Overcome - A Mental Health Podcast

How Perimenopause Impacts Women’s Mental Health with Amita Sharma

• Travis White | Mental Health Advocate • Episode 25

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In this deeply moving episode of Overcome, host Travis White sits down with Amita Sharma, co-founder of NourishDoc, to uncover the hidden struggles of midlife mental health—particularly for women navigating the tumultuous journey of perimenopause. Amita shares her personal story of childhood trauma, cultural suppression, and the eruption of unspoken emotions that caught her off guard in her 40s. With honesty and vulnerability, she discusses the connection between hormones, anxiety, and self-worth—and why society urgently needs to normalize this stage of a woman’s life.

Together, they explore how holistic wellness, gut health, community support, and candid conversations can empower women to reclaim their identity and well-being. Whether you’re personally walking this path or supporting someone who is, this episode is a must-listen.

What We Discussed:

  • The emotional toll of perimenopause and its impact on mental health
  • Why many women suffer in silence due to stigma and societal expectations
  • The overlooked struggles of midlife women balancing careers, family, and personal wellness
  • How unresolved childhood trauma can resurface during hormonal transitions
  • Holistic and integrative approaches to healing, including diet, gut health, and Ayurvedic practices
  • How partners and workplaces can support women through this phase
  • The mission behind NourishDoc and its role in making self-care and expert guidance more accessible

Perimenopause isn’t just a hormonal shift—it’s a deeply personal journey that deserves understanding, empathy, and support. If this episode moved you, don’t keep it to yourself.

  • Share it with a friend, partner, or colleague who needs to hear it.
  • Rate and review the show on your favorite podcast platform—it helps us reach more people.

And most importantly, take a moment today to nourish your own mind, body, and spirit. You are not alone. Together, we can break the stigma.

 Connect with Amita and explore NourishDoc’s holistic wellness resources: 

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Travis White (00:00)
Hello and welcome to Overcome a Mental Health Podcast, a place for you to share your stories. I'm so excited for tonight's guest. We are speaking with Amita Sharma. Amita, welcome to the show. Yeah, it's a pleasure to have you. Amita is the co-founder of NourishDoc, a holistic wellness platform, and she is here to tell us about her journey. I'm just gonna have the...

Amita Sharma (00:02)
Thank ⁓

Thanks.

Thank you. Thank you so much, Travis. Yeah.

Travis White (00:27)
Time over to her and have her share with us her story.

Amita Sharma (00:32)
Yeah, no, I like you focusing on the mental health issue and also in the society we have sort of normalized this whole mental health. It's okay to have mental health issues, right? You know, it's acceptable to take, to do therapy. But what I think is that most of the mental health is geared towards younger, right? Younger, maybe teenagers. Most of the time we talk about younger people who are having mental health issues.

and maybe seniors. But what my focus is on a journey of a mid-age, specifically mid-age woman in this case, also mid-age men and the focus is on a mid-age woman who's going through panimantophosis, menopause, and 50 % of them are having anxiety and mental health issues that they are too scared.

scared but they're silent about their struggles or they're silent about this whole journey that they're going through for fear of being judged in a way because at that time they're probably moms, wives, whatever, right? So I want to bring this whole topic out, you know, the mental health issue specifically for mid-age women and why this happens, how this happens and how it can impact our society and what can we do about

Right? Really, that's really what I wanted to talk about. I'd like to get your feedback before I say something.

Travis White (01:54)
No, no, that's that's totally fine. I

like I like this direction.

Amita Sharma (01:59)
Okay, so, you know, I can start with a little bit of my journey. It's not that I developed mental health issues when I started belly menopause. I had mental health issues earlier as well. Typically, you know, most of the women who have more mental health issues have had some kind of a history of childhood trauma or childhood, you know, other experiences during the teenage years. And I think I had that too during growing up.

in a country where women were a bit subservient and I wanted to do something with my life and so many other things, the cultural part, the family part. I went through my own teenage trauma, own teenage mental health issues of lot of different things. I should say that family issues, all those things, That happened in my, think starting in my, I would say it started in teenage years. You typically that's what

we see here also starting. And I never expressed that I was having mental health issues because at that time in my, you know, now it's okay to talk about mental health issues, but at that time, you know, it was not okay to talk about that you having mental health issues because it was considered that, you know, something is wrong with you. You cannot talk about how you were feeling and that's exactly what happened. So.

