The consistency trap: why women need to stop living by male biology
The truth about a system built to bankrupt your energy and keep you struggling
A couple of weeks ago, the following Note popped up in my feed from the brilliant
over at Soma Healing:As a wildly inconsistent ADHDer currently emerging into the sunny uplands of menopause, this stopped me dead in my scroll. It crystallised something I’ve been wondering about for years:
Why do I feel so enraged when men tell me the secret to success is consistency, discipline, self-denial, routine?
Yes, it’s always annoying to be told what’s best for you. And yes, they are particularly annoying men doing the telling: the likes of Alex Hormozi, Tim Ferriss, Jocko Willink and Jordan bloody Peterson.
But almost nothing they say winds me up quite as much as their obsession with consistency. Once, trapped in someone else’s car, I was forced to listen to Tim Ferriss and Andrew Huberman discuss their daily body building routines for over two hours (that’s another thing – why do these men all have such extraordinarily long podcasts?). I’m still angry about it, even now.
So what’s with this rage? And is it just me that finds it almost impossible to achieve consistency?
Most months I’ll have a good run of days where everything clicks: ideas flow, and work feels energising rather than draining.
But there’ll also be days where I can barely string a coherent sentence together. My brain feels like cotton wool. The same tasks that felt effortless yesterday now seem impossibly overwhelming.
How about you? Does any of this sound familiar?
Here's what I used to think: I'm useless. I’m inconsistent. I lack discipline. If I could just get my act together and show up the same way every day, I'd finally be successful.
But here's what I now realise: we are all trying to force our biology into a system designed for someone else entirely.
The 24-hour lie that keeps women stuck
Every productivity guru, business coach, and self-help book will tell you the same thing: consistency is key. Show up every day. Do the work. Follow the same routine. Build habits that compound.
This advice sounds reasonable until you realise it's built on a fundamental assumption: that everyone operates on the same 24-hour rhythm.
But here's what they omit to tell you: that rhythm is male.
Men's hormonal cycles run on roughly 24 hours. Testosterone peaks in the morning, dips throughout the day, resets overnight. Their energy, focus, and even mood follow predictable daily patterns. The entire modern productivity industrial complex – from Tim Ferriss's biohacking protocols to Silicon Valley's optimisation obsession – is built around this male circadian rhythm.
Women run on a completely different operating system.
Our primary cycle isn't 24 hours: it's approximately 28 days. The menstrual cycle profoundly affects mood, behaviour, cognition, physical performance, sleep, and libido, with significant variation across its phases. We have weeks when we're absolutely on fire, knocking everything out of the park. And we have weeks when we're naturally more inward, reflective, processing. This pattern seems to continue even in menopause, at least for a number of years.
This isn't a bug in our system. It's a feature.
But, living in a system built by men for men, we've been taught to see it as a failure.
When being female is called a “disorder” or a “syndrome”
When women can't maintain the same daily output as men, society pathologises us.
Can't maintain consistent energy levels? Must be thyroid issues, anaemia, or other deficiencies.
Don't want sex as much as your partner? Female sexual dysfunction disorder: here's some "female Viagra" to fix you.
Feeling more emotional during certain weeks? PMS is clearly the problem, not the expectation that we should feel exactly the same every single day.
Take sexual desire. The invention of Female Sexual Interest and Arousal Disorder (SIAD) perfectly illustrates how society sees everything through the lens of male biology. We may not be permanently horny like men, but we are consistent if you tune in: most of us have a surge in libido once a month after we ovulate. What's consistent for a woman is having a few days when we feel much more open to sex and pleasure, then other times when we literally feel like screaming at anyone who tries to come near us.
That's not illogical: our system is saying "you're getting ready to shed" or "there may be a fertilised egg trying to implant." There's a perfectly valid biological reason for sometimes wanting to punch your partner on the nose when they get all lovey-dovey. But society has convinced most women that there's something wrong with us if we're not aroused at the drop of a hat at any given time.
The system also rolls its eyes when it sees women use PMS, maternity and perimenopause as an “excuse” to “slack off." Look at how working mothers are treated in the UK. When my friends had children and put in requests for flexible working hours (not even wanting days off, just wanting to start and finish work earlier), the response was: "No, we can't do that. It's impossible for your job function to work if you don't fit into our system."
Obviously, as mothers with children, especially when you're lactating, when you're being regularly woken up in the middle of the night (even with a supportive partner), your body is not on that 9-to-5 schedule anymore. Your biology pulls rank.
But what happened to most of my female friends? Their company asserted dominance over their biology. Mostly, they got demoted. They had to take on worse-paid, more boring, menial jobs that weren't at all suited to their level of seniority or competence. The system basically said: "You're useless. We have no use for you if you can't clock in and clock off and be available consistently at all the hours we specify. We can’t legally sack you, but you can go back to being an intern for all we care."
Just like a new car losing a chunk of its value once it's driven off the forecourt, women experience a huge decline in perceived and actual value the minute they give birth.
But here's the really insidious part: because motherhood gets framed as a personal choice, the problem also gets framed as personal – not systemic.
Because you have chosen to prioritise motherhood over your career, you have to put up with the consequences of your choice. It's your problem that your career is being interrupted. Your problem that you're getting demoted. On your silly little head be it, if you’re going to be selfish and go around having kids like that!
The pushback is that Western women are increasingly choosing not to have children, because they can see the impossible bind they're being put in. It's not just a double bind: it's a triple bind.
First: You're going to have to work harder than men in your paid job to prove you're serious about your career.
Second: You'll do a massive amount of unpaid, invisible labour - childcare, eldercare, emotional labour, household management - but we'll condition you to do it unconsciously and call it “naturally” your job.
Third: Here's when things get really crazy - when your caring duties really ramp up, you still won't be able to afford to stop doing your paid work. Yet if you complain about it or make it known that you have additional responsibilities outside of work, we will punish you for it.
So you're trapped: work harder than men + do all the unpaid work + get penalised if you show any signs of breaking when the unpaid work becomes overwhelming.
Then companies say: 'Look, you've got to toe the line. We need you back in the office 9-to-5 (or longer, usually), and you're just going to fit everything else around that. But hey, we'll put on a yoga class every Monday to help you chill out and deal with the stress.'
It's complete bullshit. And it's built on a foundation that's been so normalised, most of us don't even SEE it anymore.
Remember that $11 trillion worth of work we're doing for free?
Here's what we need to keep reminding ourselves of: women collectively perform at least $11 trillion worth of unpaid labour every year. This is the foundation capitalism is built on.
We make it possible for society to continue and companies to flourish because the system has taken all the work of day-to-day living - the caring, the child-raising, looking after the sick and elderly - allocated it to women, labelled it "natural", and therefore not something anyone should expect to get paid for.
If you're doing two to four hours of unpaid labour daily on top of your paid work, where exactly are you supposed to find time for personal development, pleasure or even just a much-needed nap?
This is why one of the top barriers women have to working with us isn't price, it's time: "I'd really love to do this, but I just don't have the time right now." They're not making excuses, either. Women genuinely don't have time as long as they're still trying to make the system work for them - believing there's some magical way to “have it all” if only they can find the right way of rearranging things, or working a bit harder, and eventually it'll all come good.
As long as we think like that, we're stuck in this overload, barely functioning, barely keeping our heads above water.
Here's the pattern we see constantly: women try to squeeze personal and business development into their already overloaded lives. They start strong, carving out time for consistent daily action on their vision. But they haven't actually made space for it - they've just added it on top of everything else. Eventually, the relentless pace becomes overwhelming: "I've managed to keep this up for X weeks, but I need a rest. I'll come back to it when I’ve got my energy back, honest."
But without a planned structure for re-engagement, they lose all the momentum they'd worked so hard to build. One step forward, two steps back. Stuck.
Nobody is riding to women's rescue here. Why would they? The system benefits massively from us doing all this work. We're the only ones who can put our foot down and change things.
But first, we need to understand what's been stopping us from seeing our situation clearly.
The male lens that limits our imagination
Here's patriarchy's greatest trick: limiting our imagination about what's possible.
If we can't even imagine it, we're never going to desire it, create it, experience it.
We talk about the male gaze and how we've internalised it: looking at ourselves through male eyes, appraising whether we meet the beauty standard. Are we smooth and wrinkle-free? Do we have a pleasing smile? Are our breasts perky enough?
But patriarchy goes much deeper than the male gaze focused on appearance. It's a male lens: an invisible framework through which we see everything. As
shows in Invisible Women, we constantly take the male experience as the universal standard for everyone. And when we always look at the world through the male lens, it limits what we can imagine for ourselves as women.You can hear this limitation whenever you start a conversation about alternative ways of organising work. Recently, I posted on LinkedIn about experimenting with a three-to-five-hour working day. The response was incredulity and derision, not just from men but from women too. "That's never going to work!" "Don't be so ridiculous!" “That’s just wishful thinking!”
But seriously, what IS the alternative? Even if we ditch a lot of the unpaid work (which let’s face it, we're never going to stop doing entirely), we still need time for ourselves – and where will that time come from?
And the fact is, it's impossible to work eight plus hours a day, then start your second and third unpaid jobs, then find time for basic self-care, without burning out
Evidence that alternatives are possible
When you mention alternatives to patriarchal systems, that limiting response is equally predictable: "But that's primitive! Patriarchy and capitalism were natural evolutions as society became more advanced. We can't go backwards!"
