Women Health Expert: Birth Control Changes Who You Are & How You Feel About Your Partner!

Are you saying that you'd recommend that a woman looking for a partner gets off the birth control pill until they find one?

Yeah. I mean, researchers found when women who were partnered to attractive men went off hormonal birth control, they were more attracted to their partner. But for women who were partnered with less attractive partners, they became less attracted to their partners and reported being less sexually satisfied.

It's quite frightening.

Dr. Sarah Hill is a leading research psychologist and professor.

Uncovering the shocking effects the contraceptive pill has had on women, relationships, and society... ... and what we can do about it.

There's been nothing more instrumental to women's ability to be able to achieve independence than the birth control pill, and so we're very cavalier in just giving it to people. "Oh, well, you should go on it for this, and you should go on it for that." But it has huge costs, and when I started to dig into the research, I found there's at least five different things the birth control pill does to change who we are. And these risk factors, they're swept under the rug by their doctors who are prescribing it. First, it changes our emotional states with increased risk for developing anxiety and depression. And then it influences our ability to put on muscle mass, and it can also affect our sexual function because it turns off that estrogen surge that makes us feel sexier and makes us wanna have sex. And there's more, but we also know that it affects men in two different ways, and this has implications for society around us, and I'll tell you why. So-

So what are the alternatives for women?

Let's dive down into that. First...

This has always blown my mind a little bit, 53% of you that listen to this show regularly haven't yet subscribed to the show. So could I ask you for a favor before we start? If you like this show, and you like what we do here, and you wanna support us, the free simple way that you can do just that is by hitting the subscribe button. And my commitment to you is if you do that, then I'll do everything in my power, me and my team, to make sure that this show is better for you every single week. We'll listen to your feedback, we'll find the guests that you want me to speak to, and we'll continue to do what we do. Thank you so much. Dr. Sarah Hill. What is the mission that you're on? If you had to sort of encapsulate it into a couple of sentences, all of the work you're doing into a couple of sentences, and the impact it has on people like me, but also my partners, my mother, and my sisters, um, who read and understand your work, what is that mission?

Um, it's to help women understand themselves, and I think that, you know, part of that is doing the science that helps to uncover the insights that help women understand themselves and then also being able to communicate that to women. Um, I think that, you know, for a very long time, because of the way that medicine has been set up, um, the fu- the focus has been primarily on men. Um, and most of the things that we think that we know about health and functioning in the human body and brain is based on research conducted in men. And so it's taking that back and helping women actually understand themselves as themselves.