Health & Wellness

Fell Off Your Wellness Streak? ‘The Wellness Process’ Explains What to Do Next

December 4, 2025

If one missed day turns into a full identity crisis, you’re not alone. Most of us are trying to “be better” while also low-key fighting for our lives against burnout, hormones, and the urge to throw our phones into the sun. One small slip, and suddenly you think all your hard work has gone out the window and wondering how your entire routine collapsed overnight.

On The Wellness Process, host Elizabeth Endres breaks down why this happens and what actually gets you back on track without blowing up your life. Whether you’re deep in a spiral or just starting to feel the cracks, these three truths might be exactly what you need.

Fell Off Your Wellness Streak? Here’s What to Do Next

One missed day can reset your entire relationship with a habit

Streaks do something sneaky to your brain. They stop being about the number and start becoming part of your personality. You meditate for 200 days and suddenly you’re “a person who meditates.” Then you miss once, and your brain’s like, well, maybe we don’t do that anymore.

That’s exactly how it played out for Endres. She broke her streak the day after her wedding, and not because she couldn’t squeeze it in. “I don’t have an excuse because I had plenty of time,” she says. “But I think that sometimes when life events get really big, we tend to feel like we don’t need it. We don’t have the time for it. We just don’t prioritize it.”

That one skip shifted the whole vibe. “As soon as you give up on your streak…you are resetting your view on the entire ritual,” she explains. Once the streak was gone, missing another day felt easier. The habit wasn’t anchored anymore.

And honestly, the psychology checks out. Streaks build identity and momentum, which is why losing one feels like the wheels just fell off your routine. It’s not dramatic, it’s human. The brain loves patterns. When the pattern breaks, the motivation drops too.

From there, her habits unraveled fast. She started sleeping in because she didn’t “need” to wake up early for meditation. Her phone ended up charging next to her bed again. The excuses multiplied. “It’s just really interesting how we start to make excuses for ourselves,” she says, “and how a lot of times when our environment changes, we internalize that as an excuse to not have to do the work.”

Saying yes to everything is a fast track to resentment

Once Endres felt her routine slipping, her instinct was to double down and do more. More partnerships, more meetings, more opportunities, more everything.. “I was in a little bit of a scarcity mindset,” she says. “There were so many things that were kind of circulating in my mind that were bringing out fear and lack and scarcity. And so I started saying yes to a bunch of stuff.”

The beginning always feels great. People want you. The inbox is popping. The calendar looks important. You convince yourself the grind is proof that your life is moving forward. But then the adrenaline wears off. “I really burned myself out,” she admits. “It was too much. And I started to wake up in the morning resenting what I did.”

This is classic decision fatigue. The more you say yes, the more you drain your mental bandwidth, and the worse your choices become. You’re not building momentum. You’re emptying the tank and hoping willpower magically refills it.

That’s when the “f*ck-its” hit—the moment your to-do list gets so unhinged that doing nothing feels easier than doing one thing. “That’s very opposite of my personality,” she says. “I’m very much a, ‘I do things 110 percent,’ I get stuff done and that always really fills my cup. But it sort of becomes this twofold beatdown when I feel so overwhelmed that I just kind of stop doing.”

The person who snapped her out of it was her husband. “You have literally carved out your dream job, career, and podcast. It should feel good every day,” Endres recalls him saying.

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You have to slow down to speed up

“Oftentimes we actually need to slow down in order to speed up,” Endres says. “And instead, by default and by programming, we think that we need to speed up in order to speed up. We need to do more. We need to fill our calendar. We need to check the boxes. We need to skip the meditation because I need to really get my day going.”

You push like that long enough and something always gives. “Ultimately, I think our bodies end up having to slow us down for us,” she points out, noting that she saw it in her results long before she admitted it to herself. The harder she pushed from a place of fear and scarcity, the less anything worked. “When you do anything with fear…it kind of impacts your results,” she explains. “I started to see less growth on my account. I started to just feel not as great in my body and in my mind.”

The shift showed up in the most random place: a hot yoga class she nearly skipped.

Her friend suggested it, and her brain immediately tried to steer her toward something “more intense.” She went anyway. “When I tell you I have never felt better,” she says. “I was like on a high during that class.”

That moment cracked something open. Intensity isn’t always pace. Sometimes the hardest, most transformative thing is choosing to slow down—and slowing down actually paid off. “I have had more creativity to pour into reels and content that really lights me up,” she shares. “I have had tons of growth. I have had financial gains way more so than when I was saying yes to everything.”

The point isn’t to do less forever. It’s to stop sprinting through your life on fumes and calling it discipline. Rest isn’t anti-productivity. Rest is the charger. If you’ve been gripping your to-do list like it’s a flotation device and still sinking, this is your permission to loosen your grip and breathe.

For more insights, you can listen to this episode of The Wellness Process wherever you get your podcasts.