This Is Your Brain on Birth Control by Sarah Hill

Author:Sarah Hill
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2019-09-30T16:00:00+00:00

Quick Thing 2: Excitatory neurotransmitters tell your brain cells to get ready for action, making them more likely to fire off messages to other cells in the brain. These are your alert, ready-for-action neurotransmitters.

Quick Thing 3: Inhibitory neurotransmitters, on the other hand, tell your brain cells to slow their roll, making them less likely to fire off messages to other cells in the brain. These are your relaxed, kumbaya neurotransmitters.

The most prevalent and frequently used inhibitory neurotransmitter in the brain is GABA. And as the star inhibitory neurotransmitter in the brain, it’s often on the scene in a big way when your brain is trying to slow itself down. For example, GABA gets released when you’re relaxing in your PJ pants in front of the fire, and it also gets released when doing things like meditation and yoga. When GABA receptors are stimulated, it causes powerful anti-anxiety effects in the brain, helping you feel like the calmer, more relaxed, kumbayaed version of yourself.

Interestingly, you can get a nice, relaxed, GABA-rific experience not only from GABA but also from other things that stimulate GABA receptors. This is how alcohol and benzodiazepines like Xanax work. They do their seductive black magic by prompting the action of your GABA receptors, slowing down synaptic firing in your brain and making you feel . . . Ahhhhhhhhh. This is why having a drink at the end of a stressful day can help take the edge off. It slows down your brain, making all that dumb little sh** that you were worrying about on your way home seem like much less of a big deal than it was before the cork was popped and the wine was poured.

Now, the cool part about this is that our bodies actually produce a variety of compounds that work like alcohol and Xanax, but without all the calories or potential for addiction. One of the most powerful of these comes in the form of a neurosteroid called allopregnanolone. Allopregnanolone gets synthesized when progesterone is broken down in the body and has the effect of kick-starting action by your GABA receptors. Just like alcohol and Xanax! But from progesterone! This is part of the whole mom-jeans part of the cycle, with women’s bodies doing things to prepare for the possibility of egg implantation. It’s believed that allopregnanolone is synthesized to slow women’s brains down such that they’re more inclined to relax at home than do the kinds of activities that could knock a newly implanting embryo out of place. So, an upside of the luteal phase and its relatively high levels of progesterone is that it allows for the synthesis of more of this calming neurosteroid.

Unfortunately for women on the pill, it doesn’t seem that the artificial progestins in the pill offer this same type of benefit. In fact, the research suggests that women on the pill may have lower levels of these naturally occurring sedatives relative to what’s observed in its absence, regardless of the point in the cycle.

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