So bottom line is I suppressed, there was a suppression of feelings that happened during this whole year of growing up, years of teenage. And it went on and on until I hit petty menopause. I never expressed my feelings. I never expressed myself, how I was feeling. I was always trying to please others. I was like too eager to please others and never thinking about how it's going to impact me, me as a self person.

So during this whole conflict of emotions that always used to happen in my mind, in my head and everything would result into this whole disturbance of my hormonal imbalance, which I am not agreeing, but I am doing it, right? If you can imagine. So this whole continued and started in my teens, went into my twenties. In my twenties, again, there was a lot of family issues that I had a lot of mental health issues.

to a point that I actually needed therapy. And therapy was not something that was very common, know, back. It has become common now, but not at that time. So the perimenopause, when it hits, it all bubbled up. Everything just kind of bubble, and exploded. To a point, what happened is that in perimenopause, and I never quite understood that me being a meek person, me being a

Travis White (04:21)
Mm-hmm.

Amita Sharma (04:41)
sort of like a mellow person. How come everything is bubbling up and I'm talking like, you know, that movie, we're gonna lie, you know, the Jim Carrey, he said, oh, I can't lie. Oh my God, the words are coming out of my mouth. I can't do anything, right? So I literally became that person, words are coming out of my mouth and I don't know what to do. It was so bizarre. And what was happening was this whole.

Travis White (04:49)
Mm-hmm.

Amita Sharma (05:06)
So I started learning about the science of why it is happening to me and why I'm getting these strange, almost to a depression kind of a mode where I'm having very dark thoughts, you know, I cannot control. And the anxiety, wake up in the morning, sometimes I can't wake up in the mornings, I have anxiety issues all the time. because of my anxiety, I have gut health issues. So it was sort of like a, you know,

like a cycle that's going on and I'm going to get out of that. So what was happening was that my hormonal balance got disturbed when I started getting into this perimenopause journey. And that's what happens to millions and millions of women every year when they start their perimenopause journey. When the hormonal imbalance starts happening to me, whatever mental health issues I was suppressing earlier for the last two decades.

more when I turned 40s, that all started bubbling up because I was not digesting my emotions. Right? And now suddenly I'm having, you know, hot flashes sitting in the meetings and public places and because of hot flashes, now I'm getting more anxiety issues and now I'm not able to concentrate at work, at my workplace.

I come home, start having night sweats and I'm kind of like a completely confused muddled up person if you can imagine. Totally nervous right, not confident, having a very low self-esteem because I'm not able to focus, you know, at workplace and the fear of that, they're going to let me go, they're going to fire me. And I was laid off like three, four times, five times, don't I don't even remember. So many places because I did not realize at the time that

due to my petty menopause journey, the hormonal imbalance, I'm not able to do my work properly and then the anxiety kicks in and I'm not able to work and I'm getting my, you know, kicked off from work. That's kind of how it started happening to me. Does that sound like, you know, you've heard this story before from someone or?

Travis White (07:10)
Yeah, that sounds...

Yeah, that's... And sometimes I feel like with mental health, as an individual, I struggle really bad with anxiety and depression. And it takes a while to actually realize what is going on with yourself. It's not something that... And it's not until you fully admit that you have a problem that you're actually willing to go and get the help.

Amita Sharma (07:20)
Okay.

Yeah.

Travis White (07:38)
and ⁓

Amita Sharma (07:38)
Yeah, exactly.

You think you look normal, like I'm looking normal to you right now, right? And you look perfectly normal to me, but nobody can tell behind this facade that what's happening in the head, right?

Travis White (07:41)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah. ⁓

And did you ever feel like these days that you know you're sitting in meetings and going through all this anxiety that you just had to fake it to to get through the day?

