New Delhi, 2016. My family and I were somewhere in the middle of an itinerary I can no longer fully reconstruct, temples blurring into markets blurring into traffic, when we came across a tree. I don’t remember what kind. I remember that it was enormous, wide enough that my arms couldn’t close around even a fraction of its trunk. I did what I had always done in front of trees like that since I was old enough to walk toward one. I hugged it.

One of my family members laughed. Enough that I remember it a decade later. I had never been embarrassed about this before. My mother raised me inside a world where touching a tree wasn’t strange, where nature was something you were in relationship with rather than something you walked past. Before I was twelve, this was simply my normal. That day in Delhi was the first time someone from outside of it looked in and decided it was worth mocking.

I stopped hugging them in public.

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That held until recently, when I joined a leadership advancement community built almost entirely around internal work, self-discipline, the slow and unglamorous business of confronting the things in yourself you’d rather not confront. Part of the structure is a rotating monthly challenge. Last month, it was a ninety-minute meditation, every single day, built around balancing and moving energy through the body and up into the brain. This was a meditation that I had done a handful of times throughout my life, but not something I ever thought I was going to be doing for such a long period of time.

By the first week, my body had started to feel strange. Not sick, not wrong exactly, just unfamiliar. I guess my nervous system was a bit destabilized by the changes of doing such a strong practice every day. And somewhere in the middle of that first week, something in me turned back toward nature. The urge to touch a tree, to put my hands and my whole body against one, came back exactly as strong as it had been before Delhi. And it helped, it grounded me and eased my nervous system.

I was staying in the countryside during that stretch, and one day the pull took me to a waterfall near the house. It was cold that day, windy, though not raining, and I got in anyway. The water was frigid enough to knock the air out of me for a second. And then, in the minutes after, something in my body reorganized itself. The struggle of that first week didn’t disappear, but it recalibrated. I came out of that water steadier than I’d been in months.

There was an actual charge in that water, not just a feeling I decided to have. Water breaking apart against rock strips electrons loose into the air, the Lenard effect, and physicists measuring real Alpine waterfalls found steep negative ion concentrations rising in the spray, far above the surrounding air. My body picked up on more than the cold. The shock of it pulled a gasp out of me first, a sharp sympathetic surge, not calm at all, and then something steadier moved in right behind it, waking a reflex that runs straight into the vagus nerve, the one that helps decide how safe the body feels. Researchers have measured that exact shift, cold water immersion increasing heart rate variability and slowing the heart within minutes.

Trees are doing something quieter but related, all the time. Through photosynthesis and transpiration, trees and other vegetation generate their own negative ions, with the effect strongest in early morning and late afternoon, when photosynthetic activity peaks. Some of that charge comes from somewhere even smaller, faint electrical discharges released from the very tips of their leaves. The trees have their own rhythm to this, hours when they are more charged than others, whether or not anyone is there to hug them. None of it stays in the air being decorative. It moves into the lungs and the bloodstream, and it has been tested directly on the human body. A double-blind clinical trial treating seasonal depression with high-density negative ions found real improvement, not as strong as full light therapy, but far beyond placebo. So when I say the waterfall and the trees gave me something, I don’t mean it only as a feeling I decided to have. There was an actual charge in that air, and whatever it is in me that has always reached for a tree, it turns out to be built to take it in.

I mention all this, not really in the hopes of convincing someone about the benefits of nature, but rather as an exposure of the research I personally did when all of this was happening to me, how I was linking my lived experience to science. However, I personally think there is much more to uncover that science does not have the tools for just yet.

As a closing, to this new period of going back to myself, not long ago, I went hiking with my best friend in a town I’m moving to next month, a place I thought I already knew well until that day showed me a side of it I’d never bothered to walk into. We climbed until we reached the top of the mountain where the trees were old, the kind that have clearly been there longer than anyone currently living nearby. One of them called to me from maybe thirty meters off. I didn’t think about it. I just walked over and hugged it, my best friend beside me the whole time, no laughing, no half second of dread.

The tree had an M carved into its bark, and it sat there for a moment reminding me of all the things my life has been revolving around recently.

Surprise, surprise, I am a tree hugger, and I always have been. I guess this is yet another anecdote of going back to myself.

