The Invisible Work of Being Well

Much of what we do to take care of ourselves happens quietly, out of sight. What would happen if it didn't?

Mar 11, 2026

Much of what we do to take care of ourselves happens quietly, out of sight.

You don’t see me take a few calming breaths as I drop my kids off at school.

You don’t see the words I journal before I crash into sleep or the gratitude I try to hold onto as I close the day.

You don’t see the lunges or lengths in the pool, the quickened steps on a lunch-time walk or the tree poses looking out into the garden.

You also don’t see the days I do none of the above, or the times that I’m so confused by what I should be doing that I do nothing at all.

But all around us there are images of women being well.

That disconnect really came home to me over the past week as I attended events for International Women’s Day.

At each one I met incredible women who are not broken. They are capable, thoughtful, conscientious, and they care deeply. They try. And they are stretched.

They are holding work and care, family and responsibilities, life admin and even emotional labour. They manage teams and households, ageing parents and creative work, businesses and hobbies. All while trying to tend to themselves somewhere in the margins.

Outwardly, things look as though they are ‘working’. But internally, many are depleted, overwhelmed, under-supported and stressed and that's not because they’re doing wellbeing wrong, but because they’re carrying so much responsibility without enough support.

Often the people I talk to aren’t asking how to optimize their wellbeing and they are not looking for the perfect morning routine. What they and we are seeking is something more relatable, and more human:

How do I cope?

How do I carry on when I’m just so exhausted and I’m fantasying about running away to a hotel room and hiding but just need someone to say can I make you dinner and can I help you with that?

How do I feel more alive in the life I already have?

How do I find myself again under all the shoulds?

All while wondering whether we should be stacking more habits or taking some of those down.

In the world many of us are actually living in wellbeing can become yet another invisible job: regulating ourselves so everything else can keep going. We can find ourselves acutely self-monitoring and self-correcting, absorbing structural stresses privately.

And the information about how to do this often lands disproportionately on women.

One reason this disconnect persists is that many of the voices shaping how we talk about wellbeing are not always ours. The advice that we’re absorbing, whether from books or podcasts or in online spaces, can reflect a particular ideal of what thriving should look like and how we can achieve it in lives that don’t quite match.

Analyses of self-help reading patterns show a striking gender paradox. Women make up the majority of readers—around 62.5% of the audience for self-help books—yet many of the most widely read titles are written by men. In some analyses, around two-thirds of popular self-help books are authored by men. Similar patterns appear in adjacent media: women are a large share of the audience for wellbeing and lifestyle podcasts, while expert-led formats and top-ranked shows are still disproportionately hosted by men.

This can underline this disconnect: between what our lives look like and how we’re supposed to be feeling better within them.

If wellbeing begins to feel exhausting, it may not be because we’re doing it wrong. It may be because we’ve turned it into another form of labour and something we are expected to manage privately while the pressures of modern life continue to expand around us.

The women I meet are not “failing at wellbeing”. Rather they are navigating really complicated lives that expect so much and offer so little support. Perhaps the question is not how to optimise ourselves, but how we begin to imagine forms of wellbeing that acknowledge the realities we’re actually living.

Days when we’re at capacity and we’re crying in the bathroom. Times when we say we’re just going for a quick walk, and we feel someone judging us for taking that time. Moments when we do sit down to rest but feel selfish when there’s so much to do because we’ve learned that there always is and that takes priority. That’s when the invisible labour of wellbeing has to become a form of collective acknowledgement and support as well.

We need the moments we journal and the moments someone is happy that we left work on time.

When we can fold in the small things because we know someone is helping us carry the bigger ones.

When we can meditate and know that the to-dos can wait because someone else shares similar ideas around self-care not being indulgent.

This weekend this looked like a room full of women sharing that sometimes being self-employed feels more vulnerable then they ever expected; that often they find themselves just standing in a room not knowing what to choose to do next because there are too many options, too little time and too much information; and that although they’d like to spend more time on themselves, they need something around them to change for them to even do that.

And for a moment at these events, I felt less alone in striving to be well and more part of a group who were similarly trying to figure it all out. There’s hope in company.

x Claire

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