Hormones, Emotions & the Female Nervous System: Why Women Feel So Much with Dr. Sonya Jensen

In this episode of The Resetter Podcast, Dr. Mindy Pelz sits down with hormone expert Dr. Sonya Jensen for a deeply honest conversation about how hormones shape our emotions, behaviors, relationships, and sense of self across every stage of a woman's life. Together, they explore why emotional reactions intensify during hormonal transitions, how resentment and rage often have ancestral roots, and why symptoms like anxiety, fatigue, and overwhelm are not character flaws, but signals from the body asking for support. Dr. Sonya introduces her "HER Cycle" framework, showing how hormones, emotions, and relationships are always influencing one another and how healing often begins in the body, not the mind. To view full show notes, resources mentioned in the episode, transcripts, and more, visit: 👉 https://drmindypelz.com/ep325 Explore our community membership at: 👉 https://resetacademy.drmindypelz.com Please note our medical disclaimer.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Mindy Pelz?

  Let's talk about cod liver oil for a second. And I know what you're thinking, cod liver oil? Really? Dr. Mindy, that sounds like something my grandmother took. But hang with me here for a moment because this is one of those old school remedies that modern science keeps proving right. Cod liver oil is one of nature's most concentrated sources of omega-3 fatty acids. Also, it's high in vitamin A and vitamin D, all in a form your body can actually recognize and use. This is such a powerful combination that is profoundly anti-inflammatory. It's protective to your brain.

• 0:42Mindy Pelz?

  It supports your hormones and it does something I care really deeply about, which is it starts to repair and nourish your gut lining at a deep cellular level. This is something I personally take every single day. And one of the things that I have noticed the most is what it's done for my skin. I recommend it to women who are navigating hormonal shifts, dealing with chronic inflammation, or simply trusting to protect their long-term health. So Standard Process is the company I deeply align with and trust. It's a whole food-based, clean company, and it has held the standard of quality for decades.

• 1:26Mindy Pelz?

  And I expect only the best from Standard Process. They are definitely one of the top supplement companies in the world. So if you want to try it, check it out. You can learn more and get some for yourself at drmindypels.standarprocess.com. That's drmindypels.standarprocess.com. Enjoy.

• 1:53Mindy Pelz?

  On this episode of the Resetter Podcast, I bring you Dr. Sonya Jensen. Now, a couple of things to know about Sonia. For starters, she is a dear, dear friend. At one point, I actually did a podcast with her and another doc on women's issues. That was several years ago. We also know each other from a mastermind that we did together of all different types of doctors and healers, all masterminding around health. It was a really beautiful group of humans. And she has a real passion for women's health. Like, I really want you to hear, this is what I want, I want you to feel her words, because

• 2:37Mindy Pelz?

  that's who Sonia is. She is the gal you want to sit on the couch with, and I've done it many times with her, and have a heart-to-heart. And that's what you're about to hear. You're about to hear a woman that cares so deeply about women and getting the right health information out to women. And she has a new book. It's called Heal Your Hormones: Reclaim Yourself. And it's coming out in last week of February. And she's introducing a concept she calls the "HER" method. And one of the things that I love about this book, and what I love about this conversation you're about to hear, is that she has done one of the

• 3:19Mindy Pelz?

  most brilliant jobs linking our emotions to our hormones. Now, think about this for a second. Walk through this with me. How many times have we been mad? Have we been sad? Have we been feeling really irritable? And we always think it's the person, the place, the situation. But how many times do we stop and go, "I'm stress intolerant today because I don't have enough estrogen"? Now, hopefully, those of you who have been listening to me for a while are starting to connect those dots. But what you're going to hear in this conversation is how do we start to translate our emotions? And how do we understand if they are whispering?

• 4:01Mindy Pelz?

  From our hormones, how do we understand if our lifestyle changes can affect our emotions? How do we understand if it's inherited? We talk a lot about inherited emotions from generations before us. It's really probably one of the most in-depth conversations I've ever brought you on our emotional landscape of the female experience of life and how our hormones dictate our emotions and control our emotions and what we can do to ride that wave and to speak out more and to learn to have more compassion for ourselves.

• 4:44Mindy Pelz?

  It's just a juicy conversation and I'm really excited for you all to have it. So I'm gonna shut up now so that you all can hear the wise Dr. Sonya Jensen. And her book is out. Go grab it, talk about it, help other women find it. This is the level of conversation we need in women's health right now and especially in menopause. So we'll leave all the links on how you find her book, but most importantly, enjoy.

• 5:14Mindy Pelz?

  Okay, well, Dr. Sonya Jensen, I am so happy to have you here. And there's so much in your book that I feel like I want to take a page of your book and like rip it out and be like, go into the streets and be like, we need to talk about this, everybody. Why aren't we talking about this?

• 5:36Speaker 01

  I'm so glad you feel that way. I do too.

• 5:39Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah, because there's just so much depth in understanding hormones and behavior. And I think you and I have both been on this crazy journey of educating women about hormones, going through our own hormonal experience. And I literally think like almost 10 times a day, I'm like, is that hormones talking and reacting right now? Or is this person really being egregious? Or is this situation really bad? Or am I overreacting to it? So what I want to do is start off with, can you help us understand how hormones, no matter what your age, determine our personality and our behaviors?

• 6:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, great question to start with. I think what happens is our hormones and when we're in those transition phases amplify what's already existing. So our emotions give meaning to our experiences. So we have an experience, whether it's a stressful one or a joyful one, and we have certain hormones that then tell the brain and the body how to respond. And so when we've been wired a certain way to respond a certain way, our hormones now have a pattern that they've been following for a really long time. And then we hit these transition points in our life, whether it's through puberty or, you know, we're getting pregnant, postpartum, perimenopause and menopause as we're experiencing.

• 7:04Speaker 01

  And then all of a sudden, those feelings that we had about certain scenarios or experiences, they just get really amplified and we become more vulnerable to our surroundings and to the triggers in our present day, which creates that hormonal chaos, which hormonal confusion of like, like you said, is this actually about him or about this moment? Is it my body? Like what's, and I think it's all of it. But we're being informed in such a different way because we're not playing the old patterns and the roles and the identities anymore. And so I think that's what creates that confusion in a lot of women of being able to discern, okay, what's now, what's from before?

• 7:44Mindy Pelz?

  Right. Okay, so is there a way, like I'll, I'll, I'll use myself as an example. There were many times in my perimenopause, so I'm about three years post-menopause now. In my perimenopause where I would have a reaction and I felt like somebody had hijacked my brain. I'm like, I've never reacted like this before. Why am I reacting like that? It would be easy when you have like a 180 turn in your personality to be able to see that it was hormones. But how do you know if you're like a 35-year-old woman and it's a week before your period and you're crying all the time?

• 8:26Mindy Pelz?

  Like, how do you know, oh, it's hormonal, it's not hormonal? Like, is there some kind of way we can, to use your words, like decode? Oh, this is a hormonal moment? Oh, no, wait, this is actually a difficult moment that I I'm just having a human experience with? Um, or this is actually both, I'm I'm hormonally in a different place, mixed with I just had a really stressful thing happen to me? Is there a way to tell the difference between those three?

• 8:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. I think what you said initially is that self-awareness of like, okay, something's off. And maybe in our thirties, that doesn't come from internally from us. It might be from a partner, it might be from a child, it might be from a colleague of like, okay, you're behaving a little bit differently. Or this reaction is causing a challenge in a relationship and then we're reflecting on it. So the best thing to do is look at pattern recognition. And you mentioned, you know, a week before my luteal phase, maybe something is off. So when you start to recognize, oh, this is turning into a monthly thing. So this is where tracking and writing down our story throughout the month can be really indicative of like, okay, what are the patterns that are stressing me out?

