'Why I Gave up on Birth Control'

I first went on the contraceptive pill when I was 17. I had a long-term boyfriend, and while we were using condoms, I decided I wanted a more reliable form of birth control.

I knew a few of my friends were on hormonal contraceptives, but didn't really know much about them. It just seemed like everyone I knew was going on them and they made a lot of sense; I didn't spend a whole lot of time thinking about the potential side effects at the time.

In fact, the biggest hurdle for me when it came to birth control was accessing it without my parents finding out; that was the thing I was most worried about. It wasn't so much that I thought they would be horrified to learn that I was sexually active, it was more the idea that I didn't want to talk to them about it because of the awkwardness.

During high-school in the mid-nineties, we had a health class where you talked about the ins and outs of childbirth and why you shouldn't get pregnant as a teenager, but there wasn't a ton of discussion around contraceptives.

Starting birth control

When I visited my doctor, I was told about the physical risks, for example developing thrombosis or heart problems, but I never heard anything about any type of psychological side effects that I might experience from my birth control.

The first contraceptive I had was an injection, which lasts for around three months. I was told that I might experience some light vaginal bleeding, but that it would desist within a few weeks and then I would no longer have a period at all. I thought: "Sweet, that sounds awesome."

Unfortunately, I ended up having a terrible reaction to the shot. It changed my mood completely, I felt like a complete basket case. I cried every single day I was on it and just felt very emotionally volatile. I didn't know for sure my change in mood was being caused by the injection, but I suspected that it could have been contributing to how I was feeling.

After three months, my doctors asked me whether I wanted to continue with the same contraceptive injection. I thought they were out of their minds. I stopped taking birth control altogether for around two months.

Choosing partners on the pill

Following that experience I was really turned off to the idea of hormonal contraceptives, until a friend of mine recommended a combination birth control pill. She insisted it had cleared up her skin and that she had no physical or emotional problems.

I decided to give it a try and was relieved to find I didn't have any psychological side effects, it didn't make me feel crazy. For my first two cycles it made me nauseous, but that cleared up after a couple of months. My boyfriend and I broke up before I went to college, but I remained on hormonal birth control for the next decade.

I found that when it came to looking for potential partners, I was very interested in safety. I really wanted stability, certainty and security. I had a checklist of what qualified someone as a suitable partner; thinking: "Is this man going to be handsome, a stable partner, a decent provider and a good father?" I was very focused on the tangible attributes of a partner, rather than a feeling.

Of course, attraction was important—but I was less focused on instant chemistry with a potential partner and instead concentrated on their substantial qualities. Throughout my time in college and graduate school, my romantic interests were all very much guided by that type of decision making.

Losing interest in sex

When I was a teenager, I had a very healthy libido and was always really open communicating about sex related issues with my partners. I never had any issues when it came to being able to climax.

But when I was on birth control, I found sex was something that didn't really interest me. At the beginning of a relationship, I would be interested in being physical with my partner, but it would quickly fade and I would become absolutely neutral about sex.

In fact, if someone had told me in my twenties that sex was something we would get rid of as a species, I would be like: "Okay, cool." I felt as though there was something wrong with me, because I just did not care.

During my time on hormonal birth control, I had several different relationships and it didn't matter who I was with, sex felt like an obligation and not something I spontaneously wanted to do. There was nothing wrong with my partners, there was something wrong with my libido.

Prior to being on birth control, I found various different people attractive. I even remember having a crush on my boyfriend's best friend. But while I was on the hormonal pill, I wasn't attracted to anybody.

I wasn't motivated to do things to make myself look enticing to men. I rarely even noticed males I wasn't in a relationship with. I didn't see myself as sexy, I was much more focused on building my career as a psychologist; getting my Ph.D. in Evolutionary Psychology and later starting my own research laboratories at Texas Christian University.

Life without birth control

When I was in my late twenties, I got married and fell pregnant with my two children. Of course, I came off hormonal contraceptives during both my pregnancies and while I was breastfeeding, but because my body was under so much physical strain, I didn't really notice any differences.

After I was done breastfeeding my youngest son, when I was 31, I went back on birth control for around six months before my husband got a vasectomy, so I could come off hormonal contraceptives.

Within three months, I really started to experience the world differently. While I was on birth control I felt like I was some kind of worker bee, a drone who wasn't interested in sexuality or excitement, but now I felt this incredible feeling of dimensionality.

I'd always been somebody who looked after their physical health, but once I was off birth control I just had this energetic drive, I loved exercise in a way I hadn't before. I wanted to run all the time, I started cycling again and got a gym membership. Moving my body felt good.

When I went on the pill, I stopped being interested in music. If I was cooking or cleaning, I never wanted to have an album on in the background because it would overwhelm my senses. It just felt like too much. But once I came off it, I wanted to have the radio on all the time. Whether it was exercising or hanging out with the kids, I wanted that extra stimulation.

Another thing I noticed was that, all of a sudden, I felt like a sexual person. My husband was thrilled, our sex life did a total 180 degree turn, because I just couldn't get enough of him. It was fantastic.

I started growing my hair out for the first time in years and started whitening my teeth. I was just interested in my physical appearance again, which I hadn't been since high school. As I got older, I'd chalked that lack of interest up to maturing, but all of a sudden I cared about my looks again. I felt what I believe it means to be a woman; these naturally occurring cyclical variations and hormones and being in tune with my sexuality and femininity. I just felt more alive.

As soon as those changes happened, I knew I never wanted to go back to feeling the way I did again. It wasn't as though I'd had a really terribly negative experience on birth control, it allowed me to concentrate on my children and get my degrees, but being off it was a total game changer for me. I never went to a doctor about these changes after coming off the pill, so although I haven't spoken to a medical expert, there is nothing else, in my view, that can explain the difference in my libido from being on the pill to not.

In my late thirties, my husband and I separated. It was unrelated to my coming off birth control, but I quickly noticed that my choice in partners was very different to what it had been before. There was no longer a checklist, it was all about intangibles.

It was less about, "Is he handsome and successful?" and more about, "How do I feel when I am with this person?" and, "How is my body responding?" I think being on birth control had dampened my typical hormonal responses, which naturally picked up on those intangible attributes and fan the flames of attraction in prospective partners.

Why did the pill have this effect?

After seeing how much more three-dimensional my life felt after coming off birth control, I was inspired to conduct my own research into how hormonal contraceptives can impact women's behavior, which I lay out in my book. Through my research, I found the synthetic hormone cocktail that you find in birth control suppresses the release of the body's natural endogenous sex hormones, estrogen and progesterone, in your body. It also lowers your levels of testosterone and blunts the activities of your stress hormones. It has the overall effect of changing the levels of some of the naturally produced hormones in your body, those which can be essential in creating the experience of being a three dimensional human person.

While this is not the case for all women who take birth control, my advice for women who may be taking hormonal contraceptives, or considering it, is that if you don't like the way that you feel on a certain product, go to your doctor and try another one.

The reason for this is there's close to 100 different formulations of hormonal birth control out there and individual women respond differently to various things. If you don't like what you're on, talk to your doctor and try something else.

Sarah E. Hill PhD is an award-winning research psychologist and professor with expertise in women, health, and sexual psychology. She is the author of This Is Your Brain on Birth Control: The Surprising Science of Women, Hormones, and the Law of Unintended Consequences.

All views expressed in this article are the author's own.

As told to Monica Greep.