Keep Starting But Never Finishing? Find the Hidden Friction

The Real Reason You Abandon What You Start And How to Finally Break the Cycle

In This Article

Episode 25 of The Better You Show

This article was inspired by a real conversation had on The Better You Show. Want to hear it straight from our coaches? Watch the full episode here then keep reading for the science-backed expansion.

When Starting Isn’t The Problem, Finishing Is

You started.

The journal. The morning routine. The new habit that was absolutely going to be different this time.

And then it stopped. No dramatic moment. No catastrophic failure. Just a quiet dissolve back into the way things were. And somewhere in that silence, a story crept in:

“That’s just who I am. I’m someone who doesn’t follow through.”

I want to push back on that story — hard.

Because in all the years of working with women who feel stuck, I’ve never once met a woman who didn’t follow through because of laziness or lack of discipline. Not once. What I have met, over and over, are women who were following the wrong map. Women who were building habits borrowed from other people’s lives. Women who were running on empty and didn’t know it. Women who were quietly, unconsciously, afraid.

And none of that is a character flaw. All of it is information.

This article unpacks what’s actually happening when you start something meaningful and then abandon it — and what to do instead. It’s one of the most important things we can share with you, because the story you’ve been telling yourself about your follow-through may be the very thing keeping you stuck.

You’re Not the Problem — The Story You’ve Been Told Is

The self-help world has a follow-through problem, and ironically, it’s the self-help world that created it.

Every week, a new “system” lands in your feed. A morning routine that will “change your life.” A journaling method that successful people swear by. A 21-day habit reset. A 5 AM wake-up protocol. And you see the testimonials. You see the before-and-afters. You see the smiling faces of people who say it worked for them.

So you try it. And it doesn’t stick. And you conclude: the problem is you.

But here’s what the testimonials don’t tell you: habits and routines are deeply personal. What works for someone else’s biology, schedule, season of life, and nervous system may have absolutely nothing to do with what works for yours.

Research from MIT’s Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences confirms that habit formation is not a one-size-fits-all process — individual differences in neurobiology, stress levels, sleep quality, and emotional state all influence how and whether habits stick.

The 21-day habit myth — popularized in the 1960s — has been thoroughly debunked. A landmark study published in the European Journal of Social Psychology found that habit formation takes anywhere from 18 to 254 days, with an average of 66 days — and that missing a day here and there does not break the habit loop.¹

You weren’t meant to have this figured out in three weeks. You weren’t designed to sustain habits that don’t fit your life. And you are not broken for stopping things that weren’t truly yours to begin with.

You are not someone who doesn’t follow through. You are someone who hasn’t yet found what you actually want to follow through on or the system that works best for YOU.

The 5 Real Reasons You Keep Quitting

After years of working with women navigating midlife transitions, identity shifts, and the quiet grief of a life that looks fine on the outside but feels hollow on the inside, we’ve noticed that the patterns behind quitting fall into five categories. Most people are dealing with more than one at the same time.

Reason 1: It Was Never Your Goal to Begin With

Sometimes we start things because we think we should. It’s working for everyone else. It’s on every podcast. It’s all over social media. And so we absorb it — almost by osmosis — and suddenly we’re journaling at 5 AM not because we want to, but because we think that’s what people who have their lives together do.

When you abandon something that was never truly yours, that’s not failure. That’s discernment.

“It sounded like something nice, but it wasn’t your goal.”
— Counsellor Shelley

Reason 2: You’re Running on Empty

You can’t build new habits on a depleted foundation. Willpower is not an infinite resource — it is a finite cognitive function that depletes with use.

This is called ego depletion, and it has been studied extensively in social psychology. When your mental reserves are already exhausted from decision fatigue, stress, caregiving, or chronic overextension, even a habit you care about will crumble.²

If you’ve been trying to add a new habit while juggling work, family, aging parents, health challenges, or just the sheer emotional labour of being a woman in midlife — you weren’t failing at the habit. You were doing too much with too little.

Reason 3: You’re Afraid — But Maybe Not of What You Think

This one is the hardest. It’s also the most common.

