Episode 449: Dr. Sarah Hill: How Birth Control Changes Your Brain, Dating Choices, and Evolutionary Psychology

Is hormonal birth control affecting more than just pregnancy prevention? In this Habits and Hustle podcast episode, I am joined by Dr. Sarah Hill, an evolutionary psychologist and author who explains the surprising ways birth control pills influence women's brains, behavior, and mate selection. We discuss how synthetic hormones alter women's natural cycles, changing partner preferences and affecting emotional responses. We also explore the fascinating science behind mate selection through an evolutionary lens, why men are attracted to women at peak fertility, and how birth control can disrupt the pheromonal cues that influence attraction. Dr. Sarah Hill is an evolutionary psychologist, author, and researcher who earned her Ph. D. at the University of Texas at Austin working with Dr. David Buss. Her research focuses on understanding behavior and motivation through the lens of Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection, with particular emphasis on women's psychology, hormones, and sexual motivation. What We Discuss: (00:00) Birth Control & Women's Psychological States (04:14) Effects of Birth Control on Emotions (15:26) Relationship Changes After Birth Control (19:22) Hormonal Birth Control and Pheromones (27:05) Partner Preferences and Attraction Triggers (34:43) Modern Dating Challenges and Hormones (39:01) Modern Dating Delays Marriage (42:51) Women's Relationship Choices and Evolution (48:07) Competition, Jealousy, and Marriage Threats (55:27) Divorce, Dating, and Female Friendship (01:04:43) Hormonal Birth Control and Side Effects …and more! Thank you to our sponsors: Therasage: Head over to therasage.com http://therasage.com/ and use code Be Bold for 15% off TruNiagen: Head over to truniagen.com http://truniagen.com/ and use code HUSTLE20 to get $20 off any purchase over $100. Magic Mind: Head over to www http://www/.magicmind.com http://magicmind.com//jen and use code Jen at checkout. Air Doctor: Go to airdoctorpro.com http://airdoctorpro.com/ and use promo code HUSTLE for up to $300 off and a 3-year warranty on air purifiers. Bio.me: Link to daily prebiotic fiber here https://bio.me/?utm_source=Jennifer, code Jennifer20 for 20% off. Momentous: Shop this link https://www.livemomentous.com/?srsltid=AfmBOorDUIZz3psr1Qsq_n1yE8_6JTq_QUFabOO9lH65HDEXCIoJOPLj and use code Jen for 20% off DavidProtein: Try David today—buy 4, get the 5th free at davidprotein.com/habitsandhustle http://davidprotein.com/habitsandhustle. Find more from Jen: Website: https://www.jennifercohen.com/ Instagram: @therealjencohen Books: https://www.jennifercohen.com/books Speaking: https://www.jennifercohen.com/speaking-engagement Find more from Dr. Sarah Hill: Website: https://www.sarahehill.com/ Books: https://www.sarahehill.com/your-brain-on-birth-control/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sarahehillphd/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  Hi guys, it's Tony Robbins. You're listening to Habits and Hustle. Crush it!

• 0:06Jen Cohen?

  Can birth control really change who you're attracted to, or even who you become? On this episode of Habits and Hustle, I'm joined by Dr. Sarah Hill, who's an evolutionary psychologist and author to explore how hormonal birth control impacts the brain, behavior, and mate choice. We dive into how the pill can alter sexual desire, stress response, emotional sensitivity, and even influence the type of partner you're drawn to. It may even affect your mental health and motivation in ways most women aren't told. So whether you're using birth control or just curious, this is an eye-opening conversation that will change how you think about hormones and your identity.

• 0:56Jen Cohen?

  Before we dive into today's episode, I first want to thank our sponsor Therasage. Their Trillight panel has become my favorite biohacking thing for healing my body. It's a portable red light panel that I simply cannot live without. I literally bring it with me everywhere I go, and I personally use their red light therapy to help reduce inflammations in places in my body where honestly I have pain. You can use it on a sore back, stomach cramps, shoulder, ankle. Red light therapy is my go-to. Plus, it also has amazing anti-aging benefits, including reducing signs of fine lines and wrinkles

• 1:35Jen Cohen?

  on your face, which I also use it for. I personally use Therasage Trillight everywhere and all the time. It's small, it's affordable, it's portable, and it's really effective. Head over to therasage.com right now and use code BBOULD for 15% off. This code will work site-wide. Again, head over to therasage, T-H-E-R-A-S-A-G-E.com and use code BBOULD for 15% off any of their products.

• 2:20Jen Cohen?

  Okay, you guys, this is gonna be a goodie. We have Sarah, Dr. Sarah Hill on the podcast today, who is an evolutionary psychologist. By the way, I want you to tell us what that is. But she is someone who talks all about hormones, the effects of birth control. You wrote a whole book on this. And mating, which is, again, I love all your stuff. So I'm so happy you're here today.

• 2:46Speaker 02

  Thank you. I'm so excited to be here. And I will tell you what an evolutionary psychologist is.

• 2:50Jen Cohen?

  Please.

• 2:51Speaker 02

  So I'm a psychologist. And the thing I'm really interested in is trying to study behavior and motivation. So I'm like really interested in why people do things that they do. And the lens that I use to do my research is that of Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection. And all that that means is that I use the tools from evolutionary theory to make new predictions about why people do the things that they do and think the things that they think and feel the things that they feel. And yeah.

• 3:16Jen Cohen?

  That's so that's.

• 3:17Speaker 02

  That's it.

• 3:17Jen Cohen?

  That's a great, that's a great summary of what you do. But then you wrote a book about birth control.

• 3:23Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 3:24Jen Cohen?

  And that was, but you wrote that book a while ago. But it seems to get, it's been seeming to get more, a lot of traction recently.

• 3:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. So I did, so I wrote the book in 2019. It was published in 2019. And I've spent my research career studying women and trying to understand especially sexual motivation. That has been sort of my bread and butter in research is trying to understand women's motivational states with respect to sexual relationships. And then I went off the birth control pill that I had been on for more than a decade of my life. And when I went off of it, I felt like I woke up. Like I felt like I like went from like a black and white line drawing into like this full dimensional colorful reality. And I kept asking myself, like, is there something about those hormones that I was on that influenced me? And you know, it's funny, because I had published in my research

• 4:14Speaker 02

  that I had done, you know, throughout my career studying women and women's psychology, published papers about the ways that women's hormones affect their motivational states and sexual desire and everything else. And it never even crossed my mind that these synthetic hormones that I was taking were then, of course, also going to influence the way that my brain worked and the way I felt and the way I experienced things. And so I went to the research literature to see what had been published on birth control pill in women's brains. And I saw that, oh, my gosh, you know, there's all this research that's been around for like 30 years that nobody's ever told anything about. And so that's what ultimately led me into that research area to really begin to uncover what we know and don't know about hormonal birth control in

• 4:58Speaker 02

  the brain. And as you noted, I did publish this in 2019. And it's really, you know, in a lot of ways, it was a little bit before its time because people weren't really having these conversations yet about birth control. And it's really been in the last two years or so that things have really exploded and women are really interested in trying to better understand, one, what does birth control pill, what do birth control pills do to their brain and the way that they experience the world, but then also who are they off of it? And trying to better understand the role of their hormones and everything else in the way that they experience the world.

• 5:34Jen Cohen?

  So why do you think now, or like two years ago, it became such a hashtag worthy topic, like hormones? It's become very trendy. It's very big, like you said. What do you think? What was the, like, what was the trajectory that all of a sudden people are really talking about this now?

• 5:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's such a great question. And I've always wondered it myself. I mean, I think it was a combination of, you know, I think that the pandemic made us all look inward just in terms of our health and trying to understand our bodies. It gave us a lot more time because we had time on our hands during that time to try to educate ourselves. So I think that there was a little bit of that where people were kind of trying to understand their bodies a little bit more during the pandemic because they were trying to keep themselves healthy in the face of this, you know, unpredictable kind of a virulent threat.

• 6:22Speaker 02

  But I also think that just as the next generation of women has sort of started to, you know, phase out of the reproductive years and younger women have sort of moved into that space. This is a much more savvy population in some ways. Like I'm a Gen Xer and you know, when I was growing up, if my doctor gave me something, I never thought twice about it. I didn't think, I didn't think about what was in my tampons. You know, I didn't think about anything. I mean, it was just like, okay, this is like what you take and this is what you put in your body.

• 6:52Jen Cohen?

  Exactly.

• 6:52Speaker 02

  You know what I mean? And the younger generation of women are suspicious of that. And they're like, wait a minute, like what is in these tampons? And you know, sure enough, it's a bunch of chemicals.

• 7:01Jen Cohen?

  Right.

• 7:02Speaker 02

  And now there's like labels on there and we know what's in them. And so I think as these women who are a little bit more suspicious of the idea of just put something in your body and shut up little lady.

• 7:13Jen Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 7:13Speaker 02

  You know, that they're not willing to put up with that. And so I think that these younger generation of women in their quest to try to better understand what's going into their bodies, has really begun to do a deep dive in trying to understand the impact of synthetic hormones and in particular the pill, on the way that their bodies sort of experience the world.

• 7:29Jen Cohen?

  So let's talk about that because I think this is how I found you. Because you initially started talking about how our brains are very different and our choices or life choices are very different. When we're on birth control versus when we're not on birth control. Can you just talk about some of these major things that change our brains when we're on synthetic hormones?

• 7:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely. So the first thing that we need to do is just orient ourselves to a naturally cycling woman. Right? So this is somebody who's not using hormonal birth control. And let's learn a little bit or talk about a little bit about what their hormones do. And so if you are a naturally cycling woman, meaning you're not on the pill, but you're having cycles. The first day of your cycle is the day you get your period. Right? So that's why your doctor is always asking, when was the first day of your last menstrual period? It's because that is the start of your cycle. And at that point, your levels of sex hormones are really low. So even though women get a hard time all the time about, you know, being hormonal because they're having their period.

