Pauline Goossens

I was an aspiring doctor, but what got me to where I am today as a hormone cycle researcher & educator was going through the traumatizing journey of taking hormonal birth control from the age of 16 when I had debilitating cramps and was starting to become sexually active.

For 10 years, I had taken synthetic hormonal birth control, not knowing it gets rid of our stress response system, depletes our gut microbiome, stunts brain development, muscle growth, & bone density, changes our sense of smell to find a suitable partner, and increases our risk of depression by up to 220% when quitting.

By the age of 20, I had developed an autoimmune disease called psoriasis. I was studying Pre-Medicine and Spanish, having terrible levels of stress and lack of sleep.

It never made sense to me that many medical students and doctors had poor nutrition, stress, and balance in their lives. I sat in on a couple of medical school courses learning about what pharmaceutical drug to give to a patient and I wondered,

I quit that pursuit, and at the age of 26, I finally decided to come off the pill. I went through a year of depression until one day, a friend told me about how hormones affect us. I was dumbfounded! I’ve since passionately & deeply researched our cycles.

I can only be grateful for the trauma I went through to have brought me to where I am today. Since then, I have deeply explored my new passion, researching hormone cycles and how they affect our mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual beings.