Sometimes we don’t finish things not because we’re afraid to fail — but because we’re afraid to succeed. Because what happens if you finish the project and it isn’t good enough? What happens if you lose the weight and you’re still not happy? What happens if you put yourself out there and people see the real you?

The unconscious logic is airtight: if I never finish, I can never be judged.

And so the habit quietly dissolves. Not because of distraction. Because the deeper part of you is keeping you safe.

“What if I try and I fail? So let’s just not try at all.”
— Counsellor Shelley

This is protective. It is also one of the most common barriers to lasting change — and it deserves compassion, not criticism. Safety here is key.

Reason 4: Comparison Is Quietly Sabotaging You

Social media has created a culture where we have curated, highlight-reel access to other people’s discipline, productivity, and results — without any visibility into their biology, context, resources, or struggles. We compare our insides to everyone else’s outsides.

Research published in the Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology found a direct link between social media use and diminished wellbeing — including increased feelings of inadequacy and self-comparison.³

When you’re constantly measuring yourself against someone else’s morning routine, you lose access to the question that matters: What works for me?

Reason 5: The Wrong Thing at the Wrong Time

Some habits and goals genuinely don’t fit the season you’re in. Not forever — right now. Cyclical living (which we’ll explore more in the next section) teaches us that our capacity, energy, and focus naturally ebb and flow. Trying to sustain a high-output habit during a low-energy season isn’t discipline. It’s a mismatch.

This is not an excuse to avoid growth. It’s an invitation to grow in the direction your life is actually moving.

The Comparison Trap: Why Someone Else’s Routine Is Ruining Yours

Let’s talk about the 5 AM club.

Everywhere you look, someone is telling you that the world’s most successful people wake up before the sun. That if you’re not journaling before dawn, doing your cold plunge, and completing your first workout before most people eat breakfast, you are, by implication, behind.

But here’s the honest truth from a coach who has worked with women across every chronotype, life season, and energy profile: there is no one-size-fits-all time to be a person.

Chronobiology — the study of biological rhythms — tells us that roughly 25% of the population are genuine evening types (night owls), 25% are morning types (larks), and 50% fall somewhere in between.⁴[4]

Forcing yourself to operate against your chronotype doesn’t make you more productive. It makes you more depleted. And depleted people don’t build lasting habits.

I worked with a client — a genuinely brilliant woman in her 50s — who had failed at every morning routine she’d ever tried. Not because she was undisciplined. Because she is a night owl who does her best thinking and creating between 9 PM and midnight. When she finally gave herself permission to design a routine around her actual peak hours, everything shifted.

“I don’t have to be like everybody else. I can still do my exercise when I wake up, whatever time that is. It’s okay because that’s what works for me.”
— Coach Joyce

The invitation here is not to abandon structure. It is to build your structure around YOUR life — not someone else’s.

Cyclical Living: Your Energy Has Seasons

One of the most powerful frameworks I use with clients is cyclical living — the understanding that human energy, focus, and capacity are not constant. They move in cycles.

This is not a metaphor. It is physiology.

Beyond the well-documented hormonal cycles of younger women, research into ultradian rhythms (90-minute cycles of peak and rest throughout the day), infradian rhythms, circadian rhythms, circannual rhythms, even idiosyncratic rhythms show that every human being, regardless of age or hormone status, experiences predictable cycles of higher and lower energy.⁵

When you start a habit on a high-energy day — that day when everything feels possible — and then try to maintain it on a low-energy week, you’re not failing at the habit. You’re failing to account for the cycle.

Cyclical living asks a different set of questions:

• When in my week, month, or year do I tend to have the most creative energy?
• When do I tend to crash, rest, or feel more inward?
• Which of my habits could I build to align with my high-energy periods?
• What would it look like to be gentle with myself during my natural low seasons?

This isn’t an excuse to avoid growth during hard stretches. It’s a strategy for making growth sustainable. Because the only habit that matters is the one you can still do in six months.

Ask not ‘why can’t I be consistent?’ but ‘what season am I in, and what does this season need from me?’

The Role of Fear (The One Nobody Talks About)

We talk a lot about the fear of failure. We don’t talk nearly enough about the fear of success.

But in my work with clients — and in my own life — the fear of success is often more paralyzing, and more invisible.

