The Holderness Family Gets Real About Perimenopause
About this episode
In this episode of unPAUSED, Dr. Mary Claire Haver sits down with Kim and Penn Holderness, the husband and wife content creators behind the widely popular Holderness Family, bestselling authors, and winners of The Amazing Race Season 33. Together they built an audience of millions by finding the humor in real life, and in this conversation they turn that same lens on perimenopause, ADHD, marriage, and the particular chaos of midlife.
Kim opens up about the perimenopausal symptoms that arrived before she had any name for them: the anxiety that made everything feel like being chased by a bear, the panic attacks triggered by nothing she could identify, and the growing sense that something was fundamentally wrong with her. She describes walking out of her doctor's office with no treatment after being told her symptoms were normal, the financial reality of having to seek out a functional medicine doctor to finally get the estrogen and progesterone support she needed, and the combination of hormonal and psychiatric care that eventually helped her feel like herself again. She also speaks with real honesty about her postpartum anxiety, perimenopause and depression, and her OCD diagnosis, and how all of it left her desperate for a voice that would simply say: this is hard.
Guest links:
The Holderness Family (Instagram)
The Holderness Family - Music (YouTube)
The Holderness Family - Comedy (YouTube)
The Holderness Family (Facebook)
The Holderness Family (Substack)
The Holderness Family (TikTok)
Laugh Lines with Kim & Penn Holderness (Apple Podcasts)
PC’s Playbook Podcast (YouTube)
Books:
“ADHD Is Awesome,” by Penn and Kim Holderness
“Everybody Fights,” by Penn and Kim Holderness
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