Vote With Your Dollars!

Hi Sheconomist Insider 👋 It’s Thamina, Founder of The Sheconomist. This is your bi-weekly dose of celebrating the female economy where I help ambitious, purpose-driven women like yourself flip the script on money, career & wellbeing conventions so you can live life on your own terms.

TLDR:

• 💔 Why I almost blew up my entire life earlier this year

• 📚 The power of building in public

• 💰 20 beloved female-founded brands to shop from

• 💜 Meet Kelly Chung, Founder of Amplifier Effect

Friendly Ask: Do you love this newsletter? Do you want more in-depth resources such as courses, events, and a membership? Then please share The Sheconomist with your friends because I can only offer more when the scale is there. When one of us wins, we all win. Thank you. 💜 

Every time I send out this newsletter, a few of you reach out to me with incredibly kind messages and feedback. THANK YOU! I so value your opinion and would love to hear from you whether you want me to start sharing more about my own life. If you don’t mind, please quickly answer the poll below and if you want to share more ideas/thoughts/requests, please don’t hesitate to DM me.

🧪 Freedom Formulas

Earlier this year, I almost blew up my entire life.

From what felt like one day to another, I started experiencing this profound sadness.

Multiple panic attacks that made me fear I was falling back into depression.

I took 2 sick days because my body and mind weren't functioning.

At all.

It felt like I had lost complete control over my body and mind.

I don’t remember the last time I had been crying that much.

Almost broke up with the love of my life, my partner of 7 years.

Almost quit my coveted Big Tech job.

Contemplated moving back to Europe.

It's the most scared I've felt, probably ever.

I put a 6-month project launch on pause.

Everything felt off. Out of alignment.

And yet?

I went to work the next day pretending everything was fine.

A few weeks and some lab work later, I discovered my hormones were completely out of whack.

Specifically testosterone (abysmally low!) and DHEA - likely responsible for my mental health spiral.

Low testosterone and DHEA can mess with your brain chemistry more than most people realize.

These hormones influence dopamine, serotonin, and GABA, which are key neurotransmitters for mood stability, motivation, and stress resilience.

When they’re low, it can feel like anxiety, panic attacks, brain fog, or even depression, when really, it’s your biochemistry asking for support.

Initially, I thought something was WRONG with me.

I was desperately looking for ways to "fix" myself.

So I started reaching out.

Setting up countless conversations with girlfriends and women in my trusted network, just so I would feel less lonely.

And well.

Turns out, every single woman had either gone through this or was currently experiencing it herself.

Every. Single. One.

There's an epidemic of young women feeling this way.

Breaking down in private. Performing wellness in public. Googling/ChatGPTing symptoms at 3am.

Wondering if we're "just being dramatic."

Spoiler: We're not.

Here's what I've learned:

→ Your hormones aren't a luxury health topic - they're foundational

→ That "unexplained" anxiety might have a very real biological cause

→ We've been gaslit into thinking our suffering is normal

→ The medical system wasn't built for us

But mostly? We don't talk about it.

Why?

Because admitting your body is betraying you feels like failure in a culture that demands we "have it all together."

Because hormone talk isn't "professional."

Because we've internalized that our pain is inconvenient.

I'm done with that.

To every menstruator reading this who's been:

→ Dismissed by doctors
→ Told it's "just stress"
→ Suffering in silence
→ Feeling like you're going crazy

You're not crazy.
You're not weak.
You're not alone.

You're navigating a system that wasn't designed to support your biology.

And it's time we started talking about it.

❣️ Thamina’s Top Picks

🫒 This is quickly becoming a staple in my kitchen & gifting it to my entire family - met the founder at an event recently and was blown away by her story and passion

🐮This female-founded brand is an excellent example of why building in public is so important and so powerful - plus, I LOVE their product

📽️ Same girl, same - this one cracked me up and I feel like this is the ethos amongst a lot of us very smart, usually highly ambitious women

🎵 For all my fellow cycle syncing friends, really enjoying this for my luteal phase workouts or just a walk around the block during lunch time on those WFH days

✨ This week’s Moodboard

Post credits go to Evolving Knowledge, The Body Shoppes, crackcancer, Evolving Knowledge

💸 Cooking up Wealth

Stop giving all your money to companies run by men.

Here’s a list of 20 of some of my favorite female-founded consumer brands so you can “vote” with your dollars: