Are we prisoners of our hormones?
Ever notice how quickly that phrase comes up in conversation? "It's hormonal." Like a final explanation. Almost like an inescapable conclusion.
When the body changes, when the mood wavers, when the energy is no longer the same, we often point the finger at hormones. In adolescence, we used to say "it's the age". Later, "it's stress". Then one day, other words appear: perimenopause, menopause, andropause. And with them, a diffuse but tenacious impression: something is eluding us.
Perhaps you've experienced it too. That strange feeling of being traversed by states that no longer really resemble you. Rougher emotions. A different kind of fatigue. A relationship with your body that changes, sometimes without warning. And that silent question, which we don't always dare to ask: Is it me... or is it my hormones?
Our age loves biological explanations. They reassure. They give the impression of understanding. But they can also be confining. Because if everything is hormonal, what's left of our inner freedom? Of our ability to get through these passages in ways other than resignation or struggle?
For a long time now, however, certain traditions - notably Rudolf Steiner's anthroposophy - have been proposing a different reading of these transformations. A reading that does not deny the body, biology or hormones. But one that refuses to reduce human beings to their mechanisms. A reading that speaks of thresholds, of metamorphoses, of passages in life where something withdraws... so that something else can emerge.
Puberty, maturity, menopause andandropause are not simply hormonal accidents to be corrected or endured. But key moments in human biography. Moments when the question is not only "what's happening to me?" but also "what is this transformation asking of me?"
So let's ask the question differently, without fatalism or illusions of control: are we really prisoners of our hormones... or are we facing passages that invite us to change our relationship with ourselves?
That's the exploration I propose here.
Hormones: one influence among many
You've probably heard - or uttered - the phrase: "I'm like this at the moment, it's hormonal".
It's become almost automatic. As if hormones were the final cause, the ultimate explanation, the one that puts an end to reflection. And let's face it: it's not absurd. Hormones influence energy, mood, sleep, desire and concentration. They play a real, measurable, undeniable role.
But have you noticed anything?
When we talk about hormones, we often talk about them as if they were a force outside us, almost alien. As if they were acting on us, without us. As if we've become spectators to a body that operates according to its own laws.
Yet we accept quite readily the idea that other influences run through us without defining us entirely. We know that our family has left its mark on us, that our upbringing has left its mark, that our culture, our era and our social environment have shaped the way we think and react. And yet, we don't say: "I'm doomed to be the sum of it all."
We talk about self-work, awareness, inner transformation. We recognize the influence... without making it a prison.
So why should hormones be any different?
Perhaps because they affect the body. And when the body changes, it confronts us with something more raw, more immediate. It doesn't ask for our opinion. It transforms itself. It imposes its own rhythms. And that can be deeply destabilizing.
But to reduce these transformations to a simple biological mechanism is to miss something essential. Because influence is not necessarily condemnation. It can also be a language. A way for living organisms to signal that a balance is shifting, that a threshold has been crossed, that an old way of functioning is reaching its limit.
From this perspective, hormones are not inner enemies or invisible masters. Rather, they are one of the many forces involved in our personal history. Just like our family heritage, our social conditioning or our old wounds.
The real question, then, may not be: "Do hormones influence me?" but rather: "What place do I give them in understanding what I'm experiencing?"
For between denying their role and blindly submitting to them, there is a space. A space of awareness, of relationship, of dialogue with what is transforming us. And it is precisely this space that life's great passages will come to test.
Major hormonal shifts: a biographical reading
Have you ever noticed that certain moments in life don't just change us... they move us internally? Not just a little more tired, a little more sensitive, a little less patient. No. Something deeper. As if an old way of being didn't really work anymore, without the next one being clear yet.
These moments are not anomalies. They recur in almost everyone, in different forms, at different rhythms. And very often, they coincide with what are known as hormonal transitions.
Puberty, for example, is not just about growth or sexuality. It's a rupture. The body changes, yes, but above all the relationship to oneself, to others, to the world. What was taken for granted is no longer taken for granted. Emotions take over. The gaze of others becomes burning. You can no longer inhabit your body as you used to.
