This article was medically reviewed by G. Our stories are reviewed by medical professionals to ensure you get the most accurate and useful information about your health and wellness. For more information, visit our medical review board. Birth control may cause mood swings, particularly for teenagers or people with a history of depression.
However, birth control may also help alleviate the depressive symptoms of PMS, resulting in positive mood changes for some. If you feel like your mood has been negatively affected by birth control, ask your doctor about switching to a non-hormonal method like a copper IUD or condoms.
Visit Insider's Health Reference library for more advice. Madeline Kennedy is a health writer for Insider covering a wide range of topics including reproductive and sexual health, mental health, nutrition, and infectious disease.
Before joining Insider, Madeline worked as a health news writer for Reuters, and a domestic violence therapist. She has a master's degree in social work from UPenn and is interested in the intersection of health and social justice. Additional comments. Email optional. They noted that women with a history of depression were more likely to experience mood worsening on the pill than those with no history of depression. One of the largest studies included 6, sexually active non-pregnant women participating in the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health.
In a cohort of women aged 25—34 years, the researchers compared contraceptive users with other sexually active women who were using either non-hormonal contraception or no contraception.
While this study may provide some reassurance to women concerned about the impact of oral contraceptives on their mood, many questions remain. This was a cross-sectional study, where women were evaluated at a single time point. One might hypothesize that women who developed mood symptoms after treatment with an oral contraceptive most likely stopped taking OCs, so that in this study the hormonal contraceptive users as a group consisted primarily of women who tolerated OCs whereas the non-user group contained a higher number of women who were unable to tolerate OCs.
The hormones used in birth control pills—in particular, ethinyl estradiol—can contribute to feelings of nausea, giving you an urge to vomit or use the toilet once you start taking birth control pills. These feelings can occur temporarily after you take each pill or persist throughout the day as a general side effect. Like other birth control side effects, nausea is usually temporary. It tends to be more severe with emergency contraceptives such as Plan B than with regular birth control.
There are several ways to make nausea from birth control pills easier to tolerate. The first is to only ever take your birth control with food. The second is to take your birth control pill at night. Birth control pills can also cause several less common side effects.
These include a decrease in your sex drive , mood changes and even migraine headaches. For a small percentage of people, birth control pills can even have an effect on your eyes. This side effect was more common in the past than it is now, as older-generation birth control pills used higher doses of estrogens and progestins. This is also why many women experience headaches during their period. This can help to even out your hormone levels and prevent the sudden fluctuations that can cause headaches.
Make sure you sleep well, avoid sources of stress, limit your alcohol consumption and stay hydrated, especially after you start using birth control. Migraines can indicate that you may have a higher stroke risk from hormonal birth control, making it important to talk to your healthcare provider about safer alternatives. Your healthcare provider might recommend switching to a safer, alternative form of hormonal birth control, or using a non-hormonal method of contraception.
The progestin and estrogen hormones used in birth control pills can affect your mood, causing you to experience mood swings. Like other uncommon birth control side effects, this tends to only affect a small percentage of women who use birth control. When you start using birth control, the higher levels of these hormones in your body can make it easier to become annoyed, sad or angry. This is because hormones have a real, noticeable effect on your mood.
Studies show that progestin hormones can induce irritability, depressed mood and anxiety when given to women as part of a hormone replacement therapy HRT treatment. But if you notice yourself feeling sad, angry or annoyed after you start taking the pill without any obvious reason, it could be the result of your hormones.
According to studies , mood changes affect four to 10 percent of women who take hormonal birth control pills. These side effects can often be minimized or avoided by switching to a different pill, or by using a non-hormonal form of contraception.
Birth control can have mixed effects on your libido. Some women notice an increase in sexual desire after they start taking birth control. The key reason birth control can affect your sex drive is its impact on androgens. Testosterone is also one of the main hormones that can cause acne, which is why some birth control pills are approved by the FDA as acne treatments.
For some women, this can cause a noticeable reduction in your interest in sex, as well as your level of desire for sexual activity. But the risk of successful suicide attempts was actually higher: It was triple that of women not on hormonal contraceptives.
As with depression risk, the biggest negative impact of hormonal contraceptives on suicide risk was found for young women ages 15 to 19 on non-oral products.
When it comes to why the pill can mess with your mood, the two systems that shoulder most of the blame are the HPA axis and some of our neurotransmitter systems. First, the HPA axis or hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis.
The type of blunting of the HPA axis we tend to see in pill-taking women is a known contributor to mental health problems, including the types of mood disturbances characteristic of PTSD. Because lacking the biological tools necessary to deal with stress literally harms your ability to cope, having a broken stress response might be a key player in the development of anxiety and depression. It could also harm emotional well-being in indirect ways through its negative impact on our ability to absorb emotionally meaningful events from our environments.
The second piece is the role that neurotransmitter systems play in making women feel lousy on the pill. Before I explain, I need you to know three quick things. Quick Thing 1: Neurotransmitters are chemicals that the brain uses to communicate with itself and the rest of the body. Quick Thing 2: Excitatory neurotransmitters tell your brain cells to get ready for action, making them more likely to fire off messages to other brain cells. Quick Thing 3: Inhibitory neurotransmitters tell your brain cells to slow their roll, making them less likely to fire off messages to other cells in the brain.
The most prevalent and frequently used inhibitory neurotransmitter in the brain is GABA. And our bodies actually produce compounds that work much like alcohol and Xanax. One of the most powerful is allopregnanolone, a neurosteroid. It gets synthesized when progesterone is broken down in the body and has the effect of kick-starting action by your GABA receptors. A number of mental-health-related issues, including panic disorder , depression , bipolar disorder and the mood-related symptoms of PMS , are characterized by lower-than-average levels of GABAergic activity.
Research suggests that changes in dopamine and serotonin signaling may also play a role in mood-related changes seen on the pill.
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