• 9:41Speaker 01

  Or the triggers that are stressing me out in these moments? Then we're able to create discernment from there. So then we're able to see, okay, I'm more vulnerable in this time. And so the noises outside are going to bug me a bit more. A conversation, I might be a bit more sensitive to it. So that's the first step. And then when you start taking that second step is understanding, okay, is there a theme to my reaction? Maybe there's something I'm not listening to that my body is trying to tell me I need to pay attention to. Right? So that's that discernment of like, is it the relationship or is it my hormones? So I could blame my hormones and say, okay, well, every month I'm gonna, you know, not like what he's doing

• 10:23Speaker 01

  or, you know, what pressure I'm putting on myself or all the things that I'm caring for my family. But it'll be fine next week, so I'll bleed and it'll be okay and I'll just ignore it again. But if that same situation coming up over and over and over again. That's when we want to recognize, yes, your hormones are trying to tell you and they're amplifying your reaction on purpose. So you can create a different life, so you can make different choices, so you can take action so that it's not so amplified at that time.

• 10:52Mindy Pelz?

  Right, yeah. And I, you know, I can go back, I think we all could probably go back and, and, and see that pattern. I wouldn't even need to track it. I could go back and be like, oh, I can tell you exactly how I felt the week before my period almost all the time. So, so I like that, looking at the patterns. It made me think, are there, are there different expressions of our emotions at different times of our mu- of the month? Like, are we meant to be happier at some times? We're meant to be more inner at others, like, could we also see a pattern like that? We're not always, not necessarily just the negative patterns, but maybe I'm happy on day one to day fifteen all the time. Like, what are we supposed to be?

• 11:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, and you know, you educate on this a lot too, and it's that experience, it's going to be different for everyone. I do believe that. And when you start to look at hormonally, when estrogen is high, often joy is a little bit higher because we're more confident. And when we're more confident, we're making different decisions. We're, you know, out in the world a little bit more, we're a little bit more extroverted because the confidence is there. Estrogen allowing more suppression of fear, so we're not basing our decisions off of fear. So we can do the things in that follicular phase. And after ovulation, when progesterone is supposed to be higher, that is the hormone that's telling us to take a break. It is telling us to nurture ourselves a little bit more.

• 12:14Speaker 01

  And doesn't mean we have to hide out from the world, but maybe we just need to slow down and maybe I will feel more reflective. So maybe I will feel a bit sad because I'm in reflection. Maybe I will have more memories of grief that I've experienced, or maybe there's a loss that I experienced that the follicular phase maybe hides a little bit for me. But then in my luteal, I have this opportunity to feel and heal from that. So I think when we understand that, we can give ourselves some, you know, room to actually feel and not feel like we have to experience. Shame because of our emotions or feelings or get labeled, oh, you know, it's just PMS, so she's just too emotional. But yes, there is rhythms through our month and we're wired to worry, like women are wired.

• 12:58Speaker 01

  To look at challenges, so our brain works in such a different way. That we need to start honoring these emotions and understanding them and speaking to them. So that we know what their cycle is too with our cycle.

• 13:11Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah, you know, it's interesting. I think you and I, I feel like had this conversation like ten years ago. Of like when, when I really started to wrap my head around hormones and how they ebb and flow. I thought, oh, my God, I wasn't meant to be the same, have the same attitude all month long. That's really exciting. And then there's sort of a, a moment where you do allow yourself to feel. All the whole spectrum, like if you go into this rhythm that we're talking about, you do start, and I hope people listening do this. Like notice, are you happier in the front half of your cycle and in the back half of your cycle, you're a little more inner.

• 13:50Mindy Pelz?

  Um, and I really have like a vision where I feel like we should be teaching this to every teenager because. Right? Cause I don't know about you, but. I, I, whenever I felt like I couldn't work out the week before my period, or every time I felt like I wanted more carbs the week before my period, or. Every time I felt like I just couldn't, I was overwhelmed, I couldn't take one more thing. I thought it was a me problem.

• 14:14Speaker 01

  Well, we're conditioned to think it's a me problem always, especially as women. Yeah, you know, so and I think self-awareness is really important to understand, okay, where this reaction is coming from me, yes. And there's some allowance of, you know, how I can feel throughout the month, like the libido conversation. You know, women, I'll talk to them when they're twenties and thirties and they're like, you know, sometimes I just don't. Have that same reaction to my partner, even though I love it. I'm like, yeah, because you're not meant to. You know, libido is highest around ovulation on purpose. And so, yes, a week before, you're not going to feel the same. You're not feeling the same in your body. You might be feeling bloated, you're. Fatigued, you're, all your energy is going into creating this.

• 14:55Speaker 01

  Tissue so it can bleed and you can, you know, let go of that endometrium. Of course, you're doing so much work there, you're not going to want to be intimate at that time. So I think it does give us permission and allows us just to like exhale, it's like, okay. There's not anything wrong with me, this is my biology and it's my body just trying to speak to me so I can go back into that rhythm. And make the choices I need to for myself.

• 15:20Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah. How it it's such a, it's such a revolutionary concept on an ancient biological process.

• 15:28Speaker 01

  I know, just the conversations weren't happening, I was having that conversation with myself in my mind just earlier today of how. We're talking so differently about women's health that I think even women are still uncomfortable around it. And it's the the little things, I was thinking about, you know, my hair is going gray and I have a aunt who's. Just ten years older than me, my mom's youngest sister and there is a moment where she's like, you know, I have this natural dye. That you can use. And I'm like, why do you feel like I need to use a dye? She's like, oh, you know, because you're starting to look older. It was coming from such a sweet space, I'm like, oh yeah, this is uncomfortable. It's uncomfortable for women to accept themselves, it's uncomfortable.

• 16:12Speaker 01

  To start speaking our truths, like this is creating, this is ruffling feathers, which we're not used to. And which, but I think needs to happen.

• 16:22Mindy Pelz?

  Right, which is why I wanna like, I really wanted to hone in on this part of the conversation because. Um, I think that as women, we we have a tendency to always think it's our problem. And your book opens up with this beautiful story of a woman who has. An understanding of how her hormones have been affecting her her whole life. And then she gets into work with you, you start balancing, helping her balance her hormones through lifestyle and all the things. And then she has a different. Like relationship with herself.

• 16:55Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 16:56Mindy Pelz?

  Tell that story, cuz I I really want women before we even move on to understand that you we have been wrapped up in all kinds of bows to make everybody else happy. And this has caused us to misunderstand ourselves.

• 17:12Speaker 01

  That's right, caused so much suffering.

• 17:14Mindy Pelz?

  So much suffering. And the story of the woman you opened the book with, I was like, wow, that is every woman's story, I feel like.

• 17:21Speaker 01

  Mm hmm. Yeah, I still I get goosebumps every time I even think about her and that story. And I do think she's the huge why behind this book too, because those few words that she said to me that one day of you saved my life. And I was just really taken aback. You know, I knew we were doing some good work and she was feeling better and all of that, but I didn't know how deeply she was feeling all of this. And so she had come to me just feeling really depleted, really depressed. She was taking care of a husband who was going through cancer treatment, having difficulties with her daughter, who was a teen, having to work, having to manage the house. And as women, we just carry so much, like we carry such a mental load.