Later, there's the period we call maturity. This is when, outwardly, everything seems more stable. The body "works", hormones are more discreet, you keep up the pace. And yet, here too, something is at play. A form of installation. Sometimes even an illusion of mastery. As if the living world were holding its breath before a new tipping point.
Then come other thresholds. Quieter, sometimes more disconcerting. Menopause, andropause - loaded words, often dreaded. Not just because of the symptoms, but because they touch on identity. Who you thought you were. To the role your body has been playing until now, without you really realizing it.
In a purely biological reading, these stages are described as hormonal variations. In a purely psychological reading, as existential crises. But in a biographical reading - as proposed by Rudolf Steiner - they appear as something else again: thresholds of transformation, where the forces of life change direction.
The idea is simple, but deeply disturbing: as life goes by, certain forces don't disappear... they withdraw from the body. And this withdrawal can be experienced either as a loss, or as an opening.
When the body is no longer entirely mobilized by growth, reproduction or performance, something is released. But this liberation is not automatic. It requires a different way of relating to oneself. Otherwise, what could become an inner strength turns into fatigue, bitterness, a sense of decline.
And this is where the notion of biography becomes essential. For these passages are not isolated accidents. They are part of a continuum. What we undergo at one age, we can sometimes integrate at another. What we couldn't understand at puberty reappears, in another form, later in life.
From this perspective, hormones are not just chemical substances. They mark the moments when life forces us to change our inner posture. To leave one way of being to invent another.
The question then becomes: what are we to make of these passages? Live them as disturbances to be corrected... or as stages that require a new relationship with ourselves?
This is what we're going to explore, starting with life's first major upheaval: puberty.
1. Puberty: when the body speaks
Do you remember that moment when your body started to change without asking you? Maybe not in detail, but in sensation. That vague impression that something was happening. That the body was becoming more present, more cumbersome at times. More demanding too.
Puberty is often described as a hormonal storm. And this is not untrue. Hormones upset our rhythms, our emotions, our relationship with desire, anger and sadness. Everything becomes more intense. More unstable. More difficult to contain.
But have you noticed how, at this age, we often feel dispossessed of ourselves? You don't really recognize yourself anymore. The body doesn't respond as it used to. Reactions overtake thought. And the people around you, often clumsily, simply explain: "It's adolescence As if this were enough to make sense of what's going on inside.
In this phase of life, the body literally takes over. It imposes its laws, its rhythms, its urgencies. And for most of us, we don't yet have the inner tools to deal with this upheaval in any way other than confusion or revolt.
From a biographical perspective, puberty marks a very special moment: one in which the human being begins to directly experience forces that no longer pass solely through thought or imitation, but through bodily experience. The body becomes the site of an intensification of inner experience.
And perhaps this is why this period is so often misunderstood. We treat it as a problem to be managed, when in fact it raises a fundamental question: who am I, when I can't control what's going on inside me?
At puberty, it would be illusory to speak of inner freedom in the full sense of the word. We undergo a lot. And that's normal. But this experience leaves its mark. It inscribes in us an initial experience of the tension between what passes through us and what we can do with it.
It's no coincidence that, later in life, other hormonal transitions sometimes awaken similar sensations: irritability, hypersensitivity, unexplained fatigue, a feeling of no longer recognizing oneself. It's as if the body has come to remind us of a question left unanswered.
Puberty is much more than an episode to be overcome. It is a first initiation into the complexity of the human being. It shows us, sometimes brutally, that we are not only beings of will and control, but also beings driven by deep-seated forces.
What changes with age is not the disappearance of these forces. It's the possibility - or otherwise - of developing a different relationship with them. Where the adolescent suffers, the adult can begin to observe. Where the child defends himself, the mature person can learn to listen.
And it is precisely this difference that will become central to the next stages of life.
2. Maturity: the illusion of stability
After the storm of puberty, there's often a calmer period. At least on the surface. The body finds its own rhythm. Hormones seem to have calmed down. Energy returns in a more regular form. You "hold on". We're moving forward.