Think about it for a moment. If you actually finish the thing — the project, the course, the health goal — what happens? What does that mean for your identity? For your relationships? For the expectations people will have of you?

What if you finish it and people see you clearly, and still find you lacking?

These are not irrational fears. They are deeply human fears. And they are especially prevalent among women who have spent decades shrinking, accommodating, and prioritizing everyone else’s vision of who they should be.

Brené Brown’s research on vulnerability and shame shows that the fear of being “too much” or “not enough” are two sides of the same coin — and that they frequently operate below the level of conscious awareness, shaping behaviour in ways we don’t recognize as fear.⁶

When you find yourself repeatedly stopping just before the finish line — or never quite letting yourself get all the way in — it is worth asking: Am I afraid of what’s on the other side of done?

The good news is that awareness is the beginning of change. You don’t have to eliminate the fear to move forward. You just have to name it.

A Coaching Prompt

The ADHD Connection: When Biology Is the Missing Piece

I want to share something that doesn’t come up often enough in conversations about follow-through and habits: the possibility that for some women, the pattern of starting and abandoning things has a neurological component.

ADHD — Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder — is chronically underdiagnosed in women and girls, in large part because the presentation in women often looks different than the hyperactive little boy stereotype most people picture.

A 2019 study in Frontiers in Psychiatry found that women with ADHD are significantly more likely to be diagnosed later in life — often in their 30s, 40s, or 50s — and that their symptoms frequently manifest as difficulty sustaining attention on tasks they find uninteresting, impulsive novelty-seeking, and a pattern of starting many projects without completing them.⁷

One of our own coaches at BetterYou received her ADHD diagnosis at age 57. Her words were striking:

“My brain works differently. And that’s okay. I can now use strategies and give myself the dopamine hit I need. I’m getting more done now than I ever have — and finishing things.
It’s exhausting, but it’s finally starting to work.”
— Coach Joyce

I share this not to suggest that everyone who struggles with follow-through has ADHD. That would be an irresponsible overreach. But I do want to name it, because if this pattern has been present across your entire life, if no amount of systems, accountability, or motivation seems to help long-term, it may be worth having a conversation with your health practitioner.

You deserve to understand your own brain. And you deserve to make informed choices — about support, strategies, and yes, medication if that’s appropriate for you — without shame.

There is no one right answer. There is only what is right for you.

What Actually Works: A Framework for Following Through

Now that we’ve looked honestly at why the old approach wasn’t working, let’s talk about what does.

This is not a productivity system. It is not a 30-day challenge. It is a way of relating to yourself and your goals that makes follow-through not just possible, but sustainable.

Step 1: Check the Source — Is This Actually Your Goal?

Before you commit to any habit or change, ask yourself one honest question:

Is this what I actually want, or is this what I think I should want?

There is no wrong answer. But there is a costly one — and that’s spending months or years chasing a goal that was never truly yours.

Your goal should feel like something you’re moving toward, not something you’re trying to be worthy of.

Step 2: Check Your Cup — What Do You Actually Have?

New habits require capacity. Before you commit to a practice, honestly assess your current energy reserves.

Are you in a season of high output or recovery? Are you sleeping? Are you supported? Are you dealing with something hard that nobody can see?

If your cup is empty, the first habit to build is refilling it. Everything else comes after.

Step 3: Start Smaller Than You Think You Should

James Clear’s research on atomic habits⁸ and BJ Fogg’s Tiny Habits methodology⁹ both point to the same conclusion: the habits that stick are the ones that feel almost embarrassingly easy at the start. Not because easy is the goal — but because consistency is the goal, and consistency requires a foundation that doesn’t collapse under its own weight.

If you love journaling but can’t sustain it, try one sentence a day. Not three pages. One sentence. Build the identity of being someone who journals before you build the volume.

Step 4: Design It to Fit You — Not Someone Else

This is where creativity comes in. If you don’t like writing, a journal doesn’t have to be written. It can be a voice memo. A video diary. A single drawn image. A text to yourself.

The form is not sacred. The practice is.

Ask yourself: What would this look like if it were built around how I actually am, not how I think I should be?

Step 5: Stay Curious, Not Judgmental

When you stop — and you will stop sometimes — treat it as data, not evidence of failure.

