okay. So that was, you know, I was pretty far gone on some drugs by that point. I don't know. I'm not going to lie. But I remember this kind of like, oh, sorry. And I remember thinking, oh my God, I can't, I felt like I'd failed because I had an emergency C-section. God, that's- It's a bit like I remember afterwards I couldn't breastfeed. My boobs were

just fucking massive and having thought that I would be like this is where I was going to come into my own and I'm going to be feeding everyone. Feeding the village. Yeah the village milkmaid. Actually what happened was my daughter was like the first person in my life to turn away from my boobs screaming in horror, basically. Wow. She was like, you know. They're magnificent. Let's be real. Thanks.

But anyway, I remember again, the shame about that. You're not breast. But I was just having to say, when I was reading your book, it was really viscerally coming back to me, the pressure we put on ourselves as women to do things in a certain way that we have perceived to be the right way. And actually in the end, the right way is the way you end up doing it. And surviving. Is the right way. And not dying. Yeah. It's so powerful what you're talking about. And it kind of, it really curdles me hearing stories like yours of how sad and how fucked the conditioning is around natural and the purity of a woman's body that so many

end up in situations where they feel like they have to apologize in a situation like you're describing. I mean, I find that so staggering. And it shows how deep the conditioning goes around all of these ideas around what a woman should be, even in moments of unbelievable vulnerability, where there are two lives to preserve. I still blame myself for the fact I ended up having an emergency C-section. I still think that I wasn't like, there's a part of my brain, and I don't think about it very often to be honest, so it's not like this isn't something that wakes me up in the middle

of the night, but you know, my daughter's 11 now, but I still have this sort of like, oh, if I had been less of a fuck-quit, if I had studied harder, if I had practiced the golden thread breathing more. Then what? Then maybe it wouldn't have happened. And of course, I know, I know intellectually that is not the case, you know, but I think it's, I'm sort of saying this because I think it is, as you say, it's to show how deeply internalized this shame we put on ourselves. And that's before we even get into the whole conversation of how the pressure we put on

ourselves to be mothers when that isn't our only role in life. You know, there is this whole other podcast I could do about infertility or, you know, choosing not to have children, you know. This is very specifically about, you know, hormones, but it's about our mental health as women. And I just feel like almost the whole month should just be me interviewing you on separate differently, you know, because this isn't, you can't boil this all down to a like 40-minute episode of a podcast, but I think it's really important to get people listening to shift into that more nurturing view of their bodies and to start this year with that thing of,

maybe your PMS isn't a bad thing. Maybe you're not a bad person because you have this. Maybe if we were more in tune with ourselves, with our vital signs, we would be able to live our lives more fully. Yeah. I mean, it's a monumental project that we're talking about. So someone I worked with who would just find their partner absolutely intolerable in the PMS week, I mean, truly intolerable in like the PMS week.

I mean, truly intolerable. The rest of the month, not at all. But part of our work was kind of working to look at why does her voice stop here? You know, what is in the way of her saying what she needs to say and even knowing what her needs are. And we kind of got to a point of realizing that she's so flooded with her own needs at that time that she is so overwhelmed, she doesn't know how to be. She doesn't, you know, and anything her partner would do wouldn't feel like enough, you know,

it wouldn't quite touch it. But I think it's important to not over pathologize what's happening. You know, for some people, having the medical framing is really important because there are certain medications that will really help. Some people not, you know, that it's a whole other podcast talking about hormonal medication. And we're going gonna do it at a later date. Yes, but we cannot pathologize all of this. That is a dead end because there is a biological process happening, clearly, but that cannot be the entirety of the story. Our relationships, our history, it's kind of everything. It's like the ecosystem that we live in. You cannot divorce a body from the environment that it lives in.

That is a complete dead end. So I always encourage people to go inwards, to think, what do I need at the moment? And that might be something really simple like going to bed. If you are able to go to bed for a couple of hours in the middle of the day. Oh, God, what a gift. Right, but at the...

Without beating yourself up. Yeah, drowning in guilt. I'd speak from experience there. But to go inwards and to kind of think, what is this about? If I'm furious, you know, anger is very often beneath it is something more vulnerable. There is something unsaid, there is something unmet, there is something that needs to change. And the anger is a really useful signal for that. It's like, oh, God,

you know, I need to do something, I need to say something. But if you can think about what you need, then I think that opens, if you can be curious with yourself, rather than going down that incredibly tempting, and we're talking about this, this all happens internally. You know, it's wild, the inner lives that we have. But if you can give yourself a bit of time to think if I'm applying the word should, then it's a story, it's a narrative. Where does that come from? Whose voice is that? Very often it's not your own. You know, if you can kind of be curious enough to think about what's happening inside of you. You know, we internalize people's voices. You know, I often still hear voices of particular teachers who I haven't thought about for, you know, 25 years, but

they're there and they become part of our belief system. And that is what informs how we view ourselves, how we think about ourselves, but there is room to think differently. Do you know, I think that you might, Eleanor, have just given the best bit of advice for all of 2025, which is question the shoulds, be curious about the shoulds that you put upon yourself. Yep. Ask, inquire, wonder, and maybe allow yourself this year to just be. Dare to be curious about where they come from because they are not sacrosanct, they are not the

law. The mind is changeable, is malleable. We can change our relationships with ourselves and I think sometimes it does start with questioning what is automatic. Those automatic negative thoughts we have, those automatic, God, I really should be able to do this better. I should be able to cope better. Why? Says who? Question the authority. Eleanor, on that note, thank you so much. Pleasure. God, I could have carried on chatting to Eleanor well into the year 2026. And you know what, there is a lot of talking about hormones, women's hormones and women's mental health in particular, that needs to be done. I think the main takeaway from me is that when we

understand our bodies, it's not just empowering, it's really essential to us reaching our full potential in life. And don't dismiss yourself. Please don't dismiss yourself. If you take one thing from this episode into the rest of 2025, make sure that it's you're not dismissing your body, your feelings, all of it. Listen to yourself. If this episode resonated with you, please share it with someone who might need to hear it. And don't forget to hit follow and leave us a review. It helps more people to find us. As always, take care of yourself and I'll see you on Friday.