You may have experienced that phase when you say to yourself: that's it, I know how I work.
The body responds. Emotions are more contained. Life is organized around projects, responsibilities, sometimes family, work, involvement in the world.
And yet... have you noticed how deceptive this stability can be?
The hormones haven't disappeared. They've simply gone silent. They act in the background, supporting endurance, theability to give, to produce, to meet expectations. This period of life is often marked by outward movement. We build. We cope. We sometimes forget ourselves too.
Perhaps that's why maturity gives theimpression of regained control. You don't feel as tossed about as you did in your teens. You've learned to compose. To contain. To rationalize. But this mastery often rests on a fragile balance, maintained by forces that also have their limits.
In a biographical reading, this phase corresponds to a time when the body still largely supports the external activity of the human being. Vital forces are mobilized for action, reproduction and adaptation. As long as this balance holds, everything seems to go without saying.
But this "holding" comes at a price.
Because when we live for so long under the illusion of stability, we sometimes forget to develop a conscious relationship with what's going through us. We rely on the body as a matter of course. And when that support begins to change, the surprise is often brutal.
That's when the first cracks appear. A different kind of fatigue. Stress that runs deeper. Emotions spilling over where they had previously been under control. As if the body were slowly beginning to withdraw its unconditional support.
Maturity is therefore a pivotal phase, even if it doesn't present itself as such. It silently prepares the way for what follows. It reveals, sometimes belatedly, what we have learned - or not - to do with our inner life when the body was still carrying us along without resistance.
And when this balance begins to shift, a new question arises, often more head-on than ever: if I can no longer rely on my body in the same way, what am I going to rely on from now on?
It's this question that comes to the fore in the great passages of menopause and andropause.
3. Menopause and andropause: the end of a role, not of life
There comes a time when the body ceases to take certain things for granted. Not always abruptly. Sometimes by successive touches. A disturbance here. An unusual fatigue there. An emotion that overflows for no apparent reason. And that unsettling feeling: I don't function like I used to.
Menopause and andropause are often presented as biological events to be managed. Hormonal check-ups. Symptoms to be corrected. Dreaded, sometimes even dreaded thresholds. But this view often misses the point.
For what wavers at this point in life concerns more than just the body. It's also an inner role that is being transformed.
For decades, part of our vital energy has been focused on reproduction, performance and adaptation to the outside world. Even when we didn't have children, these forces were there, mobilized and available. They supported a certain way of being in the world: active, projected, outward-looking.
When these forces gradually withdraw, it's not just a biological function that dies out. It's a whole balance that shifts.
You may have felt this before. That strange feeling that something is coming to an end, without you knowing exactly what. A different relationship with time. A crumbling patience. Or, on the contrary, a sharper lucidity. Sometimes a deep fatigue, sometimes a new emotional intensity. It's as if the body is saying: I can't bear all this in the same way any more.
In a biographical reading, these passages are not a decline in the strict sense. Rather, they mark a shift in the direction of life forces. What used to be absorbed by the body is no longer used in the same way. And this energy, if not recognized, can turn against us in the form of irritation, discouragement, a sense of loss of meaning.
This is often where the idea of being a "prisoner of one's hormones" is born. Not because hormones dominate everything, but becausewe continue to live as we did before, when something needs to be experienced differently.
These periods confront everyone with a delicate question: who am I when I am no longer supported by this role? When my body no longer pushes me outwards with the same obviousness? When certain expectations fall, sometimes without warning?
Menopause and andropause put an end to a function, not to life. They mark the closing of a chapter, but also the opening of a new space. A space that can be uncomfortable, because it requires less doing... and more being. Less responding to external injunctions, and more listening to what's emerging from within.
This passage can be experienced as an unfair loss. Or as an invitation. It all depends on our relationship with these transformations. For what withdraws from the body does not disappear. It waits, silently, to be taken up again in another way.
This is where the central question of this article becomes inescapable: are we condemned to undergo these upheavals... or can we learn to transform them?
To suffer or to transform? Rudolf Steiner's radically different approach
At this point, a question becomes inevitable. Perhaps it's been running through your mind since the beginning of this article: if hormones have such an influence on our lives, do we really have any room for manoeuvre?
