Psychedelics, Hormones, and the Missing Piece in Women’s Care

I was genuinely excited to see this recent bulletin in the MAPS newsletter focused on hormone-informed psychedelic medicine for women. It felt especially resonant because my capstone project during psilocybin facilitator training centered on tuning into my own menstrual cycle and how psilocybin affected me across it.

That work made something increasingly clear to me: psychedelic experiences do not happen in isolation. They happen in real bodies, and women’s bodies are cyclical by nature.

Mood, perception, emotional openness, pain sensitivity, and nervous system regulation all shift across the menstrual cycle and across life stages like perimenopause and menopause. It makes little sense to assume psychedelic experiences would somehow be exempt from these realities.

Most psychedelic research and many modern protocols have either ignored the menstrual cycle entirely or treated it as a confounding variable to be controlled or excluded. In practice, I see the opposite. When the cycle is acknowledged, experiences tend to feel more coherent, safer, and easier to integrate. When it is ignored, women are more likely to question themselves rather than the framework they were given.

Why This Research Matters

This is why the work coming out of Hystelica immediately stood out to me.

Their research focuses on how ovarian hormones such as estradiol and progesterone interact with psychedelic substances like psilocybin, and how changes across the menstrual cycle can meaningfully alter subjective experience, emotional tone, and physiological response. This aligns closely with what I see in practice.

Ovulation does not feel the same as the premenstrual phase. Perimenopause does not feel the same as your early thirties. Expecting a uniform psychedelic response across these states is unrealistic at best, and potentially unsafe at worst.

This is not theoretical for me. These differences show up consistently in preparation sessions, in journey experiences themselves, and in the weeks of integration that follow.

What I See Working With Women

In my work, being cycle-aware often means slowing down rather than pushing forward. It means asking different questions, offering different forms of support, and understanding that what feels expansive and resourced one week may feel overwhelming or dysregulating another.

For some women, certain phases of the cycle bring emotional openness, insight, and a sense of connection. For others, those same phases heighten sensitivity, anxiety, or physical discomfort. Neither response is wrong. Both are information.

When that information is honored rather than dismissed, women tend to feel safer and more trusting of their own experience. Integration is often smoother, with less confusion or self-blame afterward. This is especially important for women navigating PMDD, perimenopause, chronic pain, or hormone-linked mood shifts. These are not rare conditions; they are common realities that medicine has historically minimized or misunderstood.

In my own experience, working with my cycle in psychedelic therapy has led to a noticeable decrease in menstrual discomfort, along with an opening of creativity that wasn’t available to me before. I’ve also observed how different themes emerge during different parts of my cycle, and how that awareness informs how I move through the world, make decisions, and relate to my work.

Timing Is Not an Inconvenience

One of the most important points raised in Hystelica’s work is that hormonal variability should not be treated as an inconvenience. It is central to understanding how psychedelics work in women’s bodies.

Rather than flattening women’s biology to fit existing models, there is real potential to develop more precise and effective approaches by working with the cycle instead of around it. That could mean better outcomes, fewer adverse reactions, and greater trust in psychedelic therapies overall.

Cycle awareness is not about limiting access or being overly cautious. It is about offering care that actually reflects how women’s bodies function.

Where Practice and Research Meet

Right now, many facilitators and practitioners are working at the intersection of lived experience and emerging science. We are listening closely to women, noticing patterns, and adjusting with care, even as large-scale research continues to catch up.

Organizations like Hystelica are doing the foundational work of building the research framework this field needs. Their article goes much deeper into the neuroscience, clinical implications, and ethical stakes of ignoring women’s biology in psychedelic research.

If you are interested in the scientific grounding behind cycle-aware psychedelic work, I strongly encourage reading their full piece and following their research as it continues to develop.

Looking Ahead

Psychedelics are often described as tools for seeing more clearly. If that is true, then this is an important moment for the field to examine who has historically been centered in research and who has been overlooked.

Being cycle-aware is not about adding unnecessary rules or restrictions. It is about creating conditions where women can engage this work with greater safety, trust, and depth. In my experience, that awareness fundamentally changes how women relate to both the medicine and themselves, and it feels like a necessary next step in this work.