Can I ask you something?

How many times have you started a new habit — eating better, moving your body, taking time for yourself — felt good about it for a week or two, and then watched it completely fall apart the second life got in the way?

And then blamed yourself for it.

Monica Packer has spent 20 years studying why that happens. And her answer might genuinely change the way you think about this, because the problem isn’t you. It’s that the entire habit-building system you’ve been handed was designed by people whose lives look nothing like yours.

This conversation was SO good, you guys. Monica is a writer, podcaster, certified habits and identity coach, and author of the upcoming book Sticky Habits: A Woman’s Guide to Reclaim Happiness, Ditch Perfectionism, and Create Habits That Last. She also has a 20-year history with eating disorder recovery herself, which made this conversation feel so honest and grounding in a way I wasn’t expecting.

We went deep. Like, really deep.

How Perfectionism Can Lead To Underachieving

Monica’s story starts with perfectionism, specifically with realizing that perfectionism has two faces, and most of us only recognize one of them.

The overachieving perfectionist is the version we all know: checking every box, hitting every goal, excelling on the outside while privately paying a massive cost.

But there’s another version. The underachieving perfectionist.

This is the woman who is waiting. Waiting for the right time, more energy, better circumstances, less chaos. She’s responsible in every area of her life that involves other people, but for herself? Everything stays on the back burner. Because if she can’t do it perfectly, some part of her would rather not do it at all.

Monica sat with a therapist at 30, feeling just as lost and stuck as she had a decade earlier, and her therapist said: “You’re a perfectionist.” Monica laughed in her face. She hadn’t set a personal goal in years. She wasn’t achieving anything.

But that’s the thing. Perfectionism, Monica explains, is a misplacement of identity — banking who you are on your outcomes, whether you’re getting them or not. On the “all” side, you’re exhausted and burning out. On the “nothing” side, you’re calling yourself a non-starter, lazy, someone who just doesn’t try. Either way, your sense of self is fragile, and you’re stuck in a loop.

Sound familiar?

Why the Standard Habit Advice Doesn’t Work for Women

Here’s the part of this conversation that rarely gets talked about. 

The entire self-help world around habits — the 21 days, the 75 Hard, the no-days-off, consistency-means-doing-it-every-day-the-same-way messaging — was built predominantly by men. And whether they mean to or not, they’re giving advice that assumes their life circumstances. Their time. Their energy. Their predictability.

Women’s lives are different. That’s a fact.

Because of invisible labor, women carry the majority of caretaking tasks in the home, regardless of whether they work, have kids, or have an incredibly supportive partner. Less time. Less energy. More interruptions. Less predictability. And two-thirds of invisible labor is just the mental load — the conceiving and planning of tasks that never stops.

The habit advice built for a life with predictable blocks of uninterrupted time will keep failing you if your life doesn’t look like that. Which means the failure isn’t yours. The system is just wrong for your reality.

What “Consistency” Actually Needs to Mean

Monica offers a completely different definition of consistency, and I want to share it here because I genuinely think it can change things for you:

Consistency is doing your best, most of the time, over time.

That’s it. Your best is allowed to change day to day and season to season. “Most of the time” means more times than not — even 4 out of 7 days counts. And “over time” means there’s no magic number of days, no perfect streak required.

Flexibility doesn’t undermine consistency, she says. It’s what makes consistency possible.

Here’s how it looks in practice: she teaches her clients to design two versions of every habit. The ideal version — what you’d do on a good day. And the baseline version — the smallest, simplest version you could do on your absolute worst day, when you’re sick or exhausted or the whole house is falling apart.

Maybe the ideal is a 30-minute workout. The baseline is putting on your shoes. Or 5 minutes of stretching. Or one set.

That baseline sounds like giving up. But it actually creates something much harder to build: a habit you don’t break. Because maintenance is everything, and you can always build from a foundation that already exists.

The Identity Piece Nobody Talks About Enough

This is the part that tied everything together for me.

Monica makes the point that every time you show up — even just to do your baseline — you get to tell yourself something: I’m a person who does this. I keep commitments to myself. I do the thing I say I’m gonna do.

That affirmation on a baseline day matters just as much, maybe more, than the one on a great day. Because identity isn’t built in the peak moments. It’s built in the ordinary ones, the ones where you almost didn’t.

And this is exactly what I see happening inside Food Freedom Academy. The women who start to heal their relationship with food aren’t transforming because they finally found the right rules. They’re transforming because they keep showing up, keep practicing, and slowly become someone for whom this way of being just feels natural. The identity shifts. And then the behavior follows.

In This Episode You’ll Learn

• What the “underachieving perfectionist” actually looks like, and why so many women don’t recognize themselves in it
• Why perfectionism is a misplacement of identity (and what that means for how you see yourself right now)
• Why habit advice built for men’s lives will keep failing women — and the specific reason invisible labor is at the root of it
• Monica’s redefinition of consistency that actually works for real women with real lives
• The “ideal vs. baseline” habit framework and how to use it so you never fully break a habit again
• How flexibility and consistency work together, not against each other
• Why the smallest baseline action still rewires your identity — and why that matters more than you think
• The one belief Monica wants every woman to leave this conversation holding onto

About Monica Packer

Monica Packer is a recovering perfectionist who uncovered the truest model to lasting growth: progress made practical. As a writer, podcaster, and coach, she guides women to find sustainable growth by adopting progress over perfection. Her podcast, About Progress, is a top-rated show with millions of downloads, and her upcoming book Sticky Habits: A Woman’s Guide to Reclaim Happiness, Ditch Perfectionism, and Create Habits That Last will be traditionally published Fall 2026. Monica is a mom of 5, former middle school teacher, sourdough obsessor, and beginning gardener.

Find Monica at: aboutprogress.com Instagram: @aboutprogress Pre-order Sticky Habits: stickyhabitsbook.com

Resources + Links

• Pre-order Monica’s book: Sticky Habits at stickyhabitsbook.com (pre-orders matter SO much for first-time authors — if this episode resonated, this is a meaningful way to support her work)
• Monica’s podcast: About Progress — search it wherever you’re listening right now
• Monica’s Instagram: @aboutprogress

This conversation reminded me that so much of what keeps us stuck isn’t a discipline problem or a motivation problem. It’s a system problem. We’ve been trying to fit our lives into a framework that was never designed for us.

And the way out isn’t to try harder in that same framework. It’s to build a new one.

I love you so much. Thank you for being here.

xo, Sabrina