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Works Cited

1. Kolarž, P. et al. “Characterization of ions at Alpine waterfalls.” Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, 2012.

2. “Vegetation type modulates negative air ion generation in urban green spaces: the critical role of suburban forests in air quality enhancement.” Frontiers in Public Health, 2026.

3. Li, S. et al. “Characterization of the Response of Negative Air Ions Released by Green Tree Species to Temperature.” SSRN, 2025.

4. Terman, M. & Terman, J.S. “Controlled Trial of Naturalistic Dawn Simulation and Negative Air Ionization for Seasonal Affective Disorder.” American Journal of Psychiatry, 2006.

5. Hayashi, N., Ishihara, M., Tanaka, A., Osumi, T., & Yoshida, T. “Face immersion increases vagal activity as assessed by heart rate variability.” European Journal of Applied Physiology, 76(4), 394–399, 1997.

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If you compress the entire existence of Homo sapiens, roughly 300,000 years, into a single twenty four hour clock, industrialization happens one minute and seventeen seconds ago. Mass adoption of screens happens in the final seconds before now. Our bodies had nearly the full twenty four hours to become what they are. We have asked them to metabolize a completely different mode of living in less time than it takes to read this sentence out loud.

I felt that mismatch in my own body before I had language for it. When my kidney was failing, I became the ultimate biohacker without ever calling myself one. Wake up meditation. Lemon water with a pinch of salt and some coconut water. Green juice. Coconut Cult. A high fat, high protein breakfast. Red light therapy. All organic food, natural products, no PFAS, no forever chemicals if I could help it. No smoking. No drinking. I remember asking myself, more than once, whether I had gone a little coo coo. Whether this was too much.

I don’t think that anymore. I think the question was aimed at the wrong subject. Extreme, compared to what?

In the climate world, there is already a vocabulary for this. Adaptation. Resilience. Activists have spent years warning that cities built for a climate that no longer exists will keep failing the people inside them until they’re rebuilt for the one that does. We need to have that same conversation about the human body. Evolution had nearly the entire clock to build what we’re walking around in. We gave it one minute and seventeen seconds to catch up.

I still haven’t stopped thinking about a conversation in a paleopathological anthropology class at UC Berkeley, taught by Sabrina Agarwal, about how much our reproductive behaviors have changed and what that could mean for our health. The working theory, sometimes called the incessant ovulation hypothesis, comes out of anthropological work on natural fertility populations, most influentially Beverly Strassmann’s research among the Dogon of Mali. Strassmann found that women living without modern contraception, married young, with five or more children and years of breastfeeding each one, experienced somewhere around 100 total menstrual cycles across an entire lifetime. Pregnancy and lactational amenorrhea did most of the work a monthly cycle does today. A woman in an industrialized country now will experience something closer to 400. Four times the hormonal turnover, in a body that evolved under the first condition and is now living inside the second. Some researchers now connect that exact gap to the rising incidence of endometriosis and hormone sensitive cancers. Even menopause may be part of the story, less a cliff and more the shutdown of a system that was never built to run uninterrupted for forty years.

My point in bringing this up is not to suggest that all women now must marry young and have handfuls of children. What I am saying is that our behaviors have changed, and we need innovative ways to cope with, and build resilience against, the secondary effects of these changes.

But this is not only affecting women’s biologies. It is affecting men’s too, and in ways that are just as concrete. A major meta-analysis led by Hagai Levine found that sperm counts among men in North America, Europe, and Australia fell by more than fifty percent between 1973 and 2011, a decline that has since been found accelerating, and extending into South America, Asia, and Africa. Whatever this mismatch is doing to us, it is not choosing a side.

Nor is it only physical. A study published this year in The Lancet, part of the Global Burden of Disease project, found that the number of people living with a mental health condition worldwide nearly doubled between 1990 and 2023, from about 600 million people to 1.17 billion. Major depressive disorder rose 131 percent in that window. Anxiety disorders rose 158 percent. The researchers were careful to note that the known risk factors, violence, bullying, hardship, stayed roughly flat over the same period, and only account for a fraction of the increase. Something else is driving it, something the study doesn’t have a name for yet. We are not coping, and the data says so plainly, even though it still lives in a place we can’t fully point to.

