Make Your Path to Hormonal Health Effortless

Mindy Pelz, DC

Mona Sharma. I just want to start off by saying thank you for joining me in every way possible, but thank you for coming to this amazing summit that we’re putting on. I’m so happy to have you.

Mona Sharma

My pleasure. I’m so excited. This is the best part of my day to be with you always.

Mindy Pelz, DC

Thank you so much. What I want everybody listening to know is that you and I have been in some extreme situations before, but we have known each other through Jesse at SoulScripts, but when we’re hiking, when we’re cold-plunging, when we’re saunaing, this is what we’re talking about, like people who are about to hear what Mona and I talk about, even when it’s just our personal time, so I just can’t wait. So exciting.

Mona Sharma

Same. Let’s go deep. I love it.  

Mindy Pelz, DC

Yes, let’s go deep. Exactly. For starters, just so people have an understanding of the context of your mind in your heart, talk a little bit about how you came to your work today, because I know it continues to morph and there’s so much for us all to learn from it.

Mona Sharma

Yes. Gosh, I still feel like I’m morphing into something completely different, which is exciting. In my previous life, about 12 years ago, I used to work as a national artistry and sales trainer for a bunch of different luxury cosmetic companies. At the time, it seemed really great coming from a family with an Indian dad. I didn’t pursue becoming a doctor or a lawyer like my brother, so I just found an industry that I loved. I got to the top of my game really fast, and sure enough, it ended up being just that typical corporate sales job. I was really busy. I was out of alignment with my purpose. I was waking up in different hotel rooms, not knowing what city I was in. I was living in that kind of high-fashion lifestyle, eating, drinking, smoking, doing all the things. There was a point. I don’t know if I told you this. We were actually taking laxatives to kind of counteract the foods that we were eating because we thought it was just getting toxic and onset, debilitating anxiety onset, and irregular periods. Brutal PCOS. I was told that I was never going to be able to have children, and these heart palpitations that were onsite, you know, I would just bend down to pick up a pair of socks, but they got so bad if I went for a run or something that I thought that I was going to black out. At that time, I wasn’t really interested in doing the personal work or the growth. Like so many of us, this was around 24 years old at the time. Then later on, towards my thirties, what ended up happening, I was on Beta blockers and ended up going in for my second heart surgery, for gosh, was like my fifth ablation for this tachycardia that just wouldn’t go away. But I wanted a quick fix, so I went on the beta blocker and gained a ton of weight. I was probably about 20 pounds heavier, and it was in the second heart surgery where I was looking at this monitor because you’re awake for the whole thing. They’re injecting you with adrenaline and all these other things to boost your heart rate. I could see my heart with wires going everywhere, and they said, All right, we found it. But here’s the thing, Mona: If we go through with this ablation, you might have to wear a pacemaker for the rest of your life.

Mindy Pelz, DC

Oh, my God. 

Mona Sharma

Talk about it like, That was my moment. That’s when I was like, What is happening? This is not my life. I’m not going to have a pacemaker. I am sick of identifying as somebody with a heart condition, and I’m sick of feeling this way. The irony of all of this is that I grew up with a very different conception of health. My father is Indian, like I said. My mom is Danish; she’s from Denmark. But I’ve only ever known my mom to have debilitating rheumatoid arthritis. So autoimmune diseases are completely deformed. I’ve never had my mom without a disease. As a result, with my father’s insight on Ayurveda and this ancient Indian practice of healing the body, the motto in my house, growing up was Eat it, it’s good for you. My mom would try anything and everything to take down this inflammation in her body.

The idea of food as medicine was in our house in the 80s. My dad would take us to live at an Ashram, the spiritual center, where they practice yoga and meditation, connect with nature, eat whole foods, spend lots of time in community, and just heal your nervous system. Here I was with all this insight because I was the girl; my dad would tap me on the shoulder at 5:00 to go meditate. Yoga felt like torture to me, right? Looking back, it was a gift. So in that moment, in the heart surgery, I’m like, Oh, my God, I know that there’s a better way. I’ve got to go back to the Ashram. And so I did. I quit the corporate world altogether. I went back to the Ashram. I became a yoga teacher, a meditation teacher, and then a holistic nutritionist at this time, not pursuing it professionally at all. This is only my personal healing journey.

Mindy Pelz, DC

Cure yourself.

Mona Sharma

Cure myself. I started working with CEOs and a lot of hockey players at the time. What I realized quickly was that I had started incorporating the rituals from the Ashram into their healing protocols. It wasn’t about the diet, and I’m sure one of your questions is going to be, In this healing at the Ashram, I stopped dieting and started eating more carbs, and I had probably eaten in over a decade. I was exercising less. I wasn’t on a crazy, you know, Atkins diet or spending two hours at the gym. Instead, I was just there to heal. I knew that there was something more than just diet and exercise to rebalance and gain health.

Mindy Pelz, DC

Yes. What strikes me in that story is that there’s a similarity for me in the sense that I was given really strong, foundational roots about what health was as a child. For me, it was my mom who was really adamant about the quality of food. We had to actually go into the grocery store, and if we wanted something other than what Mom wanted for us, we had to show the ingredient label and read it to her, and if sugar was in the first four ingredients, we weren’t allowed to have it. This was in the ‘70s. The one thing I wanted to have was a fruit roll-up, and the fruit roll-up had the number four ingredient was sugar. All I wanted to be was like one of those other kids with the fruit roll-up, and when I got sick in my twenties, I came back to what I had been taught, which is very similar to what you’re saying. I think for parents out there, it’s super important to realize that you may feel like you’re not being heard, but when a crisis hits, they’re going to come back to their roots, and I actually see it with both my kids now, at 23 and 20.

Mona Sharma

Oh, my gosh. Same with me, too. It’s like just the imprint that’s happening right on. I noticed my kids doing something or offering to help in the kitchen. Then they’ll say, Get a veggie. It’s like, Oh, they’re listening. It’s working.

Mindy Pelz, DC

It’s amazing. Do you think in your story, do you think we’ve overcomplicated health completely?