For there are two impasses into which we easily fall.
The first is to reduce everything to biology. It's hormonal, so there's nothing I can do about it. We observe, we endure, we wait for things to pass or to stabilize. There's something reassuring about this posture, but it often leaves a bitter taste: that of being dispossessed of your own experience.
The second impasse is the opposite: denying the body. As if everything were a matter of the mind, of willpower or positive thinking. As if we could get through these upheavals by a simple inner effort, without taking into account what is actually happening in the body.
Rudolf Steiner proposes a path that resembles neither of these. And this is where his reading really becomes interesting.
In his later lectures, particularly those devoted to health and disease, he very clearly recognizes the role of hormones and glands. He doesn't minimize them. Nor does he spiritualize them. But he refuses to see them as the ultimate cause of what human beings experience.
What he does introduce is a disturbing and demanding idea: hormones regulate processes, but they do not carry the meaning of these processes.
In other words, they accompany profound transformations, without being the conscious driving force behind them. And when we seek to correct the biological level alone, we act on the effects without questioning what it is in the person's life that needs to be reoriented.
This is why Steiner is so critical of purely physiological attempts at "rejuvenation". Not because they would be absurd in themselves, but because they miss the essential question: what happens to the energy that is no longer mobilized by the body?
In his vision, aging is not just a loss of strength. It's also a displacement. Certain forces withdraw from metabolism, reproduction and growth. And this withdrawal creates a void. A space. An empty space never remains neutral. It is either filled unconsciously - through complaint, anger, bitterness - or invested consciously.
This is where the notion of transformation takes on its full meaning.
Transforming, in this perspective, doesn't mean "controlling your hormones". It means changing our relationship to what is transforming within us. It means developing an inner activity capable of welcoming these shifts without experiencing them solely as losses.
This work is neither magical nor spectacular. It does not promise to eliminate symptoms, nor to avoid difficult passages. But it does profoundly change the way they are experienced. Where we used to suffer, we begin to observe. Where we used to resist, we learn to listen. And sometimes, where we thought we were weakening, we discover a different kind of self-presence.
True freedom here is not about escaping hormones. It's about not being reduced to them.
And this is perhaps what these major hormonal changes teach us, often reluctantly: that the human being is never entirely defined by what happens in his or her body... but neither can he or she do without a conscious relationship with that body.
A different way of inhabiting change
When the body changes, where does one place one's support?
At this point, a question almost naturally arises. You may have already formulated it in your own mind: okay, so much for understanding... but in concrete terms, how do we get through these passages?
Rudolf Steiner didn't give us any recipes. And that's probably what makes his thinking so disturbing, but also so right. He proposes neither a technique for "correcting" hormones, nor a method for avoiding upheavals. He proposes a much more radical shift: changing the fulcrum of our lives when the body can no longer carry certain forces for us.
The first and often most difficult step is to give up the idea of going back to the way things were. Faced with hormonal transformations, our reflex is almost always the same: to want to regain the energy of yesteryear, the stability of before, the way we used to function. For Steiner, this struggle is one of the main sources of suffering. Not because it is "wrong", but because it keeps the human being attached to a form of life that is in the process of withdrawing.
Giving up here does not mean giving up. It means recognizing that the body no longer plays exactly the same role. And that clinging to it costs more energy than it saves.
This gradual withdrawal of biological forces is not a disappearance. Forces no longer mobilized by growth, reproduction or performance become available in other ways. But this availability is not automatic. If nothing is taken up internally, this energy often turns against the organism: diffuse fatigue, irritability, nervousness, feelings of emptiness or disorientation.
This is where Steiner places the heart of human work: consciously taking up what the body no longer carries. Not by forcing it, nor by trying to control it, but by developing a different quality of self-presence. A more lively way of thinking. An ability to observe without immediate judgment. A genuine interest in what makes sense, above and beyond efficiency or utility.