• 18:02Speaker 01

  So she's carrying all of that for the whole unit and just feeling stuck. And but was used to being the one that everybody relied on. She was the people pleaser. She came from a culture where that was modeled to her, that women sacrifice in order to hold their family unit together. And so we started doing the hormonal work first. I find as soon as you show a woman on a test or you start to speak to her about her physical symptoms, she starts to realize, okay, my body's telling me something. I can't go on longer. And you know, in the beginning, I think we do it for others. She wanted energy to take care of her husband. She wanted to be okay, so she didn't react to her daughter. And so sometimes we have to start with that.

• 18:46Speaker 01

  And when she started to see, you know, this chronic stress was lowering her hormones, it was causing more anxiety, more depression. We started doing that physical work. Then we were able to unwind the emotional patterns of people pleasing and putting up the boundaries, saying no to something so she can say yes to her. She stopped abandoning herself to help everybody else. But in doing that, she was still able to help others because she was more full. And you know, so she didn't have to rely on medication. And that's when she's like, I was at my end. Like, I didn't know the choices I had because medication doesn't work for me. And the other choice was taking my life.

• 19:29Speaker 01

  And you know, I, that's a conversation I think many women have in their minds and don't say out loud. It actually makes me quite um. Emotional to say that. And so I think women need to know that you're not alone. Like, we all have those thoughts when we're so burnt out, when the world just feels so chaotic. And so when we understand that this is my body speaking to me so that I can heal. There's so much hope that can be anchored into.

• 20:00Mindy Pelz?

  Okay, let me ask you a personal question. And uh, this one is a really important one. Which is, when was the last time you had your vitamin D checked? And I'm saying this because in all my years of working with women, low vitamin D is one of the most consistent findings I see. And one of the most consistently missed. And vitamin D matters for so many aspects of your health. We're talking about a deficiency that can show up as hormonal imbalance, mood struggles, poor sleep, immune issues. Even stubborn weight that won't but budge no matter what you do. But here's the part that most people don't know.

• 20:42Mindy Pelz?

  Taking an isolated D three supplement isn't enough. This isn't like just running down to the local store and grabbing some D three. Your body actually needs D three to be combined with very specific cofactors to actually absorb and utilize vitamin D the way nature intended it. And most supplements on the market don't include these cofactors. That's why I personally love Cataplex D from Standard Process. It's a whole food supplement. It's vitamin D complex, not just an isolated nutrient.

• 21:18Mindy Pelz?

  There's an incredible difference between checking a box and actually moving the needle on your health, and this one really moves the needle. In fact, in my clinic, we used to test vitamin D, and we could see with a product like Cataplex D, we could see on lab work, the vitamin D levels in people go up. So you can learn more, and you can get yourself some vitamin D, you can test out Cataplex D at drmindypells.standarprocess.com. Enjoy.

• 21:55Mindy Pelz?

  So in that scenario, you worked on her hormones first, and then she started to see the patterns of thought change.

• 22:02Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 22:02Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah. Yeah. That would be pretty profound. I, you know, I had an experience this year with really acutely seeing my thoughts change from just committing to get out into nature every day, and getting out in the forest that's behind our house, getting in the water, surfing every day. And I, and I came in one morning to my husband, he was sitting on the couch, I'm like, "I wish you knew what was going on up here. If you understood what was happening." Like, the brain has stopped telling me worst-case scenario, and it's starting to tell me all the things that I should be grateful for and joyful for. My brain hasn't done that in years.

• 22:47Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 22:48Mindy Pelz?

  And all I did is slow down and commit to getting into nature every single day, because somebody told me when I moved here to Santa Cruz, they're like, "Let the land here heal you." And I was like, "I'm out of answers. I'm gonna let the land heal me." And so, the reason I bring that up, is I think, we as women, always think it's our fault. We always think that whatever was showing up emotionally, physically, like, we did something wrong. And I want to point out, in your book, you have a thing around the her cycle, and I want to go into that, because what you're offering us is a lens to be able to say, "Wait a second."

• 23:31Mindy Pelz?

  I'm depressed, I'm anxious, I'm suicidal, I can't focus, I have all kinds of problems. But what you're telling me is instead of trying to change those problems, I should work on changing my hormones and see if I react to those situations the same. Just so we're clear, that's what you're saying, right?

• 23:49Speaker 01

  Absolutely, it changes the lens through which you're experiencing that problem. And then the emotion follows that. So I think that's why I called it the her cycle, the hormones, emotions and relationship. It's because each one is feeding into the other. Sometimes it's hard to see the chicken, the egg, you know, what comes first because they're feeding into one another. So when you grab on to the thing that we can control, we can support our hormones, we can eat a certain way, we can move a certain way, we can go out into nature. We can do all these things. And then all of a sudden it starts to feed the brain different information. Then the information that we're receiving is like, okay, now, you know, progesterone's there all of a sudden. We can feel more relaxed.

• 24:30Speaker 01

  Okay, estrogen's being fed, okay, I can feel some joy, like, you know, I'm actually feeling happy when I go outside. And so you start to see that, like, okay, now I can actually pause when I'm in an experience that's uncomfortable or if I'm in a trigger. I can take a moment to recognize the reaction that's happening, which will then feed into our relationships. So just understanding that, I think, can give one so much hope and trust back into oneself. Because we lose so much trust in ourselves when we're having all those thoughts and it feels chaotic. And, and also allowing the chaos a little bit, I think, is important too, because that brings acceptance. It's like, this isn't my fault, this is what it is because of my story, because of my history, because of the generational history.

• 25:16Speaker 01

  And here it is in front of me and I'm experiencing it. How do I nurture her? How do I understand this feeling? How do I talk to this feeling so it starts to work for me instead of against me?

• 25:28Mindy Pelz?

  One of my biggest ahas this year in in healing myself was how important it is to bring the body into the healing experience, so much so that I've even wondered like, is is my mind making these thoughts up, or is my body informing my mind on what to do?

• 25:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:47Mindy Pelz?

  Have we ever done a percentage of like, is it, you know, seventy percent of your thoughts controlled by your body?

• 25:54Speaker 01

  I'm sure there is, I don't know what the actual statistics are, but just coming from like a yogic perspective, the reason why we do yoga is to train the mind, because you can't train the body through the mind, because the mind is all over the place, we call it the monkey mind, right? It's like those thoughts you were talking about, like, it's crazy what can happen in here, but if we attach to every thought, that's what's causing the suffering. If we can observe them and understand them, because that is translating into that feeling and into that subconscious space, then we can start to make different choices and have different habits and things that will feed different thoughts, and then we take different actions. So it's that cycle again, and it's just really that understanding is where we start.

• 26:36Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah. It's, and I just want to say before we, and I I want to jump into the her cycle and how we start to decode this, but for everybody listening, if you haven't gone through the body to heal the mind, it's really transformative, and to just all of a sudden experience yourself reacting differently is like the greatest gift in the world.

• 26:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:59Mindy Pelz?

  It's like, so I can see why that woman came into you and said, you changed my life, because she probably observed herself reacting in a different way, which is just so beautiful.

• 27:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:08Mindy Pelz?

  So, so talk about the her cycle. Okay, so somebody's listening to this, and and I just want, this is really for women of all ages, just so we're clear, this isn't just women that are bleeding or not bleeding. Um, I, once I've identified, hey, wait, my emotions may not be all about whatever I, whatever's going on in my day to day, it might be more the neurochemical messengers in my body. Where do we go with that? Where does the her cycle take us from there?

