Things I quit doing because I’m tired of pretending they worked

There’s this thing that happens when you try a wellness habit and it doesn’t work. You don’t blame the habit. You blame yourself. You think, clearly I am the broken one, because everyone on the internet is thriving on their Sunday meal prep and their 64 ounces of water before 9am.

I did this for years. Tried the thing, hated the thing, kept pretending I just needed to try harder at the thing. And then one day I just… stopped.

This is not a post about quitting being bad. This is about the specific, extremely popular habits I waved goodbye to — and why I don’t feel even a little bit guilty about it.

Is Sunday meal prep actually worth it, or is that just something we say?

Sunday meal prep is the wellness habit that sounds the most logical on paper. Cook everything at once, refrigerate it, eat it all week, feel like a competent adult. Great concept. Truly.

Here’s what actually happened every single time: I’d spend three hours on a Sunday cooking chicken and rice and chopped vegetables, feel extremely proud of myself, and then by Wednesday I could not stand the sight of any of it. The sad little containers stared at me from the fridge. I ordered takeout anyway.

The problem isn’t the cooking. The problem is that I don’t want to eat the same five things on rotation just because I prepped them on Sunday. Sometimes Tuesday me wants tacos. Sometimes Thursday me wants cereal. Prepping food three days early assumes I know exactly what I’ll want — and I genuinely never do.

I quit meal prepping in the traditional sense and started doing what I now call “ingredient prep” instead. Cook the rice. Chop the vegetables. Don’t assemble anything yet. That part? That actually works for me. But what do I know?

The gallon of water a day challenge is a part-time job I didn’t apply for

Drinking a gallon of water a day — roughly 128 ounces — is genuinely not necessary for most adults according to the Mayo Clinic, and yet wellness culture has made it feel like a moral failing if you don’t carry a jug the size of a fire hydrant everywhere you go.

I tried it. I had the giant Stanley-adjacent water bottle. I had the time markers on the side. I felt like I was being chased by my own hydration goals all day. Also I was in the bathroom every 45 minutes, which — if you work from home, fine — but it just gets ridiculous.

The part nobody tells you is that a lot of the water you need comes from food. Fruits, vegetables, soup, coffee — it all counts. Your body is not a car that needs exactly one gallon of a specific fluid to function.

I drink water when I’m thirsty now, like a regular human, and I feel exactly the same as I did when I was tracking ounces obsessively. Possibly better, because I’m not thinking about water 47 times a day.

Did the gratitude journal do anything, or did I just feel guilty every time I skipped it?

The gratitude journal had the longest run of all my failed wellness habits — probably because it felt the most virtuous to defend.

I’d sit down, write three things I was grateful for, and then think: okay but am I actually feeling grateful or am I just writing things down? There’s research that suggests gratitude practices can genuinely improve mood and wellbeing — a study published in the Journal of Positive Psychology found that written gratitude exercises had measurable effects — and I’m not here to say the concept is wrong.

What I will say is that for me, personally, the journal became a chore. And when a thing that is supposed to make you feel better starts making you feel bad because you didn’t do it, that’s a sign.

I don’t think gratitude itself is the problem. I think the prescribed format of “write three things every morning in a notebook” is just not the delivery system that works for my brain. Some people love it. I know people who swear by it. I am not those people.

What about the 5am morning routine everyone seems to be obsessed with?

At some point someone decided that waking up before the sun was the secret to success, and approximately everyone on social media agreed.

I tried waking up at 5am for two weeks. I was not more productive. I was tired and slightly unhinged by 2pm and deeply resentful of everyone who told me this was going to change my life.

Some people are genuinely early risers and the morning works for them. That’s real. But the idea that there is one correct time to wake up and it is before dawn — that’s just not science, that’s just a personality type with a PR team.

I stopped trying to force myself into a circadian rhythm that isn’t mine. I work better later in the morning. I am more creative after 10am. Trying to override that didn’t make me a morning person, it just made me a tired person who got up early.

Is there anything from the wellness trend pile I actually kept?

Okay, here’s where I get honest in the other direction: walking.

Not “power walking for 45 minutes while tracking your heart rate” walking. Just walking. Outside. Without a podcast sometimes. No goal, no step count mandatory, just moving through the world for a little while.

It’s the one thing I tried because everyone said it was good and it turned out to be — genuinely, annoyingly — good. It costs nothing. You don’t need equipment. You can do it whenever. It doesn’t require you to be awake at 5am or eat sad refrigerated chicken.

I don’t know why walking works and the other stuff didn’t. Maybe it’s because it doesn’t feel like a performance. Nobody is posting their walk in a motivational carousel. There’s no water bottle to fill or notebook to buy. It just is what it is.

And that, honestly, is what I wish more wellness advice sounded like.

The thing about quitting habits that don’t work is that it feels like failure until it doesn’t. And then it just feels like relief.

I’m not anti-wellness. I’m anti-pretending. There’s a difference between a habit that’s hard because it’s new and a habit that’s hard because it was never right for you in the first place. The second kind doesn’t get easier. It just makes you feel worse about yourself on a recurring schedule.

If you’re also white-knuckling your way through a routine that isn’t working, permission granted to stop. From me, here, on the internet. I’m not a doctor and I’m certainly not a life coach. But I have quit a lot of things and I feel fine.

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