Layer physical disease on top of that and the pattern holds, though unevenly. Lifetime cancer risk sits near 39 percent in the United States, nearly 1 in 3. In the United Kingdom, for anyone born after 1960, it has crossed 1 in 2. In Colombia, the risk of a diagnosis before age 75 is 17.9 percent, closer to 1 in 6. I don’t think this means Colombian bodies are simply more resistant to modern life. Screening and detection do real work in these gaps. But I don’t think it’s only a measurement artifact either. The daily rhythm, environmental exposure, and pace of life inside these countries, and in different regions within them, are genuinely not the same, and until the data gets better, we won’t know how much of that gap is detection and how much is a real difference in the size of the mismatch each body is absorbing.

So I no longer think the woman with the spreadsheet, the man swapping his blood, or the version of me under red light in a hospital gown is the extreme one in this picture. The risks our environment and culture expose our health to are, very clearly, real.

But I think the issue has various layers of complexity. Even Bryan Johnson, arguably the most measured human alive, and a person who dedicates his life, literally, to biohacking, was diagnosed this month with autoimmune gastritis, on top of an autoimmune thyroid condition he has carried since he was twenty one. And so, if a man who does everything in his power to be the healthiest version of himself is still being affected by chronic disease, more inputs and more control clearly isn’t the whole answer. In my opinion, the role of our emotions and our state of mind is deeply tied to the physical, and perhaps our disconnect from ourselves, in addition to all of the environmental changes our bodies are trying to cope with, is a big part of the puzzle. But that is another conversation.

What is part of this conversation, however, is the fact that we need to think about this critically and fast, on a systems level rather than an individual one, because the consequences for the well-being, and even survival, of our species will depend on it. Especially in highly industrialized places, public policy needs to start moving toward creating guardrails, so that people don’t go insane, so that half the population doesn’t get cancer, and so that people don’t struggle to conceive when they want to.

Works Cited

1. Strassmann, Beverly I. “The Biology of Menstruation in Homo sapiens: Total Lifetime Menses, Fecundity, and Nonsynchrony in a Natural-Fertility Population.” Current Anthropology, vol. 38, no. 1, 1997, pp. 123–129.

2. Levine, Hagai, et al. “Temporal Trends in Sperm Count: A Systematic Review and Meta-Regression Analysis.” Human Reproduction Update, vol. 23, no. 6, 2017, pp. 646–659.

3. Levine, Hagai, et al. “Temporal Trends in Sperm Count: A Systematic Review and Meta-Regression Analysis of Samples Collected Globally in the 20th and 21st Centuries.” Human Reproduction Update, vol. 29, no. 2, 2023, pp. 157–176.

4. GBD 2023 Mental Disorder Collaborators. “Updated Trends in the Global Prevalence and Burden of Mental Disorders, 1990–2023: A Systematic Analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2023.” The Lancet, 21 May 2026.

5. American Cancer Society. Cancer Facts and Figures 2025. Atlanta: American Cancer Society, 2025.

6. Ahmad, Amina S., et al. “Trends in the Lifetime Risk of Developing Cancer in Great Britain.” British Journal of Cancer, vol. 112, no. 5, 2015, pp. 943–947.

7. International Agency for Research on Cancer. “Colombia Fact Sheet.” Global Cancer Observatory: Cancer Today, GLOBOCAN 2022.

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How? My body looked completely fine: no signs of anything when I looked in the mirror, my blood work had been perfect for years, and my urine samples were also perfect. Nothing to trace what was seriously wrong inside of my body.

But that is a lie. Of course I had symptoms; I just gaslit myself into thinking of them as normal and minimizing what I was feeling.

The biggest symptom came after my nights out drinking: I would get pain in my right kidney, which I justified as scar tissue that had been left behind from my previous kidney infection; at least that is what Google led me to conclude, and what was easiest for my busy student self to believe as true.

But no, my kidney just had hydronephrosis stage 4, and the pressure of urine wanting to exit the poor thing after a night of fun with nowhere to go was creating the pain.

The thing is, I had been losing the relationship with my body for years, training myself not to listen to it.

Out of attachment to false perceptions.

I had been betraying myself, in different layers of my life that led me to this point.

There was a moment I remember clearly: I said yes when every part of me meant no. Not because I didn't know what I wanted. But because holding the line felt harder than crossing it myself. I let that happen more than once, in more than one part of my life. Sacred things, treated like they were negotiable. The body keeps the score on all of it.