Amita Sharma (07:53)
There's some like...

yeah, always. at that time, you're not strong enough, right? The word is strong. If you're not strong enough to admit that something is going wrong with you and you're not seeking help, now how do you put up a strong front to make sure that everybody thinks that you're normal? And also you need your work, your job, right? So you need to put a facade.

that you are strong and you're able to do the work that you've been hired to do, right? ⁓ So that's important because otherwise people, know, from a professionalism, you need to kind of make sure that you present yourself as a sort of like a put together person, not falling apart kind of a cookie crumble person here, right? And that's what inside I was, a cookie crumble person, really becoming like a cookie, not able to put myself together.

Travis White (08:32)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Amita Sharma (08:56)
And I did not know where to go for help. And that was the biggest, biggest problem. And if I had known that my hormones have started fluctuating because I'm entering this phase of hairy menopause, and the really strange thing is during the day, the hormones fluctuate so much that you don't even know what is the norm for any woman. And 50 % of the women during going through this phase

are having anxiety issues, depression issues, and also suicidal thoughts. In fact, what has happened just like two days back in UK, there's a woman, was I think 56 years old, she was admitted in some kind of facility for mental health issues and she committed suicide. It's just two days back. So it's like it's in all over UK right now.

Travis White (09:47)
Yeah.

Why do you think the mental health issues or mental health effects of periominal pause are often overlooked or misunderstood?

Amita Sharma (09:58)
Because see, okay, so first of all, we don't even pay attention to women beyond the reproductive years. All over the world, it has nothing to do with United States or any country for that matter. Generally as a society, all over the world. Women are generally, you know, get your kids and that's it. All right? That is, you know, and thankfully we pay attention to reproduction now, the fertility part, the pregnancy.

taking care of that. So most of the communities, most of the cultures are focused on the fertility of a woman. And after the fertility, we don't even pay attention to the perimenopause. Menopause, associate menopause as, you're old, right? You're no longer young. So, okay, now you're going to have, anyway, you're getting old, so you're going to have a disease, a chronic condition. it's all kind of, it's the mindset of the society all over the world.

underfunded, under researched this whole phase of a woman's life. It's not well understood even by the medical fraternity. It's not even taught in the medical schools. Hey, menopause. Menopause is taught only for eight hours. And this came actually on NBC by a OBGYN. She herself admitted that this is not being taught. So now if you look at the source, you're not teaching the experts about some topic. How the heck it's gonna filter.

to a common person like me or any of the women because at that age I'm not in college. I'm at home, I'm taking care my kids or whatever. And the only place I'm going to seek help is either through the medical system or through workplace, right? Both of these places in the medical system, they're not taught. In the workplace, it's sort of like, my God, you're going to get judged. So where do you go for help?

Travis White (11:27)
Mm-hmm.

Amita Sharma (11:53)
That's the thing. And now you feel so secluded, isolated. On top of that, the other thing that happens to mental health is the reason because loss of libido is one of the other symptoms that happens to lot of women. Now that can impact your relationship with your spouse or partner. Now that also can add the mental health, aggravate the whole mental health issue, right? It's not just only the mental health of other things, but there are your relationships.

your partners can also exasperate the whole mental health issue. Not just one thing that's happening is what I'm saying.

Travis White (12:30)
Yeah, of course. And how did you, when you were gone through all, or as you've gone through all these issues and stuff, like mental health, health and peri-menopause, how did you manage like balancing your career and, you know, family responsibilities and every other thing in life? How did you go about doing that?

Amita Sharma (12:34)
Yeah.

Yeah.

and

It's tough. It's tough for all the women because at that point of your life, you're something. Most of the women are at the peak of their careers because they have worked for almost 20 years approximately. They're at a point they are like, they're experienced and they probably have a couple of kids. I mean, that was my story too. And how do you balance it all? It's very, very tough because you're running between your work, your home,

taking care of your family, your kids and all, and your other things. So the only way I learned how to balance was actually incorporating holistic therapies, right? I started going into some yoga, some meditation, some Ayurvedic massage therapies, fixing my diet, trying to get some me time and trying to cut down on my social time, you know.

because earlier you would end up spending almost on Saturday and Sunday, half a day for socializing friends and stuff like that. It's not that I completely stopped, but I needed to cut that time down to make time for myself for taking care of myself. So it was just a lot of maneuvering of the time management that I had to do to take some time out for me time for myself so that I don't fall apart.