Mona Sharma

I think that what we really have to recognize right now is that we’re living in this era of hyper-wellness. There has never been more access to health information, food, and diet than ever before in history. And yet diseases are on the rise, right? Diabetes, cardiovascular disorders, mental health issues are all on the rise among adults and children. Something is not working here. Right? And with my approach with my clients, very much like you, you really have to honor your personal constitution in order to heal. How could it be that one diet or one style of eating was perfect for all of us? In order to feel the same benefits like you and I have with our health journeys, we have to consider what the environment was like when we were growing up. What is our mental state? What is our self-dialogue with ourselves every day? What is the environment that we’re living in? They all contribute to how we’re feeling today. The sooner that we can break out of this cookie-cutter idea of what to do and instead kind of tune in to our bodies intuition a little bit more, we’re on a much faster track to healing.

Mindy Pelz, DC

Do you think we have struggled to believe that the simple can help? The medical system has taught us that it’s so sophisticated that you can’t understand it. You have to be part of the intellectual elite to be able to even understand it. Then I’m going to deliver it to you. We don’t even know; when we walk into our doctor’s office, we have no idea how much they’re going to even charge for that appointment. It’s like this big mystery has been wrapped up in it. It’s too sophisticated for the individual to understand. Then here we come along with, Hey, you might want to look at eating more vegetables. You might want to fast, or you might want to meditate. The human mind is like, That’s too simple. It’s this mysterious, complicated thing that’s going to save me. Do you feel like it’s our perception of where the greatest health benefit comes from? If it’s too simple, we dismiss it.

Mona Sharma

I think that we used to have a lot more support, right? We used to live in larger family units. We used to live in villages where more people were delegated to help. We’re busier than ever. So yes, the simple act of preparing a healthy dinner is complicated all of a sudden, right? I’m a perfect example of that. When I went to the doctor, you were put in a position of being inferior. They have all the control. You’re naturally a little bit scared. Because you’re the one who’s suffering, right? Then all of a sudden, and God bless doctors who do this, they’re trying to take away your pain. When doctors prescribed the beta blockers, I was like, Oh, my God, okay, I need to do this. This is easy. It didn’t occur to me that they weren’t asking about my emotional health at the time, my spiritual health at that time, the fact that I was taking laxatives, the fact that I was out of alignment in my life, the fact that I was partying and not sleeping; they just wanted to know that I wasn’t drinking too much alcohol or eating too much McDonald’s, right?

Mindy Pelz, DC

Then they ask that? 

Mona Sharma

They ask that, and the same thing with surgeries, which I’ll never forget. I ended up doing this just shortly after my second heart surgery. My brother he’s ten years older. He’s always been the triathlete, the runner, the marathoner, and everything in between. He said, Why don’t you do this tri-adventure with us?  Then I said, No, I can’t, my heart. Then he looked at me and was like, How’s that working out for you? How’s the story going for you?

Mindy Pelz, DC

Oh, that is so good.

Mona Sharma

It really was just a wake-up call. Like, Oh, yes, the story isn’t working for me at all anymore, right? I’m doing these things that doctors have told me to do, but I know that there’s a better way. I think that my biggest challenge with a lot of the clients that I work with is just taking the pressure off their shoulders. I’m like, This doesn’t have to be so heavy and complicated. We can come up with something that is so personalized to your lifestyle that it makes it seem easy. But with any change in life, it’s going to seem a little bit hard in the beginning, right? I think that we do need a reframe and maybe a decision saying, Hey, if I’m going to focus on myself, the buzzword is lifespan. Now, if I want to feel great into my 80s, 90s, and beyond, every decision that I make today is going to matter. What are those decisions going to be? Then having some really hard boundaries around what those choices are, right? It’s not that some things are good or bad; it’s just deciding when and how they can fit in, if they’re going to be in a state of health or a state of imbalance.

Mindy Pelz, DC

Yes, I was thinking as you were as you were talking about one of the gifts, one thing that you and I share as well as we’ve both worked with a lot of celebrities. One of the gifts of working with celebrities that I’ve had or have been able to realize is that these people’s lives are so complicated and they are so busy that the tools I need to bring them have to be very simple. They have to work quickly. Because the other thing is that a lot of these people have all the money they want to spend on anything they want. I call it shiny object syndrome, where they’re like, Oh, how about I get that? How did they get this? But what I’ve learned has been that the most effective and chaotic lifestyles or life patterns are simple approaches to food fasting and exercise-like mindsets. The more simple I can make something for a celebrity, the easier it is to follow and the better it works in their crazy lifestyle, which should be everybody who has a busy lifestyle. Have you done that as well?

Mona Sharma

Yes, I would say the biggest, which I’ll never forget, was a racecar driver that I was working with. He had everything. He had the personal chef, the massage therapist, the physiotherapist, and the psychotherapist there, that everything was like a full support system. He still wasn’t working out feeling great or feeling his best. When we’re working with him, we just have to address first his state of being. Once we understood his state of being and what he was really lacking, it wasn’t in conversation about, Hey, have this green smoothie to start your day, and this is going to be the solution, or taking this bowl of supplements every day. It’s like, No, you need to go and have some alone time away from all screens, where you can just sit and be and read and look up at the sky, right? In a sense, this is nervous system regulation that had to happen for him and for other people. Yes, to your point, because of this excessively busy lifestyle, their health has gone so often to the other direction. They’re nutrient-deprived and accustomed, and I would say they’re undernourished. They’re not eating enough food, and they’re eating all the wrong foods, but they don’t know anything else, right? They’re eating for fuel. They’re eating for the rush of energy that they need to go and present, and be. It really depends on the individual, but I can certainly guarantee that money is not the factor that makes you healthier or unhealthy.

Mindy Pelz, DC

That’s right. It’s an agreed. Oh, my God, that’s such a good statement because it’s how complicated we have made every aspect of our lives. Another unifier, I think, for you and me is our approach to health: Let’s come back to the basics. Let’s come back. Let’s stop looking for the magic thing that’s going to cure you. Let’s just redo your lifestyle so that it’s more effortless and it’s working for you, not against you.

