Women In Wellness: Author Parijat Deshpande On The Five Lifestyle Tweaks That Will Help Support People’s Journey Towards Better Wellbeing
An Interview With Candice Georgiadis
Don’t let anyone discourage or sway you from your vision. We have the visions that we have for a reason and we have the availability to turn them into reality. Not everyone can see our visions, but that’s okay.
As part of our series about the women in wellness, I had the pleasure of interviewing Parijat Deshpande.
Parijat Deshpande is an author, speaker and the CEO of a global, boutique company dedicated to reducing pregnancy complications and ending preterm birth. On a mission to end the high-risk pregnancy crisis, she has served and supported hundreds of women through her programs, one-on-one work and bestselling book, Pregnancy Brain: A Mind-Body Approach to Stress Management During a High-Risk Pregnancy.
Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Our readers would love to “get to know you” better. Can you share your “backstory” with us?
I always knew I wanted to work in women’s health. As early as 8 years old, I have memories of wanting to grow up and be an OBGYN. I knew what that was because my friend’s dad is an OBGYN, and every single time I had an opportunity to learn about his work and listen to his stories, I did. In junior high and high school when we had various career or science reports, anytime I had an opportunity to interview someone, I would choose him because I was so fascinated with the work and the world of pregnancy health.
When I got to college and was introduced to chemistry, I soon realized chemistry and I didn’t get along. Naturally, my career path changed directions and I pursued my undergraduate degree in psychology. This then led me to my undergraduate thesis, where I focused on research in developmental psychology. Ultimately, my career switched again, and I completed my graduate degree in clinical psychology, Yet, I still felt like there was something missing. It wasn’t until I had a real-life experience when I became the patient, that my eyes opened to a different way of working in women’s health that didn’t require me to be an OBGYN. After my experience with infertility, loss, and a very high-risk pregnancy, I realized I could be very closely involved on the pregnancy journey of people and work closely with OBGYNs in a capacity that actually suits my skillset even better!
Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you started your career? What were the main lessons or takeaways from that story?
One of the first private clients I worked with came to me in her second pregnancy after having survived a previous high-risk pregnancy where she developed particular pregnancy complications and delivered preterm. She was hoping it wouldn’t happen again, but the same pregnancy complications resurfaced, except this time, even earlier in the current pregnancy. Her medical team tried to prepare her to deliver earlier in her pregnancy and encouraged her to be ready to have her baby in the NICU, too. That’s when she contacted me. She felt very strongly against being a NICU parent again and wanted help to figure out how to help herself manage the complications and stay pregnant.
I remember it all so clearly. Her doctors had given her a specific gestational age by which they were certain she was going to deliver. With the combination of continued prenatal medical care as well as our work together, she flew past that gestational age. I even remember her telling me she went to one of her medical appointments and her doctor was in complete shock she was still pregnant. It’s hard to forget the look on her face when she told me how fascinated her doctor was by the neurobiological work she and I were doing together to effectively help her stop her preterm contractions. She also got to show her medical care team during that very appointment how she could actually modulate those contractions. It was amazing to see her doctors truly start understanding how important trauma-informed, neurobiological support is in conjunction with prenatal medical care. She flew past her due date and ended up delivering her baby a few days after.
I think the biggest lesson for me from that experience was to remember the incredible power of this work and the incredible power of the human body. That has helped me whenever I’m doing something out of my comfort zone to build my business: to always think of her and clients like her who remind me that the work, works. It’s really powerful and helpful not to just my client but for the next generation of people we are trying to raise, too.
It has been said that our mistakes can be our greatest teachers. Can you share a story about a mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?
When I first started my work, I was really shy and nervous to talk about what I do. I didn’t want to offend people, I didn’t want to ostracize people or make them feel like they were doing something wrong in their pregnancy — I just didn’t want to talk about it. My hopes were that people would figure out that they needed my services on their own and then come reaching out. I think this was a mistake, a rookie mistake maybe, because it undercut the value and the power of the work and it prevented people who needed my services from knowing that they existed. The more often I heard, “I wish I had known about you or your services when I was going through this”, the more I am reminded about the importance of sharing why I changed my career to be a trauma-informed, high-risk pregnancy specialist, how I work with clients, client success stories, and inviting people to work together. The more people can find me when they need this support, and we can help them have a healthy high-risk pregnancy, the more we are setting up the next generation for improved health!
