Make friends with your hormones to feel calmer, happier and more alive

Boudicca Fox-Leonard, with expert advice, tried taking control of six key hormones for one week to improve her mood – and her life. Here’s what happened...

Our bodies are full of tiny messengers, marching around telling us whether we should throw a tantrum, eat a doughnut, or fall in love. So far scientists have identified over 50 of these dispatch-riders, the neurotransmitters that we call hormones.

And shooting these messengers has become an endemic habit, blaming our hormones when we’re not feeling up to scratch.

What if we got to know them better? Perhaps then we wouldn’t be in such a hurry to blame them for simply doing their job.

The Swedish lecturer and author David J P Phillips has built a career on coaching people to communicate better with each other. His TED Talk has been viewed over two million times.

Now he wants us all to learn how to communicate with our own hormones. Deep diving into his own body’s chemical factory has helped lift him out of personal adversity. Having suffered from depression, he has learnt to harness his hormones to better control his mood.

“If you learn to optimise your body’s chemical factory you can change your emotional state whenever you want,” says Phillips with a broad smile.

His book High on Life was published to great acclaim in his home country – although his father was English (“He met a beautiful woman”) – and has now been published in the UK.

He has picked out six key substances: dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin, cortisol, endorphin and testosterone – and

‘These are tools to be able to exist with ourselves and enjoy the phenomenal world we have’

explained how they impact our mood and overall wellness.

“This is the hardest world our brain has ever lived in. There’s so much stimulus. It’s hard work. So these are tools to be able to exist with ourselves and enjoy this phenomenal world we have. If we don’t take charge of our own brain, it is a very difficult world to live in.”

Taking him at his word, I tried to make friends with my hormones for a week. This is how I fared.