Mona Sharma

Totally. Mindy, I can’t tell you more than 95% of the calls that I do, the initial assessment, everybody wants, Mona, just tell me what to eat. What’s the perfect diet? I will start it tomorrow, and I’ll say, Okay, we’ll get there, right? I want to understand your biology and what’s happening. The first question that typically comes up is, Tell me, how are you feeling in your body? When they say, I got you, I’m feeling frustrated, I’m feeling angry, and I feel like I don’t have time. How does that make you feel? It makes me feel really sad and like I don’t have any control over my body. Then I’ll ask, Well, when did these start to happen? When did these emotions start to come out? When was the last time that you felt good, safe, or happy in your body? For a lot of people, they can’t even remember a memory from the distant past. For a lot of people, I have to do some timeline therapy and go back into like a time of childhood, and all of a sudden, it’s like it opens the floodgate of tears of just not even remembering what it feels like to feel good in your body without focusing on dieting, without focusing on a number, on a scale, not feeling good enough or pretty enough, like you’re the right size or whatever it is, right? It’s true. It is such a big picture. I think that we can cultivate more of that by remembering who we are and how we came into this world. Making healthier decisions becomes so much easier. You’re not looking for the red pill anymore because you’re like, That would make my body feel really good. If I eat that, that’s not going to make my body feel really good. Your intuition really takes over. Going back to basics is key. I think that it’s also going back to the basics, getting to a time when stress, overwhelming anxiety, and busyness weren’t the most prevalent things.

Mindy Pelz, DC

Yes, it wasn’t highlighted as a sign of success. That’s why I think we have to get out of this idea that, Oh, I’m busy means I’m important or worthy, or that when I look a certain way, it means I’m lovable. All of those patterns are where we have to start to unwind, which also leads me to the question that you and I really connect on, which is women. I think that this modern world is hurting women more than it’s hurting men. Talk a little bit about what you’re seeing in your sphere with women, because one thing I want the listeners to realize is that it doesn’t matter if you’re a celebrity or not; all women are suffering in a very similar way, and that suffering can stop if we get education out on what women can do. So talk a little bit about that.

Mona Sharma

Yes. I don’t know about you, but I’ve always hated the title “mompreneur.” It’s like you’re wearing all these hats and supposed to be proud of them. You’re drinking wine at the end of the day as a coping mechanism to get up and do it all over again. You’re not sleeping; you’re constantly busy. You’ve got hundreds of tabs open in your mind. For mothers, it’s just one thing. To your point, it’s like, If we’re not busy, we all of a sudden feel like there’s a lack of self-worth or something.

Mindy Pelz, DC

Like we’re not worthy.

Mona Sharma

Yes, it’s wild. When I address this and when I can really hold space for a lot of women in my practice, it is going back to the fact that within their nervous system they’re constantly wired and tired, and through their searching for what to do and what to eat, they’re overstimulated. They’re looking for more Band-Aids, and the Band-Aids are stacking on top of each Band-Aid over and over again. What cleanse, what colonic, what detox is right? Give me the next.

Mindy Pelz, DC

Yes. Give me the next magic thing.

Mona Sharma

Yes, If this doesn’t work, what’s next?

Mindy Pelz, DC

Yes. What would you do? I think many of the women listening to this podcast will fall into this category. You had this woman who has been living this rushing lifestyle, doing too many things, putting everybody ahead of her, and she’s physically and mentally struggling. We want to give her some basics. I think one of the things I love about your teachings is that they all come back to ancient healing strategies, which is my passion. This is why I love fasting. When I found fasting, I was like, Oh my God, everybody can do this. This is free. This is healing. How do we teach the world? How do we teach that woman? Probably in her early 40s? This is usually when we start to realize that our pattern of health isn’t working for us. How does she come back to the basics? What are some of the tried-and-true things that she absolutely has to incorporate?

Mona Sharma

First and foremost, address your symptoms, right? We are living in a society where we all are suffering with these symptoms that we’ve become masters at ignoring, or we just call them normal, right? Bloating, irritability, fatigue, low sex, drive, cellulite, lack of motivation, or concentration like these things aren’t normal. Constipation and diarrhea, like they’re not normal. You might have been experiencing it for a long time. They might be normal to you now, but start paying attention to what those symptoms are first and foremost. Next, address the state of your emotional being. There’s this magic time in the morning when you first wake up. How do you feel? Are you tempted to jump out of bed and get busy? Is your thought like, Oh my God, it’s already morning; it’s time to get going again? Or Is there a sense of ease that you can feel? So I teach my clients how to tune into their mind, their body, and their mind to address their state of being. This impacts your hormones, too, right? If you’re running out of bed and your cortisol is spiking first thing in the morning like crazy, you’re going to be on this roller coaster throughout the day. If you can kind of set the stage, have that magic morning practice that works for you, not my morning practice, your perfect morning practice. Set the stage for you to go out into the world with some sort of grounding and regulation where your body can feel like it’s not in that fight or flight mode, right? Just overdrive, and it’s back into this parasympathetic kind of orchestra where things tend to flow a little bit more smoothly. Start with that first before any diet.

Mindy Pelz, DC

How do you break that, though? You’re asking two huge things about that. You’re asking to understand your symptoms, and I think, like, most people don’t know what to do with that. I want you to talk a little bit about what some of those symptoms might mean or how you would navigate some of the symptoms that you talked about. Then you’re asking women to slow down when they’ve got a pack of kids, a job, and they’ve got it. There’s too much to do. What tools do we have to help that woman change the way that the rushing happens  during the day?