• 8:29Jen Cohen?

  Totally.

• 8:29Speaker 02

  That is like literally the time in the cycle when our hormones are at. Their absolute lowest. And when our hormones are really low, that tells our brain that it needs to stimulate our ovaries to begin egg follicle maturation. Right? So our brain tells our ovaries, start working on some eggs. And as those eggs are beginning to develop, that leads to the release of estrogen. Right? And as the eggs are maturing and developing and getting ready to ovulate, estrogen levels rise, rise, rise, rise, rise. And so for naturally cycling women during the first two weeks of the cycle, it's characterized by this nice, beautiful rise in estrogen. That corresponds to the period of time in the cycle when sex can lead to conception.

• 9:08Speaker 02

  Right? And so it's not surprising that what we tend to see with research in estrogen is that when estrogen is high and rising, like getting close to ovulation. Women experience increases in sexual desire. They feel sexier. They have more sex. They're more likely to have orgasms. They have more energy. They're more attuned to all things related to mating. So they notice men. They can decipher the scent differences between different types of men. They're cued into testosterone levels in men. And all of these things correspond to this big rise in estrogen that women get right prior to ovulation. Because this is the time in the cycle when sex can lead to conception.

• 9:47Speaker 02

  Right? And so it's like evolution by natural selection made our brain primed for mating and the ability to sort of distinguish between high and low quality mates. At this time when estrogen is high and rising. So then you ovulate and then that empty egg follicle actually becomes a temporary endocrine structure. And it starts to release a second sex hormone called progesterone. Right? So the first two weeks are characterized by this high and rising levels of estrogen. Right? That corresponds to the release of the egg. Women feeling great and happy and sexy and flirty and noticing men. And then all of a sudden their estrogen levels crash and instead it's replaced by the second sex hormone progesterone, which remains relatively elevated for the last two weeks of the cycle.

• 10:30Speaker 02

  And during this time, women are hungrier, they're sleepier, their energy levels are lower, they tend to be more emotionally a little bit all over the place. In psychology, we call it labile, right? It was like when you're kind of moving around. Around a little bit.

• 10:42Jen Cohen?

  What's it called? Labile?

• 10:44Speaker 02

  Labile. Isn't that a fancy word for like,

• 10:46Jen Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 10:46Speaker 02

  like being kind of all over the place?

• 10:48Jen Cohen?

  Right, scattered.

• 10:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, a little emotionally, you know, sensitive. And so for naturally cycling women, you get this nice rise in estrogen, which is characterized by one set of states usually related to sexual desire and attraction. And then you get the second half of the cycle, which is characterized more by emotional sensitivity and tiredness and hungry and all of that stuff. And so this is important to keep in mind because this is what the normal sort of state of affairs is for women. Now, what happens with a birth control pill is all of that gets shut down. Okay, so you take this pill and it tells your brain, do not stimulate your ovaries. Right? And so your ovaries never start maturing egg follicles. You don't release estrogen. You don't release an egg, which is why you don't get pregnant. You don't release progesterone.

• 11:32Speaker 02

  Instead, you take this daily synthetic set of hormones, which is comprised of level of the synthetic progesterone, which is called a progestin. Right? And it is what fools the brain into not stimulating the ovaries. And then a relatively low level of estrogen. And so every day, women get the same hormonal message. And that hormonal message is relatively high level of synthetic progesterone or progestin, low level of estrogen. And so this, of course, creates a state when you're getting the same message repeated every single day. This creates a very different state than that beautiful waxing and waning between like sexual desire and, you know, feeling sexy and alive and energetic and then feeling a little bit tired and sleepier and hungrier. And instead, it makes the same daily hormonal message

• 12:17Speaker 02

  that is one that tends to be characterized by relatively low levels of sexual desire, low energy levels, more sleepiness, a greater risk of depression. And you don't get those big surges in feeling sexy or sexual desire or any of these other things that we tend to see in naturally cycling women. Instead, you get the same daily hormonal message every day. And so it creates a very different state.

• 12:40Jen Cohen?

  So it kind of blunts your emotions in some way.

• 12:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, it does.

• 12:44Jen Cohen?

  It blunts your like highs and lows. Your, so what, because of that. We you would say we'd make different choices. So you're saying that we would pick and choose different mates and partners even based on that.

• 12:59Speaker 02

  Right, we could. So here's what the research tells us. So one of the things that we know about estrogen, when it's moving across the cycle for a naturally cycling woman, is that when estrogen levels are high and rising, this is related to an increased preference in cues that are related to, for example, genetic compatibility. So women prefer the scent of genetically compatible men when estrogen levels are high, and they're not able to tell the difference between them when they're at low fertility. And so estrogen primes our brain to be more sensitive to these fine tuned differences between men. And women are able to distinguish between genetically compatible and incompatible mates, and are more dialed in to those that they're compatible with in a way that they're not

• 13:41Speaker 02

  at low fertility. We also know that when estrogen is high in the cycle, that women express a greater preference for facial, vocal, and behavioral masculinity in men, meaning that they prefer men with more masculinized male faces, with sort of more social dominance in their like personalities.

• 13:59Jen Cohen?

  When they're not on the pill.

• 14:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, when they're not on the pills. So this is all, this is all women, when they, when they're at that estrogen, high estrogen point in the cycle, because your brain is primed for mating, and evolution by natural selection has shaped our brain to be sensitive to levels of estrogen. And when estrogen is high, it turns up the volume on all things related to being able to decipher between, you know, good and maybe less good mates. And it also increases women's attent-, I mean, it just makes them more sexual. They are just like more dialed in to their sexuality. Right? So that's what naturally cycling women. When women are on the pill, and you're not experiencing this, so you're not, you're not getting that big surge in estrogen, you never experience that shift that's going to lead you to have a greater preference for, for example, masculinized male faces

• 14:45Speaker 02

  and voices and behaviors. You're not going to get that shift that leads you to be able to tell the difference between men who might be genetically compatible and incompatible based on their scent. You're also not going to be motivated to choose a partner based on sexual attraction, because your sexual attraction and just sexual desire tends to be dampened. And so what we tend to see Is that when women choose partners, when they're using hormonal birth control, they tend to de-emphasize that quali- like they tend to de-emphasize the extent to which they value qualities related to sexual attraction, right? They tend to prefer less masculinized male faces and they tend to prioritize other cues that have absolutely nothing to do with sex. Like what? So, for example, like a man's provisioning ability. So is he going to be a stable,

• 15:30Speaker 02

  financially providing partner? Is this somebody who's going to be somebody that they see as potentially a good father? And obviously, these are incredibly important things, right? Most women who are choosing long-term mates wouldn't look at that list of characteristics and say, this is a terrible decision, right? It's terrible. But it's going to lead you to something a little bit different, right? And sometimes- More stable. Well, yeah. More secure. Yeah, more stable, more secure. More feminine? Yeah, more fem- and what's really interesting about this is that when they- researchers have done studies where they looked at the divorce rate- Yeah. -of women who chose their partners when they're on or off the pill, and women who choose their partners when they're on the pill are less likely to get divorced. But when they do get divorced, they're overwhelmingly the ones who initiate it, which is also really interesting. Really?

• 16:13Speaker 02

  Yeah. And so it suggests that it does lead to more relationship stability in some ways, because you're sort of choosing based on your head, you know? Not your heart. Not your heart, but that, of course, comes at a cost. And for some women, what happens when they go off of hormonal birth control and they do start cycling again, and all of a sudden they're going through these periods of estrogen surge, if all of a sudden they don't like what they see or what they smell in some cases, then it leads them to become less sexually attracted to their partner, and sometimes it can lead to relationship breakups. And so what tends to happen, and there's been research that's looked at, you know, what happens when we follow couples longitudinally, so over time, when they've gotten together, when they were- when the woman was using hormonal birth control, and

• 16:58Speaker 02

  then she discontinues it later on. And what researchers find is that if women were- chose their partners when they're on the pill, go off the pill, that it does lead to changes in attraction and sexual desire with respect to their partner. But for some women, it gets better. So if they just so happened to choose a partner who had those qualities that they're naturally cycling self likes, that it's associated with an increased sexual attraction to their partner, more sexual desire and they have more sex. But for some women, it leads to the opposite and the women discontinue it and all of a sudden, they don't feel attracted to their partner. Their sexual attraction to them decreases and then it causes relationship problems. And so essentially what it's doing is it's taking the blinders off.

• 17:41Jen Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 17:42Speaker 02

  And, and so some of the time when you take the blinders off, you know, it's kind of like the, the show on like Netflix, like Love is Blind.

• 17:48Jen Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 17:49Speaker 02

  Yeah. It's like, it's like you choose a partner without, you know, with the, with the little mask on.

• 17:52Jen Cohen?

  The goggles on.

• 17:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, the goggles on and you have no idea what they look like. And sometimes you pull off the goggles and it works. Sometimes you pull off the goggles and it doesn't work. And that's pretty much what is going on with hormonal birth control is because it's a little bit of a different version of yourself who is choosing that person than who you are once you're off of it.

• 18:09Jen Cohen?

  So how about on the male side? Because if you're picking, if, if you're, if the females, certain things are dampened, like her sexual libido and her desires and all these other things are like more dampened, what kind of man is attracted to a woman on birth control versus one that's not?

• 18:27Speaker 02

  That's like such a fascinating question and nobody's like, nobody's asked the question quite as you just asked it. Right? And that's a really interesting question and like, and something that like I'll totally have to go back to the lab and research. But what, what they have done is they have looked at like the extent to which women, or pardon me, the, the extent to which men desire women who are either using or not using hormonal birth control. And what research generally finds is that low and behold, you know, men are more attracted to women when they're naturally cycling, particularly when they're at a high estrogen part in their cycle. Right? And one of the things I talk about in my, in my book is this really brilliant study that was done, this was done several years ago now, and that was done at a strip club.