And if I fall apart, the whole family falls apart, right? That's what happens to most of the women. If they fall apart, the family falls apart. 60 % of the women go through divorce, by the way.

Travis White (14:18)
That's very true. If the woman falls apart, the family falls apart. My wife is the glue that keeps us running. I'm not saying that I don't have my spot, but she's the ⁓ reason that the household keeps going. When it comes to...

Amita Sharma (14:24)
Exactly.

Yeah!

Travis White (14:42)
paramedic, mental health mixed together. What do think the biggest stigma is with the two of them?

Amita Sharma (14:45)
Yeah.

Both, both has stigma, I'll tell you that, right? Because now the women are kind of, they don't talk about they're going through perimenopause. It's just the mindset, I'm getting old. It's one of those things, right? Women don't like being told that they're getting old, right? So it's one of the, my God, now, so, and the mental health, it's a stigma attached to both of them. And that's why you need to normalize these discussions. If we start talking as a society,

It's okay. Well, it's normal. Perimenopause is normal. Every single woman is going to go through perimenopause, menopause, postmenopause. Every single woman might not get pregnant, right? Think about it. But, you know, that is a fact. So it's a stage of her life, a woman's stage of life that she's going to go through it. And we don't even as a society, don't have the resources, right? We don't have the right medical help or...

you know, any kind of expertise help or I should say that, not necessarily medical help, but expert help. And we don't even want to talk about that in the, at home or anything to make sure that we give enough support to our moms or to our daughters, not daughters actually, to our moms or to our sisters and to our wives, right? From a guy's perspective. So it's like how we support the young girls when they're starting their men are.

know, the menstrual cycle begins, we give them support the same way that that same support in a different way has to be given to the woman when she's finishing her menstrual cycle. And that is a journey of finishing her menstrual cycle now. Not that it has to be celebrated with a party or anything, that's not what I'm saying, but at least with this right kind of resources, right kind of support. And that needs to come when we normalize this discussion.

Travis White (16:38)
And as a, know, having a wife, how do I go about supporting her through peri-metal pause?

Amita Sharma (16:46)
Yeah, so you know, so there are actually some of the myths about perimenopause. A woman can start perimenopause in her mid-30s or late 30s. It's not necessarily in 40s anymore. The whole thing has shifted. So the fact that you're interviewing me is supporting your wife or partner because you're trying to understand what a woman could go through. So for men, least having a basic understanding of what

what their partners or their wives will go through and trying to support them in a way. And if she's having a problem that cannot be fixed by self care, for example, seeking help, seeking the right type of help is important. You know, not that you can't, you can do everything yourself. I tried to do everything by myself, which was a big mistake. You know, I suffered through it in silence. then, then in two, three, three years back, when I was talking to so many holistic experts, said, no, this has to

So the support can be from community, from a husband point of view, just understanding the overall complexity of this topic, what it can do to a woman, helping her clean up the diet, making the movement, all these things, you know, making some lifestyle modification. Maybe you can start with making lifestyle modification or dietary modification so that both of you are doing it together so that she doesn't feel isolated, right? Because otherwise she's the one who's vegan or vegetarian or whatever, you know, she wants.

or cutting down red meat as an example, and you are having a beefy, juicy steak, so now it becomes difficult. So maybe some things could be done together as couple so that it seems like a togetherness of a couple kind of a thing rather than, oh, now you can't have this, oh, I'm gonna have that, you know what I mean?

Travis White (18:29)
Yeah,

well, we've already got the diet part pretty much figured out. I went through a slew of health problems and so we cut back on like sugars and we don't eat totally gluten free, but we do eat a lot of gluten free stuff. And so.

Amita Sharma (18:34)
Hahaha!

Travis White (18:45)
that happened at the end of last year and now she's having a couple health problems of her own so she's like I think you just prepared me to change my diet before I really had to get told to change it I was like maybe but maybe maybe I wasn't the only one that was supposed to go through some health situations like maybe you've been taking care of me for years so maybe it's my turn to take care of you

Amita Sharma (19:08)
⁓ some.

But is it women problems or just general health problems?

Travis White (19:15)
No, no, it's

just a few mental health problems and she just got...

diagnosed with some thyroid problems.