Mona Sharma

Yes. First and foremost, I did this with a client yesterday and asked her to write down her fire list. What are the things in your life that, when you think about them, evoke some sort of emotion that doesn’t make you feel good? Irritability, anger, sadness, grief, and resentment. Get it out of your mind and your body and put it on paper. Okay? Yes. Is it going to cause healing to happen right away? No. But we need to have awareness. Why? We know that if you have a powerful “why” for your healing journey, that’s the instigator. To commit to your healing journey, you need to have a powerful “why”, and then I can support people in seeking the right practitioners to help with that. The second thing is, yes, starting out in that peaceful state of mind. Instead of the diet, the first thing that I’m working on with my clients is their morning routine. This has gotten a lot of attention, and a lot of it sounds woo-woo. But it’s now backed by science. At the Ashram, I’ve talked to you about this a thousand times; it wasn’t the diets that we had there that helped me lose weight. It was the structure of the day that allowed all the running and open tabs in my mind to shut down so that I could be focused in that moment. If you’re creating this like Steven Kotler, for example, he has written so much on “Flow state training”. When we’re in flow, we feel a sense of ease and grace, and life happens a lot more smoothly. We’re more productive. For that busy mind, the thing that we can do to thrive is create a schedule.

Could it mean that you might have to wake up five, ten, 15, or 20 minutes early? Yes. I have one client who now wakes up an hour early. She has a full 60 minutes to herself in the morning before her three kids get up. Is it comfortable at the beginning? Not at all. Is it highly advantageous, soul-filling, and life-loving for her afterwards? 1,000%. In that morning routine, it could look like a few things. Some people can easily go into a guided meditation routine where they’re listening to something guided that’s going to help them set the tone for the day. It could be on affirmations, or it could be on gratitude. For other clients, what we’re doing is creating a movie reel for them. I teach them how to visualize. Like, if you could go out into your day and decide or remember, your thoughts would become a reality. What’s your day going to be like? You’re going to feel a sense of calm. Are you going to be racing around? Do you want to reach for that third, fourth, or fifth coffee? Or would you rather nurse yourself instead?

Mindy Pelz, DC

Decide ahead of time.

Mona Sharma

Decide what it is. Having a plan. Women thrive on planning and thinking ahead, right? So let’s use that to our benefit. For other people, it’s going out for a walk, depending on where you are. Just like the grounding aspect of getting into nature, that connectedness is also backed by science to help cool and calm the nervous system. I think that just by honoring what your perfect morning should be and taking action on that, it’s going to take a few days to get it right. I’m old-school. I use an old agenda, but I literally map out hour by hour what my day is going to look like so that I don’t feel like I’m not showing up as the best version of myself at any point or that I’m giving my kids my leftovers or my clients my leftovers. When the time is set, you can just be so hyper-focused and present to that moment, which automatically releases stress from the body.

Mindy Pelz, DC

Do you schedule downtime? Do you literally put down unscheduled time into your daily calendar?

Mona Sharma

I do, yes. It’s a big thing for me, and it took me a long time to do that. My kids are five and eight now, and don’t get me wrong; if some parents are listening, they might have more children or younger children. Some of this goes out the window some days. But I’m just at a point where I give myself grace; this is life. It’s not falling off the wagon. It’s just life. Tomorrow is a new day. I started again. But yes, after scheduling that time for me, I just noticed, like through my ordering, that if I read before bed, my deep sleep goes up.

Mindy Pelz, DC

I’m fascinated. I’m going to have to check that out. That is so it doesn’t matter what you read doesn’t.

Mona Sharma

Yes, and obviously it’s the books that you and I are always into.

Mindy Pelz, DC

All right? I can’t read, so I can’t read nonfiction before I go to bed, or my brain gets too stimulated. I have to read fiction. I have to. Otherwise, my brain is like, Oh, my God, what about this? And what about that?

Mona Sharma

That’s a good point. Most of my books are probably on mindfulness, so that’s probably why another great hack for me. So at the Ashram, we’re up early, and we walk. We walk outside. The sun isn’t always up, but when it is, we now know that the sun naturally boosts serotonin in your gut. Microbiome right? You carry that happiness with you. Imagine that when your kids wake up, you’re no longer in that fight or flight scrambling state. You’re like, Oh, hey, good morning. How are you? Right? Such a shift, and that is just something that you can do by planning a master schedule.

Mindy Pelz, DC

I don’t know if I ever told you the story of when my kids were, I want to say they were like in fifth grade, maybe in seventh grade, too. We had a situation where two of our closest friends moved out of our area, and it was really devastating for me. I was like, They were like my best friends. We were family friends, and I noticed something really interesting when they moved to these new locations. A lot of the grievances they had in their life, everything from their children to their husbands to the rat race of their life, changed. In this new life they were in, I was trying to figure out what it was that allowed them to have this massive shift in their perspective of their life, and I realized what they did was a pattern interrupt. Something had happened that interrupted a pattern that was not working for them. I said to myself, How could I do a pattern interrupt in the life that I’m living right now? I decided I had to get up early in the morning. I started getting up at five, and I knew my kids would be up by seven, so I just said 5 to 7 is going to be the time for me. I’m going to make sure that I do something for myself before anything else. And so I would get up. I would read, I would meditate, and I would work out. Then, by the time everybody else woke up, I was like, Hey. I was so excited to see everybody. I felt like I had already given it to myself. That negative thought pattern that I walked around with was, Nobody cares about me. Nobody knows how hard I’m working this life; you know, I don’t love the life I’m living. All of that shifted because I gave to myself first. I think that’s what I hear in your morning time, that you’re saying.

Mona Sharma

Yes, you and I both know our bodies are miracles. Like you are your own self-healer. What we want, we’re talking about before constantly looking for these external programs, validators, pills, diets, and gurus. What happens when you work with a therapist? They pull the answers out of you so that you become your own healer, right? You and I, when we work with our clients, help them decipher what they need most. It’s like the answers are within you. You just have to trust and take the action that you need to do that. The pattern disruptor, it’s so funny you brought that up. I think for many of us, we can all agree that life isn’t going to become less busy. It’s going to remain hectic. This world of technology, for me, doesn’t make things easier. It makes things a lot more complicated. A really great and easy pattern disrupter. One thing that I used to do was just get up and go for a walk. Whenever you’re spinning in your mind or in your head, get up, go for a walk, break the pattern, and take a breath. The other thing is a rebounder.