• 19:12Speaker 02

  And they had all of the women who were working there as dancers, keeping a diary. And they indicated whether they were using hormonal birth control or not. Right. And then every day, they just simply wrote, did they get their period today or not? I mean, how much money did they earn? Right. And so they were able to look at all of the dancers, their tip earnings over the course of two menstrual cycles. And then they were able to divide the women up based on whether or not they were using or not using hormonal birth control. And what they found was that for women who are naturally cycling, so again, experiencing their own hormones, you get this really sharp increase in tip earnings that are corresponding right around high fertility. So they're earning more money when estrogen is high in the cycle than they are when estrogen is low in the cycle.

• 19:56Speaker 02

  And these women are out earning, the pill takers, whose, whose earnings were relatively flat across the, the cycle. They were out earning them by several hundred dollars a shift. And so just going to show that even, you know, and we don't know what it is about that. Like, was it something about the way the women were moving because they were feeling sexier? Is it something about the way that they smell? Because we also know from research that men prefer the scent of women at high fertility compared to low, suggesting that men can pick up on estrogen levels by scent, which doesn't really make a whole, um, it's not very surprising because many cells in the body express estrogen. And so we would expect that this would be the case. But men do seem to pick up on the scent of estrogen.

• 20:37Speaker 02

  And so it could be that, it could be that the women are dressing sexier when they're, I mean, we just have no idea exactly what it is, but men seem to be picking up on it and they prefer that. And so those women earn more money than the women who are naturally, who are using hormonal birth control because men are dialed into cues of fertility, right? And again, evolution by natural selection would have it no other way than for a man to be most turned on by women at times when conception is possible. Because men who had that Tendency, they would have passed down a greater number of genes because those are the women that they would be sleeping with.

• 21:12Jen Cohen?

  That is so interesting.

• 21:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, totally.

• 21:15Jen Cohen?

  And like, these are a lot of things that you ever would think about, right?

• 21:17Speaker 02

  Like, no.

• 21:18Jen Cohen?

  Partner choice and all of these things. What is like the percentage of women, do you know, that are on birth control?

• 21:25Speaker 02

  So, I don't know.

• 21:26Jen Cohen?

  In different age brackets?

• 21:27Speaker 02

  In different age brackets. So, the, by far, the most frequent users are women in their young, like, early twenties.

• 21:33Jen Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 21:33Speaker 02

  You know, like, twenty to thirty is like the big age range. Twenty to twenty-five in particular is like really hot. And in some cases, I've seen population estimates as high as like forty percent or something. It's very, very high. And then it's, and then it falls off. And this is the group of women who is usually most motivated to avoid pregnancy. I mean, a lot of these women are in college or trying to build their careers or, you know, just trying to avoid parenthood for other, other reasons.

• 22:00Jen Cohen?

  Right.

• 22:00Speaker 02

  And.

• 22:01Jen Cohen?

  What about IUDs? How about that?

• 22:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, so the, the, it depends on what IUD you're talking about.

• 22:06Jen Cohen?

  But there's two, the copper one?

• 22:07Speaker 02

  The copper one doesn't have the hormonal effects, right? And so, that is definitely one that I would recommend for women who are willing to try it. And I know it sounds really scary and barbaric, and so not everybody is like game to want to have that put in. And doctors are getting better about it. They used to not want to give that to women who hadn't had kids because they were like, oh, you know.

• 22:27Jen Cohen?

  Really?

• 22:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, but they're getting, they're getting over that position, thankfully. But, so, yeah, that is a non-hormonal option that is obviously incredibly effective. It tends to, besides, you do tend to get heavier cramping and bleeding with that. But other than that, it has a very manageable psychological sort of profile of side effects. And so, that's one that I like as an alternative to something hormonal. The hormonal IUD also has a lot of these same effects that we've been talking about.

• 22:57Jen Cohen?

  What would be the point of taking an IUD with hormones if you could take one without hormones and get the same effect?

• 23:02Speaker 02

  I know. No, amen. I have no idea. Yeah, no, I honestly, I have no idea. And so some people might say, well, you know, you can avoid copper toxicity because you do, it does create an inflammatory experience like down in your cervix to have that there. But it really is minor and most women, it's not anything to worry about. And they've done a lot of safety tests on it. And I think that there's a lot of myth around the idea of copper toxicity with that.

• 23:27Jen Cohen?

  I've had it my whole life.

• 23:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 23:29Jen Cohen?

  Like 20 years or, I changed it, but like every 10 years you change it.

• 23:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, they're great. I mean, yeah, no, that's like, that's definitely my, my favorite because it does allow you to cycle.

• 23:38Jen Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 23:38Speaker 02

  And experience your normal, you know, state of your amplitude of being. Whereas with the hormonal IUD, it's like, you know, most women who are on it, and here's, there's a few funky things about it. So one is that most women who are on it, when they're first on it for like the first year or so.

• 23:54Jen Cohen?

  The copper one?

• 23:55Speaker 02

  No, this is the hormonal one.

• 23:57Jen Cohen?

  The hormonal one, okay.

• 23:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's like the women don't ovulate, right? And so there, it's like the hormones being, are released to such an extent that they're telling the brain not to ovulate.

• 24:05Jen Cohen?

  Okay.

• 24:06Speaker 02

  And so doctors will tell women like, oh, it's, you know, locally acting hormones, which is bullshit because there's no such thing as a locally acting hormone.

• 24:13Jen Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 24:13Speaker 02

  Hormones go into the bloodstream and they go everywhere that blood travels. And the last I checked, that's everywhere.

• 24:18Jen Cohen?

  Right.

• 24:19Speaker 02

  And that includes the brain.

• 24:20Jen Cohen?

  Yes.

• 24:20Speaker 02

  And so like the idea that like somehow they managed to just circulate down there is like the biggest bunch of crap. And then doctors.

• 24:27Jen Cohen?

  People will do anything and say anything.

• 24:29Speaker 02

  Well, I know it is.

• 24:30Jen Cohen?

  To sell stuff or to like.

• 24:31Speaker 02

  It's so frustrating because a lot of, you know, I've talked to so many women who've had the experience of feeling like they're totally crazy. Because their doctor is like, well, you know, I've like, I've been so depressed since I started this and you know, and, and, and unable to even get out of bed because of my depression. And, and I feel like it was this IUD, but the doctor said the hormones act locally. And I'm like, that's, that's like malpractice.

• 24:53Jen Cohen?

  Totally, right?

• 24:55Speaker 02

  It's just crazy. I'm like, there's no such thing as a locally acting hormone. And so, you know, most women are ovulating and when they're on it. But then a lot of them about halfway through the five years that they're on it, a lot of them will start ovulating. So then the hormones are in there, but they're not, um, the brain is like up to, they're kind of figured out what's going on. And so, because the levels are low, they keep it very low. And so the, the brain is like, all right, these levels aren't very high and ultimately will start stimulating the ovaries to, um, to ovulate again. But the question I've always had is if you are able to protect yourself from pregnancy with the hormonal IUD without suppressing ovulation. So, right. So not turning that off. Why do you need the hormones in there at all?

• 25:37Jen Cohen?

  That's what I just said. Like, it makes no sense.

• 25:38Speaker 02

  Well, no, I know.

• 25:39Jen Cohen?

  Who in the hell would get an IUD that has hormones? I never understood that. Like, the whole purpose of getting an IUD, so you don't need hormones.

• 25:46Speaker 02

  Well, so I've heard people, so I've heard people get the hormone one because it's plastic and they're like, oh, I don't want the metal in my body. Okay, fine. But this plastic one clearly doesn't need the damn hormones or else, you know.

• 25:58Jen Cohen?

  Exactly. Well, that's the thing. It's, it's basically like, it isn't just like covering your, your, um, cervix?

• 26:04Speaker 02

  Well, it's not really covering it, but it is putting something there. And so your body is like, no, thank you. I'm not getting pregnant.

• 26:10Jen Cohen?

  That's what I mean. It's, it's basically like a, like a, like a shield or whatever, whatever you call it.

• 26:15Speaker 02

  Right. Yeah.

• 26:16Jen Cohen?

  But what I wanted to ask you, cause it sounds like, how about pheromones? Where does pheromones fit into this?

• 26:20Speaker 02

  So pheromones, you know, so pheromones are essentially like anytime they have a chemical signal that's affecting another, another organism, right? So if you smell my estrogen levels, then we call that a pheromone, if that influences your behavior. And so with a naturally cycling woman, you do get these kinds of pheromonal effects, as I've noted, since men, when they smell the scent of ovulating women, it tends to increase their testosterone levels. So men actually get a little increase in testosterone in response to the scent of ovulation and without knowing what it is, right? They'll like smell t-shirts worn by women who are ovulating and they prefer the scent of the ovulating women compared to t-shirts worn by the same women at different phases in the cycle when estrogen is low.

• 27:05Speaker 02

  And so, yes. So having like taken the pill, for example, can disrupt this, right? It can prevent, because women aren't in this nice estrogenic state at any point in their cycle, that's going to decrease some of these attraction related molecules that women might already release otherwise. And other, and it also seems to decrease women's ability to pick up. On male form or pheromonal cues. All right. So we know from research that especially at high fertility, when estrogen is high, women are really good at being able to detect metabolites of testosterone. So when men's bodies are breaking down testosterone, it releases different types of compounds that shed in the skin. And women are really good at being able to pick up on it when estrogen is high.

• 27:49Speaker 02

  Their brain is like, you know, like I smell a man, right?

• 27:52Jen Cohen?

  Really?

• 27:52Speaker 02

  Yes. And, um, yes. And like, I really, it's like, it's, it's attracting to them, right? They, they are, they're drawn to it. They like that. And for women who are using the pill, no.

• 28:02Jen Cohen?

  You know, it's like, it's like they just, everything is shut off.

