What Your Gut Is Trying To Tell You About Your Stress | Mona Sharma

I knew within the first few minutes of speaking with Mona Sharma that this was not going to be a conversation about wellness trends or green powders or whatever the internet is currently calling optimization.

Mona talks about the body like someone who has had no choice but to listen to it closely.

Before she became known for blending Ayurvedic principles with modern nutrition and nervous system work, she was working in the corporate beauty world, climbing quickly through roles with brands like Christian Dior and Tom Ford Beauty. On paper, everything looked successful. In reality, she was waking up in hotel rooms not knowing what city she was in, living on processed diet foods, pushing through constant anxiety, and ignoring stress levels that had become completely normalized.

Then came the heart palpitations

At first they were unsettling. Then they became debilitating. She described bending down to pick something up and nearly blacking out. Doctors diagnosed her with atrial tachycardia, prescribed beta blockers, and eventually performed two cardiac ablations while she was still in her twenties. Neither procedure fixed the problem. After the second surgery, she was warned that another attempt could leave her dependent on a pacemaker for the rest of her life.

What stayed with me most was not the surgeries themselves. It was what Mona realized afterward. No one had really asked about her life. No one had asked what stress looked like day to day, how disconnected she had become from herself, or what years of chronic pressure might have been doing to her body long before her heart started sounding the alarm.

So she walked away from everything and went back to the ashram in Quebec where she had spent parts of her childhood learning yoga, meditation, and Ayurvedic healing practices.

Two months later, the palpitations stopped.

The Body Keeps Score

The ashram Mona returned to was part of the Sivananda Yoga Vedanta Centers tradition, tucked into the mountains of Val-Morin, Quebec. Growing up, her South Asian father and Danish mother had brought their family there regularly. At the time, she saw it simply as part of her childhood. Looking back, she realized those experiences had quietly shaped the foundation of everything she now teaches.

Living there again as an adult forced her to slow down in ways she had resisted for years. She meditated. She became a yoga teacher. She ate differently. Not restrictively, but simply. Real food instead of packaged “healthy” foods. Warm meals. Fiber. Rituals around eating. Mornings that started slowly instead of with adrenaline.

The weight she had gained on medication came off. Her energy returned. But the biggest shift was understanding that the body was never working against her. It had been trying to communicate with her the entire time.

That idea runs through almost everything Mona teaches now. Symptoms are not random inconveniences. They are information.

When she eventually became a holistic nutritionist and started working with professional athletes, celebrities, and high performers, she noticed something surprising. Many of the people who looked the healthiest from the outside still felt terrible. They had trainers, chefs, supplements, and every resource available to them, yet they were exhausted, inflamed, anxious, disconnected from their bodies, and struggling with digestion.

That became one of the central themes of our conversation. Looking healthy and feeling healthy are not always the same thing.

The Modern Epidemic we call “Normal”

One of the most revealing moments in our conversation came when Mona described the two questions she asks nearly every client.

How is your digestion?

And how stressed are you on a scale from one to ten?

She told me most people answer seven or higher without hesitation. That level of stress has become so normalized that many people do not even recognize how dysregulated they feel anymore. We override exhaustion with caffeine, distraction, scrolling, and busyness until eventually the symptoms themselves become part of everyday life.

What fascinated me most was how often she uses digestion as the entry point into deeper conversations about health. People may not immediately want to discuss emotional stress or trauma, but they will talk about bloating, stomach pain, constipation, anxious stomachs, or feeling unwell after meals. And in her experience, when digestion improves, many other symptoms begin improving too.

As an orthopedic surgeon, I found myself thinking about how often medicine separates the body into isolated systems while patients are living inside one interconnected experience. Mona repeatedly came back to the idea that the nervous system touches everything. Sleep. Hormones. Inflammation. Energy. Recovery. Digestion. Mental clarity.

The body does not compartmentalize stress the way healthcare often does.

She also said something I have not stopped thinking about since. Most people are living almost entirely from the neck up. Constantly thinking, planning, reacting, consuming information, but rarely checking in with what their body actually feels like.

That disconnection catches up eventually.

Rituals Over Rules

Mona’s approach to nutrition feels noticeably different from most wellness conversations online because she spends very little time moralizing food.

Instead, she talks about food as communication.

At the ashram, she explained, food was treated as information for the body. Fiber feeds the gut microbiome. Warm foods support digestion. Nutrients communicate with cells. Meals affect not only energy, but mood, hormones, inflammation, and even how well the body handles stress.

And despite the complexity of modern nutrition science, many of her recommendations are surprisingly simple.

Drink warm fluids in the morning. Eat more fiber. Walk after meals. Get morning sunlight into your eyes. Stop scrolling first thing when you wake up. Eat enough protein and healthy fats to feel satisfied. Support digestion before obsessing over restriction.

None of it sounded extreme.

That may actually be why it works.

One thing Mona returned to repeatedly was the difference between habits and rituals. Habits come and go, she said. Rituals become part of who you are. That distinction felt important because so much of wellness culture revolves around temporary discipline rather than sustainable rhythms.

She spoke about morning routines less as productivity tools and more as opportunities to regulate the nervous system before the demands of the day begin. Even five minutes of stillness, breathing, or checking in with your body can shift the way the entire day feels.

And yes, she talks about bowel movements with incredible seriousness.

Honestly, by the end of the conversation, I understood why.

She explained that many people rely on caffeine simply to have a bowel movement, something that has become so normalized most people barely question it anymore. Her perspective is that digestion is one of the clearest windows into overall health, not because it is glamorous, but because it reflects how well the body is functioning as a whole.

Health Is Not Just Biology

One of my favorite parts of the conversation was hearing Mona talk about joy and fun with the same seriousness she talks about nutrition and supplements.

She coaches clients to intentionally schedule things that make them feel alive. Trips. Walks. Time outdoors. Solo mornings. Family dinners. Adventures. Moments without screens. Not as luxuries, but as part of the healing process itself.

That perspective feels especially relevant right now, when so many people are functioning in survival mode while calling it productivity.

At one point, I shared that becoming an attending physician was strangely anticlimactic after years of training toward that moment. Mona immediately understood. So many high achievers keep waiting for some future point where stress will end and life will finally begin. Meanwhile, the body is absorbing the cost of that mindset in real time.

Her work challenges the idea that resilience means pushing harder.

Sometimes resilience looks more like slowing down enough to notice what the body has been asking for all along.

Connect

You can learn more about Mona Sharma through her Rooted in Wellness podcast and wellness education platform, where she blends modern science with Ayurvedic principles, nutrition, mindfulness, and nervous system regulation. For more conversations like this one, subscribe to The Resilience Factor wherever you get your podcasts, and find me @dr.pamelamehta on social media.