What to do after a relapse

After a relapse, log it as one day and keep the days before it. The next 24 hours carry more risk than the slip did, because the story you tell about it decides what happens next. Then change one thing about tonight.

What counts as a relapse

There is no official definition. NoFap and similar communities each draw the line in a different place. Pick a rule once and keep it.

A workable rule: a relapse is doing the thing you set out to stop. If you set out to stop watching porn, then watching porn counts. Scrolling a feed that got close does not, and neither does an urge you sat through. Those are worth noting, but marking them as relapses inflates the count and makes the record less useful.

Decide the rule while calm, write it down, and stop renegotiating it at midnight. A rule that moves depending on how the night went is a rule you can't learn anything from.

Why the day after is the risky one

One slip often turns into three. Curry, Marlatt and Gordon described why in smoking research, published in the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology in 1987. They called it the abstinence violation effect. What predicted whether one slip became a full return was the explanation the person gave for it: I am weak, I always do this, I was never going to manage it.

The slip happened on one night. The explanation stays with you into the next day, and that is where a second slip tends to come from.

The limits come with it. The model was built in smoking and drinking research. Nobody has tested it on porn. It describes a pattern, and it gives you no measured odds for your own next week.

A streak counter that drops to zero can work like a machine for that explanation. It shows you a zero the morning after, at the point where the story is easiest to believe. Why the first few days are the hardest stretch is in why you keep relapsing on day three.

Log it, don’t erase it

Gardner, Lally and Wardle, writing in the British Journal of General Practice in 2012, reported that missing the occasional opportunity to perform a behaviour “did not seriously impair the habit formation process”, and that gains resumed after one missed performance.

That study followed people building simple daily routines, like eating fruit or going for a walk. It did not study people stopping something. Treat it as the closest available evidence that one day does not wipe out the days before it, and not as a finding about porn.

So log the slip on the day it happened, and leave the rest of the record alone. Twenty days with one bad night in them is still twenty days. A record that deletes them is less accurate, and less useful the next time you look back at what was working. If the slip came after a long run, the same reasoning is laid out in is it normal to relapse after 30 days.

Monke Reset’s calendar keeps every day you logged, so a slip costs one day.

One change for tonight

Pick one change and make it before tonight starts.

1. Look at how last night began. What did you open first, where were you, and what time was it?
2. Pick the step nearest the start. For most people it is the phone in bed or a feed opened to fill a few minutes.
3. Change that one thing tonight. Charge the phone across the room, set a time limit on the first app you opened, or turn on the Screen Time filter with how to block porn on an iPhone.

Make it one change, small enough to keep. If an urge arrives anyway, what to do in the first minute is in the first sixty seconds of an urge.