• 28:04Speaker 02

  It's just blunted. Yeah. It's just blunted. It's that, it's that blindfold from like, we've been talking about from that, um, from that show, Love is Blind.

• 28:11Jen Cohen?

  Love is Blind.

• 28:12Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 28:19Jen Cohen?

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• 29:01Jen Cohen?

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• 29:28Jen Cohen?

  So then women, though, who are not on, on birth control, they typically like, what, what, what is attractive to a woman naturally? And what is attractive, what is attractive to a man?

• 29:42Speaker 02

  Okay. Yeah. And obviously, when I, when I answer this question, it's going to have huge error bars around it because there's so much idiosyncrasy in everybody's partner choice. But just, you know, like, there are some things that men and women tend to desire are sort of in equal measures. And so like, men and women both want a partner who's, you know, kind and understanding and a partner who's in good health. And these are things that men and women are both looking for. In ways that men and women, on average, tend to differ in terms of their partner choice. Women, a naturally cycling woman, likes to strike a balance between what in the evolutionary sciences, we would call direct and indirect benefits. Direct benefits are all of those

• 30:23Speaker 02

  things that you get yourself from your partner. So for example, if they are a good provider, that would be, you know, a good direct benefit. And that's one that we know that women desire in their partners. We also know that women are interested in a long-term mating context with partners who exhibit cues related to being a good dad. Right? So somebody who's going to be caring and be able to help care for children. And so that, those are direct benefits. Anything a woman gets herself. Indirect benefits are essentially good genes. Right? So this is where we're looking for qualities that are related to genetic quality in a partner that we want for our children. And obviously, this usually goes on unconsciously. Right? These tend to be the qualities that our brain just happens to find really sexy. Right? So something like having

• 31:07Speaker 02

  testosterone-related cues. So we like men who have a nice chiseled jaw, right? Broad shoulders, deep voice, you know, a dominant sort of personality. These are cues related to testosterone. And testosterone is what we call a good genes marker, simply because men who were able to release high levels of testosterone during development, that indicates that they probably had a high-quality immune system, because men's immune systems get traded off with testosterone. In a way that men's bodies will not produce high levels of testosterone if they have an immune emergency to deal with. And so the idea here is that only men who are in good health during development are able to release really high levels of testosterone during development,

• 31:51Speaker 02

  because there is this trade off between immune system functioning and testosterone levels. Right. And so one of the reasons that our brain finds testosterone related cues sexy in men is because only men who had relatively high functioning immune systems during development were able to release that and form those types of features. And so, yeah, so it's, yeah. So that's like one type of a cue. The scent of genetic compatibility, that's another set of sort of genes that we're looking for. And we tend to pick this up by way of scent, right? Sort of picking up on some of those cues that somebody might have different immune genes than your own, which are generally the ones that we find most attractive. And for most naturally cycling women, what you see is that when we're choosing a partner, it's generally brokering

• 32:35Speaker 02

  that trade off, you know, it's like sort of understanding you want the sexy qualities that are gonna, you know, just like really attract you and make you physically drawn to somebody. But then also as a long term partner, somebody who's going to be, you know, sort of a good provider and, and, you know, be a good parent and so on and so forth. And, you know, so for naturally cycling woman, what you generally see is that there is some sort of trade off, right? Where they're making decisions about, you know, this person has to be somebody I'm attracted to, but also has to have these other qualities. And then you find the person who best, you know, matches that set of criteria. For women who are using the pill, it seems like all of that, you know, what we call indirect benefits, that genetic compatibility and cues of, you know, immune system quality because of testosterone and all that, it seems like all of

• 33:19Speaker 02

  that just gets shut down. It's just like the light switch goes off. Just goes off. And it's just, it's focusing exclusively on these other partnership qualities, which again, isn't necessarily bad, right? It's just different. It's going to get you a different partner, probably than what you would get if you were striking that balance between what, you know, who you're most physically attracted to. And then, you know, who's going to be a good partner and, you know, good at provisioning. And so that's, you know, women, men tend to be, you know, in a sort of natural state of things. Men are also brokering that same balance, you know, but for men, there's a whole lot of emphasis placed on cues related to fertility and what we call reproductive value. And fertility, of course, refers to the probability that a woman will be able to have a child with an act of sex.

• 34:04Speaker 02

  And we know that for women, fertility peaks at the very young age of about 25 and then starts to decline. And of course, it declines pretty rapidly after a woman's in her late 30s, mid to late 30s. And men, of course, are dialed into cues that have historically been related to fertility. Because again, you know, over the course of evolutionary time, those men who just so happened to find women most beautiful when they were able to reproduce, they would have passed down that preference to a lot of sons, right? Whereas if you have a man whose preference tended to focus on qualities related to older age, they wouldn't have passed down that preference to anybody, right?

• 34:43Jen Cohen?

  Right.

• 34:43Speaker 02

  Because no, those, yeah.

• 34:45Jen Cohen?

  But that doesn't seem to be like, I think, are there very specific things that you can point to in a, that men find attractive beyond just cues of estrogen cycles?

• 34:57Speaker 02

  Right, right. No.

• 34:58Jen Cohen?

  In evolution.

• 35:01Speaker 02

  Absolutely not. That's the only thing that matters.

• 35:03Jen Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 35:03Speaker 02

  No, no, absolutely not. No, um, yeah, there's, there are so many things. I mean, men's, men's partner choices are just as complex as ours in a lot of ways. And what you tend to see is that if men are just choosing like a short-term sexual partner, you know, then it's like, you know, looks and all the superficial stuff.

• 35:20Jen Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 35:20Speaker 02

  When men are choosing a long-term partner, in addition to the cues related to fertility, but in, in, and let me just make sure that I, that's really, that really is important to men's attraction. I mean, whether we like it or not.

• 35:33Jen Cohen?

  Right.

• 35:33Speaker 02

  It's like, you know, it's like.

• 35:34Jen Cohen?

  It's youth also.

• 35:35Speaker 02

  It's huge. Yeah, youth, youth and, and because youth is related to fertility.

• 35:40Jen Cohen?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 35:40Speaker 02

  You know, it's confounded. Yeah. And so those things are, tend to play a really important role. But men are also like, some of the things that they're most important, that they find most important, like when you ask men to rank order, like how important are all these qualities? Loyalty, kindness, right? So some of these, you know, other types of qualities.

• 35:57Jen Cohen?

  I think that's a load of shit, to be honest. I think if they're not attracted to you.

• 36:00Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, no, a hundred percent.

• 36:02Jen Cohen?

  I think after that, then it's loyalty, because I have a lot of guy friends who are in their mid, let's say in their midlife, like forties, let's say, even some of them are fifties, never been married, never have a serious girlfriend. And I try to set them up all the time.

• 36:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 36:18Jen Cohen?

  And I say to them, oh, I have the best girl. She's this, she's, she's pretty, she's successful. She's, you know, she's got a great personality. At the end of the day, they're not interested. Why? Unless they find her hot.

• 36:31Speaker 02

  Right.

• 36:32Jen Cohen?

  Physically.

• 36:33Speaker 02

  Right.

• 36:33Jen Cohen?

  All those other qualities, her success doesn't matter, her confidence doesn't matter, her sense of humor doesn't have, doesn't matter. I think some, I think that with men, it's, this is, I'm no evolutionary psychologist, but I would say physical attractiveness is pretty much paramount.

• 36:50Speaker 02

  I, I would completely agree with that. No, I think that it is. But in, in a lot of ways, I mean, it's for us, for women.

• 36:57Jen Cohen?

  Not for women, no.

• 36:58Speaker 02

  Well, no, so yes and no. So no, I don't think that looks are paramount for women, but I will say that for women, because our, for us, what attraction is, is a lot more complex than for men. Attraction for men is generally physical attraction, right, based on physical cues. Women's attraction is a lot more complicated, right? Just meaning that it's like for us, physical attraction, in addition to just being based on somebody's physical appearance, is also based on all kinds of things. Like, does this person have, you know, a take charge personality? Does this person, you know, say the, like, the right things? Is this person going to be a good provider? And some of these other cues, I mean, it's like, women are the ones who get the ick

• 37:39Speaker 02

  for a reason, you know, it's like the ick is essentially like somebody just violated something that impacts our very complex and nuanced version of attraction, which is about more than just physical appearance. But for us, attraction is just as important as it is for men. It's just that what feeds into attraction for women is more complicated than just physical appearance.

• 37:58Jen Cohen?

  Okay, that, that makes sense to me. That makes sense to me. But then why is there such a mating crisis? Like, people are not dating anymore, as they, they're not having relationships anymore.

• 38:08Speaker 02

  Yeah. And you know, that's such an important question because it's like, what is going to happen societally? Yeah. I mean, honestly, and you know, I think that the, I think the answer is very complicated. I don't, I don't know that I know all the answers. I think that one of the answers is just simply that, you know, we have the ability to regulate our fertility now with birth control. And for most of history, we did not have that ability. And the fact is, there are a lot of people who now are saying, I don't want to have kids and I don't have to have kids. Right. And it used to be the case that that was never a possibility. Right. It's like, if you liked sex, you were going to be a mother, like whether you wanted them or not. Right. Like what do you want, like the idea of like, whether you want kids used to not be a question people could ask.

• 38:53Speaker 02

  It was about whether or not you wanted to have sex. Right. You know, and so I think, you know, that, like, that's one thing, but like, why are people not wanting to have sex? I think that there's a few things happening. One is that I think hormone or endocrine disruptors have lowered testosterone to an extent that it's making people, you know, just less sexually motivated. We know that testosterone is one of the big sexually motivating hormones and that higher levels are related to more sexual desire. Lower levels are linked with less sexual desire. So that's one thing is that we have these endocrine disrupting compounds that are lowering testosterone. And I think that's a part of the puzzle. Another part of the puzzle is hormonal birth control. And we know that hormonal birth control is something that's associated with lower libido.