Mindy Pelz, DC

So yes. Okay, say more. Why is that word other than lymphatics?

Mona Sharma

Yes, I ended up getting a rebounder because I separated from MALT a year ago, which was on this crazy MALT protocol, and I was doing everything to support my lymphatic system to remove any blockages. Then I realized that whenever I was on the rebound, I was like, Oh, this really gets to me. I would go on to it in a state of stress or worry, But I’d come off of it feeling like, Okay, this feels great; let’s go. Like a boost of energy or like a nice dose of coffee without the jitters. You can get a mini rebounder.

Mindy Pelz, DC

They’re easy. You can easily get them in your house. They’re small and they’re inexpensive.

Mona Sharma

Totally folds under your couch or your bed or whatever it is. 

Mindy Pelz, DC

Pattern industries. Starting your day differently. I’m going to put that in the category of like major thing you need to do. If you’re a woman who’s trying to get your health back on track, what else? When we look specifically at hormones, which you and I have talked about, I’m just shocked. I’m shocked at how illiterate the world is about hormones. Yet they completely drive us. They completely drive us. They drive our food habits. They drive our sleep habits. They drive how we interact with other humans. I would agree if somebody said to me, where’s the first door in to better hormonal health? I would agree with everything you just said. It slows your life down, re-patterns it, and makes it work for you instead of other people. What would you say the second step of lifestyle would be that a woman would need to do to change her hormonal profile?

Mona Sharma

Again, not food, but sleep. Optimize your sleep. Make sure that you’re getting into that deep, restorative sleep every single night, but with consistency. At the Ashram, we go to bed at the same time every night. We rise at the same time every day, and you and I know the body thrives on routines and rituals. Consistency is everything your body wants to know about when it’s going to get food, when it’s going to get nourishment, or not. We can train our bodies, and I think, especially after children, we don’t talk about this, but adults need to sleep and train after having kids, right?.

Mindy Pelz, DC

That is, after your kids are like five. It’s like, if you have three kids, that’s 15 years of poor sleep. Yes. That’s a lot. It’s big.

Mona Sharma

But think about that. For me, my greatest indicator of my stress when I had mold exposure was through my oura ring. My deep sleep was plummeting. What is that? There are higher levels of stress and inflammation in the body if you’re not getting deep, restorative sleep consistently. If you’re a bad or poor sleeper, your body is not going to be able to function the same way that it would. This means that your body is under a state of stress every day. Creating the perfect symphony of hormones is not going to be your body’s priority. Surviving is going to be your body’s priority. Seeking caffeine, carbs, and sugars in your diet is going to be a priority to keep the ship running throughout the day. So optimize your sleep. What do we talk about? We talk about no screens. At least an hour before bed. In our home, we dim all the lights after dinner, and blue light-blocking glasses are really great. No screens in the bedroom. All the weird stuff I do.

Mindy Pelz, DC

Yes. I bet your kids like that. What do they think? I’m sorry. You said, No screens in the bedroom, but I want to make sure that gets put out. But what do they want? That’s got to be, like, fun to be your child. Like, okay, after dinner, we’re going to turn all the lights down. Is that what happens?

Mona Sharma

Totally. I’ve got to make a video and all the things that we do. I have these blue light-blocking glasses for my kids. If we’re doing a movie night and stuff like that. Yeah, I’ve got some, like red light therapy, for them that we do once in a while. Because here’s the thing: once you start trying these different modalities, the point is that you feel a difference, right? It’s not about me; I’m looking at the science behind it, and you and I have to try everything before we can recommend it. Everything I talk about, the things that I do, I can preach because I feel them working, right? When my sleep is all over the place. When you and I travel and do a lot of crazy things, our sleep is a mess, and we really feel it, right? 

Mindy Pelz, DC

Exactly the most for two people that prioritize sleep. The activities that we seem to do with Jesse are the worst sleep habits ever. Like it’s crazy. Actually. That brings up a point. Do you think that men can get away with more poor sleep than women can?

Mona Sharma

Yes. Biologically, their bodies deal with stress differently than women’s bodies do. Period. Right? And as having fluctuating hormones throughout the month that just need different cues to activate. That can’t happen if there’s constantly this like cortisol pumping at the wrong times of the day or it spiking at the wrong times of the day or at night. For a lot of my clients, if they’re telling me that they’re constantly waking up between one and three in the morning, that, to me, is like cortisol getting them up at the wrong time. We’ve got to fix this, right? I might help with that with some sleep aids or some of the recommendations we’ve not just mentioned.

Mindy Pelz, DC

Do you think that women are more vulnerable to stress than men do?

Mona Sharma

I do. 1,000%. One because of our hormones. One, I think we are just these empathetic creatures. A lot of us will take on a lot of what’s happening in our immediate environment, within our families, within our society, and within the world. I can’t even watch the news anymore because I feel like the images stay in my mind, and we practice. It’s like you not only digest what you eat but also what you watch, what you smell, what you eat, what you listen to, and what you feel. So ask yourself, What are you digesting? Are you digesting the things that are going to optimize your body and help it function as the things that are going to nourish you? Or are you digesting the things that are going to cause inflammation that are going to fuel more stress and anxiety? They’re going to fuel your worries, your anxiety, and your pain, right? What are you digesting? And so I’ll often work with my clients to create their Ashram at home. When you’ve got that really messy closet or that drawer with all the mess in it, right? My dad would always say, a cluttered house is a cluttered mind, which makes sense, but a cluttered mind causes a congested body.

Mindy Pelz, DC

You just have me thinking that one of the chronic statements that I’ve heard recently is that when we eat, we have to remember that what we’re eating is building our cellular health. So looking at food, not from the taste buds perspective, but looking at it from what kind of cellular health do I want to build? But you just made me think a little bit deeper on that because who you’re talking to, who you’re allowing to go into your brain, it’s not just changing your neuronal pathways in your perception of life. It is literally leaving an imprint on the 72 trillion cells in your body.

