Is the Soft Girl Era Making Us Soft?

There's a video circulating that I haven't been able to stop thinking about. It's a critique of the "soft girl era" — the aesthetic of candles, nervous system regulation, protecting your peace, saying no, slow mornings, and the general cultural mandate to do less of anything that might cause discomfort.

And the question it asks is a good one: in our collective rush to calm down, are we losing something?

I'll be honest. I've been fully enrolled. I traded HIIT for Pilates. I drink my coffee before breakfast in the morning to avoid cortisol spikes. And I do think a lot of it is legitimate — women in particular have spent generations absorbing stress that was never ours to carry, and learning to set it down is not weakness.

But there's a version of this that has gone sideways.

When "protecting your peace" becomes a reason to avoid hard conversations, hard work, hard feelings — when the nervous system becomes a permanent excuse rather than something you're actually healing — that's not wellness. That's avoidance with a better aesthetic, and wellness influencers have gotten very good at making avoidance look like self-respect.

Grit isn't the enemy of healing. Discomfort isn't a nervous system emergency. Some things are supposed to be hard (ahem, parenting), and pushing through them is how you find out what you're made of. The soft era, taken too far, quietly tells women to shrink... just in pastel, with a red light mask on.

We can regulate our nervous systems and still be in the arena. Some of us don't have a choice.