What If You Have Been Measuring Success All Wrong: Health, Happiness and Meaning as a Different Starting Point
- 2 days ago
- 8 min read
Most women have never consciously chosen the definition of success they are measuring themselves against. It was handed to them. Through education, through culture, through the steady accumulation of messages about what a woman's life, body, career, and home should look like. It started early, and because it rarely gets examined, it just becomes the standard.
The problem is not that the standard is hard to reach. The problem is that it was never a reliable measure of anything that actually matters. Income, job title, dress size, the number on the scale, the car, the postcode, the followers: these are visible, comparable, and almost entirely disconnected from what a life actually feels like. The research is consistent on this. Yet these are still the criteria most women use, often without realising it, to decide whether they are doing well enough.
And the standard is not a single thing. It is everything, all at once. Career and body and home and relationships and parenting and health and appearance, each with its own set of numbers and labels and comparisons. Success, by this definition, is not a destination. It is a condition of meeting all of it, simultaneously, without falling short in any direction. Which means most women are, by their own measure, always somewhere behind.
That constant, largely unconscious measurement has a cost. To how we think about ourselves. To the choices we make and the ones we rule out before we have even considered them. To how we feel when everything on the list feels urgent and there is still not enough of us to go around.
In this article, we look at where that definition of success came from, what the evidence says about what it costs, and what a more grounded starting point for health, happiness, and meaning actually looks like.
Where does the success scorecard come from?
The markers most women use to measure themselves are extrinsic goals: goals oriented toward external validation, status, and appearance rather than toward what a person actually values. Kasser and Ryan (1996) found that the pursuit of financial success, social recognition, and physical appearance as primary goal orientations was consistently associated with lower wellbeing, higher anxiety, and reduced life satisfaction. Goals driven by external approval rather than internal meaning do not produce fulfilment even when they are reached.
The health version follows the same pattern. Weight as a number. Calories counted and tracked. Protein weighed to the gram. Repetitions logged. These are measurable, comparable, and entirely arbitrary as indicators of how someone actually feels. Crocker and Wolfe (2001) found that basing self-evaluation on weight or physical appearance is specifically associated with anxiety, shame, and a reduced sense of autonomy. The number on the scale tells you very little about how you feel in your body. It tells you everything about how you have been taught to assess it.
The scorecard was handed to you. You did not design it. It was never calibrated to you.
What does measuring yourself this way actually cost?
The cost of extrinsic success criteria is not merely that they produce a sense of insufficiency. It is what the ongoing pursuit takes from you.
When self-worth becomes contingent on meeting external standards, a specific kind of psychological pressure takes hold. Crocker and Park (2004) describe what happens when a person's sense of value depends on continued performance against visible markers: chronic anxiety, heightened sensitivity to perceived shortfall, and a relationship with effort driven by threat rather than genuine motivation. The goal stops feeling like something you want and starts feeling like something you cannot afford to miss.
This is the guilt that arrives when the workout does not happen. The self-judgement that surfaces when someone else's career announcement appears on LinkedIn and the comparison is instant and unkind. The worry that runs underneath a full, busy life, regardless of what is actually going well. Festinger (1954) and Vogel and colleagues (2014), connecting upward social comparison to social media use, found that comparing yourself to people who appear to be meeting external criteria more successfully predicts lower self-evaluation and reduced wellbeing. Consistently.
The particular weight of this for women is that the comparison rarely stays in one domain. It runs across professional achievement, physical appearance, parenting, relationships, domestic competence, and how gracefully all of it is being managed at once. Breines and Chen (2012) found that self-criticism in response to perceived inadequacy increased the motivation to avoid rather than to act. The mental load is not only the logistics. It is the constant, running self-assessment against criteria that keep shifting and were never agreed to in the first place.
What if success started with a different question?
Most women have been asked what success looks like for them. The problem is that the question lands inside the same framework that created the scorecard in the first place. A different perspective is needed entirely.
Deci and Ryan's Self-Determination Theory (1985, 2000) identifies three needs that, when met, underpin genuine wellbeing: autonomy, the experience of acting from your own values rather than external pressure; competence, the sense of being effective in the things that matter to you; and relatedness, genuine connection with others. These are not a hierarchy. They are present simultaneously, and most women are navigating conditions that place all three under pressure at once.