• 27:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I call it the hormonal hierarchy of healing and you start in that physical plane. So this is where testing comes in.

• 27:44Mindy Pelz?

  Okay.

• 27:45Speaker 01

  And getting testing done and also recognizing, asking the questions. I feel like the quality of questions we ask in those moments are gonna make a huge difference in the outcome that we have. So it's befriending those feelings that we're having. So if you're having feelings towards anxiety, for example, asking yourself, you know, you know, am I stuck in the future? Am I stuck in worry? What are my fears that are coming up? Like being able to kind of label and understand and know the feeling that you are feeling because, you know, as children, we're taught these like, it's, you're feeling sad, you're mad, and you're happy. Like there's these three emotions and yet it's so nuanced. There's frustration in that,

• 28:28Speaker 01

  there's rage in that, there's joy in that, there's happiness, there's sadness, there's grief. There's all these elements of these emotions that we're feeling often all at once. So being able to first identify and being self-aware of like, what is going on in my body? Maybe it's showing up like a symptom, so it might be fatigue. You know, another podcaster, Carrie Jones, a friend of ours, asked me, she's like, um, what's a symptom we sometimes, or we often think is physical, but it's actually emotional?

• 28:58Mindy Pelz?

  Great question.

• 28:59Speaker 01

  And what came out of my mind was fatigue, right away. And, or came out of my mouth, was fatigue right away because that chronic level of stress we experience will get anchored into our body. So you might be feeling fatigued, you might, you might not be sleeping well. You probably have the hot flashes, night sweats, or maybe your cycle is irregular. So first, we want to understand how that translated into your hormones and your physical neurochemistry. So understanding, okay, if your progesterone is low, that's translating to your GABA being low. So then that

• 29:29Mindy Pelz?

  Right, okay.

• 29:30Speaker 01

  neurotransmitter is low. If your estrogen is low, then that's translating to your dopamine and your serotonin being low. Your testosterone is low, that's also translating to low dopamine. So that's going to equal low motivation. So kind of Putting those pieces of that puzzle together for her. So she understands like, oh, okay, it's not just in here. It's it's in my body, it's in my brain. So now it makes sense. So now I can do the things to help support that physical body. So as her hormones start rising or balancing. Then all of a sudden, the emotional pieces become more clear. There's more clarity of like, okay, actually, I'm still reacting to this. That means there's something deeper that I need to be working on. The rage is still there.

• 30:14Speaker 01

  What resentment have I been holding on to for so long? So then we can get into that emotional and mental body after that physical layer.

• 30:21Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah, it's, you know, I'm so happy that you're bringing this up. And of course, this is gonna lead me to the HRT. Conversation that I just need to have at this moment. Um, and I've done something on this podcast where I've tried to bring HRT experts of all but all different types on here. Because I don't think there's a one size fits all. Um, but what I've learned is that the more conservative medical. Doctors feel like we should, we should be taking these hormones. So that we can get the motivation back, we can get the happiness back. And then we are able to do the lifestyle tools. So, you know, take the exogenous hormones and then do the lifestyle tool.

• 31:06Mindy Pelz?

  I'm gonna say my feeling is more like try the lifestyle, do all the lifestyle. And then nine out of ten times, you realize you're not going to need the exogenous hormone. Um, and yet, if you don't have motivation, if you are having suicidal thoughts, like. Going to the gym and picking up some weights and eating thirty grams of protein at every meal. Is not something you're gonna feel pulled to. So what, what are your thoughts on the eight, where HRT fits into this part of the conversation?

• 31:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I've been prescribing now since twenty twelve is when I first started really diving into hormones. And what I have learned over those years with myself, with every patient that I've worked with. They both have to coexist together. And, um.

• 31:59Speaker 01

  You can take the, so I do B H R T, bio-identical hormone therapy. You can take all of that. So say you don't do the lifestyle things. At some point, you're going to hit a plateau. Because we haven't done the other work. You're no longer going to be absorbing it. Like you were before. If you don't do the mental emotional work, those triggers are still there. They may not be as amplified, but as soon as those hormones go down again, they're going to be amplified because life happens, stress happens. And then I've seen on this side here, depending on a woman's, because it's so nuanced. Depending on her life, her circumstances, time and all of that. Sometimes she does need to start with the hormones to just get her that, give her that little oomph.

• 32:39Speaker 01

  So that she can now make better decisions with food. She can have the sleep, the full eight to nine hours of sleep that she needed to have energy in the day to deal with the kids, to deal with her partner. Go to work, do all of that and take care of herself. So sometimes we need that to give the education on this side here. So I don't think it's one right answer for any woman. Um, I've helped both sides. I've helped women with just lifestyle and their hormones are completely changed. And we've used herbs and nutrition and going in the, moving your body, I would say is like number one medicine. When it comes to your hormonal health. And then there's some women that just can't even go there.

• 33:19Speaker 01

  Because they're so burnt out, because they don't have the means or they don't have the time and they need, it's like a lifeline to them that those bio-identical hormones. So yeah, I think it's a nuanced conversation for sure.

• 33:32Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah. What are some, outside of movement, what are some other things that you would say, just before we move, like I, I just, or like, hey, you should absolutely do this. Like one of the things that I say is every forty year old should have their hemoglobin A1C checked on a, at a, on a yearly basis and make sure their metabolic health is good.

• 33:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:49Mindy Pelz?

  Um, are there some, and, and I'm also, I, I just wanna, I, you're always my favorite plant based friend. So.

• 33:56Speaker 01

  I eat meat now.

• 33:57Mindy Pelz?

  Oh, you eat meat now? Oh, let's talk about, okay, let's talk about this because especially on this, in this week, you know, the, our, uh, we came out with a new food pyramid here in America.

• 34:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 34:10Mindy Pelz?

  Um, and I've been trying to dive in and see what I think of it, but protein's at the top. So. Yeah. So maybe talk about food and what we can do to balance our hormones through food and.

• 34:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 34:20Mindy Pelz?

  Let us know why you're eating meat.

• 34:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, I will. Well, I mean, the big reason for meat in our home really was our younger son and you you know about his story. He came out with like these canines ready to be a carnivore and I was forcing this vegetarian lifestyle on him. And soon as I introduced meat for him, his nervous system completely changed. So it just took me back to my roots of looking at an individual's constitution. So for me, when it comes to hormones and eating, again, it's been very nuanced in my own journey. So for many years, about fifteen years, I was strictly vegetarian. And before that, just growing up, we didn't have a lot of meat in the home. So being from an Indian background, it was easy to be vegetarian and we've had meat here and there.

• 35:05Speaker 01

  And it's something I could live with or live without, didn't really notice any anything with it. Um, but come my forties, when I went into perimenopause, I could feel I was missing protein. And a certain type of protein.

• 35:20Mindy Pelz?

  Did your canines start growing a lot?

• 35:21Speaker 01

  You know, they're getting sharper and sharper every day.

• 35:25Mindy Pelz?

  I've noticed your teeth look a little different.

• 35:27Speaker 01

  A little bit different than before. Uh, well, what I started to notice was um, my energy was shifting when I added the meat in. My sleep got better when I added the meat in. So there was things that were shifting for me in a positive direction. And I always tell people when it comes to belief around food, we don't want to hold on to them so tightly because we're always changing and transforming. And it's so important to reassess depending on where you are in the season of your life. And so my season changed, so I had to change with it. I'm still mostly plant based, but I've added in the the healthy proteins with that. And so I think again, it always goes to nuance in Ayurveda.

