The Unwritten Chapters: When Hormones Become a Source of Intelligence

We’ve all heard it.

“Are you hormonal?”

A question tossed casually into the air, one that has long been used to shrink women’s realities into stereotypes. It implies overreaction, dramatics, exaggeration. It dismisses pain. It silences truth.

For generations, hormonal changes have been painted as a burden, something to hide or endure. But what if the story has always been bigger? What if our hormones are not the villains of the narrative… but the narrators?

Today, science and storytelling finally meet to reveal a refreshing truth:
hormones are a form of intelligence.

Listening to the Body’s Hidden Language

Every menstrual cycle is a complex ballet of hormones, shifting energy, emotions, appetite, focus, confidence, and desire. Yet most women grow up learning only two words: period and pain.

Modern research now calls it Hormonal Intelligence, the understanding that our internal rhythms are not random disruptions but deeply informative signals.

Consider these lived realities:

PMS & PMDD: The Misunderstood Emotion

Nearly one-third of menstruators experience Premenstrual Syndrome, mood shifts, fatigue, increased sensitivity.
For 2–5%, those emotional waves become a monthly tsunami: PMDD, often dismissed and misdiagnosed for over a decade.

IVF: When Hormones Amplify Hope and Heartache

Fertility treatments heighten hormonal responses. Women navigating IVF often carry not just injections, but a rollercoaster of fear, anticipation, and courage.

PCOS: A System Affected, Head to Heart

One in five Indian women lives with Polycystic Ovary Syndrome. Beyond cycle disruptions and physical symptoms lie emotional effects, anxiety, depression, self-doubt, too often ignored in treatment.

Our hormones are always speaking.
The tragedy is how rarely anyone is taught to listen.

A New Language for Hormonal Health

In this silence, a movement is emerging, with technology and empathy hand-in-hand.

Also Read: Stronger, Wiser, Healthier- A Woman’s Guide to Wellness After 40

HealCycle, founded by young entrepreneur Ananya Grover, reframes hormonal health not as chaos, but as communication.
Not as instability, but intelligence.

The app supports people experiencing PMS, PMDD, PCOS, and hormonal mood disorders by mapping emotions through the cycle, validating what women have always known:
our feelings are real.

Meet Tara: The AI That Listens

Instead of cold data dashboards, HealCycle introduces Tara, an empathetic AI companion inspired by the intuitive jellyfish, a creature that moves with sensitivity and grace.

Tara helps users recognize:
• how mood correlates with each cycle phase
• what triggers emotional spikes
• which habits nourish resilience

She doesn’t tell you what to feel —
She helps you understand why you’re feeling it.

Because when emotional patterns become visible, they become manageable.

In Conversation: The Vision Behind HealCycle

We spoke with Ananya Grover, Founder of HealCycle, about rewriting the narrative around women’s hormonal health, with honesty and innovation.

Q: What sparked your mission to build HealCycle?
“When my father passed away, grief collided with hormone shifts in a way I couldn’t comprehend. I realised we’re handed maps for everything in life, except our own emotional cycles. HealCycle was created to give women language for what we silently navigate every month.”

Q: How do you define ‘Hormonal Intelligence’?
“Our emotions are data. When hormones shift, they’re communicating needs, rest, boundaries, nourishment. Hormonal Intelligence means treating these signals as wisdom, not weakness.”

Q: Tara feels different from typical health tech. Why?
“Most apps focus on periods. Tara focuses on the person. She listens, reflects, and helps you see patterns shaping your everyday life, from confidence to connection.”

Q: What do you hope HealCycle changes?
“A world where no one says ‘You’re overreacting’ again. Hormonal literacy should be a leadership skill. Understanding your cycle should strengthen your identity, not question it.”

The Other Half of the Story: A Psychiatrist’s Perspective

We asked Dr Aninda Sidhana, HealCycle’s Medical Advisor and a leading expert in women’s mental and sexual health, why hormonal emotions deserve medical attention.

Q: Why do hormonal mental health concerns go unnoticed?
“Because women’s health is treated in fragments, gynaecologists focus on the reproductive system, psychiatrists on the mind. But hormones sit in between. Ignoring that connection means ignoring women’s truth.”

Q: How does HealCycle change the way care is delivered?
“Tara provides emotional timelines that clinicians never receive. We begin treatment with insights, not assumptions. That is rhythm-informed care, and that is the future.”

Also Read: Dear Woman, Are You Listening to Your Body?

From Surviving Our Cycles to Leading with Them

HealCycle is more than an app, it’s a rising movement.
It empowers individuals, partners, teachers, and doctors with tools to approach hormones with curiosity instead of criticism.

It offers women what has been withheld from them for centuries: