Before you start

This handbook is not a substitute for medical advice. If you are pregnant, nursing, currently on hormone replacement therapy, or being treated for any hormone-sensitive condition (breast cancer, endometrial cancer, BRCA-positive risk management), send the formulation to your prescribing physician before you begin. Every active in this product is listed by name and dose on the canister label. Your physician can review them in two minutes.

This handbook tracks what most women report across the 12 weeks of the protocol. Your body's timeline may run faster or slower. We do not promise. We describe.

Week 0 — The day the canister arrives

Open the box. The canister holds 30 single-serve honey sticks. Each stick is the same: 80 mg standardized shatavari root extract, 2 mg saffron (Crocus sativus L.), 300 mg purified shilajit, 8 g raw honey, natural strawberry flavor. No fillers, no proprietary blend, no surprise actives.

How to take it.

1. Tear at the notch.
2. Place the contents under your tongue.
3. Hold for thirty seconds. This is the only part that matters. The actives need that time to absorb through the oral mucosa instead of being swallowed and routed through your liver.
4. Swallow what is left.

One stick a day. Morning is the operator default — most women find it pairs with their first quiet moment. There is no "best time." Consistency beats timing.

The cancel button. If this isn't right for you, your account page at hersagain.com has a Cancel button. Two taps. No phone call, no hold music, no retention agent. We make it easy to leave because we believe you will not need to.

Weeks 1–2 — The settling-in window

You probably will not feel different yet. The body needs about a week to register a new daily input. Some women report:

• A different quality of sleep — not deeper, just less interrupted. The 3 a.m. wakings start to space out from every night to every other night.
• A faint reduction in irritability — the kind your partner notices before you do.
• For some: nothing. That is normal. The actives are accumulating; they have not yet hit therapeutic concentration. Hold the daily ritual.

What to do this week: write down two or three symptoms you would like to track. Anything specific. "Hot flashes per night" is good. "I feel bad" is too vague.

Weeks 3–4 — First signal

Most women report something noticeable around week 3 or week 4. The most common pattern: sleep stabilizes first, irritability second, vasomotor symptoms third.

If sleep was your primary symptom, this is the window where you may start to notice. Saffron's serotonergic effect (Hausenblas HA, et al. 2013. J Integrative Med. — five RCT meta-analysis on saffron and mood) appears around weeks 2–3 in the published trial data. Shatavari's receptor-level signal effects on vasomotor symptoms (Pingali R, et al. 2024. Cureus. — RCT n=70 perimenopausal and menopausal women) appear around weeks 3–6.

What you might notice this week:

• Fewer hot flashes per day, or the same number but shorter.
• The "second cup of coffee" feeling — being able to stay focused past 2 p.m. without crashing.
• A small reduction in the daily background irritability.

Weeks 5–6 — The mood floor

This is the window most customers describe as the inflection. The mood floor lifts. The phrase that recurs in customer interviews: "I'm not whiny. I'm 54. There's a difference."

What we mean by "mood floor": it is not euphoria, it is not happiness. It is the absence of the low-grade irritability and emotional thinness that comes from a body that is fighting itself. Saffron has been studied in five randomized trials for menopausal mood symptoms and the effect size is comparable to low-dose SSRIs, without the side-effect profile.

If you are also on HRT (hormone replacement therapy), this is the window where you may notice the formulation working alongside your patch or pill, not against it. The non-hormonal mechanism of all three actives means there is no receptor-level competition with prescription estradiol or progesterone.

Weeks 7–8 — Libido and the partner conversation

This is the window where libido returns, on average. Not back-to-twenty libido. Back-on-the-grid libido — present, available, responsive to context rather than absent regardless of context.

Two things often happen at this stage that have nothing to do with the supplement directly:

1. Your partner notices before you do. The mood floor lifted, the irritability dropped, the sleep stabilized. You feel like yourself again. That registers in the room before it registers in your head.
2. You realize how long you had been compensating. The amount of energy you had been spending just to feel okay was enormous. Now you have that energy back for other things.

If you have a partner reading this with you — there is a separate page at hersagain.com/pages/for-your-partner that names the biology without the brand-voice, and gives him the language and the patience this part of the transition needs. Send it to him now.

Weeks 9–10 — Joints, bones, and the slower signals

Shilajit's mechanism — fulvic acids supporting mitochondrial ATP synthesis, plus a measurable effect on bone mineral density at the lumbar spine and femoral neck — is the slowest of the four pathways. The Pingali 2022 Phytomedicine trial ran for 48 weeks. We do not promise BMD changes in 12 weeks. We promise that the trial was real, that the dose on our label matches the dose in the trial (300 mg purified, daily), and that the cohort is yours (postmenopausal women).

What may start to soften by now:

• Morning joint stiffness, particularly in the hands and the larger joints (hip, knee).
• The 3 p.m. energy floor — the post-lunch slump that is not really about lunch.
• Skin elasticity, slightly. This is not the brand's load-bearing claim and we do not promote it; some customers report it.

Weeks 11–12 — The honest review

By week 12, you should have enough signal to make a call. We recommend you do this:

1. Re-read the symptom list you wrote in week 1. Score each item on a 0–10 scale (0 = absent, 10 = unbearable) for today and for week 1. If your aggregate is meaningfully lower, the protocol is working for you.
2. Ask the people who live with you. They are the most honest mirror. They have been watching your sleep, your irritability, your engagement, your energy. They saw it before you did.
3. Look at your 90-day money-back guarantee. It runs from the day the first canister was charged to your card. If it is week 11 and you are not better, you have a week to decide.

Three things this handbook does not promise

1. A cure. Menopause is not a disease, it is a transition; a supplement does not "cure" it. What this formulation does is reduce the symptom burden along the four pathways the actives have RCT-level evidence on.
2. A replacement for HRT. If your physician has prescribed estrogen and you are tolerating it, do not stop without consultation. This formulation is designed to be HRT-compatible.
3. Identical results. Bodies vary. The trial data we cite shows meaningful average effects. Your effect may be larger or smaller. The 90-day guarantee is in place precisely because we cannot promise an individual outcome.

The four citations, listed in full

All four are publicly listed on PubMed. The author surnames + publication year are sufficient to find each in 30 seconds. Verify them yourself; verify them with your physician.

If something goes wrong

• Adverse reactions. Stop the protocol immediately. Contact your physician. Report to us at care@hersagain.com.
• The protocol is not working. Your 90-day guarantee is for this. Cancel from your account page, request a refund via care@hersagain.com or +1 (786) 408-2408 (Monday–Friday, 9 a.m.–6 p.m. ET).
• You have a question we did not answer. care@hersagain.com or the phone number above. Same-day response, in plain language, in English.

A note from the founder

I started hersagain because the formulation worked for me and the brand selling it was not worth the formulation. There was a fabricated physician on the website with a stock-photo headshot, a return window that quietly excluded opened canisters, and a Trustpilot pile-on you can still find.

I bought the formulation and rebuilt everything else. Real NAMS-certified physician advisor — Dr. Mira Iyengar, board certified in obstetrics and gynecology, California license verifiable on this site. Ninety-day money-back on opened sticks. Cancel in two taps from your account. Every dose printed on every panel. Every trial citation publicly verifiable.

The formulation has not changed. Everything else did.

— Maren Ostrow, founder, hersagain