International Women's Day Special
Global Women's Health Practices We Should Adopt
Last year, while researching for my book "The Art of Female Health," I found myself reading researching papers about how different cultures approach women's bodies. Not pregnancy or motherhood—just women's bodies existing in the world, cycling through hormones, aging, working, moving, resting.
And honestly? I got pissed off.
Not at the cultures I was researching, but at how much we've been missing. How the Western medical establishment has spent decades treating women's bodies like defective, imperfect versions of men's bodies, pathologizing our natural cycles, medicalizing our hormones, and completely ignoring wisdom that other cultures have been practicing for centuries.
The more I researched, the more I realized: women around the world have figured out things about energy management, cycle optimization, stress resilience, and longevity that we desperately need to pay attention to. Not because they're exotic or mystical, but because they work. They're based on thousands of years of observation, pattern recognition, and actually listening to women's experiences.
So as we approach International Women's Day and the release of "The Art of Female Health," I want to talk about what we can learn from global women's health practices—not in a "let's romanticize other cultures" way, but in a "why the hell aren't we doing this already" way.
Scandinavia: Rest as a Right, Not a Privilege
The Finnish Concept of Work-Life Integration
Finnish women consistently rank among the healthiest and happiest in the world, and it's not because they're doing intense biohacking protocols or optimizing every minute. It's because their culture has figured out something revolutionary: rest is productive.
Finland has a concept called "jokamiehenoikeus" or "everyman's right"—the freedom to roam nature regardless of land ownership. Finns take regular forest breaks during the workday, not as a wellness trend, but as a fundamental right. Studies show that just 20 minutes in nature significantly reduces cortisol, improves cognitive function, and regulates nervous system responses [1].
But here's what really matters: this isn't marketed as "self-care" or something you need to earn through productivity. It's built into the culture. Finnish workplaces close at reasonable hours. There's no hustle culture glorification. Rest isn't viewed as laziness—it's viewed as essential for sustained performance.
Compare this to Western work culture, where women are expected to optimize every moment, track every metric, look picture perfect, never age, and with it feel guilty about taking breaks or choosing themselves over someone else. We've turned rest into another performance to be optimized rather than recognizing it as a biological necessity.
Swedish Fika and the Power of Intentional Pauses
The Swedish practice of "fika"—a daily coffee break with colleagues or friends—isn't just about caffeine. It's a mandated pause in the workday, a cultural acknowledgment that human brains need regular recovery periods to maintain focus and creativity.
Swedish companies actually schedule fika into the workday. It's not something you sneak in when you have time or feel guilty about. It's expected, valued, and protected. This creates a completely different relationship with work and productivity.
The biohacking community talks endlessly about ultradian rhythms—the 90-120 minute cycles of high and low alertness throughout the day. The Swedes have been working with these rhythms for generations, not through tracking apps, but through cultural practices that honor how human bodies actually function.
Japan: Cycle Awareness Without Apology
Menstrual Leave as Standard Practice
Japan has had menstrual leave policies since 1947. Let that sink in. While Western women were decades away from even talking openly about periods, Japanese law recognized that menstruation sometimes requires accommodation.
Now, implementation isn't perfect, and uptake varies due to social pressures. But the foundational principle is revolutionary: acknowledging that female bodies have cyclical needs doesn't make us weaker or less capable—it makes policies more realistic.
Western feminism often approaches equality by denying biological differences, as if acknowledging that hormones affect performance somehow undermines our competence. Japanese policy takes a different approach: yes, hormones fluctuate, and creating systems that accommodate these fluctuations is just good sense.
The Art of Energy Conservation
Japanese culture has a concept called "mottainai"—a sense of regret over waste. While traditionally applied to physical resources, many Japanese women apply this philosophy to energy management, viewing their daily energy as a finite resource to be allocated strategically rather than depleted recklessly.
This isn't about doing less—Japanese women are incredibly productive. It's about being strategic. High-energy tasks during high-energy times. Low-stakes work during low-energy phases. Rest without guilt because rest prevents waste.
The Western approach glorifies constant high performance regardless of natural energy fluctuations. We're told to "push through" low-energy phases, which just leads to burnout and decreased overall performance. The Japanese approach recognizes that conservation leads to sustained output.
Mediterranean Cultures: Movement as Life, Not Exercise
The Greek Approach to Daily Movement
Greek women in traditional villages often live into their 90s with remarkable mobility and low rates of chronic disease. They're not doing CrossFit or optimizing their VO2 max. They're walking steep hills daily, tending gardens, and moving their bodies naturally throughout the day [2].
This is NEAT (non-exercise activity thermogenesis) before we had fancy acronyms for it. Continuous low-level movement throughout the day, rather than one intense workout followed by eight hours of sitting. Their bodies never fully settle into sedentary mode.
