How To Look After Your Health When Your Life Falls Apart

Dr. Ruth Machin of “Wise Woman Wellbeing” is here with advice from recent experience:

Holding it together

For Dr. Machin, grief after her father’s death understandably disrupted her previously consistent habits like regular exercise, healthy eating, and 7–8 hours of sleep, leading to poor sleep, reduced appetite, increased cravings, and less movement.

These sorts of things tend to unravel together, because stress and poor sleep raise cortisol and adrenaline levels, increase the hunger hormone ghrelin, and impair decision-making, which in turn drives cravings for high-fat, sugar, and salty foods, thus causing multiple habits to collapse in a chain reaction.

In other words, these habit lapses don’t happen in isolation, but rather stack on top of each other, making it harder to restart, and turning a short disruption into a prolonged break from routines.

• What to not do: the all-or-nothing approach fails because waiting for the “right time” delays action indefinitely, while going all-in sets unrealistic standards that lead to overwhelm and burnout.
• What to do instead: adopting a “minimum viable routine” reframes health as part of your identity by maintaining small, consistent actions even during difficult periods.

The core principle here is that consistency matters more than perfection, especially during challenging times when maintaining anything is more valuable than aiming for ideal habits and ending up crashing and burning instead.

So, she recommends to identify the smallest reasonably possible set of daily actions that support your physical and mental health, and keep them going regardless of circumstances.

This is critical, because maintaining even minimal habits during hard times prevents complete resets, making it easier to return to fuller routines when life stabilizes.

For more on all of this, enjoy:

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Want to learn more?

You might also like:

• How To Keep On Keeping On
• How To Bounce Back After A Setback
• What Grief Does To Your Body (And How To Manage It)

Take care!