Let’s jump to our main focus. When it comes to health and wellness, how is the work you are doing helping to make a bigger impact in the world?
Two words–generational health. I help people have healthy pregnancies by teaching them neurobiological trauma-informed approaches to improving their nervous system, endocrine system, and their immune system. This all works together to help them have healthy pregnancies, reduce their risk of pregnancy complications, help them stay pregnant as long as possible, and give their baby a strong start to life. That is the ultimate, core foundational concept of generational health.
My clients not only benefit from our work through improved preconception and pregnancy health, but they are also setting themselves up for a healthy parenting experience, which sets the baby up to benefit long-term, too. There is tremendous research that shows how fetal development is deeply impacted by the environment they are growing in and one of the ways they are impacted is through the pregnant person’s physiological stress response. Stress physiology affects the functionality of the placenta, umbilical blood flow, fetal neurological development, and the overall health of the pregnancy. This is why when we address stress physiology from a somatic, neurobiological perspective (which is not the same as calming down) we can deeply support the neuro-endo-immune triad in the pregnant person, which can positively impact placental function and fetal growth and development, and reducing the risk of complications. This is how we can set the baby up for a healthy future long-term including supporting gross and fine motor development, cognitive development, intellectual, and emotional development. The impact of the work I do with my clients doesn’t just stop with them. It affects their baby’s long-term health and the way they parent, which also affects their child’s development. The work we do is deeply focused on passing on generational health.
Can you share your top five “lifestyle tweaks” that you believe will help support people’s journey towards better wellbeing? Please give an example or story for each.
I find there are no tweaks, tips or hacks that actually help us get to deeper well-being. I want people to understand every time they’re looking for tweaks, tips, or hacks, what they’re looking for is another quick-fix solution that’s not going to get them to well-being — we have to do the deeper work. However, I do believe there are things that people can start doing now that can help them on the path to better well-being. So here are my five suggestions on where to begin:
- When we’re feeling stressed. This is a sign that something about your situation, environment, tasks at hand, or relationship, is being encoded in your body as threatening. Instead of trying to breathe your way out of it, try to figure out what specifically about the situation, the task, the job, or the relationship is actually being experienced as threatening by your body. Once you’ve identified that, you’ll be able to create a solution and/or have an idea as to how to experience the situation, relationship, or job as safe.
One of my clients would experience her blood pressure rising every time she went to the doctor. But her blood pressure was completely fine everywhere else–she would check it at home, the pharmacy, at work, etc. and it was completely fine. But every time she was in the doctor’s office, it would skyrocket and they would tell her she had hypertension and that she needed to begin medication. She would say no and would share with her medical team how the readings were fine at home. When we worked together, we had to identify what exactly was specifically threatening for her in that environment. There are a lot of people who have medical anxiety especially if they’ve experienced medical trauma and medical gaslighting. For her, it was actually the smell of the exam room that was triggering her somatic memories of her previous loss. Once we figured that out, we were able to work out how to change the smell of the exam room while supporting her body to come out of that triggered state, we were able to help her bring her blood pressure down at her doctor’s appointments. - When we have trouble sleeping. If you’re having trouble sleeping, and you’ve done everything in your power to improve your sleep hygiene, the next thing you want to do is to see what happened the day before. At what point in the day prior, did you experience a threatening moment–which is what we often call feeling stressed–that you couldn’t resolve completely physiologically? While you might feel calm emotionally, your body is still holding onto the impact of that threat response being activated. If you can figure out those patterns, you’ll have a better chance of being able to resolve that stress cycle before you go to sleep.
