If I slipped once, is that a relapse? Do I reset to day zero?

The word does a lot of work it was never built for. In the model the term comes from, a lapse is one instance and a relapse is a return to the pattern. The model's central finding is about what happens in between: after a lapse, attributing it to a permanent personal flaw predicts a full return to the behaviour. The lapse is not the hinge. The explanation is.

So "was that a relapse" is really two questions. The first is definitional, and you own it — no study will hand you a threshold. The second is what am I about to conclude about myself, and that one has an evidence base.

Decide the definition in advance, in writing. If you have not, you will end up writing it in the hour after a slip, which is the worst state you will ever be in for the job. A preregistered survey of men in reboot communities found perceived relapse commonly followed by shame, worthlessness, sadness and in some cases suicidal thoughts. Notice what perceived is doing in that sentence. The shame does not follow from the behaviour, it follows from the reading of it — two people can do the same thing on the same night and only one of them has had a relapse, because only one of them held a definition that said so.

A brittle definition has a specific failure mode. If one slip sets everything to zero, then by ten past eleven the cost of the next hour is identical to the cost of the last one: the month is already gone, there is nothing left to protect, and the rest of the evening becomes a write-off. A rule that only ever fires after the thing it was meant to prevent is not doing much preventing.

It is also inaccurate on the measures researchers actually use. Frequency alone is a poor indicator of problematic use — distress, impaired control and functional impairment are what distinguish it — and problematic use tracks distress far better than it tracks how much someone uses. Someone who has gone from most nights to occasionally, with the distress dropping, has changed something real. A counter that resets would show them nothing at all.

A definition worth having answers three things, and you can write it in five minutes while you feel fine:

• What counts as a slip. One episode. "Slip" is the better word for it because it does not arrive with a verdict attached.
• What counts as a return to the pattern. Not one evening. Something recognisable: back to most nights, or the environment changes abandoned, or the phone back on the nightstand and staying there. That is the thing you actually want to prevent, and it is worth naming precisely enough that you would know it when you saw it.
• What you do in each case. For a slip: stop the episode now, note the bare facts, do the thinking tomorrow, change one thing. For a return to the pattern: a proper review, and possibly a person rather than an app.

Keep the counter if you like it — knowing is better than not knowing. Just let it be one number among several rather than the verdict. The measure that moves first, and the one worth watching, is how quickly you get back on after a slip.

One evening is one evening. It is only day zero if you say so, and it is worth thinking hard before you say so.

Where this comes from

Read the full lesson: Abstinence or reduction? →