This is complete nonsense, and the archaeological evidence proves it.
Take Çatalhöyük in modern-day Turkey, one of the world's earliest known cities, flourishing around 7,400 BCE. For over a thousand years, this sophisticated urban centre housed up to 10,000 people with no evidence of hierarchical rule, warfare, or gender inequality. Archaeological findings show shared labour, communal decision-making, and egalitarian resource distribution. Women held significant religious and social roles. The city had advanced architecture, art, trade networks, and agricultural innovation.
This wasn't a "primitive" society that needed patriarchy to civilise it. It was a complex, thriving civilisation that organised itself around completely different principles for over a millennium.
The !Kung San of Southern Africa traditionally work in bursts: periods of intense activity followed by communal rest and socialising. There's no expectation of daily productivity, no guilt about natural rhythms. Their economic system is so effective that they typically work only 15-20 hours per week to meet all their needs, leaving ample time for social bonding, creativity, and cultural practices.
The Mosuo of China have maintained their matrilineal practices for over a thousand years. Women hold central roles in decision-making, property passes through the female line, and flexible work roles adapt to community needs rather than rigid schedules. They show remarkably low rates of domestic violence and mental health issues compared to patriarchal societies.
None of these are romantic fantasies about a "golden age." They're evidence that the 24-hour grind, the masculine model of constant availability, the pathologising of cyclical rhythms: none of this is natural or inevitable. It's a recent historical development we've been taught to see as “progressive”.
These examples prove different ways of organising life and work aren't just possible - they've worked in the past and in the present, sometimes for very long periods of time, with benefits to both men and women. So now the question becomes: how do we build from this inspiration, and start thinking differently ourselves?
Redefining consistency through a female lens
This isn't about abandoning consistency or discipline. It's about imagining what it might look like to be consistent over a 28-day cycle, instead of forcing ourselves into 24-hour patterns that don't match our biology.
I know this feels radical, or even downright weird, because we're just not used to thinking this way. It stretches the limits of our imagination. But what if consistency meant working with our natural monthly patterns instead of against them?
What might that look like? Here's one way we might think about it:
Week 1 (Inner Spring): A week devoted to ideas and ideation. Fresh starts, new projects, planning and visioning. Brainstorming and big-picture thinking. The perfect time for starting longer projects or mapping out multi-month strategies.
Week 2 (Inner Summer): Peak performance time. You're firing on all cylinders. Focused execution, important meetings, challenging tasks. This is when you're naturally most visible and communicative. Ideal for difficult conversations, talks and presentations, or pushing through complex work that requires maximum mental energy.
Week 3 (Inner Autumn): Your inner perfectionist emerges. Time to review, refine, complete. You naturally want to edit, give feedback, and wrap up whatever phase of work you're in. Attention to detail peaks here. Great for quality control and finalising deliverables.
Week 4 (Inner Winter): Your mind wants to go inward. Integration, rest, reflection. Planning for the next cycle, processing what you've learned, shedding what’s not needed, and revisiting your strategic thinking. Not a "lost" week: a necessary one for letting ideas percolate and preparing for the next surge of energy.
Of course, not every project fits neatly into three weeks. But you could align the phases of longer projects with your natural energy cycles. You might even organise this around actual seasons rather than the arbitrary Gregorian calendar that forces us to make "fresh starts" on 1st January - surely the most idiotic timing possible for new beginnings.
This IS consistency, just on a timeframe that works with female biology instead of against it. Picture never having to apologise for low energy days because they're expected and built into your calendar.
What would it feel like to stop fighting your natural rhythms and start working with them instead?
Building our own experiments
Of course, there's no blueprint to follow here. We have to figure this out for ourselves, try things out, and see what works.
That's exactly what Naz and I are starting to experiment with in our business: three weeks of focused work followed by one week of integration.
During work weeks, we're fully engaged: creating, coaching, supporting clients, driving projects forward. During integration weeks, we step back. It allows us to see the bigger picture, rather than constantly working inside our business. We reflect on what we've learned and spot the dropped balls and missed opportunities while there's still time to do something about them. We can circle back on opportunities we want to explore, or deal with the dropped balls instead of just ploughing on regardless. We let ideas germinate in the quieter days, and rest.
The resistance we felt initially to this experiment was intense. Our conditioning runs deep: productive people don't take breaks. Successful businesses don't slow down. What will people think? Will everything fall apart?
But we’re discovering that integration weeks aren't where productivity goes to die. They're where breakthroughs happen. When you stop pushing and allow yourself to simply be, your brain makes connections you couldn't see when grinding away relentlessly. It solves problems you'd been wrestling with for weeks.