Amita Sharma (19:27)
okay. You know, the other thing, the mental health problems can also be solved by keeping our gut health. Gut health and mental health are very well connected, right? Right, so there's a vagus nerve. So what I did to take care of my mental health issues, I'll tell you that, I cleaned up my, like I loaded up on prebiotic, probiotic, I made sure my gut health is super like.

Travis White (19:33)
Yeah, yes exactly.

Amita Sharma (19:53)
clean in the sense like I'm eating the right kind of food to feed my gut microbiome. All those things become very important, right?

Travis White (20:02)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, and we've started taking supplements and cleaning up and eating better. And last year, like I never realized like how much the body and the mind like work together. Like you don't for so long, like I felt like I was taught that like there's kind of separate.

Amita Sharma (20:16)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Yeah.

Travis White (20:22)
just because

our society puts a bandaid on everything. It's like, no, if you look at the body as a whole, your mental health is going to start getting better.

Amita Sharma (20:26)
Correct.

Yeah, exactly. And that's the problem. We are taught in a regular Western medicine that compartmentalizing like for mental health doctor, the gut health doctor, know, this doctor, that doctor. But if you just fix your diet and you are just actually doing bowel movements every day, proper bowel movements, your mental health also automatically starts improving, your metabolism starts improving. And that's what happens to me. started because earlier I used to get very bloated, you know, right here.

Travis White (20:39)
Mm-hmm.

Amita Sharma (21:01)
I would think that, my God, I'm putting on a lot of weight and all those things that my gut health wasn't regular. So I started fixing it slowly and slowly. The other thing is that I went on a lot of cleansing diets, know, like a Kichidi diet or some of the simple mono diet for a few days to clean my diet, to cleanse my system, make it like really, you know how you have a palate cleanser and then you have the other, the next course, right?

Travis White (21:31)
Mm-hmm.

Amita Sharma (21:31)
So it was

sort of like cleansing inside. And I did a lot of that as well to cleanse my gut.

Travis White (21:39)
Back a few minutes ago you mentioned normalizing a pair of menopause. How do we go about normalizing?

Amita Sharma (21:45)
Thank

So when I use the word, it's like, you know, talking about offering, like even at workplaces, there should be some resources as an example, because at this age, most of us are working now. That is our community, sort of like a nine to five, and we are so much of our time over there. So I think the workplaces need to incorporate some kind of resources to help women who are going through a pedimental cause that is not there yet, right?

Travis White (22:15)
Mm-hmm.

Amita Sharma (22:16)
UK has picked up, but US is still so far behind. the big companies, two or three companies are doing something, but it's not like a standardized event. 50 % of our workforce is willing nowadays, right? So that's what I mean by normalizing. And even in community or even in some of the faith organizations like at churches or temples, they could be some kind of a simple educational series that could be given to the community.

Travis White (22:29)
Mm-hmm.

Amita Sharma (22:44)
women who are going through that, their spouses or partners can understand what they're going through and how it works. Wherever the community congregates, the congregation is happening. That's where most of time it's happening at this age for us is either the community, we are part of a faith community or we're part of a work or we are part of some friend circle. And so wherever the community is, maybe there could be some kind of a simple.

educational series or simple things that are made available so that you know people who are interested can learn about it and how to support their partners right that's when I mean and it should not be like my god I can't talk about my wife or me in going through tenement house menopause it should be like it's okay if you because everybody's gonna get that that is one day or another it should not be regarded as my god now I can't talk about it right we regard like that we say

We don't talk about these things, although we talk about so many other things, but we just go hush when these kind of topics come, right?

Travis White (23:48)
Yeah, a lot of times we do. It's like you said, it's a huge problem with society. And I feel like the mental health space is just barely getting to that point where we're talking about it more. And I still do think that we could probably do a lot more in that space as well. But like you said, just having spaces to talk about it within the community.

Amita Sharma (23:53)
Yeah.

Yeah, mental health thing started about a decade back, Nobody wanted to talk about mental health 10 years back. You talk to anyone like, what, what are you talking about? But slowly, slowly, startups started coming up and people started talking about, I have mental health issues. It's very normal. People say, hey, I have mental health issues. Nobody judges you if you say that. And the same thing is if someone's going through a natural phase of a woman's phase in her life, this is truly a natural

Travis White (24:15)
Mm-hmm.