Western fitness culture has turned movement into a separate activity we schedule and track. Mediterranean cultures have maintained movement as simply how you live. You walk to get places. You climb stairs. You carry things. Your body moves because life requires movement.
The Italian Passeggiata
The Italian evening stroll—la passeggiata—is a social ritual where entire communities walk together at sunset. It's simultaneously movement, stress relief, social connection, and circadian rhythm support (evening light exposure helps regulate sleep-wake cycles).
This single practice hits multiple health optimization targets: moderate exercise, social bonding (which reduces all-cause mortality), natural light exposure at the optimal time for melatonin regulation, and a clear transition between work and rest time.
We pay for gym memberships, therapy, sleep coaching, and social clubs to get separately what the Italians get in one free, enjoyable daily practice. Sometimes the biohacks we need most are the ones that don't feel like biohacks at all.
Korean Culture: The Science of Heat Therapy
Strategic Use of Temperature for Metabolic Health
Korean jjimjilbangs (bathhouses) use various temperature rooms—hot saunas, ice rooms, warm soaking pools—in strategic sequences. This isn't just relaxation; it's metabolic training. Alternating hot and cold exposure improves insulin sensitivity, increases brown adipose tissue activity, and enhances mitochondrial function [3].
Western biohackers are obsessed with cold plunges and sauna protocols, treating them as hardcore performance enhancers. Korean women have been doing this casually for centuries as basic hygiene and health maintenance.
The practice also creates regular body-neutral social spaces where women of all ages, sizes, and shapes exist together without performance or judgment. This has profound effects on body image and mental health that Western "wellness" culture, with its Instagram-perfect aesthetic, completely misses.
Infrared Heat and Lymphatic Support
Korean "hanjeungmak" (traditional clay saunas) use radiant heat that penetrates deeper than conventional saunas. This supports lymphatic drainage, reduces inflammation, and promotes detoxification through enhanced circulation rather than just surface sweating.
Western wellness has commodified heat therapy into expensive services and devices. Korean culture maintained it as accessible community infrastructure, recognizing that these practices benefit everyone and shouldn't be luxury items.
Ayurvedic Wisdom: Personalized Health Before Personalized Medicine
Constitutional Types and Individual Optimization
Ayurveda has been doing personalized health for 5,000 years, categorizing individuals into constitutional types (doshas) with specific nutritional, exercise, and lifestyle needs. While the framework is different from Western science, the underlying principle is revolutionary: what optimizes one person's health might be wrong for another.
This directly contradicts Western health trends that prescribe universal protocols—everyone should do intermittent fasting, everyone should eat low-carb, everyone should do HIIT. Ayurveda starts from the assumption that bodies are fundamentally different and require different approaches.
Modern biohacking is finally catching up to this with genetic testing and biomarker tracking, but Ayurvedic practitioners have been customizing health protocols based on individual constitution, current imbalances, seasonal changes, and life stage for millennia.
Cyclical Living and Seasonal Adaptation
Ayurveda emphasizes "ritucharya"—seasonal routines that adjust diet, exercise, and daily practices based on environmental conditions. Your body's needs in winter differ from summer, and your health practices should reflect this.
Western health culture pushes consistency above all—same workout schedule year-round, same diet regardless of season. But your circadian rhythms actually change with seasonal light patterns, your immune system has seasonal vulnerabilities, and your hormonal patterns are influenced by environmental factors.
The biohacking community is starting to discuss chronobiology and circadian optimization, but Ayurveda built entire systems around working with rather than against natural cycles.
East African Running Culture: Joyful Movement and Community
The Ethiopian Women's Running Groups
In Ethiopia, women's running groups are social institutions where women of all fitness levels run together at dawn, combining exercise with community building and mutual support. These aren't competitive training groups—they're social practices that happen to involve running.
The mental health benefits are profound. Morning light exposure, aerobic exercise, social bonding, and shared purpose all occur simultaneously. Plus, the focus is on the experience and community rather than metrics, times, or appearance outcomes.
Western fitness culture has made exercise so performance-focused and appearance-driven that many women develop toxic relationships with movement. Ethiopian running groups demonstrate an alternative: movement as joy, social connection, and empowerment rather than punishment or optimization.
High-Altitude Adaptations and Metabolic Efficiency
East African cultures living at high altitude have developed remarkable metabolic efficiency and mitochondrial adaptations that enhance endurance and oxygen utilization. While genetics play a role, lifestyle factors—including specific dietary practices and movement patterns—also contribute.
These populations show us that metabolic optimization isn't just about supplements and protocols. It's about consistent, moderate practices that allow your body to adapt naturally over time. The slow adaptation approach actually creates more robust and sustainable improvements than extreme interventions.