A woman managing financial pressure does not stop needing connection. A woman carrying the cognitive weight of her household does not stop needing to feel effective in her work. These needs do not wait their turn.
Which is why a more useful starting point is not to picture what success looks like, but to consider what it would look like from a completely different set of conditions. Not the ones that have been handed to you, but the ones that actually reflect what matters to you.
Explore your own version of success by considering what it would look like if:
Financial security were not a factor.
Physical safety need not be considered.
There were no risk of social exclusion.
The judgement of others carried no consequence.
The needs of those who depend on you were fully met.
The fear of falling short elsewhere were removed.
These are not hypothetical questions. They are an invitation to see what remains when the external pressures and inherited criteria are set aside. What comes back is usually more specific, more honest, and a more useful place to start.
How does a different starting point change things?
Once the question shifts to what actually matters to you, the research on positive psychological functioning offers something more useful than another set of metrics to meet.
Ryff's (1989) research identified six dimensions of positive psychological functioning:
Self-acceptance
Personal growth
Purpose in life
Positive relationships
Environmental mastery
Autonomy.
These are not outcomes to achieve. They are conditions to recognise and move toward. Of these, purpose in life and personal growth are the dimensions most consistently associated with sustained wellbeing across time. Not status. Not the metrics. Meaning, and the sense of moving toward something that is specifically yours.
This is where health, happiness, and meaning stop being three separate goals to manage and become one coherent question: what matters most to me right now, in the life I am actually living?
Once that question has a real answer, the starting point looks different. Bandura (1977) found that the most reliable path to sustained behaviour change begins with a task that is specific, achievable, and meaningful to the person doing it. Close enough to what actually matters to feel worth doing. That is a very different brief to the one most women have been working from.
Lyubomirsky, Sheldon, and Schkade (2005) make a distinction that is worth holding onto. Circumstantial changes, a new job, a new home, a different number on the scale, produce short-term shifts. Intentional, values-aligned activity produces something more durable, because it is connected to something real.
Health and happiness built from that starting point look entirely different from health and happiness pursued as performance metrics. One is something you are always behind on. The other is something you are already experiencing or are already moving toward.
What This Article Has Covered
The definition of success most women measure themselves against was not chosen. It was handed to them through culture, education, and the accumulation of external messages about what a woman's life should look like across every domain at once. It is built from visible markers: income, title, appearance, numbers that others can see and compare. And it is not a single standard to meet but an all-encompassing one, which means the measurement is constant and the sense of being somewhere behind it rarely lifts.
Kasser and Ryan's research on extrinsic goal pursuit, and Crocker and Park's work on contingent self-worth, show that this kind of measurement produces anxiety, self-judgement, and social comparison rather than the motivation or satisfaction it promises. The cost is not in reaching or not reaching the goal. It is in using it as the measure at all.
Deci and Ryan's Self-Determination Theory offers a more grounded framework: three needs, present simultaneously, that when threatened make genuine choice and genuine wellbeing harder to access. Autonomy, competence, and relatedness are not a ladder. They are the conditions under which a life can feel like yours. And when the starting point shifts from what does success look like to what actually matters to me, the answers that come back are more specific, more honest, and built on something real.
Ryff's research on purpose and personal growth, and Bandura's work on meaningful, achievable starting points, point in the same direction. Not optimisation. Not a complete overhaul. A starting point that is close enough to what you actually value to be worth doing.
Health, happiness, and meaning are not found in the numbers or the labels. They are the experience of a life that is aligned to your values, your circumstances, and what genuinely matters to you.
Explore This Topic Further
If you want a structured, supportive space to apply these ideas in practice, the Women's Wellbeing Lab offers psychology-informed tools designed to support improved wellbeing in real-life conditions.
Inside the Lab, you'll find psychology-informed tools designed to help you understand what's driving how you feel, organise competing demands, and respond with intention rather than reaction.
Bring this knowledge to your decision-making and coaching sessions to make faster progress toward your goals.
References
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