The Art of Doing Less (and Actually Feeling More Alive)

5 Gentle Habits for Woman Who Are Tired of Healing

Once upon a time, I believed healing had to look heroic — 10-step miracle mornings, long journaling rituals I could never quite perfect, complex workouts I secretly despised, and a brand of relentless optimism that always ran out before I did.

I would believe in this brand of “self-care” through gritted teeth, smiling while utterly, cosmically exhausted.

Like so many of us baptized in the personal development era, I mistook striving for transformation. I registered for Tony Robbins events. I filled carts with organic powders and adaptogens that promised vitality. I nodded through webinars about discipline, mindset, and morning routines — all while my body whispered, this isn’t working.

But I was told this was how you filled your cup: through hustle disguised as healing.

What it really did was teach me to perform wellness until it broke me.

After years of chronic pain, hospital visits, mental illness, and a slow unraveling of faith itself, I woke to a different kind of knowing. Life, in its brutal kindness, dismantled every shiny framework of consumerist “self-care” and handed me something smaller, quieter, truer.

It’s not glamorous. It’s not optimized. It doesn’t belong on a polished Pinterest board.

It’s a version of care that feels almost pre-verbal — ancient in its wisdom, cyclical in its rhythm, feminine in its bones. It’s the low-energy kind. The kind that asks for less doing and more being. The kind that doesn’t fix, but soothes.

These are the five habits that found me — unforced, unscripted — rising from the quiet places I once ignored. Rhythms that felt sacred and familiar, like remembering a language I used to know. The kind that remind me that healing isn’t something we chase. It’s something that waits for us, patiently, when we finally stop running.

1. A warm cup of comfort minutes after I wake

I’ve stopped trying to win my mornings — or feel guilty for not doing so. Instead, I’ve started simply entering them.

There was a time when I believed the right morning routine could save me. I would force my body through a workout before sunrise, make the bed with militant precision, and choke down a powdered green smoothie like it was penance. It all looked very “high-functioning” from the outside — and felt utterly lifeless on the inside.

Now, I wake with my hair a wild constellation and my pajamas beautifully mismatched — because my favorite shorts don’t go with any of my favorite tops, and sometimes I sleep in a favorite cozy sweater. I leave the bed unmade, its sheets tangled like evidence of dreaming, and pad quietly down our creaking 100-year-old oak stairs toward the coffee machine.

Some mornings, when my body asks for gentleness, I brew chamomile tea from the hand-picked flowers we dried from the garden. But most mornings, it’s a steaming Americano in one of my favorite handmade mugs — beans ground just right from a local roaster I love.

There’s no ritual, no rule. Just a simple act of meeting myself as I am: sleepy, messy, and alive.

This has become my favorite time of day.

2. Dressing for comfort, rather than conformity

Years ago, I used to stand in front of my closet like it held a moral test. I’d pore over clothes, trying to decode who I was supposed to be that day — polished enough to fit in, pretty enough to be liked, composed enough to be safe. I dressed for the “pretty young mom” club, chasing belonging through hemlines and color palettes that were never mine.

I’ve since thrown that expectation away in favor of a very soft and slightly lumpy sweater.

These days, I have too many real decisions to make.

Between work, motherhood, and keeping myself alive, the choice of what to wear cannot be another form of fatigue. So, I’ve created a wardrobe that gives energy rather than takes it. Minimal. Whimsical. Intentional. Quietly me.

I discovered my palette not through a stylist or an algorithm, but by noticing what colors made my shoulders soften — what fabrics felt like an exhale against my skin. I let intuition replace “shoulds,” slowly replacing clothes that performed with clothes that embraced.

And here in the Midwest, where the air turns cold for what feels like half the year, I aspire to dress like a pillow. Black stretchy pants, soft oversized tops, bike shorts in the warmer months — and yes, I wear them more than once a week. Sometimes twice. Sometimes three.

It turns out, I can give myself permission to rest inside my own skin—to let self-expression replace decision fatigue. It can whisper through cotton and stretchy-pants and say, I belong to myself now.

3. Habits I hate — reclaimed through empowerment

I know this sounds a little gross, but I’ve always hated brushing my teeth. And doing my hair. Getting ready in the morning has long felt like a form of mild torture.

For years, I couldn’t understand why such small, ordinary acts felt so heavy — until I learned that many who live with chronic illness, mental health struggles, or histories of trauma feel the same. There’s something about the forced structure of “basic care” that echoes the helplessness of being told what to do as a child — especially for those of us who grew up without autonomy, without safety, without choice.

Realizing that I wasn’t alone in this was my first moment of compassion. The second was learning to soften the ritual.