Amita Sharma (24:40)
think that's a phase. And if someone says, hey, I'm going to pay men a pause, and you know, overall, we shouldn't say, my God, it should be okay. Well, this is what you can do. This resource, that resource, that resource. The communication should be more supportive, is what I'm saying, rather than the woman should feel, no, I can't talk about it, and I need to look all the time like a superwoman.

Travis White (24:41)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Amita Sharma (25:03)
and act like everything is under control behind a mask. We're always wearing a mask, but the mask needs to come out and you have to be yourself, the real yourself, right? That's what I mean when I'm normalizing.

Travis White (25:13)
Mm-hmm.

And so when a woman starts going through perimenopause and starts feeling the hormones are changing and emotions are all over the place, where do you send them to get help and start

being able to balance everything out?

Amita Sharma (25:32)
So there is a lot of things women can do. The self-care is of course the first thing that women should understand. Then the testing is another one that they should try to see and where the things are out of balance in the body. But typically naturopathic doctors or holistic medicine doctors, integrative medicine doctors, if they need to go there. Otherwise,

A normal woman going through this can manage it through self-care, but if she cannot, you know, all the things that I talked about, that she cannot, she's still having all these issues, then it's better to see a specialist who understands menopause, right? There very few specialists who understand that. And the typical ones who understand without the HRT is integrative medicine doctors or naturopathic doctors. you know, they are the ones who have been trained to help you.

give you a source, fix your sort of like a put together holistic plan, keeping the mind and the body all in one place rather than giving you one medicine that fix you, right? Typically. Now the other thing that women can also do is if they want, they can also seek hormone replacement therapy. What that means is hormones that are depleting as women are aging.

medical doctor or someone who's experienced in the hormone replacement therapy can help you get your hormones, know, basically injected in you or injected in the different ways of taking the hormones. That might not work for everyone. So there are a lot of options that women have, but the problem is most of the women don't even understand these options, right? They don't even know these options exist and they are like

Either they'll just go get nervous and say, oh, I want hormone replacement. That'll be, oh, I want this. So there has to be a systematic way where women understand first what is happening in their body and then identify what is happening to them, right? What is happening to their body because every woman is different, right? Once you have an understanding, then you say, okay, if the self care is not working, maybe I need the testing or the next.

expertise then you go over there to the right expertise to get yourself you know taken care of.

Travis White (27:59)
Yeah, and I think you hit it right there. The key thing that you said to me that stood out was recognize what's going on with your body. And I think sometimes that's like the hardest thing to do is to recognize like, you know, no matter what it is, it's like sometimes hard to sit back and, know, make you're having a problem or actually really know what the problem is because there's so many things that could be.

Amita Sharma (28:08)
Thank you.

Yeah, because and we ignore the symptoms, right? We as human beings and it doesn't matter, women or men, of us, both, think, a human nature, that we keep ignoring the symptoms or a body will tell you, a mind will tell you if you're not feeling that. But we say, no, no, no, no, we ignore it. And what I'm saying is not to ignore this phase of a woman's life, because it's very important. If we don't take care of ourselves, the chances of

us getting a chronic condition as we get older beyond 55, 60. They are so high because 80 % of the women have chronic conditions in this country. And you don't want to be going there, right? So that's why I am pitching this perimenopause because now it happens to younger women and younger women can make a change now because by the time you are 60, it might be sometimes it might be too late. You don't know because you already have a chronic condition.

Now you're trying to fix one thing and the other thing goes wrong, right? That's what starts happening.

Travis White (29:23)
Mm-hmm.

Back, I think it was towards the first of when we started speaking, you said that women are starting to experience perimenopause earlier than they used to. Why do think that is?

Amita Sharma (29:38)
Yeah.

So I'm not a medical doctor. What I'm sharing is all the research that I have gone through and talking to about 3,000 different holistic experts from all over the world. There are a number of factors that researchers have associated this whole trend of even young girls getting their periods earlier than the age 13, like you see eight or nine year old girls getting their periods. So a lot of things they talk about is the stress and also the toxins in the environment.