I know for me, if the news gets turned on in my house, which my husband’s a political junkie, and so often the news will get turned on, I will have to walk out of the room because I have a visceral reaction to it. Or if I’m in a conversation where somebody is just complaining and I’ve got to get away from it, my body feels like it wants to throw up, and I think it’s because I’ve trained myself over so many years to be very protective of who I hang around and what I allow into my brain because cellularly, I feel better. But when you look at what most women are doing, they’re not doing that. They’re being pulled by so much external information that perhaps is only creating more cellular trauma. How do you know if you’re in an environment that’s not working for you? How do you know if you’re around people that are not supporting your physiological and mental health?

Mona Sharma

I love this. Again, as women, I think we are built to be soundboards, right? When our girlfriends talk about things like us, we take it all on. We’ll listen to them. We want to be there for them, to be present for them, but we can’t literally take it on. I would say there are a couple of things. Ask yourself, One question: is doing this going to nourish me or deplete me? You can ask that question about everything. Yes. The food that you eat, but also the conversations that you have, the parties that you choose to go to, the people that you’re choosing to engage with, like just stopping in the moment. How is this making me feel? If you notice yourself getting more anxious, or if you want to indulge in the gossip or the bad talk and stuff like that, that’s negative energy, right? We know about this word vibration now; we can measure it. We can measure your vibration. When you’re in a state of happiness, peace, and joy and feeling calm, you have a higher vibration. Those are the people who walk into a room. You want to spend more time with them. You want to be in their presence.  When you’re around people who tend to be in that lower vibrational state of stress, worry, anxiety, fear, or even shame, that vibrational tendency tends to just be, and it will suck and drag you down with it. You have to manage your energy. Go to my practice because I’m so interested in this world of cranial-sacral health and somatic therapy.

Mindy Pelz, DC

Mm. So easy.

Mona Sharma

Yeah. Easy examples.

Mindy Pelz, DC

Yes. Why are you attracted to it?

Mona Sharma

So my son was born through an emergency C-section, and I just knew, like, there. That must have been stressful, right? It was stressful for me. It must be stressful for him and a dear friend of mine. Just give me the inside scoop on cranial sacral work for babies. A newborn baby on a cranial sacral table with a session with a therapist You can just see things like gurgles in the stomach, yawns, burps, or gas. And then this is a practice that I’ve done with my kids, my daughter. Just last week, she had a really bad fall at the monkey bars, so I took her for cranial-sacral and suit training through this simple, energetic practice. As somebody who’s trained to just like to tune into the body, I yawn after yawn, or my daughter would just like to sit up and then have to move down or have to get up and walk around or start to laugh or ask questions. And then she went really quiet, and it was just like, Wow, you see this miracle of your nervous system just unfolding on the table. So the way that we can interpret that as adults not really having this information as part of our healing is just thinking, If the body truly does keep score, what is it holding onto from the time you were a little kid? From the traumas, the falls, the accidents, the teacher that said the wrong thing, the abuse, the neglect—whatever it was, where is that being held in your body? And how could that energy be contributing to how you’re feeling now? And, you know, we talked a bit about this, but when I bring this up with my clients, I can’t; it’s just like releasing these ideas. How on earth is that amount of emotion living within the body? I say it’s alive. It’s alive. Meaning if you remember something from your past and it evokes a strong emotion for you to feel angry, sad, or cry, it’s still living. How can your body step into optimal health through diet, exercise, and all those other things that we talked about? How could you truly feel healthy and at your best when there’s still all of this suffering available?

Mindy Pelz, DC

So, oh, my God. Okay. You just gave me a whole new level of thought here. This is great. This is why I love these moments. I call them triggers. And the one thing I can say at 53 is that I feel so confident that I own my own happiness. And when I go into a place or an environment where I am not happy, I instead think, Oh, these are the wrong people, or this environment is wrong, which I think is also good to think about. But my first go-to is me. What is this triggering in me? What is it that I need to resolve in myself? And what I just realized that I think I want everybody to hear is that if you have a trauma that you haven’t healed, it’s in your cells. It’s not necessarily in your mind; it is in your cells, and it is being activated, and that is a gift. So if somebody comes into your environment, instead of villainizing that person, could you actually thank them in your own mind and say, Oh, my God, I didn’t realize that I have some healing left to do because it’s alive the way you said that it’s alive in me? And that is like a trauma that you had at 13 that is showing up at 50 and is still activating. It is still alive in you, even though the event was 40 years ago. If you don’t resolve those traumas, they stay alive. Is that what you’re saying?

Mona Sharma

That’s exactly what I’m saying. Okay.

Mindy Pelz, DC

Brilliant.

Mona Sharma

Yes. Just think about how often this could happen, even with your partner. You become so triggered that you just want to blame the other person. Right? But just because you can adopt the practice of mindfulness doesn’t mean that you’re making a change in the moment. It simply means the act of being mindful every time that it comes up so that you can just stop and ask the question, Where did this start? Why is this happening? What was the first time that I felt this emotion? Yes. For me, I even learned that there was a quick story.

Mindy Pelz, DC

Yeah, please.

Mona Sharma

I was in first grade, and I was in French immersion, and I had to read this thing in front of the class. So public speaking and reading in another language terrify me, and I’ll never forget that my paper was shaking like this. I was so scared that I couldn’t even do it. So instead of this teacher saying, Oh my gosh, you did a great job, don’t worry; take a deep breath. Everything’s fine. She pulled me out of the class. She said, What is wrong with you?

Mindy Pelz, DC

Oh, my God, I hate teachers like this. I have so many teacher stories like this. How old were you?

Mona Sharma

I was in grade one.

Mindy Pelz, DC

Oh, God. Okay, so do.