The type of things that you feel in your gut. Looking back, I can now see the moments where my gut screamed at me, literally, and I still ignored it. We have all been there.

Of course, my body gave up on communication with me regarding my kidney at some point.

Host was not responsive. The only thing to do was to be as performative as its host —me — and simmer silently in its own destruction.

Never again.

The love I now hold for myself and the respect for the relationship with my body will always come first. To trust it, to understand it, to listen to it, to nurture it and give it the earthly pleasures it deserves.

I don't have a perfect relationship with my body now. But I have an honest one. I notice things. I ask questions. I take the answer seriously even when it's inconvenient. That is the whole practice.

Thankful to my body for putting up with me, and sending love to my younger self who did not know better.

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We don’t really talk about our health. Not the true parts of it, the fear, the shame, the years of being told nothing is wrong when you know that something is. It stays behind a closed door, even between close friends. For the past month, I have been the person on the other side of that door.

Thirty-six women sat with me, in conversations that ran around an hour, and told me about their bodies. What has gone wrong in them, and how they have tried, mostly alone, to make sense of any of it. I am grateful for every one of them. To be trusted with the things women usually carry by themselves felt like a gift, and it gave me a lot to reflect on. These conversations grew out of something my best friend and I are building together called The House of Maria, a community for women, and they left me with more than I expected.

What these conversations confirmed is something I had already suspected, though I kept hoping it would turn out smaller than it is. The way we do healthcare is failing women. In the United States, women described a system so hard to move through that simply keeping up with their own bodies had become a second job, one they worked alone, googling at midnight, chasing their own referrals, holding a thread no one else would hold. In Colombia, where I am from, the gaps were just as wide. And it went well beyond both countries. The women I spoke to had been cared for, or failed, all across the world, including in places we hold up as having solved this, and what they described was no better there. In some places it was worse.

Here is the part I keep returning to. Most of the women I spoke with have everything you are supposed to need. They are educated, high earning, ambitious. Some have the best insurance money can buy. Some have doctors in the family, a mother or a father or a sibling who practices medicine. And still the system could not meet them. Still they were rushed, doubted, told it was anxiety, told it was normal, handed a prescription in place of an answer and sent home to wait it out. If this is what care looks like for the women with the most access, imagine what it looks like for everyone else, for the women without the money, the language, or the connections. I spoke with some of them too, and the gap was only wider.

There is a reason young women let this slide, and I understand it completely, because I have done it. When you are in your twenties, building a career and a life and carrying a hundred other things, your health is the easy thing to put last. It is working, more or less. Why spend the energy? But I keep thinking about the women a few years ahead of me, the ones in their late thirties and forties who sat across from me and described what it actually costs. The crisis that arrived out of nowhere. The cancer found late. The infertility, the miscarriage, the long diagnostic wandering with no one at the wheel. Nearly all of them said some version of the same sentence. “I wish someone had told me to take better care of my body when I was younger.” And if this is what the women a decade or two ahead of me are carrying, I find myself wondering what the women in their fifties and sixties would say, what our grandmothers would say, if we ever really asked them. We like to say you have to live to learn. I am not sure that is true. Or at least I am not sure it has to be.

So I am sitting with two questions. How do you convince a young woman that being proactive about her health is worth it, that she does not have to wait until something breaks. And how do you build the thing that helps her do it without making it, yet again, one more burden she has to carry alone. Because that is the trap I watched close around woman after woman. A system that was never designed for women’s bodies tells women to advocate for themselves inside it, and calls that empowerment. I do not want to hand women another task. I want to build something that stands beside them. Not only a tool. A structure. A place to bring the small question and the terrifying one, to be remembered across the years, to be believed, to be told the truth about what is happening in your body and what to actually do next.

I do not have the whole answer yet. What I have, after this month, is a clearer sense of the size of the problem, and a refusal to look away from it. I am left wondering what my role is in all of this, what people like me can really do to move systems this old and this large. I think the honest answer is that you start where you are, with what is in front of you, with the women who trusted you with their stories in the first place. You build for them. You stay with them.

For women. That’s the whole point.

Follow The House of Maria on Instagram: @thehouseofmaria_

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