• 36:11Speaker 01

  When you go into perimenopause and menopause, the constitution that's higher is called the Vata constitution. So this constitution requires healthy fats because it dries out very quickly. There's more anxiety that shows up with that constitution. So you need foods that are going to feel grounding in your body and for some that could be meat. And so I think it's important to listen to what. Your body is telling you to do in these times and have discernment around that instead of what the new trend is. And that's where I think knowing yourself is so important. To write how you feel after you've eaten certain way to experiment with different ways of eating and understanding your microbiome and what it needs.

• 36:54Speaker 01

  Using tools like fasting, using tools like keto, using tools like going vegetarian for a couple of days. Using these tools to understand what works for you and which season.

• 37:05Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah, yeah. Okay, I have something I've got to say that I really think a lot of women need to hear. If you've ever followed a health program and it didn't work, check this out. This is not your fault. I promise you. Let me explain. Most fitness programs, most fasting protocols, most dietary advice. It was researched on men. It was designed for men. And then handed to women with a shrug and a here you go. Hope this works for you. But here's the thing. You operate on a 28 day hormonal cycle. The foods you eat, the length of your fast, even the intensity of your workouts.

• 37:49Mindy Pelz?

  All of it needs to be timed to where you are in that cycle to actually get a result. This is the science I teach inside my reset academy. This is the science that I have researched for over a decade. And inside my academy, every month I walk you through it in a very practicable. And actionable and way and it's actually built for your body, for a feminine body. So it's gonna work. I promise you. I see it over and over again. So no more guessing, no more following advice that was never designed for you.

• 38:27Mindy Pelz?

  This is a moment to get back into relationship with this beautiful body that you are so blessed to live in. So if you're ready to finally understand this incredible body of yours and work with it instead of constantly fighting against it. Come find me over in the reset academy. It's resetacademy dot drmindypels dot com. That's resetacademy dot drmindypels dot com. I'll see you there.

• 38:58Mindy Pelz?

  You know, I just led a three-day water fast last week for 100,000 people. We do it at the first year. And I was trying to explain to them, on the last day, we talked about food. And I was trying to explain how fasting is like a mirror. It just, you know, whatever you need to work on, you're gonna start to see. And what I realized is that a lot of people didn't know that, this is gonna sound crazy, a lot of people didn't know that when you eat, you're supposed to get energy. Like, they didn't know, like, if you eat and you're fatigued, we need to go back and look at either what you ate, the combination you ate.

• 39:37Mindy Pelz?

  Like, there was this missing link between food and mood, and food and energy. And yet, I know, like, when my kids were little, and I would pick them up from a playdate, and they were like bouncing off the inside of the car. I was like, "What'd y'all eat there?" Like, it's the first thing my brain went to. And, you know, every single time, there was some kind of food that was wiring them. Think about women that don't realize that, that they're eating food, it's affecting their mood, and then they're operating their whole life from that mood.

• 40:14Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. Yeah, that brain connection.

• 40:17Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah, like, that's a key thing that I feel like we need to just get across, that you will behave according to your food intake, which is why you went to go eat meat.

• 40:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, I think we normalize how we're feeling after meals. Like, "Oh yeah, I always feel bloated." "Oh yeah, the food coma, that's me." Or, "I have no energy in the afternoon, that's normal for me." So I think when we normalize these symptoms, we don't realize that food actually is medicine, and food is fuel. And if it's not behaving that way, we're not feeding the body what it actually needs. And as soon as we do, we feel more vitality, we feel more energy, we feel clear in our minds, not brain fog. And that starts at a very young age. So I think there's a lot of unlearning we have to do as a society around food, and to see that it is. Is actually medicine, so if you treat it that way, we're going to make very different choices.

• 41:12Speaker 01

  And also, you know, in the book, I kind of lay out three different ways of eating for three different hormonal identities, for example, so depending on where you're at. Like if you're the anxious overachiever, you're very busy, you're on the go all the time, you're probably not cooking a lot, so you're eating out, so your relationship with food really isn't there, it's very disconnected. So her diet is going to help her slow down, her diet's going to be a little bit more of the one where there's like soups and stews and things like that are easy for her body to digest. Because she's eating on the go. And so when you start to understand that how you digest your food is how you digest your life. Like your emotions are connected to your relationship with food too, it's actually a mirror.

• 41:57Speaker 01

  To all of that, we then start to change those choices. And we start to realize that it's that food that's feeding our hormones as well. And it's everything's interconnected, which I think can feel really confusing. For women when they first realize that, but really if you just simplify. And you you make choices that are nourishing for your body, you move that in a way that feels nourishing for your body. Those simple things can go a long way.

• 42:24Mindy Pelz?

  And take note, I think, take note, do you eat and then what's the emotion you've had after after you eat? Is what I think is like we, if you just understood that there is a connection between mood and food. Then you like even like today's a great example, I knew I I had come, I had surfed this morning, I was upstairs in my kitchen table, just enjoying a beautiful day, and I went to go eat lunch, I was like how do you want your brain to work this afternoon, Mindy, like? That was how I decided is how do I want my brain to work this afternoon? And I think if we all pick food and understand food from that level, it definitely could improve mood. And I'm so happy you put eating plans in here for women.

• 43:08Mindy Pelz?

  Because I think to to go from that thought to, okay, now what do I eat? That could be kind of a big leap. So, please, everybody get her book. The the other thing you put in your book that I'm dying to talk about, that I think you and I have probably talked about inside conversations, is the emotional inheritance piece of this. And and I'm gonna tell you my story. Because I, over the last couple of years, have really been thinking and and working on a lot of my traumas. I've been deep in work, not just with therapists, but I've been doing psychedelic work. Like, I've just been, I'm like, as my mom puts it, I'm so proud of you for taking yourself on.

• 43:52Mindy Pelz?

  That's what I have done. And when I got to the emotional inheritance idea, where I have inherited some emotions from my ancestors, I literally was like, well, fuck that. I I like, I don't even know how to handle my own emotions. And now I gotta deal, now I gotta deal with what my grandmother or my great grandmother had? Like, I don't have time in this lifetime. I've got enough. And so, right, so then I started diving in deeper, and here's what's came up.

• 44:26Mindy Pelz?

  My grandmother's parents were chronic alcoholics. And my grandmother used to tell a story, very stoically, that she would be careful who she invited into the house at night, because she knew when she would open up the door, that her parents would be passed out drunk on the floor. Now, you have to understand that this story got told through my family, like, like, it was no big deal.

• 44:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:54Mindy Pelz?

  But when I dove into this idea that we inherit some kind of emotional spectrum, one of the things that I realized is that one of my biggest pet peeves in life is I don't like anybody I love to be drunk. I do not want to be around anybody who is drunk in my family. It is like nails on a chalkboard. I could watch you be drunk and think it's really funny. But if it's a family member, there's a visceral reaction. And I was like, wait a second. Then I dove in and looked at the genetic expression that changes when there's a trauma

• 45:32Mindy Pelz?

  in order to inform the future generations that if this scenario ever comes up, here's the reaction you're gonna wanna have. And I was like, oh, well, this makes sense.

• 45:43Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 45:44Mindy Pelz?

  So talk about them. It's all for protection.

• 45:47Speaker 01

  It is. So, you know, yes, we inherit these stories. We inherit the wisdom of those stories too.

• 45:52Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah, that's true.