• 39:36Speaker 02

  Right. So it can really kill women's sexual desire and in a pretty significant way. And so women are feeling less sexually motivated, men, and they're feeling less sexually motivated in part because of the endocrine disruptors. Cause their testosterone also is being lowered and then birth control can lower sexual desire further. So I think that's also part of the picture. I think another part of the picture is that now, you know, we have internet porn available everywhere. And I think that men are like, why should I bother to do all of this work and have to jump through all of these hoops for somebody who's less hot than the person that I see on the computer screen? Mm hmm. And so I think that men are like, not feeling as motivated to do the types of things that they used to have to do. In order to get access to sex.

• 40:20Jen Cohen?

  Right.

• 40:21Speaker 02

  By, you know, just by sort of using a cheap alternative. And so I think that's also part of the picture. Another part of the picture is that birth control has allowed women to achieve more than they've ever achieved in their entire lives. Right? In our entire history as a species, I mean, women are dominating. I mean, it's like we're getting more college degrees. We're getting more advanced degrees. We're going to law school and medical school at a greater extent than men. And women are hypergamous, meaning that they like to mate up. So they like to be involved in relationships with men who have at least as much education as they have themselves. So women are now in this position where they're looking up to find partners who have the same levels, at least of education

• 41:04Speaker 02

  and career success that they have themselves. And there's just not a lot of men there. Because, you know, women are doing really well. Men are kind of like, eh, I don't really, you know, I can just look at porn. And then I don't have to do all this work and get all these degrees and jump through all these hoops in order to get sexual access. Because I, my brain is being tricked into believing I'm getting sexual access by looking at, by looking at pornography. And then the last one, I think, is online dating. And I think that what that has created is made it really easy to find partners. And for men who are doing well, so men in this climate, like who have those really good jobs and have the types of qualities that women are looking for partners, they are now entering the marriage market from the dating market a lot later than they used to.

• 41:47Speaker 02

  And so what happens is because men are able to get access to dates, just like it's so easy, you know, it's so easy to find a date.

• 41:53Jen Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 41:54Speaker 02

  You haven't, when you have a dating app. And so they're not settling down until they're like 40, you know, or like.

• 42:00Jen Cohen?

  Even 50.

• 42:00Speaker 02

  You're 50.

• 42:01Jen Cohen?

  50 is now the new 40.

• 42:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's what they say.

• 42:04Jen Cohen?

  That's what they say.

• 42:05Speaker 02

  They say, that's what the men, that's what the men are trying to tell us.

• 42:07Jen Cohen?

  Yes.

• 42:07Speaker 02

  And so you'll have men who are hanging out in the dating market for a really long time. And then you have women who go into the marriage market from the dating market earlier, where they're like ready to settle down. Because their, their fertility is going to decline. And so women then are up here in the, in the marriage market, right? There's not a lot of men around because they're mostly hanging out in the dating market. And then the women are also looking for people who are at least as educated as themselves. And I mean, it's really causing problems.

• 42:33Jen Cohen?

  Well, yeah, and also from what, from the way you described it, what would, well, that would tell me is if men are getting married later, right, because they don't have to get married as early, they have this dating app so they can date and they're, and now, and, and what they're attracted to is more youthful estrogen cycles. They're going to end up dating younger girls.

• 42:55Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 42:56Jen Cohen?

  So the young girls are going to get married to these older men. Because for girls, men who are older can come across as sexy, not old.

• 43:07Speaker 02

  Right, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 43:08Jen Cohen?

  But for girls, you know, older women look like older women.

• 43:12Speaker 02

  Right, yeah, it's like our brain, it's so interesting because, yeah, go ahead.

• 43:16Jen Cohen?

  Oh, no, I was gonna say, and then what happens is it's leaving these women who have now been, who've, who've had a lot of success, you know, financially, in business, professionally, they're leaving them in the lurch because now there's nowhere, there's nowhere for them to, to go further, right?

• 43:32Speaker 02

  Right.

• 43:33Jen Cohen?

  And what my question is then, is why don't those women just go out with a younger guy who's just hot? And just do the, what, what men used to do for all these years, right? Like, just do what men do.

• 43:44Speaker 02

  Right.

• 43:44Jen Cohen?

  They're successful men, they want a younger girl, so then they go, end up with these girl, why, why don't women do that?

• 43:50Speaker 02

  Right, well, and I think that there are some women doing that.

• 43:53Jen Cohen?

  Starting more.

• 43:53Speaker 02

  Right, and it's, yeah, so, so there's, I've got two answers to that. So one is that I think that women are starting to do that more, right? So we see like, you know, uh,

• 44:03Jen Cohen?

  But they're not having kids with them.

• 44:04Speaker 02

  No, they're not having kids with them, right?

• 44:06Jen Cohen?

  They're not having families with them.

• 44:07Speaker 02

  We're sort of seeing like the, you know, like the rise of the cougar, right? Where you'll see older women dating the, and, and they're just, you know, they're not serious boyfriends, they're just like,

• 44:15Jen Cohen?

  Play things.

• 44:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, play things, because the women are like, I have my own money. Yeah, exactly, yeah, it's like, I've got, I've got my, I've got my own money, I don't need a man for that. I just want to have fun on my own terms. And so then they just like take a hot guy that they can parade around and, you know, and have a good time with. You know, Godspeed. Men have been doing this forever.

• 44:32Jen Cohen?

  A hundred percent. But it's disrupting the the natural flow of evolution. And Darwinism, I would say, like, well, isn't survival the fittest is all about.

• 44:42Speaker 02

  So it's it's just really about whatever traits get passed down or the traits that you're going to see. Right. And so all that that means is that, like, yeah, the the tendency for older women to date younger men, they're not passing that preference down to anybody, you know, because they're not having any more offspring. But and the men aren't passing that tendency to want to mate with older women on to anybody either. Because there's no reproduction going on in that context. And so like, I don't think that it's really disrupting anything, you know, just because nothing is really changing. Yeah, exactly. Nothing's really changing. But I think that there's not as much of that as there is for men, because, you know, we spend most of our evolutionary history in a context, you know, as living as hunter gatherers.

• 45:24Speaker 02

  And women were very dependent on men for access to resources. And so like, you know, getting access to food and protection, particularly during pregnancy. And because of that, we have inherited the psychology that is tends to be more coy. Right. So we tend to be more sexually cautious relative to men. And we tend to be more oriented toward long term mating relative to men. I'm just simply because throughout most of our evolutionary history, there was no short term. I mean, like, if you're a woman engaged in like, short term mating, you could end up with a baby. And so even if you're choosing somebody as just a casual fling, there's this tendency for women to get emotionally enmeshed in those relationships because we're wired that way.

• 46:07Jen Cohen?

  Right. We're wired differently.

• 46:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, we're just wired differently. It's like we we faced different adaptive problems throughout our history due to the fact that we're the ones who get pregnant. Right. And because of that, the costs of short term sex and just being sort of casual, willy nilly are much greater than what they are for men. And so that's led to a divergence within our sexual psychology that tends to make men more oriented toward, you know, casual encounters without really, you know, developing any sort of strings attached. Whereas for women, it tends to be a little bit more complicated.

• 46:44Jen Cohen?

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• 47:26Jen Cohen?

  sugar craving. It is honestly my favorite protein bar. So try David today. And now you can buy four and get the fifth free at davidprotein.com/habitsandhustle. That's davidprotein.com/habitsandhustle for your fifth bar free. Trust me, you won't be disappointed. You did.

• 47:56Jen Cohen?

  Are men attracted to successful women, confident women, established women?

• 48:02Speaker 02

  Yes, but in as much as they're attracted to them first, right? Like as you were talking about, like, I don't think that any level of professional success or success can make up for if a man doesn't feel that a woman is physically attractive. And what that can mean, though, is very broad, you know, because that doesn't mean, obviously, there's a lot of people that I think objectively, we could say, like, this person is not the most attractive person we've ever seen in their life, and somebody's in love with them and thinks that they're beautiful. You know, so it's like, we have to, you know, sort of also take that with a grain of salt, sort of understanding the fact that there's, for the most part, there can be somebody for everyone.

• 48:36Jen Cohen?

  Right. My mother would always say, there's a lid to every pot.

• 48:39Speaker 02

  I love that. That's like beautiful. That's perfect.

• 48:41Jen Cohen?

  That's right?

• 48:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 48:42Jen Cohen?

  I heard you say somewhere, I don't remember where, that looks is the number one predictor for women's upward mobility.

• 48:49Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah. How's that for a dip?

• 48:51Jen Cohen?

  Depressing statistic, right?

• 48:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, they did a, they did a study where they were looking at different types of predictors for being able to transcend the social class in which you were born.

• 48:59Jen Cohen?

  Mm hmm.

• 49:00Speaker 02

  And, you know, in this great meritocratic society that we live in, we would like to think that it would be something like your educational attainment, or, you know, where you went to school, or what you majored in, right? It might be something like this, but instead, what the research found is that the strongest predictor for women for upward social mobility was their physical attractiveness and that this was more, this played a greater role in their ability to transcend their social class of origin than their family's existing socioeconomic status, their education level and their career choice.

• 49:32Jen Cohen?

  Wow.

• 49:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's pretty depressing.

• 49:33Jen Cohen?

  Isn't that depressing?

• 49:35Speaker 02

  It is.

• 49:35Jen Cohen?

  What's the, what's a man's number one predictor for upward mobility?

• 49:39Speaker 02

  Oh, that's a really great question. I don't know, but I am willing to bet that it is probably either educate. I think it is some combination of like education that they get and then like their career choice is my guess.

• 49:54Jen Cohen?

  Right, totally different, right?

• 49:56Speaker 02

  Totally different set of, yeah, no, it's not his physical attractiveness.

• 49:59Jen Cohen?

