Why Your Habits Keep Failing Women (And How to Fix It)

I ended up in the ER because I got some bad advice around habits.

That’s where Gary Vee’s advice got me. I was twelve years into building a business, convinced that if my competitors were working while I was sleeping, I needed to stop sleeping. So I did. I was up at 4am. I was grinding. I was doing everything the self-help industrial complex told me to do.

And then my body said absolutely not, and I ended up on bed rest for three weeks.

I tell you that story because I think a lot of you have a version of it. Maybe yours didn’t land you in a hospital. Maybe it just landed you on the couch on a Sunday night, staring at your phone, dreading Monday, wondering how you can be this tired when you’ve been this productive.

That’s what Monica Packer and I talked about on this episode of the Well Lived Society and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it since.

The Habit World Was Not Built for Your Life

Monica is a certified habits and identity coach, host of the About Progress podcast, and a recovering perfectionist. Her book Sticky Habits comes out this fall. And the first thing she said that stopped me cold was this:

The self-help and habit world is largely built on a masculine framework. Not always by men, plenty of women teach it too. But the energy, the metrics, the all-or-nothing prescriptions, they were designed for a reality that most women simply do not live in.

You get interrupted. You have invisible labor that nobody sees and nobody counts. You have less time, less support, and less energy than your male counterparts, even the really good ones. And the habit advice you’ve been handed assumes none of that is true.

So when it doesn’t work, you assume you’re the problem. You’re not disciplined enough. You’re not committed enough. You just need to want it more.

Friend. The advice was wrong. Not you.

Habits Are Helpers. That’s It.

Monica said something I want to put on a billboard: habits are helpers. Their only job is to support you. They work for you. You do not work for them.

When I heard that I felt something physically shift.

Because I had been treating my habits like a performance review. Either I hit every single thing on the list exactly as I planned, or I failed. There was no in between. And the perfectionist in me, the one who ends up in the ER, would rather quit entirely than do the thing imperfectly.

Monica calls this the all-or-nothing cycle. And she is right that it is where most women get stuck. You build a beautiful morning routine. Life happens. You miss three days. You tell yourself you’ve failed. You start over. You build a beautiful morning routine. Life happens again.

The cycle doesn’t break because you try harder. It breaks when you stop treating the habit like a standard you have to meet and start treating it like a tool you get to use.

Your Season Matters

Your season of life matters. Not as an excuse. As a variable.

Monica has five kids, including a three-year-old. She talked about the postpartum year after her last baby, the survival season, she called it. The year when she couldn’t control her sleep, couldn’t control her schedule, couldn’t control basically anything. And she had to completely redesign her habits to match that reality.

She didn’t have an ideal version of movement. She had a baseline. Ten minutes of anything. Touching her toes. Stretching. Something that counted even when nothing else was possible. And that baseline, that embarrassingly small, nobody-would-post-this-on-Instagram baseline, is what kept her consistent through the hardest season. Because she showed up for it even on the worst days. And consistency compounds.

I think about this for the women I work with. The one who just took a board seat and has no margin. The one whose kids just hit middle school and blew up every routine she had. The one who is building something while holding everything else together.

You are not failing your habits. Your habits are failing your season. And that’s fixable.

The Do Something List

Okay this is the part I am genuinely obsessed with and have been thinking about since we recorded.

Monica created something called a do something list. Not a goal list. Not a resolution list. A list of things she wants to do, try, explore, revisit, and attempt, without any attachment to completion or outcome.

She started it when she was approaching her 30th birthday, feeling like she had lost herself entirely to her roles and her responsibilities. Three little kids, a husband who worked across the bay, no idea who she was outside of what she was getting done in a day.

So she made a list. Thirty things before she turned thirty. Not because she expected to finish it, she never has finished one, not in eleven years of making them. But in the pursuit of it, she kept finding herself. What she actually liked. What she had been putting on the back burner. What she was afraid to try.

One of those things was auditioning for a community play. She had put it on her list for years. Talked herself out of the audition twice. This year she did it anyway, recorded her audition while her three-year-old tried to climb the kitchen island behind her head, and she got in. Not only got in. She is the dance captain.

That is what the do something list does. It keeps you connected to who you are outside of what you produce. And when life gets hard, when the season gets brutal, that connection is what holds.

Who Are You Outside of What You Get Done in a Day?

Monica said this and I have been sitting with it ever since.

We are not our roles. We are not our outcomes. And as women, especially as high-achieving, civically engaged, genuinely trying women, we are very good at misplacing our identity in both.

You become the board member. The volunteer. The host. The mom. The one who holds it together. And somewhere in the middle of doing all of that well, you forget that there is a person underneath all of those roles who has preferences and interests and things she finds genuinely delightful that have nothing to do with being useful.

The do something list is how you find her again.

It doesn’t have to be dramatic. It can be twelve sourdough recipes. A ballet class. Reading twenty books. The point is not the outcome. The point is the exploration. The point is that you are a whole person, not just a person who leads in one aspect of her life.

And the wild thing Monica said, the thing that I believe completely, is that when you show up to your roles from that whole place, you lead better. You host better. You show up to your community with more to give. Because you are not depleted. You are full.

The Permission Slip You’ve Been Waiting For

If you have been white-knuckling a habit that stopped fitting your life six months ago, you can let it go.

If you have been following advice that was built for someone with more support, more time, and less on their plate, you can stop.

If you have been waiting until you feel ready, or until the season calms down, or until you have the perfect morning routine locked in before you try anything, you can start now with something embarrassingly small.

Ten minutes. One thing. Something that counts even when nothing else does.

Habits work for you. You don’t work for them.

Go find Monica at aboutprogress.com and pre-order Sticky Habits when it drops this fall. It is the book the self-help world has needed for a long time, and she wrote it in ten-minute increments, messy and imperfect, one baseline day at a time.

Which feels exactly right.

Listen to the full conversation with Monica Packer on the Well Lived Society podcast, available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and anywhere else you may stream podcasts.

And if you’re ready to stop leading in silos and start leading your whole life with intention, the Well Lived Society membership is open now at founding member rates until August 1st.