I have always had a lot of fears. And since a young age I have been adamant about overcoming them. Not tiptoeing around them. Collecting them. Every time I collect one — every time I do the thing and survive it — something happens that still astounds me. How easy the second time is. How there is almost literally no stopping me. I always thought this was a mindset. It is not a mindset. It is fear extinction — and the female brain is specifically, hormonally primed for it at particular points in the cycle. Here is the science behind the thing that has helped me most.

I remember the first time I understood that my migraines had a pattern. Four months of tracking in a notes app, and the dates kept clustering around the same point in the month. Always the days just before my period. Nobody had told me this was a thing — not a doctor, not a neurologist, not the pharmacists I had consulted about whether I was taking too much ibuprofen. I had spent years treating each migraine as an isolated event. A failure of hydration. A punishment for the glass of wine. I had a list of suspected causes as long as my arm, and not one of them said: your estrogen just dropped and your trigeminal nerve is reacting. This is that explanation.

I spent the better part of my twenties thinking my body was unpredictable. One week sharp and focused, the next week foggy and tender — craving different food, needing more sleep, finding the same social situation that felt easy a fortnight ago now unexpectedly exhausting. It took years before I understood that what I was experiencing was not randomness. It was a programme. A 28-day biological programme that was running, flawlessly, every single month. Nobody gave me a map. So I built one.

There is a specific version of summer dread I have felt every year since I was a teenager. It is not the heat. It is the swimsuit. More precisely: it is standing in front of a mirror and having the number on the scale still running in the background of my brain. What I now understand is that my body was not bigger because of anything I did. It was cycling. And that changes everything.

There is a particular kind of afternoon I know well. It is not quite hunger — it is more specific than that. A pull toward something sweet, something salty, something warm. For most of my life I named it by the only word anyone had given me: weakness. It took reading a significant amount of nutritional neuroscience before I understood why the signal never went away. It was not the problem. The translation was.

Ever had a week at work where everything felt harder than it should?
Same workload. Same competence. Completely different internal experience.

If that week happened during your late luteal phase, it wasn’t weakness — it was biochemistry.

Here’s what’s actually happening in your brain during PMS, and how to work with your cycle instead of fighting it.