Good Housekeeping
Hormones:a user’s guide
No nonsense trends, no impossible goals, just simple, straightforward advice for good health-keeping. This month… From stress-related cortisol to ‘orgasmic’ oxytocin, Polly Vernon shares all she’s learned about hormonal health
I hear hormones invoked over and over as the root cause of everything from low mood to poor sleep, spots to a random itch, an intense headache, how alluring we appear to the world or how reclusive we feel from it. Our worst tempers, our weirdest outbursts, our joys and sorrows (the full range of our emotional responses, actually), our excessive sweating, sudden changes in smell, pregnancy, infertility, periods – and the end of them… Hormones are the cause of it all. They’re like a bunch of unknowable Greek gods, buffeting our bodies and emotions around according to their will.
But where do hormones come from? And how do they work? Are we born with them? Do they lurk in our children’s bodies waiting for puberty to wake them up? Above all else, I wonder: how responsible are they for our characters? Our personalities? Do hormones make us who we are? More, or less, emotional?
Or anxious? Or angry?
I first hear of Dr Nicky Keay after finding a paper she wrote on stress fractures in female athletes and ballet dancers whose periods had stopped because of undereating and overtraining. I google her and discover that she’s a trained doctor, a lecturer in hormones at University College London and an adviser to dance companies, working closely with dancers to study their menstrual cycles and the impact they have on their performance. She’s also the author of Hormones, Health And Human Potential, published in 2022, and 2024’s Myths Of Menopause. I email her and ask if she’d like to meet. She says yes – ‘Always happy to talk hormones!’ – and invites me to her home in south London for coffee.