Why You Feel Like a Different Person Every Two Weeks | Sarah Hill

0:01Sarah Hill:This is a Be Well Moment, the most replayed moments from my latest conversation. It's a glimpse into the wider episode, which you can find linked in the show notes below. Because sometimes one small moment is enough to reconnect to living well and being well.

0:22Sarah Hill:What's happening in the high facility state versus the low fertility state across our brain? Like what's happening in those moments?

0:31Sarah Ann Macklin:Yeah. So you look at women's cycles, like, and you're trying to understand like, like how hormones are changing across the cycle and what's what that's doing. You have to just like understand why we cycle in the first place. And the reason that women cycle and men don't is because men's bodies only have one job that they have to do in order to reproduce and that's have sex. And so it's a very simple system, right? It's a system that's built for sex and mate attraction and partner choice. Women, our bodies have two jobs that we have to do in order to reproduce. We have to attract mates, choose mates and have sex just like men.

1:07Sarah Ann Macklin:And that is something that is coordinated by our primary sex hormone, estrogen. And in the first half of the cycle, estrogen, one of the things that it does in the brain is it helps optimize ourselves to be in a state that is ready for mate choice and sex. And what you tend to see with estrogen is that it sort of orients our brain and behavior toward mate attraction and sex. And what we tend to find is that women are more interested in men during that time. They are more easily distracted by men during that time. They have higher sexual desire. They tend to have more sex. I mean, the list goes on and on.

1:45Sarah Ann Macklin:And all of these things are being coordinated by estrogen during the time of the cycle when sex can lead to conception. right the other job that our body has to do in order to reproduce is that we have to allow an embryo to implant and we have to be able to maintain a pregnancy and that's what's coordinated by our second primary sex hormone progesterone and so after the egg gets released and that empty egg follicle starts releasing progesterone that causes our brain and the rest of our body to shift gears from being optimized for like all things sex and attraction to then being optimized for implantation and pregnancy.

2:20Sarah Ann Macklin:And this causes changes, I mean, throughout the body from head to toe, it makes our immune system shift gears, it makes our brain shift gears, it makes our energy levels shift gears, it makes our circulatory system shift gears. I mean, it just it causes sweeping changes in our body from head to toe, because the types of things that cells in the body and systems in the body need to do to be maximized for mate attraction are very different than the types of things that a body has to do in order to be able to maintain a pregnancy. And so as our body is making that shift, we feel it. You know, we can feel it and we feel it from head to toe.

2:57Sarah Ann Macklin:We feel it in the way that our moods change. We feel it in the way that our energy levels change. We feel it in the way that our appetite changes. Because as our body is preparing for pregnancy, it actually causes our basal metabolic rate to increase significantly. it increases by like seven to 11%, meaning that we burn through an additional, like an additional, like 150 to 200 calories a day in the luteal phase, because our body is working really hard to prepare itself for the possibility of implantation and pregnancy. It changes our sexual desire because sex is no longer conceptive and becomes more about connection and less about sort of base sexual desire and needing to scratch that itch.

3:37Sarah Ann Macklin:I mean, it's our whole body changes. and um and and it's actually when you think about it it's incredible you know it's incredible that you know on the one hand we can look at women and say like wow you know um you you know we're shifting from this state to this state and who do I trust and you know who am I going to show up as but the other in the other hand like when you look at and you know and I detail a lot of this in the period brain when you look at the sweeping number of changes that go on in the body and in the brain as we're shifting gears from being optimized for sex to being optimized for pregnancy, it's amazing that we experience as much consistency as we have.

4:17Sarah Ann Macklin:And I mean, it's really remarkable that our brain and our body is able to maintain a sense of integrity with itself, given the extent to which we experience these changes within us. And so I actually think that it's a really remarkable thing that we are able to handle it with so much grace. You know, even though we tend to give ourselves a hard time about being maybe more emotionally sensitive during the second half of the cycle or having less energy, the extent to which we're able to navigate gracefully these vast changes within our body is really incredible. And there's a lot of things that we can do also to help support that to make those changes feel less jarring.

5:00Sarah Ann Macklin:Because I think that a lot of women do experience their cycle phases, particularly in the last two weeks of the cycle, which are a lot more hormonally dynamic than what happens in the first two weeks of the cycle. And a lot of women experience that as worse than what they need to just simply because they lack resilience to those hormonal changes because their body doesn't have enough cellular plasticity just because of environmental changes that have happened in the last 250 years. You know, people eat worse diets. They don't have social connection. They have chronic inflammation. They're not exercising.

5:34Sarah Ann Macklin:They're not doing all of the things that help to promote cellular resilience and plasticity within the body. And when those things erode, it means that our cells aren't able to quickly adapt to huge hormonal swings like we get, especially in the second half of the cycle. And so taking steps to just improve the quality of our health and the health of our bodies can actually go a long way in terms of making and creating a greater sense of integrity within the self across the cycle.

6:06Sarah Hill:thank you for listening to this be well moment if it resonated the full conversation is linked in the show notes and i hope it gave you a small pause to take a moment for you and to reconnect to living well and being well if you loved it please do leave a review follow the show or share this maybe with someone you love