Mona Sharma

I say this because this has recently come up with this therapist that I’ve been working with. And so what we uncovered is that in that moment and every single moment in my life, when I had to go and perform, be on stage, or speak publicly, which is already fearful enough, we know that’s the number one fear for most people. For me, it always felt like I wasn’t good enough, like there was shame, or like I couldn’t even show up. I had no place being there. So by doing what you are talking about and just asking, Where does this come from? Where does this come from? I was able to uncover that moment that happened when I was in first grade.

Mindy Pelz, DC

Wow. Hey, do you know that I have a very similar story with an English teacher who looked at my essay and said, You’re not your sister, are you? And my sister was really brilliant, and her name is, and that teacher’s name is Betsy Glass, and it was in seventh grade. And so when Fast Like A Girl came out, I was in therapy because I was like, Oh my God, it’s like another, you know, aggravation of this trauma where I showed my work to somebody and it was ridiculed. And here I am putting this book out in the biggest way possible, and what is going to happen? What kind of ridicule would I get? But at least I had enough foresight to say, Hey, I better do some therapy first. Yes. So I unwound that. But we are dealing with humans that don’t think like that. And so instead, we start killing ourselves by trying to control everybody around us, not knowing that it’s all the situations and everybody around us that’s just triggering these living traumas that we never resolved. And control comes when we can resolve those traumas.

Mona Sharma

Just like with our health, when we can address our own symptoms, And I love that we’re talking about this because this is like the instigator of the first stages of what inflammation would have been like in the body, Right? So it’s a learned behavior that happens over and over again. In that style, judgment still feels alive. And there’s the work that has to be done. And I promise you, for the clients that I work with who deal with those traumas and like that aspect of themselves where they feel some freedom from the past, it’s like cutting the ball and chain that’s been there for so long. Right? What happens? You feel a sense of liberation, peace, and ease. There’s that high vibration. And when you’re on high vibration, you’re not going to go to a drive-through. You’re not going to want to have a bottle of wine. At the end of the day, you want to honor your body and how you feel. I feel so good right now. What am I going to do to keep this up? So we need to be talking more about this. Especially with women in our conversations, when we tend to gossip sometimes, instead, how do they make you feel? What are you going to do about it now? Right. When did this start for you? Right.

Mindy Pelz, DC

I was going to say that one of my predictors of whether I’m hanging around the right people or in the right situations is that I ask myself when I leave the situation, Do I feel better than I did before I went? And if the answer is no, then I’m like, That might be a situation or a person. I don’t want to be around as much, but that’s my litmus test: how do I feel after I leave? If I’m elevated, great. If I feel low or have a lot of self-doubt or trigger negative thought patterns, of course I go and say, Okay, well, this is what I need to work on, but it just reminds me not to keep putting myself in that situation.

Mona Sharma

Absolutely. Yes. And you’ll really know when you can go out into the world and make that person or that friend feel the way that you want them to. And it’s reciprocated. Then you’re. Those are your people.

Mindy Pelz, DC

The last question I have to ask you is because this is a hormonal question that came up in my interview with Tom Bilyeu. He interviewed me on Tuesday on Impact Theory, and I always think it’s really interesting when men interview me because they’re often interviewing about fasting and hormones. When we get into the topic of hormones, there tends to be an incredible fascination and much more of a misunderstanding than even women have, so the questions are fascinating. So here’s what showed up: And I want to; I’m curious about your opinion. I’m always thinking about biologically what our hormones were designed to do. So let’s use estrogen as an example. We know that estrogen is designed to release an egg. That is her number-one thing that she does because she has got to rise. I call all my hormones like they’re my friends, like she’s got to ride this to a certain point so an egg can be released. But what biology also did was raise testosterone when estrogen was at its peak, when an egg was being released, and biology decided to raise just a little bit of progesterone.

So during ovulation, estrogen ends at her peak, releasing the egg; testosterone is there to make sure that we work our libidos up and we’re motivated to procreate; and progesterone is there to calm us down. When I say we’re like our superpowers in ovulation, I can’t think of a more accurate statement, but this is what Tom and I got saying: as I said, I think what estrogen does is that estrogen is the hormone that makes us want to connect. And so we need that connection in order to be able to reproduce humanity; we have to feel an emotional connection to the person we’re about to procreate with. Now, I know that that’s maybe not the same for every woman, but I would say that in general, estrogen’s job during ovulation is to make sure that there’s a bonding that goes on with the person that we’ve decided to have sex with so that we can continue the species. And he was like, I’ve never heard that. I don’t; I’ve never thought about that. And I said, Well, yes, because your hormones come in 24 hours, you have one hormone, and we have three. That’s what I’m thinking. What do you think of that theory that our need for estrogen is providing our need for a human connection?

Mona Sharma

I think you’re a genius again. Absolutely a genius. Why? Because men don’t have to go through such massive hormonal fluctuations, even into their 40s, 50s, 60s, and beyond, they can continue to procreate with women. This goes back into that, like really honoring the feminine spirit and like this wisdom that is within us, looking for the right life partner and father, and every companion, best friend, whatever it is, it only makes sense for us to have this note within us that causes us to go out and want to have that drive. I think you’re an absolute genius.

Mindy Pelz, DC

I think you should be very confused. And I just thought, as I left, that I was. But here’s where I really go one step further: So what happens to the menopausal woman as she loses estrogen? I will be  very frank: one of the surprising parts of this menopausal journey for me is that as my kids have gotten older, I have felt less maternal draw to them. I don’t look at them in the same way, like, I need to nurture you. I need to protect you, as I did. Even when they were teenagers and their attitudes were horrible, it still felt like there was this primal maternal instinct that was there. And now that I’m moving into more of my post-menopausal years, I actually feel a little more selfish. I feel a little bit like I’ve already served you. Now I just need to take care of myself. And I’m wondering if it’s the loss of estrogen that has me thinking that way.

Mona Sharma

Is this the body’s incredible wisdom that’s supporting us as women for our children to then go off out into the world so that we’re not left? We talked about empty nest syndrome, right? So if our hormones are actually supporting us through that transition and eventually helping us cope with it, That’s it.