  It's definitely not, exactly. Do you know the other saying, like, if a man wants to be attractive, he stands on his wallet?

• 50:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I've, I've heard that.

• 50:08Jen Cohen?

  But, but the truth is, I hate to say it, but there, there's a reason why some of these things, there's a lot of truth in these things, right? Like, that's why you see a lot of these, a lot of women I see with men who are like, wouldn't, you wouldn't call them attractive by looking at them. They're four foot three, bald, and not that physically attractive.

• 50:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 50:27Jen Cohen?

  I tell you, when they have like a hundred million dollars in their bank account, they're very attractive dating the supermodel.

• 50:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's, it's really funny because we did this really cool study where we had men who are kind of average looking, we had them photographed like looking like they were in a couple with women of varying levels of attractiveness.

• 50:45Jen Cohen?

  Mm hmm.

• 50:45Speaker 02

  And what do you think, as soon as women see kind of an average, you know, kind of, kind of guy with a really beautiful woman, what do they think?

• 50:53Jen Cohen?

  He's rich.

• 50:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly.

• 50:54Jen Cohen?

  Of course.

• 50:54Speaker 02

  And so, and so what we did is we asked people about like different qualities, you know, that these men had. And just based on the virtue of the attractiveness of the women that men are pictured with, women infer all of these different things about like what they're like, and including the fact that as we see a man with a beautiful woman who's like far more beautiful than he is handsome, there's this general assumption that we tend to assume that he is like financially very well off and, you know, probably kind of, you know, got some other positive qualities as well. But it's really funny.

• 51:23Jen Cohen?

  And it's funny because the second you think of that, you think about the female and you think if the girl's really beautiful, you think, oh, well, she's a gold digger or all the other connotations, which then like because of the survival of the fittest and all that, is there a lot of jealousy with women? Because it's only a certain amount like of that stuff we're talking about, there is a limited amount of great guys that we all want. Like, I've done a few podcasts on this where just in terms of just on the dating apps, right?

• 51:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 51:53Jen Cohen?

  It's like 1% of the men get 99% of the action, right?

• 52:00Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 52:00Jen Cohen?

  Because women want guys who are six foot, six foot, make over a hundred thousand, all these things, let's just say, where it doesn't leave a very big amount of, a lot of men.

• 52:12Speaker 02

  Right.

• 52:13Jen Cohen?

  But there's a lot of women out there.

• 52:14Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 52:15Jen Cohen?

  Right?

• 52:15Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 52:16Jen Cohen?

  And women are naturally catty.

• 52:18Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 52:18Jen Cohen?

  Right?

• 52:18Speaker 02

  I think, I think that there's an element of that that's very true. Yes.

• 52:21Jen Cohen?

  Yes. And element or more than one element?

• 52:24Speaker 02

  Yes, multiple elements. Yeah. So, you know, with any resource that's desirable, there's only so many, right? It also wouldn't be desirable.

• 52:33Jen Cohen?

  Supply.

• 52:33Speaker 02

  Right? You know, supply and demand. It's like, there's only so many houses on the water, you know, there's only so many attractive mates, there's only so many top positions in the job.

• 52:43Jen Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 52:43Speaker 02

  And so there are always going to be an element of competition. And for women, especially when we're talking about mate related things, one of the primary areas in which they compete is attractiveness. And so here you have women who kind of size each other up, right? And then they can be really terrible to one another when they're trying to compete in the same pool. And I mean, I've found, I remember when I was in my twenties and how much of that there would be, you know, this like, like rivalry and, and that sort of thing. And then like, once I was married and had children, like it allowed me to have friendships with women in ways that I hadn't been able to. You know, when I was in my twenties, because I think that like that people were pared off, kind of took the pressure off of all of that.

• 53:27Jen Cohen?

  They didn't find you to be a threat.

• 53:28Speaker 02

  Right, exactly.

• 53:29Jen Cohen?

  Right?

• 53:30Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 53:30Jen Cohen?

  Because you were taken, you were already like,

• 53:32Speaker 02

  Right.

• 53:32Jen Cohen?

  You were dormant in their way.

• 53:34Speaker 02

  Right.

• 53:34Jen Cohen?

  Like you were kind of like, your, your, your things were suppressed, right?

• 53:37Speaker 02

  Right, yeah, well, no, it was really interesting because I've also, I'm, I've been divorced and now I'm married again. And during that period when I was divorced, I mean, talk about a polarizing event

• 53:47Jen Cohen?

  Tell me.

• 53:47Speaker 02

  in people's lives. Well, I mean, you know, when you are a person who is with a bunch of married people, right, you live in a community of married people who you spend a lot of time with. And then all of a sudden, you know, you're not a married person. You become very much a threat to

• 54:05Jen Cohen?

  Do they ostracize you?

• 54:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, there was a lot of that, that, that happened. I kind of got, I kind of got shoved out. I got a little bit of the exit stage left.

• 54:16Jen Cohen?

  So then what happened then?

• 54:18Speaker 02

  Well, so what happened, I found my new community. I mean, you know,

• 54:21Jen Cohen?

  Was your new community all single women?

• 54:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was mostly single women. And, uh, yeah, and it was, it was a totally, you know, and it was a really freeing, you know, experience to go through that. It was, it was terrible to lose. I lost, I lost some people that I thought were

• 54:34Jen Cohen?

  Friends.

• 54:34Speaker 02

  really good friends. But I think that, you know, it was like, on the one hand, I understood it.

• 54:39Jen Cohen?

  Yeah. If anyone would, it would be you.

• 54:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, exactly. And so it's like, you know, I'd have, I didn't, um, at first I was, I was hurt and angry. And then afterwards I was, I had a little bit of reflection on it. And it's like, you know, I under, I mean, there's two things going on there. It's like, one, you know, you don't want to have this single person that that's a threat. Um, but it's also a threat to, I mean, marriage is kind of held together by bubble gum and shoelaces. You know what I mean? It's like, it's like, uh,

• 55:06Speaker 02

  it's a hard thing to do, or you know, it's like really hard to do. And stay, and, and so the idea that somebody can just like walk away from it and be okay, because I was, I like walked away and, um, and, you know, and my, and my ex-husband and I, in some ways, it's even more threatening. He and I are great and like, we're great co-parents and we do Thanksgivings together. And

• 55:24Jen Cohen?

  I love that.

• 55:25Speaker 02

  we call it the web of love. And because

• 55:27Jen Cohen?

  How long were you married for?

• 55:29Speaker 02

  Um, like 17 years. So I was married a long time. And

• 55:33Jen Cohen?

  And how old were the kids when you got the divorce?

• 55:35Speaker 02

  Uh, tw- I want to say 12 and nine.

• 55:41Jen Cohen?

  Wow.

• 55:42Speaker 02

  Yeah. So, yeah. And, yeah. So, so, so to have somebody who we, you know, I walk away from a marriage and I'm okay and financially I'm fine because I'm, you know, I'm taking care of my business. And then to be able to get along well with my ex-husband and I feel like that also feels threatening to marriage. Do you know what I mean?

• 56:00Jen Cohen?

  Really? Why?

• 56:01Speaker 02

  Because marriage is hard and horrible sometimes.

• 56:04Jen Cohen?

  Yes.

• 56:04Speaker 02

  And, and being somebody who's married again, it's like, and, and we, we talk about this. My, my husband was, is, was also formerly married.

• 56:11Jen Cohen?

  Mm-hmm.

• 56:12Speaker 02

  And it's, it's like really hard to be married. I mean, it's like, sometimes you're just like, this is terrible. Like, this is a really terrible thing.

• 56:18Jen Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 56:18Speaker 02

  But, but you persevere. And, and the idea of like, you know, when you're having one of those moments of marriage being terrible, to see people walking away from it and being just fine. I mean, that feels really threatening. Like, oh, my gosh, should I be, like, like, that might be the, and, and that is like, you don't want to go down that rabbit hole. Nobody wants to have to sit and think about whether their marriage is a good idea or a bad idea. I mean, it's like, it's, it's a really scary thing. It was, it was a hard thing.

• 56:41Jen Cohen?

  I think also it makes people like, think to themselves like, like, they're jealous a little bit. Like, I wish, I wish I could do that. Why can't I do that?

• 56:48Speaker 02

  Right, right.

• 56:49Jen Cohen?

  Like, will I be okay? Or, or they feel trapped because financially they're trapped.

• 56:53Speaker 02

  Right.

• 56:53Jen Cohen?

  Like, there's all these other them issues.

• 56:56Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 56:56Jen Cohen?

  That they, that you are basically, you're basically making them have to, you're, you're forcing them to look at.

• 57:02Speaker 02

  Well, right. And I think that that is, I think that that was like, I think that's the biggest. I think you just hit the nail on the head. I mean, honestly, it's like, how many people are in, in, in, my ex-husband and I had a pretty lovely relationship for the most part. We just kind of grew in different directions.

• 57:17Jen Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 57:18Speaker 02

  And so, like, there's a lot of people who are in marriages a lot worse than ours was.

• 57:22Jen Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 57:23Speaker 02

  And then, you know, and then to.

• 57:25Jen Cohen?

  Then you're the one who got the divorce.

• 57:26Speaker 02

  Yes. And so I think that there was a lot of that, too. So, I, like I said, studying what I study, I have a lot of compassion for how everybody responded to me. And, and it was really hurtful at first, but I, I do feel compassion and I understand why that happened.

• 57:43Jen Cohen?

  Right.

• 57:43Speaker 02

  And then I was able to find my new community.

• 57:45Jen Cohen?

  And so when you're now in the new community and you guys are all single, like you were saying, was there cattiness and jealousy because you're all in the same boat and look like, oh, she's going on a date. Why can't I go on a date? Was there any of that?

• 57:59Speaker 02

  No, what's really interesting is no. And so with my really tight group of girlfriends, no. And, and, and we actually would trade no. It's like we had a spreadsheet.

• 58:08Jen Cohen?