• 45:53Speaker 01

  Where your brain is trying to protect you and move that forward for survival. And so there's been several studies done on even Holocaust survivors and how that's changed in individuals' adrenal health and ability to manage stress in the future. When we look at a mother's lineage and we look at, you know, how women have been treated over the last like hundred years or fifty to a hundred years and the adjustments that women have had to make um to their personalities to be accepted, to belong, to fit in, to serve, to people-pleased, to do all those things. We inherit those patterns because that's what was taught to our brain, that that's how you survive in this world.

• 46:35Speaker 01

  And so then the triggers today, like you said, that family member that's had too much to drink or whatever it might be. It's like this visceral feeling that we get very confused by because we don't know how to connect the dots. And then when you understand that story, you start to see like, okay, this wasn't mine to carry. This is something that I can release. So I think that's the empowerment that can come in from understanding your lineage. Um so for example, in my lineage, because of colonization in India. It really changed our physiology, like it literally changed our beta cells. So for South Asian women, we're more prone to PCOS. We're more prone to heart disease and waking and all of these things. So.

• 47:15Speaker 01

  Me having that understanding tells me, okay, this phase of my life, I need to be more insulin sensitive. I need to pay attention. Hence why I brought in the meat at this time. So I think these stories we carry, the emotional and the physical. They do produce the person we are today, but we don't have to be victim to them when we become aware of them. And a big one I found in my lineage was resentment. Because resentment brews when you have to stay quiet. It brews when we're not able to express. Who we are. So if you're born in a culture where just you being a woman is a burden. And there's still, you know, um, young infants that are female being killed in India and like there's still.

• 47:59Speaker 01

  All of that is still going on. And so you inherit this story of like, I'm not enough. I need to prove myself. My whole life to belong, so I can survive. So we start to carry this with us, but it can really inform of like, okay, the reason why I'm pushing through. I'm not taking a break. I'm doing all this because I'm trying to prove myself. Because of the story I'm carrying. So how do I change the narrator? How do I change this story so it can actually serve me now and not take away from me? So I think it can be a really, really empowering thing. And before we got on the call, Nick wanted me to message you about the Walmart guy.

• 48:37Mindy Pelz?

  Oh, is this where the Walmart guy comes in? Yes. Okay, tell me about the Walmart guy.

• 48:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, we could talk about the Walmart guy now. And so the reason why he wanted me to bring that up is because. When you're in that state of people pleasing, or you're born in a culture where you just, you don't have a voice, you're taking everything in all the time. And so he pointed out to me, you know, in, he was pointing out quite a few scenarios where maybe I had some hormonal rage. I'm not really sure what the initial intention was, but he said, remember when you did this and.

• 49:06Mindy Pelz?

  You're like, no, I don't, but obviously you do.

• 49:09Speaker 01

  Exactly. And so, but after he said all those examples, he was like, what was, what's amazing though, it's like how you're using your voice. And you're not letting things lie. You're not letting people cross their boundaries anymore. So this Walmart guy. So now it's Christmas time. It wasn't this, it was, I think, two years ago, because it was after I turned forty-five. Um, and you know, it's Christmas time. I'm just trying to get some gifts from my nieces and nephews, trying to get out, and it's busy. I don't like being in busy places. You know, when your estrogen is low, all the noises, or you're just more sensitive to all of it. And so I'm checking out, and he comes up to me and starts selling me their MasterCard or whatever, their credit card to get a deal. He's like, yeah, you know, ma'am, you get ninety dollars off.

• 49:51Speaker 01

  I'm like, okay, well, that's okay, that's okay, deal. Let's just do it. You don't have to do anything. And then he starts going off about all these other things that I have to pay and whatever, and I just got so overwhelmed. I, you know how they call it, the Karen, came out.

• 50:07Speaker 01

  To the point where my poor children were crying because they could see how upset I was. All eyes were on me, and I was just like, you lied to me? And I'm not gonna take it. So you need to do something about this. So I was stern and maybe a bit ragey. But it had to happen because you crossed the boundary. But ten, fifteen years ago, twenty years ago, I would have just taken it. And just left feeling resentful towards myself for not sticking up for myself. And that's like scenario after scenario. And today, version of me just can't, even whether it's resentment or even grief and sadness. There was a moment at just my mom's house a few weeks ago where she said something, compared me to my sister.

• 50:52Speaker 01

  And tears just came like gushing through, and I couldn't even control it. Where in the past, I would hold it all in. And maybe it would get released in a different way. I'd go to the gym or whatever, or I'd work harder. But now it's like I've softened so much, or I've had to in that sit in those situations where I just, I can't even keep it in anymore.

• 51:15Mindy Pelz?

  Do you think, do you think women in general are behaving like this more than ever?

• 51:19Speaker 01

  I think so. I think.

• 51:20Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah, I do too.

• 51:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's definitely, I call it a revolution.

• 51:24Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah.

• 51:25Speaker 01

  Happening where, uh, and maybe we're more aware of it because of the stage of life we're in. So our conversations are around this. My hope is that the younger generation is starting to catch on to, and I think they are. Um, they're definitely more ahead than we were at that age.

• 51:40Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah, for sure.

• 51:41Speaker 01

  More self-aware, and so I do think it's shifting. And so we're in that uncomfortable shift right now where others don't know what to do with.

• 51:49Mindy Pelz?

  Well, they're not used to women speaking out. Yeah, we're not, our culture's not used to women speaking out as, as boldly as we are right now. And it, and it makes me think, you said something early on about these transitions, like.

• 52:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 52:01Mindy Pelz?

  I feel like we go through so many hormonal transitions and the way I would explain menopause and perimenopause is like, all of a sudden the veil got really thin. And like my ability to take society's bullshit and my ability to be mistreated. And my ability to hold back what I'm thinking, just like you're saying, like there wasn't a buffer there anymore. In my book, I call it, in Age Like a Girl, I call it a neurochemical armor. And the way it feels like to me is like the armor comes down and all of a sudden you're like, wait a second. You've been treating me like that forever and I've been letting you?

• 52:46Mindy Pelz?

  I'm not gonna do that anymore. And it is in, I mean, back to everything you're bringing forward to the culture right now, which is your hormones per, relate to your moods. I think sometimes our hormones can make us go to sleep. As a good friend of mine said to me, yeah, you mean when we were drugged on estrogen?

• 53:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:05Mindy Pelz?

  And I'm like, yeah, when I was drugged on estrogen, you could treat me like that, but now that I'm not drugged on estrogen, I have less of it. And there's no buffer between your bullshit and me.

• 53:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:15Mindy Pelz?

  Um, all of a sudden, you're gonna hear what I think and it feels so freeing. But I see woman after woman after woman doing this and the world is, it's interesting to watch.

• 53:27Speaker 01

  It is interesting to watch. And imagine the women on birth control. And

• 53:32Mindy Pelz?

  Talk about that, yeah.

• 53:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, and just how masked their emotions get, how numb they get beca- depending on what generation of birth control they're using, but it changes your whole chemistry, it changes your outlook on life, it changes your ability to discern so many important decisions. And so when we're masked that like that and the veil is really thick in those moments, we can't speak up, we can't speak our truth because we don't even know what that truth is because it's getting numbed out so much. And so, like you said, when that dissolves, it's like, oh, you know, here's the opportunity to finally listen to that inner voice because we made her so quiet and she was speaking through the symptoms. And so when we start

• 54:13Speaker 01

  to listen, she doesn't have to yell anymore, we can hear her and then we can express her forward without the fear. And maybe that comes with age, maybe that comes with experience of not fearing not belonging, or not fearing not love the way we want to, because now we have that self-trust and that self-awareness, and we have faith in ourselves now. So it's easier to do that. So I do understand younger women may still have these moments of playing these identities and roles because they're figuring it out.

