Is it normal to feel worse in the first two weeks?

The answer comes in two halves that are almost never handed over together, and which one you hear depends entirely on where you read it.

The reported half. People do describe an early stretch that is worse than what preceded it: arousal gone quiet, libido absent, mood flat, and a general sense of having traded something away for nothing. A qualitative analysis of 104 abstinence journals found exactly that arc — abstinence described as impossible early on, and as attainable once cognitive-behavioural strategies and social support were in place. The word carrying the weight there is early. If your opening weeks are the hardest ones, you are describing what other people described before you.

The measured half. There isn't one. The flatline, which is the name those communities give this stretch, has never been the subject of a formal study — not a weak one, not a contested one, none. Its duration, its causes, how many people get it and whether it signifies anything are all open. The confident day-ranges in circulation were counted by nobody, and the two weeks in your question is the same kind of number: something absorbed rather than something established.

There is also a vocabulary problem worth clearing, because withdrawal is doing two jobs here. In the research it is a measurement component — the main scale identifies problematic use through six of them, salience, mood modification, tolerance, withdrawal, conflict and relapse — and there it means only how you feel when you cannot use. A questionnaire item, not a syndrome with stages. In the forums it means the flat stretch above. Sharing a word makes the second sound as though it has the standing of the first, and it does not.

The part actually worth watching

Not the low mood. What tends to land on top of it. In a preregistered survey of 587 men in rebooting communities, what commonly followed a perceived relapse was shame, worthlessness and sadness — and, in some cases, suicidal thoughts. The same work documented forum cultures hostile in ways that had nothing to do with recovery. A first slip and a flat stretch often turn up in the same fortnight, which makes that the worst possible week to be taking your bearings from a stranger with a day count.

• Feeling flat while changing a long-standing habit is ordinary, widely described, and not a signal that something in you has broken.
• It is not an argument for a stricter regime. Reading a bad week as damage, and damage as grounds for a more extreme version of what you are already doing, is a loop with nothing at the end of it.
• Be selective about what you read while you are in it, for the reason directly above.
• And keep one line clear: a fortnight of not caring about anything is not a stage of quitting. That is depression, it belongs with a doctor rather than a counter, and anything darker than that is not a later problem.

So: worse before better is real as a report and empty as a forecast. Nobody can tell you how long, nobody has checked whether it is universal, and the part you can actually influence is not the mood. It is what you decide it proves about you while it lasts.

Where this comes from

Read the full lesson: The flatline, and what we honestly know →