  Dating. Really?

• 58:09Speaker 02

  Yes, for us like to make sure like, did you go out? And it's like, oh, wait, I know I went out with him. No, he's great for you. And so like, we would even like set people up on the side, like on side chat with people that we would go out with. And then, but they didn't match up on the app or whatever with the other person.

• 58:26Jen Cohen?

  I love that because you know what you're meeting these people. And like, yeah, maybe they're not right for you, but you have Sally out there who you'd be great for.

• 58:32Speaker 02

  Yes. And in fact, one of our pictures that we had was all three of us together, like, cause there was three of us that spent most of it. There was five of us, but there was three of us that were actively dating. And so we had a picture of all three of us. And then it was like, if it doesn't work out with one of us, you can have the other two.

• 58:47Jen Cohen?

  I love that.

• 58:48Speaker 02

  It's like a threefer.

• 58:52Speaker 02

  And I think that there's something about, you know, because we were all in our, you know, we were all in our early 40s or late 30s, early 40s when we, when we met. And I think that there's also something where as you get older, in addition to, you know, just like whether you're partnered or not. It's like, I think there's a really a time that you can appreciate just how amazing female friendship is that I don't think you get when you're in your twenties.

• 59:16Jen Cohen?

  Yeah, I, I think you're right. Cause I think there's a different, like, your priorities change, you soften up a little bit, you know, there's other things that happen. How have you been married to this new husband?

• 59:26Speaker 02

  Oh my God. Well, we've been together for three years. We're just recently, recently married. Yeah.

• 59:31Jen Cohen?

  Oh, congratulations. You're welcome. And so he's got kids too?

• 59:35Speaker 02

  Yes, he does. Yeah. So we've got a blended family of five kids.

• 59:38Jen Cohen?

  Oh, wow.

• 59:39Speaker 02

  Yeah. No, no. And I say thankfully, but no, really, they're all wonderful. They're older. I mean, so like, you know, the oldest is, you know, about to graduate college. The second oldest is a freshman in college. And then, you know, our youngest are both freshmen in high school. So it's not like we have all of these, you know, like so much chaos going on in our lives.

• 59:58Jen Cohen?

  Right, right, right. But it's interesting because you've like lived all these different part, like just different stages of life that you can talk on. So then you were on the apps.

• 1:00:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, I was.

• 1:00:07Jen Cohen?

  So how did you find the apps?

• 1:00:09Speaker 02

  So I found the app. So it's funny because my first exposure to the apps was when I was in graduate school at UT Austin way back in the day. It was like 2001. I mean, I was actually writing a research paper on mate preferences and it was before there were apps. It was like when like match.com was the thing. It was like a website. And so I remember going there and like, you know, I was doing a project, looking at what are some of the qualities that men compared to women say that they're looking for in partners. And, you know, and then like did a quantification and low and behold, you know, men were more likely to say they were looking for looks and women were more likely to say they were looking for financial stability or some version of that. And so that was like my very first exposure. And then, you know, and I was dating my that my

• 1:00:54Speaker 02

  what ended up being my husband during that. So I wasn't like on the app, you know, on that. But then, you know, I had because of the work that I do, I mean, I'm very familiar with what everybody is doing with the apps forever and sort of monitoring that because it's like something that I've been really interested in, you know, understanding relationships and sex and dating dynamics. And so looking at the apps, I mean, I wasn't like looking at the apps when I was married, but just having awareness of them and like what they were and what people were doing.

• 1:01:25Jen Cohen?

  Yes, yes, yes.

• 1:01:26Speaker 02

  Was something that I'd always had.

• 1:01:27Jen Cohen?

  It was research.

• 1:01:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, totally. It was like I had my finger on the pulse of it. And then, and then when I got divorced and then when it was like, you know, I don't even, I'm trying to remember how I found out like what all the kids were using. You know what I mean?

• 1:01:39Jen Cohen?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:01:40Speaker 02

  And I think, I think that I had, I feel like I read something like how wonky is this? I think I read it in like the Wall Street Journal, like what people were using.

• 1:01:50Jen Cohen?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:01:51Speaker 02

  And I think that that's how I found like Bumble.

• 1:01:54Jen Cohen?

  Is that what you used?

• 1:01:55Speaker 02

  And that's what I was on and then Hinge for a little bit. But then, yeah, and then I ended up dating the person. I mean, I dated a few different guys, but then I ended up in the relationship with my now husband. And so then it's all she wrote.

• 1:02:10Jen Cohen?

  The rest is history. Are you happy now?

• 1:02:12Speaker 02

  Yes, very happy.

• 1:02:13Jen Cohen?

  Okay. Are you happy when through the divorce?

• 1:02:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, you know, I don't, it's hard to say that, right? So yes, it was the right decision. Do I hate it for my kids? Like, do I, would I prefer for them not to have to visit both of us? Yeah, I would prefer that. I do, I will say that I think that, I think that of anybody that I know who's in a divorced relationship, my thing, mine is incredibly healthy. And like I said, we, like my ex and I, like, he came over for Christmas to my husband's in-house. And I mean, it's just like, this is the way that we do things. And, um, and everybody's cool with it. And I feel like my kids get the experience of being able to see their, that their parents still love and care for each other, even though they're not married. And so

• 1:02:53Speaker 02

  that's like, I guess, on the positive side, but, um, and I can also tell myself, like, I think it's better for my kids to see me flourishing and not feeling a, you know, like I'm in a, in a bad spot. And like I said, it wasn't, we didn't fight or anything. I just wasn't happy. And I think, and it showed. And I was at, working all the time. So I didn't want to be, you know, it was, that was not good. And so, yeah, I guess the answer is that, yes, I'm, it was the right decision. But it's, it's hard to say like, yes, about something because of course it hurt my kids. And that was hard.

• 1:03:23Jen Cohen?

  Yeah. I mean, even if the most amicable divorce, it's still a divorce with the kid, for the kids, right?

• 1:03:28Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 1:03:28Jen Cohen?

  They're gonna have to go back and forth at the homes.

• 1:03:30Speaker 02

  Yes, exactly. And that's what they do. And would they prefer not to do that? Yes, they would. They would prefer if we were still together.

• 1:03:36Jen Cohen?

  Right, right.

• 1:03:37Speaker 02

  But that being said, they're also like, you know, they're learning some resilience with all of this. And, and like I said, I think that of anybody I know who's got a divorce set up, I think ours is really a, a nice one. And I think that the kids have been able to learn a lot from it.

• 1:03:54Jen Cohen?

  Good answer.

• 1:03:55Speaker 02

  Thanks.

• 1:03:56Jen Cohen?

  You're welcome. I think I got sidetracked there because I was so interested in your life.

• 1:04:00Speaker 02

  It's like, yeah, let's just talk about my life.

• 1:04:01Jen Cohen?

  Yeah, let's talk about life. Well, I, I, I know that the beginning, I asked you a question, and I think that we kind of like, didn't finish it, which was, well, it's like the five things that birth control can, can change or how

• 1:04:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:04:13Jen Cohen?

  It's not just this your partner choice, but there's other things to it does.

• 1:04:18Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:04:19Jen Cohen?

  And that's the part that I, I didn't finish with. Sorry.

• 1:04:21Speaker 02

  No, that's okay. Do you want me to start it off? Yes. Okay, so let's talk about some of the things that birth control does, besides just influencing potentially partner choice. We also know from research that it affects sexual desire, which I think I alluded to. Yeah, we talked about that one. It really can put women on sexual lockdown in a lot of cases. It increases the risk of developing depression or anxiety. And this is particularly true for younger women. So they've done studies where they look at the risk of developing major depressive disorder, based on whether or not you're using hormonal birth control or not. And what you tend to see is that the risk is increased for everybody of developing one of those types of outcomes from using hormonal birth control. But it's especially great for young women.

• 1:05:04Speaker 02

  So women 19 and younger, whose brains are still developing, the risk of developing a major depressive disorder and the risk of suicide risk attempt and successful suicide attempt are significantly greater for teens who use hormonal birth control compared to those who do not. There's also now research showing that if you're using hormonal birth control during your teen years, so again, 19 and younger, that this is associated with a greater risk of developing major depressive disorder across your lifetime, even after you go off the birth control pill. Because it seems that it's probably influencing brain development. And so the important message here with depression and anxiety is, one, if you go on hormonal birth control, keep an eye on yourself, have somebody that you love keep an eye on you.

• 1:05:48Speaker 02

  Because the fact is, when we're depressed or anxious, our brain doesn't say like, gosh, you know, I'm depressed or anxious and I, but it's my drugs. Instead, what happens is we think like, God, my life sucks right now. Like, my boss hates me. My boyfriend hates me. Like, it's like, we feel like all of these things are happening and we feel bad. Right. We don't, we don't actually think, gosh, I'm depressed, right? Right. We don't acknowledge what's really happening. Yeah, no, it's like, our brain has no idea, you know, it just makes up stories about what's going on. And so having somebody know that you're going on it so they can keep an eye on you is incredibly important. Because then they can tell you if you're having a personality change, if you seem low, if you seem off. Right? These are things that might, can tell you that your birth control might not be working for you in that way. And this is particularly

• 1:06:31Speaker 02

  Really true, as I said, for these young girls. And you know, I think that it's smart to avoid going on hormonal birth control, if at all possible, until you're 20 or older. Um, just because your brain is going to have most of its development done at that time, which means that it won't have a long-term lasting impact on you. Um, but if you are going to go on it when you're younger than 20, um, really, really take care and make sure that somebody's keeping an eye on you, just because the risk of developing a mental health-related side effect is so high and pronounced in this group. So that's another thing that hormonal birth control can do. Another thing that surprises people is that it can actually decrease your ability to put on muscle mass from weight training.