Travis White (29:49)
Mm-hmm.

Amita Sharma (30:12)
Toxins, pesticides, additives in our food supply, plastics, all these what they call as endocrine disruptors. And that is what they are associating this whole industrialization of how we've changed our food supply by adding all kinds of gotten was one insecticides and pesticides. And that have gone inside a woman's body and mess with the hormones inside.

You don't know which way, which direction that's going to go. And that's one of the things that's happening. Now, the other thing that's happening is a pregnant woman, when she gives birth to a newborn baby, there is, there are so many toxins in today's day and age in her placenta. They've done the test. So many tests have been done. There are over 170 toxins in the placenta. The babies are being born, they're being born with so much toxicity inside. So the, so a woman,

a pregnant woman or a woman at that time, there's so much toxins inside the body, things to cleanse. And that's what's happening with all those combined factors of all the things, the toxins that we inhale, the toxins we consume in our food supply, our plastics, our cookware, all kinds of things, our makeup, our hair, all things. We are inhaling all these things.

Travis White (31:37)
And based on your experience, what are some of the most surprising emotional and psychological changes you experienced during that phase?

Amita Sharma (31:47)
So I,

me personally, like I said, I was pretty calm. I'm actually generally a calm person and I think most different things that I personally experienced was my erratic mood swings. I myself could not control, I just could not control myself. Like suddenly, I've never gotten angry, I never barely get angry and suddenly I had this rage, I have no idea where it was coming from and I'm so.

full of anger that it was coming and kind of spewing out. And maybe I tried to kind of internalize as to why it was happening to me. And maybe it was all those pent up feelings that I probably had as a child or as a teenager and never kind of brought it up, you know, because it was not cool to see a mental health therapist or any therapist for that matter. And then this whole rage of uncontrolled burst of

suddenly came up, it used to come up when I was going through Penelwa's journey. That was something that me, I was very surprised, you know, that it was coming from me because like I said, I'm generally a very calm person and here I was. I couldn't even recognize myself, I should say that.

Travis White (33:07)
Yeah, I've had some of those moments myself where it's like rage or just like unwanted feelings and it's like where is this coming from? Why am I experiencing this? And those moments are often pretty nerve-racking and actually very damaging to your self-esteem as well.

Amita Sharma (33:08)
it.

Yeah.

Yeah, exactly. And you have to just think about how you're feeling. you almost, so what I started doing was actually I started documenting my feelings, to be honest with you, you know, on a daily basis, because there was no other way for me to help. And so I started writing about or in a journal, journaling about some of the feelings that I thought were so weird.

And that has helped me and then little bit of meditation and some yoga and some exercise. And also those kinds of things have helped me a lot.

Travis White (33:59)
Yeah, I've heard really good things about journaling. I've never really tried it myself. For me, I think I do these little methods where I, you know, it's like simple things like I count to 10 or I walk away from the room if it's something like that's going on like in my environment, I'll walk away for a minute just to reset myself. And sometimes it's only like 30 seconds that I need and I can go back into that room with a fresh mind and be like, you know what?

Amita Sharma (34:03)
Yeah.

you

Travis White (34:24)
I can handle this a lot better now. I think the hardest part for me was learning how to subconsciously pay attention and subconsciously know that there was something going on in my mind and how that was going to react in a bad, negative way.

Amita Sharma (34:36)
Yeah.

Yeah,

yeah, absolutely. And then I think it can actually, the self-esteem part is a lot of work to work on in the sense like, I had to tell myself, I had to kind of motivate myself, right? On a daily basis, how do I do that? That I have to just compose myself, right? So that I present myself in a way that I don't come across as having.

mental health issues and any other issues, right? Because it's important. You don't want people to judge you because now they label you as, this person is having some whatever. And that can be detrimental to workplace and for your all well-being, right?

Travis White (35:25)
Mm-hmm. It's really hard to come over the not wanting people to judge you apart because when you when I first started going to therapy and admitted that I had issues and had to take some medication for some stuff, that was my biggest fear was getting judged.