I had a client who had terrible insomnia since the preterm delivery of her previous child. Her insomnia started as soon as she delivered and the baby was in the NICU. It lasted for years and nothing she tried helped alleviate it effectively. She was doing everything perfectly–when she started working with me we looked through the usual sleep hygiene checklist and all of the boxes were checked. Then, we looked back at the day before to see what was happening that kept her from being able to resolve and complete that stress cycle. Her reality was such that she had to be really vigilant about her preemie’s health and the health concerns they were dealing with since their NICU discharge. But she didn’t have any buffer between offering some of the treatments, doing her child’s bedtime routine and her getting ready to go to sleep. It was go, go, go for her all day long, and then she would crash from exhaustion only to wake up multiple times through the night. Her body was holding onto all of the activation required to be vigilant as a caretaker of her medically complex child, but she wasn’t actually able to complete that stress cycle to release that activation to go to sleep. That is what we worked on, and even then when her sleep hygiene wasn’t perfect, she was able to sleep and her insomnia actually disappeared. - Movement over exercise. I always tell my clients to prioritize movement over “exercise”. Sometimes the term exercise can mean something triggering and feel daunting to do. Some may associate it with sticking to a particular routine or a specific kind of exercise type. Some may associate it with feeling a certain way in their body that they don’t like or doesn’t feel good to them. These associations will prevent us from sticking to an exercise routine, even if we know we need to. This is why I recommend starting with movement of any kind. It does not matter what you do, it’s about can you get yourself to move, and that often helps to get over that hump to figure out what kind of exercise or movement helps you. I often tell my clients, especially those who have a history of a lot of trauma around exercise, not to use the word exercise and call it movement (or something else creative!) instead.
I had a client who had a history of trauma around exercise. This client identified as a woman and I think for women, there’s a lot of shame or trauma around diet culture, weight, and exercising and this was the environment she grew up in. As an adult, when she gained weight, it was a scary experience in her home. When she was trying to conceive, she knew she wanted to lose weight, but the idea of exercising was so triggering that she wouldn’t do it, and then beat herself up for being “lazy” As we started working together, she told me, “Clearly I know I need to exercise, but I’m not doing it and I don’t know how to get myself to work out more.” We started our work together by completely stopping using the word exercise. We just focused on getting her moving. It didn’t matter what that movement looked like; it could’ve been cartwheels, walking or pacing in her office, dancing in the kitchen with her partner as dinner was in the oven, as long as she could get herself to move a certain number of times per day. If the goal was weight loss, it was too big of a leap from where she was. What we needed her to do was get used to the idea that movement could feel good and didn’t have to feel triggering in any way. Once we were able to do that, we were able to find some kind of movement practice that not only felt pleasurable to her but also helped her achieve her health goal of losing weight in order to be ready for the next pregnancy. - Change one habit at a time. Whenever we’re trying to make lifestyle changes, we often think we need to overhaul our entire life. What we really need is to change one habit at a time. The way you pick the first habit, as I recommend to my clients, is to pick the one that is going to give you the best result the fastest. What is going to make you feel better as quickly as possible–start with that first. Sometimes that’s changing your diet, your sleep routine, or something as simple as waking up in the morning and standing in the sun for 10–15 minutes to stop the melatonin production and feel more awake. It could even be drinking half a cup more water per day. These things seem really small but they have an enormous impact on setting up new habits. More important than the actual habit changes, is the experience that you can actually change your habit and benefit from the results of it on the other side.
One of my clients was wanting to make a tremendous number of changes in her health before she was ready to try to conceive again. She had a lot of health problems that popped up, especially after her stillbirth from before, and she also had chronic health issues prior to that previous pregnancy and wanted to address all of them. She had tried multiple doctors, diet regimens, supplements, and medications, but nothing was getting better or as quickly as she had hoped. Then one of her physicians, a referral partner of mine, suggested that we work together because they thought that stress physiology was underlying some of the “lack of progress” as my client called it As we began our work together, she had a long list of things she wanted to work on and I asked her how it felt to look at this list. She told me it felt very overwhelming. I said to her, “If it’s overwhelming, you’re not going to do it. We don’t do things that overwhelm us.” We then worked through her list by removing the ones that felt the hardest and slowly pared the list down to the top three that she felt were easiest to start with. I asked her which one felt the absolute easiest to do. She ended up choosing drinking water. So we worked out a plan and the only goal for her at first was to drink more water. This can be hard when we have big goals and we know we can ultimately achieve those goals with some time and effort. Sometimes these smaller steps feel like they’re not enough but that’s not actually the point–what she had to experience was that she could actually change a habit, change it successfully, and sustain that successful change to benefit from it sustainably and that gave her the motivation to continue on to add one more habit one at a time. - Compassion and understanding. To understand your body, know that nothing in your body is happening by a fluke. The pain, the discomfort, the pleasure, the days when you feel really good and the days that you feel really bad, all of that is telling you something about your body, and everything you’re experiencing makes perfect sense. Yes, even the anxiety, insomnia, heart palpitations, and weight gain, there’s a reason for all of it. With my clients, I never accept a pathologizing answer of “this is what’s wrong” or a “we don’t know” answer over trying to figure out how it makes sense that your body is doing what it’s doing. This is one of the foundational elements of trauma-informed support: looking beyond what’s wrong to incorporate the bigger picture, and the context, to figure out how your “symptoms” make perfect sense and how they are telling you exactly what your body needs.