The research supports this: our ability for deep work is limited to about four hours a day. Companies experimenting with four-day work weeks report higher productivity, less burnout, and greater gender equity. So why not play around with different ways of working?
We're not trying to figure it all out upfront and roll out a universal system. We're experimenting, learning, adapting. This is consistency over longer cycles, versus exhausting daily sameness.
And of course, individual experiments are just the beginning. Bigger shifts become possible when we start reimagining collectively.
What happens when women collectively say "enough"
What if we stopped playing by these rules altogether? What if the majority of women decided to withdraw our labour until the system acknowledges its dependence on us?
History shows exactly what happens when women down tools. In 1975, nearly every woman in Iceland stopped work for one day. Not just their paid jobs: everything. No cooking, cleaning, childcare, emotional labour. The entire country ground to a halt. Banks closed. Fathers had to bring children to work. That single day led directly to landmark gender equality legislation.
Women have so much more power than we think.
But here's a crucial point: the goal is not to replace one broken universal system with another universal system. That's the patriarchal way: figure it all out upfront, formalise it into structure, roll it out so everyone's doing exactly the same thing.
It doesn't work that way. One size does not fit all.
What we need are smaller groups of us collectively reimagining and redesigning working life around our actual rhythms. Working out how we can be consistent over longer periods of time. As adrienne maree brown shows us in Emergent Strategy and Pleasure Activism, seemingly small actions can have massive effects. Small groups experimenting with different ways of working, then sharing what works, adapting, evolving.
We don't need to have it all sorted out. What we need is the courage to experiment with working in alignment with our biology and see what emerges.
Imagine if women globally decided to work only during our high-energy weeks, and integrate and rest during our natural low-energy periods. Imagine if we refused to apologise for our cyclical nature and instead demanded that workplaces accommodate it. The system would have to adapt, because it literally cannot function without us.
But collective action starts with individual awareness. Once enough of us stop trying to fit into systems designed for someone else's biology, we reach a tipping point where change becomes inevitable.
Starting your own revolution
You don't need to wait for capitalism to fall to start experimenting with what consistency might look like through a female lens, rather than the day-by-day grind you've been conditioned to accept.
Track your energy patterns. Notice when you naturally feel most creative, most focused, most social, most reflective. Start planning important work for your high-energy times and giving yourself permission to rest during your natural low-energy periods.
Experiment with cycles instead of streaks. Instead of trying to show up exactly the same every day, try showing up consistently over monthly cycles. Three weeks on, one week integration. Plan your biggest launches for when you're naturally at peak energy.
Stop apologising for your rhythms. When you're in a naturally reflective phase, don't treat it like a failure. Communicate it as strategic: "I'm in my planning phase this week" or "I'm focusing on integration, and will be back and ready to engage with you next week."
Find your cyclical community. Connect and/or partner with other women who understand that consistency doesn't have to mean doing the same stuff day-in day-out. Plan collaborative and creative work during your high-energy times, then complement each other during your rest and integration phases.
The real consistency trap
Circling back to Alexandra’s post where we started – this is how our conversation continued:
The biggest lie we've been told is that consistency means showing up exactly the same way every single day. But true consistency (the kind that creates sustainable success and genuine fulfilment) means showing up in alignment with your natural rhythms, month after month, year after year - and continuing to experiment as our bodies change through menopause and beyond, always working with our evolving needs rather than against them.
The system wants you to believe your cyclical nature is a weakness. But what if it's actually your superpower?
The world needs women who work with their biology, not against it. Women who take seriously their need for both intensity and integration. Women who understand that the most profound creativity comes not from always being on, but from allowing ourselves to ebb and flow.
It's time to stop trying to be consistent in a way that's killing us, and start being consistent in a way that brings us alive.
What would change in your life if you stopped trying to fit into rhythms that weren't designed for you?
Start your own revolution. Honour your biology. Reclaim your time.
If you're ready to build a business around your real energy, not hustle anxiety – we have 4 spots currently available on our small group Mastermind.
Join us every Tuesday at 3pm UK / 7am PST / 10am EST to collectively reimagine what your work and life could look like, viewed through a female lens 💃💃💃
The reason men can achieve their vaunted “consistency” is they have wives who take care of them; while also taking care of their cars, their kids, their homes, their pets, their families, their finances, and presumably, themselves. It’s also the reason men are famously unevolved. They trail women by eons of geological time. (That Y chromosome doesn’t seem to be doing them a lot of good, either.) Homo sapiens are the ONLY species, in the history of planet Earth, w the frontal lobes required to create truly great conditions in which everyone could live. Yet, thanks to men, we are instead on a literal path to immolate our own species, every other species, and the entire planet. Women truly ARE the medicine.
Holding ourselves to an artificially constructed standard of consistency also teaches us to disregard our intuition, leaving us without it when we sorely need it more than ever.