It has to be biological. And here’s what you like: Here’s what we’re losing. When we used to live with our mothers, grandmothers, and great-grandmothers and just understand that wisdom, like learning it, seeing it, feeling it, and experiencing it, that is gone. So if we women aren’t taking responsibility for sharing these things, here’s the thing: I’m sure you remember when people would say, Oh, when you’re in your thirties, this is going to happen. When you’re in your forties, this is going to happen. Well, here we are moving into those ages like, Oh, sh*t.” Like it’s actually happening, right? God, I wish I had someone to talk to about this and understand why and what the physiological things are that are happening. What are the emotional responses to all of this? So I think it’s brilliant that you brought that up. Maybe this is the topic for your next book.

.

Mindy Pelz, DC

Well, that ties into the next book because the next book is about what happens to the female brain after 40. And one of the things that I’m just observing with my own brain at 53 is how  it just cares about things very differently. And I know I could easily say, Oh, it’s the time of life. As you age, you do get a little bit like, I don’t care about the things that I used to care about ten years ago that would keep me up at night.

Mona Sharma

Now I’m like, Hallelujah.

Mindy Pelz, DC

Yes, you’re right. I also think there’s a hormonal piece, and I’ve noticed that as estrogen has gone down, my maternal instincts have gone down. And it’s like one of those things that you just don’t say out loud because you sound like a horrible mother. I’m still a mother. I have two 23- and 20-year-old daughters. But I think you have a really good point. Maybe it’s protection so that I can move out of that intense need to be there for my kids. And maybe this is the hormonal moment in which I am supposed to care for myself, and my hormones shifted in order for me to be able to do that.

Mona Sharma

So imagine this: if women had that knowledge, Okay? It’s like, Okay, my body is this miracle. It’s adjusting and modifying it as needed to help me cope with this next stage of life. Then compounded with having, you know, just other people to confide in, other women to understand and go through this, even for me in my 40s, no one ever talked to me about the fact that there might be a sense of mourning over not having children anymore. Right?  Like, Oh, my God, I’m not having any more kids like that. It makes me a little sad. Well, what happens then? In your fifties, then, like what you’re talking about, and then in your sixties. Like, what if we talked about this a little bit more so that we understood it was a natural progression of life, but hey, these incredible bodies of ours are actually doing everything that they can to help us through the process?

Mindy Pelz, DC

Brilliant. In the new book, by the way, I just got done writing one of the chapters yesterday. I call it the Cultural hush because there are so many things around women’s hormones, but specifically perimenopause and menopause, that as a culture we’re scared to talk about. And I feel like the conversation you and I just had needs to be talked about because I know there are women out there that are feeling that, but they would never say that out loud because somebody would think they’re a bad mother, or maybe they’re a bad mother. I love this idea of Where are the elders? One of my new things is that I love talking to women who are ten years older than me. I learned so much from them. We actually recently heard another really interesting story. I was on a call with Traci and Patti Gift of Hay House, and we were just talking about Fast Like a Girl and the next book that’s coming, and Reed asked me if there was anything I needed to support them. And I said, Here’s what I need. I want to start a conversation across all the decades. I want the 60-year-olds to mentor the 20-year-olds. Yes, I want the 40-year-olds. I want the post-menopausal women, the 50- and 60-year-olds—to shepherd the women through their 40s. Why are we not creating books and conversations that allow all these decades to start to share the wisdom of what it is to be a woman, and why aren’t we allowing women to age? Why aren’t we putting the spotlight on it? On a stable? Because there is so much wisdom to be able to go down and support the young ones. And so then I went on and said, Where are your 20-year-old authors? And they’re like, Oh, they don’t really write books right now. I’m like, Where are the 30-year-olds? How do we unify all these decades? And we kind of left the conversation with no answer. But I think that’s what I’m pulling out of the end of this conversation. And what I would really ask everybody listening is, Who are you mentoring as a woman? It doesn’t have to be your mother. It doesn’t have to be your grandmother. But who in your life are you turning around and helping guide through the hormonal chaos that so many of us are living in right now?

Mona Sharma

So lately, what is that going to do? It’s going to change your belief system, right? If your belief system changes, even around healing, the whole game changes. If your belief system is based on the understanding that you are this miracle, This body is like a self-healing machine. That’s your belief: that what you’re doing and all of the effort and work that you’re doing are going to pay off. And I think that with the guidance of people who’ve lived it, experienced it, and done it before, there is so much wisdom that’s there that we’re losing. So I agree with you. Let’s make this a reality.

Mindy Pelz, DC

Yes. I know. I’m coming. We’re not stopping this conversation. You and I are going to carry this off offline. But, then, I just want to say that this is a perfect example. I just realized it was 3:00 when we got on. It was definitely not the highlight of my energy time of the day, and it was a very busy morning. But here I am an hour later, more energized than I was an hour ago. So that was awesome.

Mona Sharma

My creative brain is going, Well, let’s keep it going. I can talk to you for hours. Yeah. What? Agree?

Mindy Pelz, DC

I agree. How do people find you? You’re doing some really cool things. You have an amazing hack in the water out there. How do people find you?

Mona Sharma

Thank you. Yes, Instagram is, like, the biggest platform right now. So, @monasharma, you can find me there. I’ve got a lot of exciting things in the pipeline, but community is just so important to me. Xicama is my beverage. It’s spelled with an X. I. C. A. M. and an A. We just launched into Sprouts. As a retailer, we’re available online, but it’s a prebiotic to fuel your gut microbiome without sacrificing flavor or stuff like that. So yes..

Mindy Pelz, DC

And I do want to point out for the women that are fasting that I have had that in the fasting window and it did not spike my blood sugar. And because it’s a prebiotic, it actually fuels your microbes, which kills hunger during a fasting window. It is one of the best drinks to have during the fasting window. So thank you for creating it.

Mona Sharma

My pleasure. Thank you. More to come. 

Mindy Pelz, DC

Yes. You are amazing Mona.. Thank you. I adore you.Thank you so much for having this conversation with us. 

Mona Sharma

You too, thank you.