Women's Health Month has had me out in the world more than usual, which is how I ended up standing in a plumbing showroom on a Friday afternoon, staring at a bidet.

I should back up.

The past two weeks have been a blur of events, and somewhere between a kitchen/bath expo and a Manhattan popup that sold, among other things, a corded phone (we'll get there), my brain started doing the thing it always does when I'm supposed to be casually browsing: running clinical differentials on the fixtures.

And the thing that kept confirming what I've known for years was showing up in every room I walked through: every space is making quiet decisions about women's health, whether the people who designed it know it or not. The bathroom tile, the bedroom paint color, the lighting choices. All of it either supporting how a woman's body actually works, or completely ignoring it. Most of us were just never given the framework to see it.

So I'm going to.

I've spent years sitting across from women in my longevity practice who were doing everything "right" and still felt like the ground was shifting under them. And after enough of those conversations, enough labs, enough moments where I'd watch a patient describe a symptom that was also a design problem and a relationship problem and a sleep problem all wrapped into one, I started organizing what I was seeing into a framework. Six categories. Six pillars that touch everything.

Sex. Sleep. Sweat. Satiety. Style. Serenity.

I use it in clinic. I use it in my own life. And now, I'm sharing it with you, because it changes how you see everything, including the rooms you live in. Once you have the lens, you can't unsee it. Your kitchen becomes either a place where your family actually connects, or a place where everyone stares at their own screen while eating separate meals. Your bedroom is either restoring you or just... housing you.

I've been working on something with my home design partner Jill Rae that will let you see this framework come to life inside a real home, in real time. I cannot wait to share it.

But today I want to tell you about three moments from this week, three rooms that stopped me, and why.

Back to the plumbing showroom.

Torrco, for the uninitiated, is a kitchen/bath showroom here in Connecticut, the kind of place where normal people browse faucets and compare tile samples and generally behave like adults. And then there's me, frozen in front of a bidet display, mentally cataloguing every patient conversation I've had about vulvovaginal health for the past decade while a very nice sales associate waits for me to ask about finishes.

What I was actually thinking about was my daughter. And my mother. And every woman who would ever share a bathroom with this one fixture, because a bidet does something that we almost never talk about in the context of home design: it serves a woman's body differently at every stage of her life, and it does it quietly, without asking for credit.

Start with a potty training toddler whose hands aren't coordinated enough for proper front-to-back wiping. Then a woman in perimenopause dealing with the kind of unpredictable heavy bleeding that sends you scrambling on an already chaotic day. Then after sex, where a water rinse supports vaginal pH without disrupting the microbiome. And then, years later, a postmenopausal woman whose tissue has thinned from estrogen loss, where the clinical guidelines all say the same thing: eliminate irritants. Water on thinning tissue versus dry scratchy bathroom paper? The math is obvious.

One fixture. Four stages. Every woman in the house.

A few days later I was at a popup in NYC dedicated entirely to physical phones. Corded phones. Wall-mounted phones. Rotary phones in colors that haven't existed since 1994. The whole thing was a 90s nostalgia fever dream, deliberately orchestrated, and packed with people who were, I think, genuinely emotional about holding a receiver again.

I picked one up, a beautiful wall-mounted telephone designed to replace your cell phone in the kitchen, and my first thought was honestly just, I miss this. That weight. The way a phone cord wraps around your finger while you talk. The fact that when you hung up, the conversation was over, and you went back to whatever you were doing with your actual hands.

My second thought was of course, how does this make us “well”?

A Nature trial randomly assigned 89 families to drastically cut recreational screen time, and the adults in those families (surprising no one) showed significantly improved well-being and mood. Not from a supplement. From less phone.

A corded phone on the wall means you can still take a call, but you've removed the infinite scroll from the room where your family is supposed to actually connect. Serenity intervention dressed up as a vintage design choice. I thought about it for the rest of the week.

And then there was THIS hotel room.

The hubs and I took our bi-annual NYC staycation and one of my favorite places to stay is the Warren Street Hotel. Everything about this place is straight up art, especially the rooms themselves. All the jewel tones. Saturated color. Bright walls that would make every "how to design a calming bedroom" blog post on the internet collectively gasp. Not a shade of greige in sight.

I slept beautifully.

Which got me thinking about the assumption we've all absorbed, maybe from Pinterest, maybe from a Pottery Barn catalog, maybe from a wellness influencer with a white bedroom and 200k followers, that your bedroom has to be blue or beige or some shade of barely-there to be good for sleep.

The data is more interesting than that. Color psychology research shows that emotional responses to color are personal, shaped by your own associations and your own nervous system, not just wavelength. A deep green that makes you feel grounded. A warm terracotta that makes you feel held. A plum that makes you feel like you're sleeping inside a jewel box. All of those can calm your nervous system if they genuinely resonate with you.

For women in perimenopause and menopause, where sleep disruption affects up to 60% of us, your bedroom environment is a clinical variable. And when a woman actually feels at ease in her space (rather than performing someone else's idea of "calm"), her whole household benefits. Her patience. Her energy. Her capacity to be present.

Your bedroom can be bold and still be healing. It just has to be yours.

The 6S framework is about paying attention. It's about walking through your own home and noticing what's actually serving you and what's just... there because it came with the house, or because someone on the internet said it was the right choice, or because you never thought to question it.

What I've learned, both as a clinician and as a woman renovating her own home with these questions running through her head every single day: when the space supports the woman, the whole household feels it. Your sleep, your peace, your intimacy, your ability to be present for the people you love. It all starts in the rooms you walk through every day.

Your home is the first environment your family inhabits. Make it one that heals.

A massive new study just followed nearly 40,000 people for over 15 years and found that eating eggs as few as one to three times a month was associated with a 17% lower risk of Alzheimer's. Bump that to five or more times a week and the risk dropped by 27%.

The reason is likely choline, a nutrient critical for brain health that most women are not getting enough of, and eggs happen to be one of the richest dietary sources we have.

This matters for us in particular: almost two-thirds of Americans living with Alzheimer's are women, and the pathology may begin developing as early as midlife, right when estrogen levels start to decline.

Read the full breakdown, and then maybe make yourself an omelet.

I spent Tuesday night at Tamsen Fadal's apartment with a room full of the coolest NYC fitness girlies (waaay out of my league), trying on weighted vests over mocktails.

Tamsen just became YVO's Chief Wellness Officer, and after wearing this vest for five minutes I understood why she signed on. It's the first weighted vest actually built for a woman's body: contoured, bust-friendly, soft iron-sand weights that mold to you instead of digging into you, up to 20 lbs. Oh and the charms, you gotta love a vest with some flare.

But my favorite part - every purchase comes with a free DEXA scan so you can track your bone density over time. This is my new hot girl walk uniform. Shop YVO here, 15% off, just for my ITS subscribers. 💥