Moody Bitches: The Truth about the Drugs You’re Taking, the Sleep You’re Missing, the Sex You’re Not Having and What’s Really Making You Crazy...
Overworked? Exhausted? Powering between career, family and friends and frazzled and libido-less as a result? No wonder you’re moody! But as New York psychiatrist Julie Holland explains in her radical and eye-opening new book, the first step to overcoming the lows is to accept that being testy is in our nature – we were made to be Moody Bitches.Being a successful modern woman is hard, and for so many of us the constant flux in our hormones and the dip and dives our mood swings take makes it that much harder. For over 17 years, women have visited celebrated psychopharmacologist Dr Julie Holland looking for the miracle cure to eradicate these feelings. Now, in her illuminating and honest Moody Bitches, she details the invaluable advice she shares with her patients, revealing how suppressing our natural emotions is actually damaging. Instead she offers tried and tested alternatives to help keep the moods under control, making exhaustion and low sex-drive a thing of the past.From the meds you can trust to those you can’t; from the foods you should be eating, the healthy behaviours you should be practising and the herbal remedies that actually work, Dr Julie imparts wisdom from years of not only professional but personal experience too. Simple yet revolutionary, Moody Bitches is the life-changing self-help book for women and those who love them.
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Weekends at Bellevue
Thorsons
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
Published in the US by Penguin Press 2015
First published in the UK by Thorsons 2015
© Julie Holland 2015
A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library
While every effort has been made to trace the owners of copyright material reproduced herein and secure permissions, the publishers would like to apologise for any omissions and will be pleased to incorporate missing acknowledgements in any future edition of this book.
Julie Holland asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
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Source ISBN: 9780007554126
EBook Edition © MARCH 2015 ISBN: 9780007554133
Version: 2015-02-20
For Sara Starr Wolff, teacher, therapist, and gardener, who wanted what she had, and said what she meant. And for her son, Jeremy, whose shining love and acceptance allow me to blossom.
Contents
Part Two Mating, MILFs, Monogamy, and Menopause
Three This Is Your Brain on Love
Four Marriage and Its Discontents
Six Perimenopause: The Storm Before the Calm
Part Three The Moody Bitches Survival Guide
Seven Inflammation: The Key to Everything
Eight Food: A Drug We Can’t Resist
Ten A Sex Guide That Actually Works
Eleven Your Body: Love It or Leave It
Conclusion: Staying Sane in an Insane World
Women today are overworked and exhausted. We are anxious and frazzled, yet depressed and burned out. Our moods and libidos are at a rock-bottom low, our vital energies drained as we struggle to keep up with work, family, and hundreds of “friends” online. We blame ourselves for how bad we feel, thinking we should be able to handle it all. We dream of being perfect; we even try to make it look effortless, but we were never meant to be so static. We are designed by nature to be dynamic, cyclical, and, yes, moody. We are moody bitches, and that is a strength—not a weakness.
We evolved that way for good reasons; our hormonal oscillations are the basis for a sensitivity that allows us to be responsive to our environment. Our dynamism imparts flexibility and adaptability. Being fixed and rigid does not lend itself to survival. In nature, you adapt or you die. There is tremendous wisdom and peace available to us if we learn how our brains and bodies are supposed to work. Moodiness—being sensitive, caring deeply, and occasionally being acutely dissatisfied—is our natural source of power.
Yet we have been told just the opposite. From a young age, we are taught that moodiness, and all that comes with it, is a bad thing. We learn to apologize for our tears, to suppress our anger, and to fear being called hysterical. Over the course of women’s lives, the stresses and expectations of the modern world interfere with our health and hormones in ways big and small, and the result is the malaise so many women feel. There simply is a better way.
Moody Bitches opens the playbook on how we can take hold of our moods and, in so doing, take hold of our lives. By integrating timeless wisdom with today’s science, we can master our moods. If we can understand our own bodies, our naturally cycling hormones, and how modern medicines derange our exquisitely calibrated machines, then we can make informed choices about how to live better.
Women’s hormones are constantly in flux. They ebb and flow over a month-long cycle and they wax and wane throughout decades of fertility, vacillating with particular volatility during adolescence and perimenopause, the spring and autumn of the reproductive years. Compare this to men’s stable hormone levels throughout most of their lives. Our hormonal variations allow us to be empathic and intuitive—to our environment, to our children’s needs, and to our partners’ intentions. Women’s emotionality is normal. It is a sign of health, not disease, and it is our single biggest asset. Yet one in four American women are choosing to medicate away their emotionality with psychiatric medications, and the effects are more far-reaching than most women realize.