• 1:07:13Speaker 02

  And this happens because it keeps your testosterone levels low and testosterone plays an important role in terms of prompting the biological cascade that allows you to put on lean muscle mass. And so women who are doing weight training, doing the exact same regimen, compared to women who are naturally cycling, they put on significantly less lean muscle mass compared to their naturally cycling counterparts, which is surprising to a lot of people.

• 1:07:36Jen Cohen?

  Well, you know what? It's not that surprising to me because they do say that there's weight gain with being on the pill. And a lot of people don't want to go on the pill. I was one of them at a very young age because I was scared of gaining weight. So that makes sense to me because your testosterone will be suppressed. You won't be, the, the less lean muscle mass you have, the less calories you're going to burn, therefore, you know, you won't be burning as much.

• 1:08:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, I know for sure. Yeah, I know for sure.

• 1:08:03Jen Cohen?

  That makes sense to me.

• 1:08:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, a hundred percent. And then it also can influence your ability to regulate stress. And this is another one that's really surprising to people. And that is that when you go on hormonal birth control, there's research that finds that it decreases your body's ability to respond in a dynamic way to stress, potentially leaving you less able to be able to regulate your emotional responses to things, and also being less able to cope from and learn from stress. Um, and so there's research that shows, for example, that women who use hormonal birth control, that rather than having a big spike in cortisol that all of us get when we're feeling stressed out, which I'm a A lot of people, you know, give a bad rap and cortisol gets kind of a bad rap because it's, you know, if you have it chronic exposure to cortisol, it's not good.

• 1:08:49Speaker 02

  But having big bursts of cortisol when we're stressed out is actually very adaptive. And it's like part of how our body helps to manage stress and cope with stress. And so like when cortisol gets released, it dumps fat and sugar into the bloodstream. So we can make a quick getaway. It primes the birth of new neurons in our hippocampus, which is the brain area that helps us learn and remember things. And so it gets us ready to be able to recover from stress, to be able to learn from stress and to be able to sort of move on with our lives. And research finds that women who are using hormonal birth control, that rather than having this nice big response of cortisol in response to stress, they have a really flat blunted response to cortisol in response to stress. And this is something that we only tend to see in people who've suffered from PTSD

• 1:09:32Speaker 02

  or things like exposure to childhood trauma. They have these blunted cortisol types of responses. And you also see this in women who are using hormonal birth control. And it suggests that it has some sort of dysregulatory pattern within the stress response. And, you know, nobody knows exactly what it is. But what researchers think is going on is that the synthetic progesterone in birth control pills, which is called a progestin, it doesn't perfectly match the progesterone receptor, which is the receptor in the cell that picks up the hormone. And it also gets picked up by other things, including sometimes testosterone and including sometimes cortisol.

• 1:10:13Speaker 02

  And so what researchers think goes on is that these molecules are stimulating cortisol receptors and making the brain think that it's in a state of chronic stress, like chronic uncontrollable stress, and that that's causing the stress response to shut down, which isn't good. It's not good for anybody. It's bad for emotional regulation. It's bad for mental health. And like I said, it's something that we tend to see in people who have PTSD. And so not something that's positive for women who are using hormonal birth control.

• 1:10:42Jen Cohen?

  Wow. So as an adolescent, if you're listening, or parents listening, what is an alternative? Just besides doing the, what we talked about earlier?

• 1:10:49Speaker 02

  Copper IUD.

• 1:10:50Jen Cohen?

  Yeah, besides doing the copper IUD, that's really, that's the best alternative.

• 1:10:54Speaker 02

  I mean, yeah, as far as I'm concerned, you know, doing something, especially with a teenager, that's non-hormonal is going to be the way to go.

• 1:11:00Jen Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:01Speaker 02

  Copper IUD is a good one. I don't recommend the fertility awareness method for teenagers because, you know, just the idea of tracking your cycles and only using condom. Like the idea of a teenager trying to do that effectively just gives me chills.

• 1:11:13Jen Cohen?

  Right.

• 1:11:14Speaker 02

  Imagine. So, I mean, we just aren't left with a lot of options. And so one of the big messages from, you know, that I've wanted to really communicate with my book is not like, oh, you know, birth control pill is evil and all this. Instead, it's, we need more options.

• 1:11:28Jen Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:28Speaker 02

  This is imperfect. Like, this is imperfect and we need to have more choices because the fact is, especially for young girls whose brains are developing and are very sensitive to hormones, like, we don't have a lot of good options.

• 1:11:39Jen Cohen?

  No, I mean, at all. But the thing that's, and that's probably why also you wanted to write this book, I saw, right? Because it's, you had your own, you had your own story. Once you got off of birth control, you were a different person. You were making playlists and you were like.

• 1:11:54Speaker 02

  I was like, yeah, I felt alive and I felt sexy and I just, yeah, it was just like, it was like an awakening in a lot of ways.

• 1:12:00Jen Cohen?

  Yeah. I mean, I find that so, like, you don't, that's why I like, I love this conversation with you because I never really, I never really spoke about the correlation between, we talk a lot about HRT on here, right? Like hormone replacement therapy when you're older.

• 1:12:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:12:14Jen Cohen?

  But we don't talk about the hormones that we are putting in our bodies at a younger age to suppress, right? Or we only talk about the opposite.

• 1:12:22Speaker 02

  Right. Yeah. And it's really interesting because, you know, people tend to assume that, like, oh, you know, hormone therapy, like, you must be anti-hormone therapy because, and I'm like, no, like, I think hormones are great. Like, I think that the problem, you know, that with the birth control pill is that, is that you're not getting exposure to hormones.

• 1:12:39Jen Cohen?

  They're suppressing your hormones.

• 1:12:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, you're suppressing them.

• 1:12:41Jen Cohen?

  Right.

• 1:12:41Speaker 02

  Hormones are wonderful. They're a wonderful thing.

• 1:12:43Jen Cohen?

  It's a different thing, right? You're either at a young age or because of, for birth control, you're suppressing them, but at an older age, you're, you're trying to increase them to balance yourself out.

• 1:12:53Speaker 02

  Right. Yeah.

• 1:12:54Jen Cohen?

  So you don't, so you don't really do any work on that, right? On the studies of like.

• 1:12:58Speaker 02

  No, I mean, I'm I'm def- I definitely have awareness of this space. Like, I know about the research in the space and I can say that, you know, there's a lot of women who are giving birth, who are being given birth control pills as a way to ease the menopausal transition, um, instead of being given micronized progesterone and estrogen. Yeah. And, um, which I think is, I think is terrible, just because the, the synthetic progesterone in birth control pills, that progestin, isn't biologically identical to progesterone, the way that micronized progesterone is. And because of that, you don't get many of the really beautiful benefits that progesterone has for the body, including the release of this

• 1:13:39Speaker 02

  really nice neuro steroid called allopregnanolone. And it's something that gets released when progesterone is being broken down in the body. And it stimulates these receptors in our brain that are known for making us feel calm and relaxed. And it's really good for us. Like, it promotes neuroplasticity, which means that it makes our brain plastic and malleable and able to respond to things and, and not, you know, freak out. And it's, it's associated with having better mental health and all these other really beautiful things. And women who are using synthetic hormones, you know, this progestin, that because it's made out of testosterone, it's not made out of progesterone, you don't get this beautiful metabolite that has all these

• 1:14:20Speaker 02

  wonderful, um, benefits to the brain and benefits to mental health and also benefits to bone health, because progesterone and estrogen work together to help to create new osteoblasts in the bone and help to strengthen bones and do all these really nice things. And, um, I think that there's a lot of doctors out there who are just, you know, because they're comfortable with the birth control pill, they're just like giving women that to try to prevent them from not experiencing the symptoms of the menopausal transition, but the, the women that aren't getting all the benefits you get from actual hormones.

• 1:14:50Jen Cohen?

  I've never even heard that before.

• 1:14:52Speaker 02

  Oh, really?

• 1:14:52Jen Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:53Speaker 02

  Oh, my gosh. Yeah, no, I hear about this. I, I, so, you know, of course, women reach out to me with their questions. And, um, one of the questions I get a lot is about the use of birth control in menopause and like whether or not, you know, that's recommended. And is it the same as using hormone therapy with, you know, biologically identical, um, hormones? And, you know, the answer is no, um, because you don't get all those great benefits. And it does, you know, tend to have this side effect profile that's really unfavorable to women.

• 1:15:20Jen Cohen?

  Wow. Thanks for telling me that.

• 1:15:22Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:15:22Jen Cohen?

  I had no idea.

• 1:15:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:15:25Jen Cohen?

  Wow. Well, Sarah, thank you for being on the podcast.

• 1:15:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, thank you for having me. This is so fun.

• 1:15:29Jen Cohen?

  This was so fun. Did I miss anything? Is there anything else we should talk about?

• 1:15:32Speaker 02

  I don't think so. I think we talked about things I didn't even think we were gonna talk about.

• 1:15:36Jen Cohen?

  I know, your personal life.

• 1:15:37Speaker 02

  We talked about my personal life.

• 1:15:38Jen Cohen?

  I know. Thank you for sharing, because I think, I think a lot of people can relate to that, too. I think it's real life and it's, I'm somebody that like is very much someone who's interested in like the nitty gritty of someone. Beyond all this other stuff, I wanted to get to know you as a, as a person, so, thanks.

• 1:15:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, thanks for having me.

• 1:15:57Jen Cohen?

  Where do people find you, or more information on what you're doing, or your book?

• 1:16:02Speaker 02

  Yes, of course. You can find me on all social platforms, and I'm at Sarah E. Hill PhD. And that's Sarah with an H, so Sarah E. Hill PhD. And my website is sarahehill.com. And my book, This Is Your Brain on Birth Control, is sold everywhere that books are sold. And you can also find my new book, it'll be coming out in September, called The Period Brain, in September.

• 1:16:26Jen Cohen?

  I didn't know that. Thank you, guys. Go, go follow Sarah. She's awesome.

• 1:16:30Speaker 02

  Thanks.