Is edging the same as a relapse?

Edging is the case where a two-box scoreboard breaks, which is why the question comes up constantly and never resolves. Something happened that was neither clearly the thing you quit nor clearly nothing, and a system with only two boxes has to shove it into one.

There is no study on it. Not a weak one, not a mixed one — none. Every confident answer you have read was written by someone working from the same information you have.

What the measurement literature does say is that the count is not the signal. Frequency alone is a poor indicator of problematic use; distress, impaired control and functional impairment are what distinguish it. Problematic use tracks distress better than overall frequency does, and in the largest profile study the people who used frequently without distress and the people who used frequently with it came apart into different groups — it was the distressed group that differed on the mental-health measures.

That turns the question into two you can answer tonight: did my behaviour match what I had decided, and how do I feel about it now. Those are the readings that mean something. "Does it count" is not one of them.

What a brittle definition costs

The definition still matters, because you will rule on it one way or the other, and each ruling has its own failure mode.

• Rule it in, and you have handed the evening a verdict it did not have to carry. After a lapse, attributing it to a permanent personal flaw predicts a full return to the behaviour, and "well, I've broken it now" is that attribution in five words. An ambiguous act ruled into the strictest available category is the cheapest way to trigger it.
• Rule it out, and the counter keeps climbing while a behaviour doing the same job continues with an official exemption. If the honest answer to the control question was no, the number on your screen has started describing someone else.

Neither failure is caused by the act. Both are caused by asking a binary to carry information it cannot hold.

So write the definition in daylight, and make it specific enough that somebody who is not you could apply it. A definition adjudicated mid-urge will be adjudicated by the urge, and the urge finds in its own favour every time.

Then stop treating the ruling as the score. What describes your actual position is whether distress is falling, whether your behaviour is tracking your intention more often than it used to, and how quickly you come back afterwards. On that scoreboard tonight is one data point rather than a verdict, which is both more accurate and considerably easier to survive.

Where this comes from

Read the full lesson: What counts as success →