I had a client with multiple health complications she wasn’t getting enough support with. One she was especially concerned about was vertigo-like symptoms. No medical provider was able to figure out what was going on. They ran multiple tests, and nothing came up and everything was fine, yet she felt so dizzy all the time. Turns out, it wasn’t actually vertigo. One of the first things we talked about when we began working together was the idea that this dizziness is actually a very common experience for people who are living with traumatic stress for an extended period of time. There’s an explanation inside of our sensory system that helps highlight why this happens. It’s not a fluke; it happened for her whenever a particular stress threshold was crossed and there was so much activation in her body that this is how her sensory system responded. When I explained it like this to her, I remember her in tears because it was such a relief to her that she wasn’t broken, and there was an explanation for what she was experiencing. When we can have that kind of understanding and compassion for ourselves about why our bodies are doing what it’s doing, we no longer feel like we have to fight our bodies. We can understand and hold that understanding in a way to get curious about what the next steps should be to support our bodies to manage, reduce or even eradicate entirely, the symptoms that are concerning us.
If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of wellness to the most amount of people, what would that be?
My movement would be for every single person who is about to try to conceive, actively trying to conceive or is currently pregnant to have access to neurobiological trauma-informed support. This would give them the information they need so they know how they can support their bodies to have healthy pregnancies. When a pregnant person is healthy and the pregnancy is healthy, we reduce the risk of complications and reduce the preterm delivery rate. We’re essentially setting up the entire next generation for better health. I genuinely could not think of a more impactful movement than helping people create a healthy next generation.
What are your “5 Things I Wish Someone Told Me Before I Started” and why?
- Don’t let anyone discourage or sway you from your vision. We have the visions that we have for a reason and we have the availability to turn them into reality. Not everyone can see our visions, but that’s okay.
- If you’re in a business that is challenging the status quo, it can be difficult. Surround yourself with other visionaries who believe in your vision and who are also doing similar disrupting type work. This helps tremendously to keep you going, even on the hard days.
- The entrepreneur journey has lots of ups and downs. This is very normal. It doesn’t mean you’re doing anything wrong or that you shouldn’t be doing this work. It is just inherent to the experience and normalizing that as early as possible is helpful.
- Whenever you feel lost, like you don’t know what you’re doing or where your life is going, go back to your younger self. What did that version of you dream for yourself? Reconnect with that dream, because that version of you had wisdom you still have access to.
- Your health determines how many other people you can help on their health and wellness journey. An essential part of doing this work is taking really good care of yourself.
Sustainability, veganism, mental health, and environmental changes are big topics at the moment. Which one of these causes is dearest to you, and why?
The most impactful cause that is closely tied to me would have to be environmental change. Climate change not only impacts my family personally but also the work I do. For example, the increase in wildfires impacts pregnancy health and pregnancy outcomes. I am actively working, both personally and professionally, to see how I can contribute to reversing climate change.
What is the best way for our readers to further follow your work online?
Visit me at my website parijatdeshpande.com to see all the resources I have available. You can read my book, Pregnancy Brain, which is also linked on my website. If you’d like to dive a little deeper into what a trauma-informed neurobiological approach to whole health sounds like, join The Inner Circle. Lastly, you can follow me on Instagram @healthy.highriskpregnancy for inspiration and motivation.
Thank you so much for joining us. This was very inspirational!
Women In Wellness: Author Parijat Deshpande On The Five Lifestyle Tweaks That Will Help Support… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.