• 54:43Mindy Pelz?

  Right, right. And but I think it's just like we were talking about earlier, and what I hope everybody listening is getting is that when we finally speak out about it, it starts to make it easier for the next woman to speak out.

• 54:56Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 54:57Mindy Pelz?

  It's like you just, we we have to make a commitment not to to just ourselves, but to make a commitment to the every woman around us that we're, once you free one, you start to free them all. I I had a line that popped out of my head for Age Like a Girl that was, went something like, once, once a a healed woman doesn't stay silent.

• 55:18Speaker 01

  Hmm, yeah.

• 55:20Mindy Pelz?

  She turns around and heals another woman.

• 55:22Speaker 01

  That's right. It's the ripple effect. Yeah.

• 55:24Mindy Pelz?

  We don't, we don't just.

• 55:26Speaker 01

  The world.

• 55:26Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah, we don't sit back and go, okay, I figured that out. I'll I'll just sit here and hang out by myself. We're like, I gotta, I gotta do a ladies' night so I can tell every woman what I just figured out. Now, or you're crazy enough like you and me, I gotta write some books.

• 55:40Speaker 01

  Yeah. Tell the world.

• 55:42Mindy Pelz?

  Tell the world what's really, what's really going on. But I, but I, I think we're at a really cool pivotal moment in history where women are waking up. I don't, I don't know another way to say that, but the waking up is scary. And um, I think it's in these hormonal transitions that we wake up the most. And so what, let's talk about rage for a moment because this is maybe one of my favorite emotions.

• 56:12Mindy Pelz?

  Because um, it shows up for me. And when it shows up, it comes out in ugly ways. And so I've done a lot of work on what rage is. And um, it's, it's built around resentment. It's built around all the times I wanted to speak my voice and I wasn't allowed to. Uh, it's built around parents who had an expectation that I behave a certain way in a culture that said, you know, the way I was behaving wasn't, wasn't okay. And um, uh, rage was a very, very big one for me as I transitioned out into post-menopausal. And I've come to learn that the rage now, to me, rage is ancestral.

• 56:55Mindy Pelz?

  Rage is cultural and rage is personal. Um, so can you speak a little bit about the rage that women are feeling right now? Cause I don't think I'm alone.

• 57:06Speaker 01

  You're not alone at all. I think that's probably one of the most common ones um, emotions that women are feeling when you become aware of it. And it's so visceral and it's so raw because it is ancestral. Whether it's seven to 14 generations before, it's like we're feeling all of that in this moment. And it can feel really overwhelming. And I do think rage is full of action. So it allows us to take action. So when we're in rage, we're ready to heal. I'm more worried about women that get stuck in the sadness and the depression and these other feelings that can keep us stuck. Rage is full of action, so we can actually take different, we can do something, we can set the boundaries.

• 57:51Speaker 01

  And so if we do it in that way at first, it can then allow us to have the other polarity, which is the softness. It's like we've lived in such a masculine world and we've had to operate in such a yang way, in such a masculine way, that the rage, I think, is actually there because we've been misguided. And because our inner world has been in conflict for so long, that it's like ready to burst open. And what I have noticed with women that have held resentment, and this is from a Chinese medicine perspective too, it's like that's held up in the liver. And in our bodies, we actually increase interleukin six, our pro-inflammatory cytokine, when we feel anger and rage. And so that this inflammation that we're feeling comes from this emotion.

• 58:35Speaker 01

  And what I have noticed over and over again in my practice, those that feel rage and resentment often have some sort of growth in their body. For me, it's been a cyst. That's been like an ongoing practice of healing. And I know it's like this ball of resentment. I saw the same thing in my mother. I don't know if my grandmother had any, but I know my mother did. And so when we're holding on to so much, that emotion needs to go somewhere. And so when the rage shows up, I feel like in this stage of life, it's like, okay, now finally I can use my voice. It gives us permission to actually speak. So I do think that is where healing actually happens, is when we recognize the rage.

• 59:13Mindy Pelz?

  I've, I've, I, a lot of women I've talked to said like they don't like to express anger. And, and partly because, I mean, let's just be, let's just be honest, our culture doesn't like angry women.

• 59:23Speaker 01

  No, then we implode. Instead of exploding, we're imploding.

• 59:27Mindy Pelz?

  That's right.

• 59:28Speaker 01

  That's no better. And we think about just, you know, the world. Every human's first relationship is a woman. Like your mother is your first relationship because you're living inside of her for nine months. So her experience is your experience. Her hormonal story becomes your hormonal story. And so we carry those emotions forward. And so if we can help women heal today, we're healing generations forward because she's going to be then moving through life with softness towards herself. So she can be soft with her kids and her community and all of that. So this, it's such an important conversation for us to have around this, you know, women are just too emotional. That's one of my chapters too.

• 1:00:10Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah, I love that. Your chapter title is great. Yeah, exactly. We are.

• 1:00:13Speaker 01

  Thank you. Thank you for recognizing that.

• 1:00:16Mindy Pelz?

  You know, it's funny, I um, I have a, a good friend that one day, um, I said something like, you know, I feel like I'm too much. And she goes, um, she goes, you are, you are a lot, but you're not too much. You are a lot, but you're not too much. And I thought, well, that's really sweet because I don't want to stop being all the things that I am. And yet, it doesn't feel good to walk around thinking that you've, your, your emotions are too much. And I think there's a lot of women that, that feel that. Um, that, that like, if I express, I will be left, um, or something bad will happen to me because,

• 1:00:58Mindy Pelz?

  let's just be honest, we have, we have cultural, historical example of women being hung when they thought differently. Like, there, that is, that's prevalent going even back into the European times.

• 1:01:12Speaker 01

  Yes, yeah.

• 1:01:13Mindy Pelz?

  So, as we start to bring this conversation up, what, how, like, I was thinking, how do you use rage and the action that, that comes with rage in a responsible way? You don't want to like rage out on everybody. But how do we start feeling, or how do you use the feeling of depression? And still be able to get up in the day and do all the things you need to do? Because sometimes these feelings that are associated with the hormon- hormones that are associated with, with everything we've been carrying for so many years, if you actually sat and felt it, you wouldn't be able to function.

• 1:01:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. This is where I think those daily habits actually come in, like the really simple ones are just breathing. So using rage, and if you're feeling it, putting on that music and starting to dance. Breathing, being with yourself in that way with movement. So in the book, I, I created some exercises that women can do with these certain emotions on a daily basis to kind of understand them and move through them. You can sit with it and then move through it. It's when it gets stuck, that's where the challenge comes up. And so when we have these simple habits in our Every single day, like a morning ritual. That reminds you that it's okay. So if it's really hard to get out of bed.

• 1:02:33Speaker 01

  Maybe there's, you know, you give yourself a little treat of going outside in the morning. Or you're just opening your curtains and looking at the sun. Or looking at the trees, like those simple things activate something in our brain to tell us that it's okay. So there's affirmations, there's breath work, there's yoga, there's movement, there's. All these simple things that we can bring into our day and then we start to make those other choices that are going to fuel and nourish. Our bodies, going back to that conversation. So we can then manage and understand the emotion afterwards.

• 1:03:05Mindy Pelz?

  What about the emotion of shame?

• 1:03:10Mindy Pelz?

  That's a tough one.

