Relapse: Why Doesn’t a Fall Mean You’re Back to Square One?

Someone promised himself he’d get his temper under control.

He tried for months, then blew up on a hard day.

Someone else committed to a new habit, then slipped back into the old one for two or three days.

And suddenly the verdicts begin:

“I’m a failure.”

“I’ll never change.”

“I’m back to square one.”

But is that really true?

You haven’t gone back to square one.

You’ve arrived at new information.

Because a relapse isn’t proof of a weak character. More often, it’s proof of a gap in the plan.

A Lapse or a Relapse?

Psychologist Alan Marlatt developed a model for understanding what happens after a person decides to stop a behavior. It’s known as relapse prevention.

The model grew out of treating alcohol addiction, but its logic helps us understand any change we’re trying to stick with: losing our temper, smoking, staying up late, scrolling on our phones for hours.

Its most important part is a simple distinction:

• Lapse: the first time you go back to the old behavior.
• Relapse: going back to it completely, or giving up on your goal.

A lapse raises the chance of a relapse, yes. But, as an overview of this model published in 1999 explains, moving from a lapse to a relapse isn’t inevitable.

A student decided to stop using her phone before bed, and she stuck with it for three weeks. Then exams came, and she went back to it for a whole week. That’s a lapse.

A relapse is when she tells herself: “Forget it, it’s no use,” and drops the goal altogether.

How Does a Fall Turn into an Identity?

Marlatt described a phenomenon he called the abstinence violation effect: our emotional reaction to a lapse, and the explanation we give for it.

If you explain the lapse with a cause that’s internal, stable and global, like “I have no willpower, and I’ll never change,” you become more likely to give up on your goal entirely. And the guilt that comes with that explanation can drive you back to the same behavior, just to escape the feeling.

But if you explain it as not being able to handle one specific situation, you open a door to learning and to planning for next time.

That’s the difference between two voices we know well:

• Healthy regret says: “Something here needs fixing.”
• Beating yourself up says: “I’m the problem.”

The first points you to the gap; the second convinces you there’s no point looking for it. And that’s where the line between learning and falling apart gets lost.

The problem isn’t the fall itself. It’s when the fall becomes an identity.

Every Relapse Has a Story Behind It

A relapse rarely comes out of nowhere.

Before it, there’s usually built-up stress, exhaustion, boredom, loneliness, or a moment of losing control. Then comes the behavior.

Marlatt’s model calls these moments high-risk situations, and the most common are:

• Negative emotions: like anger, anxiety, frustration and boredom, which are the most closely linked to relapse.
• Conflicts with other people: like a fight with a family member. In one of Marlatt’s analyses, negative emotions and conflicts together accounted for more than half of relapses.
• Social pressure: direct, like being offered the thing, and indirect, like seeing everyone around you doing it.

The model adds two subtler ideas:

• Apparently irrelevant decisions: small choices that bring you closer to the risky situation without your noticing, like someone trying to stay away from sweets who buys a big box “for guests.”
• Imbalance: when the “shoulds” in your day outweigh the “wants,” the voice that says “I deserve this” gets louder.

Imagine an employee who quit smoking two months ago. After a fight with his manager and a long day without a break, he stops by the corner shop “just to buy some water.”

The relapse didn’t start the moment he lit the cigarette. It started several steps earlier.

What Does Research Say About a Missed Day?

Many people picture a habit as a chain: if one link breaks, the whole thing falls apart.

But a study by Phillippa Lally and colleagues at University College London says otherwise. It began with 96 volunteers, each of whom chose a healthy behavior to repeat every day for twelve weeks.

On average, it took them 66 days for the behavior to become automatic, with big differences from one person to the next: anywhere from 18 days to a period estimated at 254 days.

Most importantly: missing it once had no real effect on forming the habit.

But in fairness, we have to finish the story: those who missed more often, even if the misses were spread out, ended up with a lower level of automaticity.

So a single lapse isn’t the end of the road, but repeated lapses with no review do leave a mark.

Isn’t Forgiving Yourself Just Letting Yourself Off the Hook?

This is the most common misunderstanding. We’re afraid that if we aren’t hard on ourselves, we’ll go easy and do it again.

The research points the other way. In four experiments published by Juliana Breines and Serena Chen in 2012, some participants were asked to look at a mistake they had made, or a weakness they had, with self-compassion, meaning with understanding and kindness instead of harshness.

Compared with the comparison groups, these participants showed more motivation to make amends and avoid repeating the mistake, spent more time studying after failing a test, and were more convinced that their weakness could change.

The experiments were done with university students, and most of them measured motivation, not long-term behavior. But they tell us something important: being kind to yourself doesn’t cancel your responsibility; it makes carrying it possible.

And there’s a limit that needs saying clearly: if the relapse is into an addiction, or into a behavior that hurts you or others, getting help from a professional isn’t weakness. It’s part of the plan.

How Do You Read Your Relapse Instead of Putting Yourself on Trial?

After any relapse, don’t ask: “Why am I like this?”

Ask these four questions instead:

1. What feeling came before it?

   Example: “Before I yelled at my brother, I felt insulted by something I heard at work.”

2. What was the first sign I ignored?

   Example: “I noticed I’d been tense since noon, and told myself: it’s nothing.”

3. What small thing brought me closer to it?

   Example: “I left my phone next to the bed instead of putting it in another room.”

4. What one change will I try next time?

   Example: phrase it as “If… then…”: “If I get home tired after ten, then I’ll leave my phone in the kitchen before I sit down.”
   

A Simpler Mental Model

• A lapse isn’t a relapse, and a relapse isn’t inevitable.
• A fall is an event, not an identity.
• Every relapse has a story behind it: a feeling, a signal, and a small step.
• Being hard on yourself doesn’t stop you from repeating it; understanding does.

Sometimes a relapse doesn’t mean everything is lost.

Sometimes it only means…

that the plan was incomplete.

And an incomplete plan doesn’t get thrown away.

It gets completed.

If you fall this week, answer just one question: what feeling came before the fall?

Further Reading

• Relapse Prevention: An Overview of Marlatt's Cognitive-Behavioral Model — Larimer, Palmer & Marlatt, Alcohol Research & Health, 1999: A clear overview of the model: the difference between a lapse and a relapse, the abstinence violation effect, and high-risk situations.
• How long does it take to form a habit? — UCL News, 2009: The university’s news story on Lally’s study, and what it found about missing a single opportunity.
• How to form a habit — The British Psychological Society, 2010: More detail on the same study: the number of participants, the average time, and the effect of repeated misses.
• Self-compassion increases self-improvement motivation — Breines & Chen, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 2012: The four experiments that found self-compassion strengthens the motivation to improve instead of weakening it.