What This Means for You (And Why It Matters Now)
Here's what struck me most while researching "The Art of Female Health": these practices aren't secrets. They're not hidden knowledge that required some wellness guru to discover and monetize. They're normal parts of how billions of women live their lives.
The revolutionary act isn't adopting exotic practices—it's recognizing that Western medicine and wellness culture have failed women by ignoring our actual biological realities. We've been sold individual solutions to systemic problems. We've been taught to optimize and track and measure and perform, when sometimes what we need is to simply rest, move naturally, eat real food, and exist in community with other women.
Practical Integration (Without Cultural Appropriation)
You don't need to adopt another culture's specific practices wholesale. You need to understand the principles underlying them:
Rest is productive, not lazy. Build actual recovery into your schedule, not as a reward for productivity but as a requirement for it.
Your cycle matters. Track it, understand it, and adjust your commitments and expectations based on hormonal realities rather than pretending your body operates the same every day.
Movement should feel good. If exercise is punishment, you're doing it wrong. Find ways to move that you enjoy, that fit naturally into your life, that feel like living rather than training.
Temperature therapy works. Whether it's sauna, cold exposure, or hot baths, strategic use of temperature is one of the most accessible biohacks available.
Community is medicine. Female friendships and regular social connection with women aren't nice-to-haves—they're essential for physical and mental health.
Personalization matters. What works for your friend, that influencer, or that study might not work for you. Learning to read your own body's signals is more valuable than following anyone else's protocol.
The Bigger Picture: Systemic Change
Individual practices are important, but they're not enough. We need systemic changes that reflect these global health wisdom traditions:
Workplace policies that acknowledge hormonal cycles and energy fluctuations
Healthcare that emphasizes prevention and lifestyle over pharmaceutical intervention
Fitness culture that celebrates diverse movement practices rather than narrow aesthetic goals
Nutrition guidance that recognizes bio-individuality
Social structures that support women's health without making it our individual responsibility to biohack our way out of broken systems
This is why International Women's Day matters. This is why we need to keep talking about these things, keep pushing for change, keep refusing to accept that women's health should be an afterthought or a luxury or something we optimize in our spare time.
The Art of Female Health: A Different Approach
Writing "The Art of Female Health" forced me to confront how much of what we're told about women's health is either incomplete, outdated, or straight-up wrong. The book isn't a protocol or a program—it's a framework for understanding your body on your terms, drawing from both cutting-edge science and ancient wisdom traditions that actually listened to women.
Because here's the thing: you already know what your body needs. You've just been taught to ignore those signals in favor of external "expert" advice. You know when you need rest, but you push through because that's what strong women do. You know when your cycle affects your energy, but you pretend it doesn't because acknowledging it feels like weakness. You know that you can't sustain the pace you're maintaining, but you keep trying because that's what success looks like (or so you think).
The women I studied while researching this book—from Finland to Japan to Ethiopia to Greece—they're not superhuman. They're not doing anything magical or perfectly. They're just living in cultures that haven't divorced women's health from women's actual lives and bodies.
"The Art of Female Health" releases on March 8th—International Women's Day—because women's health isn't a niche topic or a wellness trend. It's a fundamental human rights issue. It's about demanding that our bodies be understood, respected, and supported on our terms.
The book covers everything we've discussed here and more: circadian biology, nutritional biochemistry, hormonal optimization, stress physiology, movement science, sleep and community health—all through the lens of female biology and global health wisdom. It's a coffee table book because women's health deserves to be beautiful, visible, and unapologetic. It's a guide because you deserve practical information you can actually use.
If what you've read here resonates—if you're tired of wellness culture that treats women's bodies as problems to be fixed, if you want information that actually reflects how female biology works, if you're ready to approach your health with both scientific rigor and self-compassion—this book is for you.
Pre-order "The Art of Female Health" now, and join a different conversation about what women's health can look like when we stop trying to fit into systems that were never designed for us.
Because you deserve better than biohacking protocols designed for men, wellness trends that ignore your cycle, and health advice that treats your body like it's broken. You deserve the art and science of female health—on International Women's Day and every day after.
References
[1] Hansen, M. M., Jones, R., & Tocchini, K. (2017). Shinrin-yoku (forest bathing) and nature therapy: A state-of-the-art review. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 14(8), 851.
[2] Buettner, D., & Skemp, S. (2016). Blue zones: Lessons from the world's longest lived. American Journal of Lifestyle Medicine, 10(5), 318-321.
[3] Laukkanen, T., Khan, H., Zaccardi, F., & Laukkanen, J. A. (2015). Association between sauna bathing and fatal cardiovascular and all-cause mortality events. JAMA Internal Medicine, 175(4), 542-548.