• 1:03:11Speaker 01

  It is a tough one because I do think, you know, when women use the word guilt, it's often not guilt, it's actually shame. And when I talk about trauma in general, um, I heard and I can't remember where I heard this, but I. Talk about it in the book that there's two types. Of wounds that show up from trauma, it's either an invasion one or an abandonment one. And both anchor shame into our bodies. So. An invasion one might be that, you know, someone didn't have boundaries with you, whether they were physical or emotional. And so that makes an imprint on you. An abandonment one might be, you know. Someone would withdraw love from you if you didn't meet their expectations. And so now you've turned into that people pleaser.

• 1:03:55Speaker 01

  And so every time you please somebody else and not yourself, there's shame wrapped up in that because of that initial response or that initial wound. And so when we're experiencing shame, what we need to know is A, it's not ours to carry. And B, once we speak it, we take the power away from it. It's when it's unspoken that it's trying to stir up. All of these imprints and emotions and this like self doubt, self negative talk, all of that self criticism. But when we speak it and we can see it for what it is, we understand that shame doesn't belong to us at all, it was given.

• 1:04:31Mindy Pelz?

  Ah, and we but and we also interpreted it.

• 1:04:34Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:04:34Mindy Pelz?

  As whatever we that we did something wrong. I've heard shame. The phrase I like is shame can only live in secrecy.

• 1:04:42Speaker 01

  And that's why we have to speak it. Yeah.

• 1:04:43Mindy Pelz?

  That's why we have to speak it, which is again, like what I'm hoping that women are getting listening to this is that when you talk about these things, even if you don't know what's going on, like the rage. You know, I originally thought that the rage that showed up during perimenopause for me was because I was tired. I was working too much. I was exhausted being the primary care. You know, breadwinner for my family, like easy to say, but then when I started to look into the the patriarchal messaging and I started to go back and look at even my relationship with my father and the and the way my mother protected some of the horrible behaviors of my father, I started realizing like, oh, oh, no.

• 1:05:26Mindy Pelz?

  I don't just have rage from my adult years. I have rage from a lifetime.

• 1:05:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:05:32Mindy Pelz?

  And I have therapists that were along the way that were like, speak it, talk about it. You know, and I'm like, I don't, this is an energy that if I unleash it, I have no idea who's going down.

• 1:05:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:05:46Mindy Pelz?

  Like, like, maybe you could give me a little bit. So one of the things that I started doing is my morning time, and I just want to point this out is I really put on music and I start doing whatever emotion I started last year. It was I had a date with grief every morning. I just listened to sappy music and cried my eyes out. Um, I think I think rage that you know, these rage rooms are showing up everywhere.

• 1:06:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:06:12Mindy Pelz?

  So I've I've actually gone and destroyed things in a and and just like take a water bottle I didn't need and took a hammer to it. And I'm like, this feels really good.

• 1:06:24Mindy Pelz?

  But but to your point and what I want to bring out and what your book is is really giving language to is that these all these emotions are welcome.

• 1:06:33Speaker 01

  Yes, yeah, yeah, there are signals to what meaning you've given your life and your experiences. And then we're experiencing it through your hormones. And so when we start to change one, we start to change the other. And so the more we befriend them, the more we're befriending our hormones and ourselves and that understanding around this like chronicity of these stories and identities and roles and chronic stress that we've been carrying in our bodies, it starts to change and starts to shift. And we can then understand the choices we need to make every single day.

• 1:07:07Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah, it's so beautiful. What are you hoping people will do with this book? I I really look at books as they open up conversations.

• 1:07:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:07:17Mindy Pelz?

  Um, I mean, women can have a very intimate experience on their couch with your words. It's a lot when you write a book.

• 1:07:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, that really is what I imagine is a woman like sitting with this book. It's in on her nightstand. And she's sitting with the words and seeing herself in these stories, seeing herself in these words and finding hope in the words that she's not alone and that everything is, you know, changeable, that there's an answer to everything too, and that she has every right to feel, she has every right to experience her body, her world in the way that she is. And there can be shifts, there can be empowerment that comes through these stories that we carry.

• 1:08:04Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah, yeah. It's so beautiful and so needed, you know, I I just want to say this, that as somebody who just put out a a menopause or an age, it was really a book on, it's a book about the aging brain and the neuroscience behind that. I'm just gonna be in full transparency here, it's a really interesting time here in America to be putting out a women's empowerment book. And the um, the menopause conversation is very congested and um,

• 1:08:33Mindy Pelz?

  What I've been hearing from a lot of women is like, oh, what do I have to do now? I gotta, I gotta pick up weights, I gotta, I gotta go to bed on time, I can't drink alcohol. And I gotta eat, you know, thirty grams of protein, like, really? I'm just trying to breathe. And um, when, uh, one of the things I love about your book is that there's no have tos. Um, and it's just like a cozy conversation with somebody who believes in you. And I really hope that we start to move away the menopause conversation from adding more have tos. To women and help women understand themselves better.

• 1:09:14Mindy Pelz?

  And this is why I think every woman should rush out and get your book, because nobody's saying what you're saying. Nobody's gone deep into how your hormones affect your moods and how moods can affect hormones. And this is a relationship women will have their whole life, starting at puberty, at least. Um, and we really need to know how to have a relationship with these hormones, so. I just, I, I really want to point that out, so it doesn't get lost. I really don't want your book to get lost in the, the bazillion menopause books are out there. This one is, is, is got something special, so please, those of you that are listening. Please, please, please go get it, engage with Sonia's socials.

• 1:09:58Mindy Pelz?

  She is talking through a different lens that we are not hearing, so I just want to say thank you for everything you're doing.

• 1:10:04Speaker 01

  Oh, thank you, and I, my hope really is that we give ourselves to permission to fall in love with ourselves again. That's really all it is, and you are so inspiring for me and all that you've done and the voice. You know, carrying your voice forward with the message that you are, so thank you, and you are giving women permission to have this feeling. On this platform.

• 1:10:28Mindy Pelz?

  Well, I, I wish, I wish more women had done it for me when I was going through menopause. I wish I had a mother who had done it for me, like, I, you know, and this is why I'm so adamant that now, once you wake up. Express yourself so everybody can. See what a truly authentic woman looks like. And the more authenticity we bring, the more we're like, oh, there's authenticity and there's bullshit.

• 1:10:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, the discernment.

• 1:10:54Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah. Yeah, we can see the difference. And yet, we have had a world of women who have behaved well for everybody else. And it's time for us to not to stop behaving.

• 1:11:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, shake things up. It's your right.

• 1:11:06Mindy Pelz?

  Yep, exactly. Okay, where do people find you?

• 1:11:09Speaker 01

  Instagram, Dr.Sonia Jensen. And the book website is healyourhormonesbook.com.

• 1:11:17Mindy Pelz?

  Beautiful. And I will tell you, I'm going to thank you as an author because it is the most gut wrenching experience to write a book, promote a book. So please, everyone, if you like this book, please share it, get it out there. What you have to do as an author to get a book out into the world, especially in this very distracted culture, is quite a feat. And so if you resonate with it, please, please hand it to friends because it's that powerful. So, thank you. I love you so much. And I appreciate you in so many ways.

• 1:11:49Speaker 01

  Me too.

• 1:11:51Mindy Pelz?

  Thank you so much for joining me in today's episode. I love bringing thoughtful discussions about all things health to you. If you enjoyed it, we'd love to know about it. So please leave us a review, share it with your friends, and let me know what your biggest takeaway is.