What happened? Was the timing wrong? Was the goal not truly yours? Were you running on empty? Was fear getting in the way?

Curiosity is the bridge between quitting and understanding yourself. And understanding yourself is the foundation of every lasting change.

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Self-Compassion Is Not a Consolation Prize

We need to talk about self-compassion — because in our culture, it’s often misunderstood as giving up, making excuses, or lowering your standards. It is none of those things.

Dr. Kristin Neff, a pioneering researcher at the University of Texas and author of Self-Compassion: The Proven Power of Being Kind to Yourself, has shown in multiple studies that self-compassion is more strongly associated with motivation, resilience, and long-term wellbeing than self-criticism is — and that it is not associated with complacency.¹⁰

In other words: being kind to yourself when you struggle is not how you stay stuck. It’s how you get unstuck.

Self-compassion looks like:

• Meeting yourself where you actually are — not where you think you should be
• Acknowledging that stopping doesn’t make you a quitter; it makes you human
• Recognizing that the people who love you want you to be happy — not to perform consistency for their approval
• Giving yourself the same grace you would give a friend who came to you struggling

Something I come back to often with clients is this: What do you want most for the people you love? Almost universally, the answer is: I want them to be happy. The people who truly love you want the same for you.

“The people that truly are our people — they want us to be happy. Even if it’s just the joy of the journey and we never actually get there.”
— Counsellor Shelley

The Invitation Underneath Every Quit

Here is the reframe that has changed things for so many women I’ve worked with:

Every time you stop something — every time you abandon a habit, a goal, a plan — it is not the end of a story. It is the beginning of a question.

What just happened? What does this stopping tell me about what I actually need? What does it tell me about what I’m afraid of? What would it look like to try again differently — or to let this one go for good?

The women I’ve watched transform their lives didn’t do it by finally finding the discipline to power through. They did it by getting curious about why they kept stopping. They turned their pattern into a practice of self-understanding. And that self-understanding became the foundation of everything that actually stuck.

Coach Joyce put it this way after her own five-year journey of rebuilding: “This is probably the most present and happiest I’ve been — inside, anyways. I wish I would have done this years ago.”

And my response was one I remind myself about often:

“The best time to plant a tree was 10 years ago. The next best time is today.”

You haven’t missed your window. You are not behind. Every single thing you’ve started and stopped has taught you something about yourself — if you’re willing to look at it that way.

Your quit pattern is not evidence of who you are. It’s an invitation to discover who you’re becoming.

Where to Go From Here

If this article landed — if some part of it felt like it was written for you — here’s what I want to offer you.

You don’t need to figure all of this out alone. And you don’t have to do the next scary thing by yourself.

A few ways we can keep going together:

Join us every Thursday for a free Coffee Chat on YouTube and Facebook at 4:30 PM Pacific / 7:30 PM Eastern. Just bring yourself. We’ll talk through whatever is sitting on your heart — this episode, your own patterns, or whatever else needs space that week.

Read and watch the rest of The Better You Show. Every episode is built around the real conversations women in midlife are having — the ones that usually only happen in the car or in the quiet hours when everyone else is asleep. You’ll find episodes on abundance mindset, midlife identity, second chapters, and more.

Subscribe to The Better You Letter (sign up below) for weekly insights, real talk, and the kind of conversation that reminds you: you are not alone in this.

Book a free discovery call if you’re ready to talk about what’s actually going on and whether coaching with our team is the right next step for you. There is no pressure, no sales pitch. Just a real conversation.

Whatever you do next, I want to leave you with the thing I say at the end of every episode:

Always remember — you matter. Please take care.

Before You Go: Your 3-Question Follow-Through Check

The next time you’re about to start (or stop) something, run these three questions first:

1. Is this actually my goal — or am I chasing someone else’s idea of what I should be doing?
2. Do I have the capacity for this right now — or am I adding this to an already-empty cup?
3. Is there something I’m afraid of underneath this pattern — failure, success, or being truly seen?

You don’t need to have the answers immediately. The asking is enough to begin.

Sources & Further Reading

These references support the evidence-based claims throughout this article. We cite original research wherever possible.