Amita Sharma (35:28)
Yes, I'm sorry.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, me too. I think that's the biggest fear I've had since I was a child, that I did not want people to judge me as, you know, I wanted them to hold me in the highest team. And that's what you try to please others all the time. And trying to please others, you don't please yourself because you're trying to always have this conflict of who you are and what you're trying to show other people and not admit that you have a problem.

Travis White (35:58)
Mm-hmm.

Amita Sharma (36:11)
That itself is a problem, right? Yeah.

Travis White (36:13)
Mm-hmm. Of course. And

it kind of goes back to what you said too earlier on is you got to find time for yourself. And I think that's like really important to overcome mental health issues. I'd love for you to share more about, so when I introduced you, are the co-founder of, or founder of NourishDoc. I would love for you to share more about what that is.

Amita Sharma (36:34)
Mm-hmm. ⁓

Yeah, so, you know, I shared my journey of mental health issues as well as going through the penny menopause. And I wanted to create a resource for women, younger as well as older women, to understand what this whole stage of her life is and what can they do to help themselves, right? So Nourish Talk is literally a holistic platform that takes into account your mind and body.

to help women, mid-age women starting their journey from perimenopause all the way to postmenopause. And what we have is self-care programs, which we are going to price it less than $5 a month so that it would be available via an app or via on the desktop. So they can say, OK, I'm going through mental health or not serious issues. OK, see that can be self-done with self-care. And then the system will guide them through.

if you should change your diet or lifestyle or all the things we talked about. So all in all, we have about 20, 25 different programs that are self-care. And then after that, or during that whole process, a person feels like, I need more help. Then we have embedded experts anywhere from movement to naturopathy to rhythm therapy, cognitive behavioral therapy, aromatherapy, new naïve diet, nutrition, that one can go in for one-on-one consultation or personalized

or plans. So the whole idea is to present a comprehensive approach and break this whole mental health. Mental health is okay. So we have therapists that can help you either in a group setting or in a one-on-one setting or a self-care setting and present this whole thing starting in a super affordable way. We know that nowadays affordability is the key. Every single day we're looking at the price of eggs, right?

So this $5 a month is like a no-brainer and then it kind of goes up as for your needs and as for your personalized needs, I should say that.

Travis White (38:39)
I love it. I love the holistic approach to the app. I, you know, learning more about holistic like medicine route in the last year, I find it like really important to know because there's a lot of people that there's a lot of things that the holistic side of medicine does that your normal Western medicine doctor is not going to do. yep, ⁓ exactly what I was going to say.

Amita Sharma (38:43)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Yes.

Yeah.

Yeah, you know, there's a place for everything, Western medicine, right?

Yeah.

Travis White (39:10)
exactly what I was going say, you took the words out of my mouth. Because I want listeners to know that there is a place for Western medicine. Where can people find out, find more on you? Like do you have a website, any social media accounts?

Amita Sharma (39:20)
Mm-hmm. ⁓

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, so the best thing is to go to our website www.marish.com. We are on all social media and like I said earlier, the app is going to be out in the month of June, somewhere around June timeframe, between May and June. And so check us out on the website and then submit a form and we will inform people that the app is out.

Travis White (39:52)
And Amita, one more thing. Is there anything you'd like to discuss that we have not covered?

Amita Sharma (39:59)
No, I just want people to not feel isolated when if they're having mental health issues. It's perfectly normal. Our brain is part of our body. Hey, sometimes, you know, I have a gas in my tummy and I don't shy away saying I have gas in my tummy in the same way my mental, you know, something's happening in my brain, which is not right. And we should not shy away from having any mental health issues and just just be okay with that.

Travis White (40:16)
and

Amita Sharma (40:25)
It's another part of our body. Our mind is another part of our body, but feed the right things, right kind of fuel to your mind and to your body. That's what I want to end up with is that nourish your mind, body and soul. That's very important.

Travis White (40:42)
I 100 % agree. Amita, thank you so much for coming on the show. It's been a pleasure speaking with you. And thank you all to listening. The best thing you can do for us right now is follow us on all of our social media accounts at OvercomePod for Instagram and YouTube. Share our stuff, like it, subscribe, do whatever you can to get our name out there. Thanks again for listening. Until next time.