What if exhaustion, anxiety, or burnout weren’t personal flaws, but signals from your body? “Balance Your Hormones, Balance Your Life” by Dr Claudia Welch reframes the way we understand hormones in the female body and their impact on health, one system at a time
Nehal Rajvanshi
Reading “Balance Your Hormones, Balance Your Life” by Dr. Claudia Welch is like opening a door into an aspect of women’s health that is often not discussed enough. Unawareness usually drives us to assume that hormones typically have a starring role during a few phases of life – puberty, PMS, menopause – but this book shifts that perspective entirely. It reveals how our hormones influence almost every system in the body, often in ways we don’t immediately recognise.
There’s a simple stress assessment early in the book – just a list of straightforward questions. I breezed through it, thinking, “Maybe one or two at most.” But when I saw how many questions I had answered “yes” to, and then read that even a single “yes” could signal imbalance, I genuinely paused. It was one of those quiet moments of realisation – you know something’s off, but you haven’t really named it until now, let alone consciously realised it.
The book expands into a deep, holistic exploration of hormonal health. What makes Dr. Welch’s approach especially effective is how she simplifies the complexity of the hormonal system. Rather than getting lost in the details of individual hormones, she categorises them into Yin and Yang hormones – terms borrowed from Eastern traditions, but applied in a practical, grounded way. Yin hormones nourish, stabilise, and restore; Yang hormones energise, activate and drive. This distinction makes it much easier to understand how our bodies tip out of balance, and how symptoms we might brush off – like poor sleep, low energy, or anxiety – can be traced back to these fundamental forces.
Dr. Welch, a Doctor of Oriental Medicine and an Ayurvedic practitioner, brings years of experience into this work, making complex systems of health feel both accessible and deeply human. She doesn’t advocate for a single medical system. Instead, she bridges the best of both worlds—Western medicine and Eastern healing traditions like Ayurveda and Traditional Chinese Medicine. She acknowledges where Western medicine excels, especially in acute care, while offering Eastern approaches as long-term frameworks for balance and restoration. That blend feels refreshing. There’s no dogma, just curiosity, humility, and respect for the complexity of the human body.
The range of topics covered is wide: from explaining why we have menstrual cycles, to heart health, digestion, emotional well-being, and how hormones play a role across all of it. At times, the information in the book can feel dense and overwhelming, but definitely rich. This isn’t a book that one can rush through. It’s one that you find yourself returning to when something feels off-kilter, or when you’re trying to understand your body a little better. It offers guidance, but also patience. It doesn’t promise quick fixes, it encourages long-term healing.
One of the most important aspects of this book is how it gives language to experiences many women have long internalised but not fully understood. Fatigue, mood swings, or burnout are often brushed aside as personality quirks or lifestyle problems. But Dr. Welch shows how these can be traced to deeper physiological imbalances, and in doing so, validates what many women intuitively feel but haven’t had the words or support to articulate. There’s something incredibly affirming about that. It moves the conversation around women’s health from one of frustration or confusion to one of understanding and agency.
This book, with its holistic perspective on the female body, is one that all women should read. And while the book speaks to all women, its impact will vary depending on when you read it. This is the kind of book every teenage girl can be handed, not just for the information, but for the sense of self-understanding it fosters, amidst the changes one undergoes at that age and the confusion it follows. For women in their twenties and thirties, it’s a chance to recalibrate, to better understand cycles, energy, and stress before patterns become deeply ingrained. And for those already navigating chronic symptoms or burnout, it becomes a gentle guide to help repair and reconnect with the body. Wherever you are, this book meets you there, with information, clarity, and a deep respect for your body.
One of the most important aspects of this book is how it gives language to experiences many women have long internalised but not fully understood. Fatigue, mood swings, or burnout are often brushed aside as personality quirks or lifestyle problems.
This book also quietly challenges the cultural pace we’ve come to normalise. It asks: What if exhaustion isn’t a flaw in us, but in the pace we’re expected to maintain? What if healing doesn’t mean pushing harder, but allowing more stillness, softness, and recovery? These questions linger long after the last chapter.
What stays with you long after finishing is the invitation to tune in. To slow down. To trust that the body knows what it needs, if only we’re willing to hear it. As Dr. Welch writes:
“When we do listen to the body, we often discover it is telling us to slow down, kick back, and chill out. Were we to surrender to the pace of the body, we might find that it is only asking us to live as we really want to live. How ironic that it takes courage to live the lives we want to live.”
“Balance Your Hormones, Balance Your Life” is a reassuring guide that takes the fear out of hormonal imbalance. It affirms that meaningful change is possible, not through drastic measures, but through conscious shifts in how we live. It’s a reminder that our health is woven into the fabric of our daily lives, and that balance often begins not by doing more, but by slowing down and listening to what the body has been trying to tell us all along.