Small Steps Create Big Shifts
The Thing about Being a Behavior Analyst
You start to see everything as data.
It’s an occupational habit for me. I have spent my days looking at antecedents, behaviors, and consequences. What happens right before something, what the behavior is, and what follows it. So at some point it was inevitable that I’d turn that lens on the one subject I have the most access to: me.
I began paying attention to what I consume and how it lands. Not just food, but everything — what I put in my body, what I put on my body, what I look at/give attention to, what I scroll through. How much it affects me. Where it affects me. How I feel an hour later, a day later, a week later. Once you start collecting that kind of data on yourself, you can’t unsee the patterns. And the patterns were telling me something was off once again.
Too Young for This
Here’s what got my attention. I started noticing symptoms that read as premenopausal — the kind of hormonal signals you don’t expect in your own reflection for another decade or two. And when I mentioned it, quietly, to friends around my age? Same thing. We were comparing notes and landing on the same uncomfortable conclusion: we’re too young for this.
To be clear about the science: true perimenopause averages around age 46, and only about 5% of women enter it early, between 40 and 45. Premature ovarian insufficiency, the ovaries winding down before 40, affects roughly 1% of women. So statistically, a cluster of younger women all feeling “off” in hormonal ways isn’t the textbook story. But here’s the part the textbook does agree with: the age of onset gets pushed earlier by things like chronic stress and poor diet. Lifestyle and environment are on the list of factors too. That’s not fringe, and that’s the accepted view.
So I started asking: what in my environment might be nudging my hormones around?
What I Found in My Own Cabinets
The term for it is endocrine-disrupting chemicals, or EDCs. The National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences defines them plainly: natural or man-made chemicals “that may mimic or interfere with the body’s hormones.” Your endocrine system runs on precise chemical signals. EDCs are molecules that show up looking just enough like those signals to jam the switchboard. NIEHS notes they’re “linked with many health problems in both wildlife and people.”
And they are everywhere. Not in some exotic corner of the store, in the mainstream aisles of every grocery store. Phthalates. Parabens. BPA in food packaging. Triclosan. PFAS. Dyes. They’re in fragrance, in plastic, in the lining of cans, in lotions, in soaps. Regulation has not remotely kept pace with how many everyday products contain them, which means the burden of paying attention ultimately falls on us.
The most convincing thing I read wasn’t a scare statistic — it was an experiment that mirrors exactly what I tell clients to do. Researchers at UC Berkeley ran the HERMOSA study: 100 teenage girls switched to personal care products labeled free of these chemicals. Just a swap. After only three days, they measured what had changed in the girls’ bodies:
Diethyl phthalate metabolites: down 27%
Methyl parabens: down 44%
Propyl parabens: down 45%
Triclosan: down 36%
Benzophenone-3 (a common sunscreen chemical): down 36%
Three days. The lead researcher, Kim Harley, pointed out that teen girls may be especially at risk because they use more personal care products than the average adult woman during a window of rapid reproductive development. But the takeaway isn’t just about teenagers. It’s this: your exposure is not fixed. Your body heals and responds fast to what you choose to put on your skin. That’s an antecedent you can actually change.
The Swaps I Personally Made
So I changed them. I read the ingredients of the things I use, and tossed anything that I didn’t understand and that sounded too chemical - Polysorbate 80, Sodium Bicarbonate, Green 40, Sodium Di-xyz, etc..
Here’s what’s different in my house now:
Deodorant — one of the first to go, and one I felt the difference from most.
Dish soap — you’re eating off of whatever residue it leaves.
Body soap — the thing that sits on the largest organ you have.
Lotion — applied to damp skin over a wide surface area, which is basically ideal conditions for absorption.
Multi-surface cleaner — this one I just make myself now. Water, vinegar, a little castile soap, and whatever essential oils I’m in the mood for. Cheaper, and I know every ingredient in it.
I won’t oversell it, but I’ll tell you the truth: I feel better. I feel back to myself. And I’m not the only data point anymore — the people I’ve suggested this to have come back and told me the same thing, unprompted.
Then There are the Screens
Food and skin were the obvious places to look. The one that surprised me was screens.
Certain websites, certain devices (phones and tablets in particular), certain stretches of scrolling — I noticed actual, physical symptoms. Nausea. A burning feeling on the areas of skin exposed. Headaches. Dizziness. And for a while I dismissed it, because who blames a website for making them queasy?
It is labeled as cybersickness. It’s a recognized cluster of symptoms — nausea, oculomotor strain (eye fatigue and headaches), and disorientation (dizziness, vertigo) — that show up without any physical motion, purely from what you’re looking at. Researchers describe it as being much like motion sickness. We have only started seeing more of these effects as our technology has become more advanced. Earlier cell phones weren’t emitting such intense frequencies. The effects can linger for hours and even mess with your sleep. But why is that happening? It’s because of the amount of radiation and other concentrated harmful things coming from the devices. Because when you notice you move it away from you, you stop having those feelings.
This is not something to become frustrated or upset about however, because then you’re unintentionally moving yourself in the direction of lowering your own frequency. Use this as a reason to pivot your attention to being more present and finding the excitement in one activity to the next. Even in the way you decide to do a necessary task. There are always to routine tasks enjoyable.
Don’t Believe Me, Just Try
If there’s one thing I want you to take from this, it’s the method. Just single-subject research design pointed at your own life:
Get a baseline. Before you change anything, notice how you feel. Energy, mood, skin, cycle, headaches, sleep. Write it down, honestly. You can’t detect a change you never measured.
Change one thing. Swap the deodorant. Cut the fragranced lotion. Put the phone down 30 minutes earlier. One variable at a time if you want discernment, or you’ll never know what did the work.
Give it real time, then observe. Days to weeks. Keep taking notes mental or written.
Compare, then decide. Is there a difference? If yes, keep it and move to the next variable. If no, no harm done, you learned something about how your body heals itself if not impacted continuously.
That’s it. That’s the whole thing. You become your own study, and the results are the only ones that actually apply to you.
Be Sparing. Be Conscious.
Slow down. Enjoy the things that make you feel good; question the ones that quietly don’t. Collect the data on yourself. See if you notice a difference too.
I did. And I got myself back.
Sources & Further Reading
National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences — Endocrine Disruptors
Harley et al., Reducing Phthalate, Paraben, and Phenol Exposure from Personal Care Products in Adolescent Girls: Findings from the HERMOSA Intervention Study, Environmental Health Perspectives (2016) / UC Berkeley News summary
Springer, Human endocrine disruption: an updated review of parabens and phthalates
Iowa State University Research — Screentime can make you feel sick: cybersickness
Hormona / Alloy Health — perimenopause and menopause age of onset