Now, I recognize and accept the feelings that settle tightly in my stomach as I get ready in the morning. I put on music or an audiobook while I brush my teeth. I breathe slower. I let it become a moment of calm rather than compliance. I try to approach these tasks in a headspace of “slow down” — as a small act of devotion rather than duty.

The biggest transformation within this awareness, has been choice.

I used to give away my power even in the smallest corners of my day — believing I had to do things simply because someone else once told me so. But now, when I brush my teeth, do my hair, or make my bed, I tell myself quietly: I choose this.

I do it because it makes me feel more alive, more me. Because it’s a way of caring for the woman who survived so much.

This shift — from obligation to ownership — is small, invisible, and utterly revolutionary.

4. Allowing myself indulgences, just because

There’s a tiny, women-run bakery fifteen minutes from our house — vegan, gluten-free, and far too beautiful for this little Midwest town I live in. When I walk in, one of the women behind the counter (tattoos blooming across her arms, bright hair pulled up in a loose knot, piercings glinting like tiny stars) greets me with the kind of smile that makes you exhale.

I feel instantly comforted.

The glass case is a miniature universe of art. Pastries shimmer with edible glitter, real florals perch delicately on fudge cakes, and the entire scene feels like something I might cry over — not because of the sugar, but the beauty. The care. The permission to delight.

And yet, my favorite thing is the simplest one: a warm baked peach cobbler, drizzled in cinnamon and crowned with a crumbly, golden top. To die for. There was a time I couldn’t have eaten it without shame. I used to count calories and punish myself for pleasure, believing that joy was something I had to earn. That every indulgence required justification, or penance.

But now, I embrace these tiny luxuries as sacred — little portals of aliveness that light up my week if I let them.

I’ve collected others, too: a favorite coffee, a shop that’s open at unpredictable hours (which somehow makes it even more magical), a glass of wine on a slow evening, a new sweater in the perfect shade.

They aren’t distractions from life; they are life. Quiet celebrations of being here: messy, embodied, alive.

5. Embracing presence over perfection

For most of my life, I believed my days had to unfold in a precise order — like some invisible checklist for being acceptable, lovable, good. I arranged my hours like a museum display: tidy, curated, and completely exhausting.

It was a cage, though I didn’t realize it at first.

Have you ever seen the video of the bear rescued from a tiny cage — how, even when placed in a wide open sanctuary, he continued to pace in the same small circle? He had been conditioned to believe that was all the space he deserved.

So many of us are that bear. We live inside invisible cages built from the pain and preferences of others — our bars made of shoulds and not-enoughs, of perfection that was never ours to begin with. The most transformative habit I’ve ever learned isn’t on any productivity list. It’s softening. It’s letting go. It’s realizing that the too much they warned me about wasn’t actually mine to carry.

I get to define my rhythm now — not tomorrow, not next month, but in this very second as I type these words.

This is what presence looks like.

Not perfection, but participation — an exhale of tension, expectation, and pain. And an inhale of beauty, truth, sacred goodness, and choice.

Conclusion

What I find most comforting about these habits is their quiet agency.

They aren’t another list of “five must-do habits for happiness,” but rather a list of you — of me — of small, intentional permissions that gift life and remind us that our lives are worthy of softness, of goodness, of alignment in our own particular way.

The older I get, the more I realize that healing, happiness, and peace are rarely loud. They don’t arrive through force or performance. They aren’t found in the holding on, but in the gentle art of letting go.

Goodness lives in the smallest moments of alignment — the warmth of a cup between our hands, the comfort of soft clothes on weary skin, the simple decision to let life be enough.

And maybe that’s what living really is.

Not a grand transformation, but a soft and quiet return —to ourselves, to gentleness, to our own flavor of joy.

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Dearest Reader,

If you loved this post, you might also enjoy my feminine fall series called The Wild Return—free and running on Sundays.

This series is near and dear to my heart, as so many women (myself included) are going through a painful yet sacred season of “awakening”—realizing we’ve been living in a fog of conditioning, belief systems and a cage of expectations that have caused us harm. We are tired. We are burnt out and we are now faced with the decision of letting go.

So as autumn lets go of her golden and scarlet leaves, we too are welcomed into this sacred act—casting off what no longer aligns, mourning what has passed: old dreams, old ways of being, old wounds. In the space that follows, there is room for new growth—for alignment, for purpose, for life.

This series just started this week. Here’s a warm and gentle invitation:

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Wildflowers Grow is a mental health publication by Alice Wild — created for women and survivors of abuse. It is a safe space to rest and grow, to flourish and connect. A place to amplify the light within the voices of those who have been silenced.

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