To inhabit your body differently is also to accept that certain answers no longer come from the outside. It doesn't mean withdrawing from life, but entering it with a different depth. Less by automatism. Less out of obligation. More out of a sense of rightness.
This inner shift needs very concrete support: rhythm. Steiner insists on this, because when biological forces change, the body becomes much more sensitive to irregularity. What once passed without consequence suddenly becomes more costly.
More regular rhythms. Rest periods that are genuinely respected. Clear alternation between activity and breaks. Less dispersion, less unnecessary overload. Rhythm doesn't replace brute force, but supports it where it is no longer available. It becomes a form of embodied wisdom.
Basically, what Rudolf Steiner proposes is not a solution to hormones. It's another way of going through life's transformations. It's a way that doesn't deny the body or its difficulties, but that refuses to reduce the human being to what's wrong with him or her.
We can't do away with passages. But we can prevent them from reducing us. And sometimes even discover that they open up an inner space that would never have emerged otherwise.
Hormones speak for the body - not the whole person
So, are we prisoners of our hormones?
If we stick to a purely biological reading, the temptation is to answer yes. But this answer leaves a strange taste, as if it amputates something essential to the human experience.
Hormones influence, that's undeniable. They mark passages, trigger upheavals, shift balances. But they don't tell the whole story about who we are. They do not, on their own, carry the meaning of what we experience.
Puberty, maturity, menopause and andropause are not mistakes made by living beings. They are moments when life changes regime. Where what was supported by the body needs to be taken up again in a different, more conscious way.
These passages can be experienced as unjust losses, or as demanding invitations. Or as demanding invitations. Not to become "better", but to become more present to oneself. More honest. More adjusted.
But it's also important to be clear: going through these phases doesn't mean having to carry everything alone. Some transformations can be physically, emotionally or psychologically delicate. Being accompanied - by a doctor, a naturopath, a practitioner of Chinese medicine or any other suitable approach - can be a real help. Not to make the passage disappear, but to help you experience it more accurately and with less suffering.
Taking care of the body, getting support when necessary, and cultivating a more conscious relationship with what's changing within us, are not opposing approaches. They complement each other and are often life-saving!
Maybe the real prison isn't hormonal. Perhaps it begins when we refuse to listen to what these transformations are telling us... or when we persist in going through them without support.
If this article has resonated for you, if certain phrases have echoed your own experience, I invite you to share it. Pass it on to someone who may be going through one of these passages. And above all, leave a comment.
Your experience, your questions, your doubts are all welcome here. We all go through these transformations - but we never experience them in the same way.
We've come to the end of this article. I hope you enjoyed it.
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Sources
This article is based primarily on the work of Rudolf Steiner, founder of anthroposophy, and more specifically on his reflections on human biography, health, aging and the relationship between body, mind and spirit.
The reference texts used to support this reflection are:
- Rudolf Steiner - Über Gesundheit und Krankheit (GA 348)
Lectures from 1922-1923, in which Steiner explicitly addresses the role of endocrine glands, hormones, aging and the limits of an exclusively biological approach to human transformations.
- Rudolf Steiner - Die Geheimwissenschaft im Umriss (GA 13)
Fundamental work for understanding the structure of the human being, life forces and the major phases of biography, beyond a purely physiological reading.
- Rudolf Steiner - Wie erlangt man Erkenntnisse der höheren Welten? (GA 10)
Method text on inner development and the conscious transformation of human experience, without denial of the body or abstract spiritualization.
- Rudolf Steiner - Anthroposophie / Psychosophie / Pneumatosophie (GA 115-117)
Lectures on the links between the physical, psychic and spiritual, placing bodily phenomena within a more global understanding of the human being.
- Rudolf Steiner - Allgemeine Menschenkunde als Grundlage der Pädagogik (GA 293)
Cycle of lectures providing a rhythmic, evolutionary vision of human life, useful for understanding the passages and metamorphoses that punctuate existence.
For access to Rudolf Steiner's original texts, including the volumes mentioned above:
👉 Rudolf Steiner Archive - https://rsarchive.org
This site provides a wide range of texts in several languages, which can be freely consulted online or downloaded, depending on rights.
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