1. Lally, P., van Jaarsveld, C. H., Potts, H. W., & Wardle, J. (2010). How are habits formed: Modelling habit formation in the real world. European Journal of Social Psychology, 40(6), 998–1009. https://doi.org/10.1002/ejsp.674 ↩︎
2. Baumeister, R. F., Bratslavsky, E., Muraven, M., & Tice, D. M. (1998). Ego depletion: Is the active self a limited resource? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 74(5), 1252–1265. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.74.5.1252 ↩︎
3. Twenge, J. M., & Campbell, W. K. (2019). Media use is linked to lower psychological well-being: Evidence from three datasets. Psychiatric Quarterly, 90(2), 311–331. See also: Hunt, M. G., et al. (2018). No more FOMO: Limiting social media decreases loneliness and depression. Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, 37(10), 751–768. ↩︎
4. Roenneberg, T., Wirz-Justice, A., & Merrow, M. (2003). Life between clocks: Daily temporal patterns of human chronotypes. Journal of Biological Rhythms, 18(1), 80–90. https://doi.org/10.1177/0748730402239679 ↩︎
5. Kleitman, N. (1982). Basic rest-activity cycle — 22 years later. Sleep, 5(4), 311–317. See also: Peretz Lavie’s research on ultradian rhythms and performance cycles. ↩︎
6. Brown, B. (2010). The Gifts of Imperfection. Hazelden Publishing. See also Brown’s TED Talk ‘The Power of Vulnerability’ (2010), viewed over 60 million times. ↩︎
7. Nadeau, K. G., Littman, E. B., & Quinn, P. O. (2015). Understanding Girls with ADHD. Advantage Books. Also: Holthe, M. E. G., & Langvik, E. (2017). The strives, struggles, and successes of women diagnosed with ADHD as adults. SAGE Open. https://doi.org/10.1177/2158244017701799 ↩︎
8. Clear, J. (2018). Atomic Habits: An Easy and Proven Way to Build Good Habits and Break Bad Ones. Avery/Penguin Random House. ↩︎
9. Fogg, B. J. (2019). Tiny Habits: The Small Changes That Change Everything. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. ↩︎
10. Neff, K. D. (2011). Self-Compassion: The Proven Power of Being Kind to Yourself. William Morrow. See also Neff’s self-compassion research database at https://self-compassion.org/the-research/ ↩︎

About the BetterYou Coaches

This article draws on a real conversation between five coaches at BetterYou.coach — a coaching network dedicated to helping women thrive as their version of a better self.

• Coach Doris Efford  (Host): Known as the Chaos Calmer, Doris is a Life Alignment Coach at BetterYou.coach, helping busy women create order, calm, and clarity in their lives——one phase-at-a-time.
• Counsellor Shelley McInroy: Shelley is a Registered Therapeutic Counsellor (RTC, ACCT) and Mental Wellness Coach at BetterYou.coach, offering a gentle, trauma-informed space to support women through anxiety, grief, burnout, and life transitions.
• Coach Tiffany Bayne: Tiffany (CLC, CHT, RSW) is a Mindset Coach and Certified Clinical Hypnotherapist at BetterYou.coach who helps women break through self-doubt and limiting belief blocks.
• Coach Joyce Erickson: Is known as the Happiness Igniter — a Happiness and Harmony Coach, Joyce helps women rediscover joy, rebuild presence, and bring lightness back into their everyday lives.
• Coach Sarah Rajkumar: is BetterYou.coach’s Transformational Leadership Coach. Sarah helps women step boldly into leadership and build businesses aligned with their purpose — through her signature Leadership with Love™ method.

Disclaimer

BetterYou.coach is a coaching network that matches people with their next right coach. We believe you’re not broken, you’re just human. And sometimes humans need support to thrive.
The Better You Show and any content posted by BetterYou.coach, Doris Efford, and/or any agents of BetterYou.coach is presented solely for general informational, educational, and  entertainment purposes. The use of information from the aforementioned sources or materials linked is at the user’s own risk. It is not intended as a substitute for the advice of any professional and/or individualized advice. Users should not disregard or delay in obtaining professional advice for their individual condition or situation.

For personalized coaching, contact BetterYou.coach