The Art of the Relapse

INSTEAD OF FEELING LIKE A FAILURE WHEN YOU FALL BACK
INTO OLD, UNHEALTHY BEHAVIORS, CONSIDER EMBRACING YOUR
RELAPSES AS MILE MARKERS ON YOUR ROUTE TO SUCCESS.

Guilt. Shame. Failure. How can one doughnut, a single
puff of a cigarette or a measly missed workout have the
power to stir up such strong emotions? If you’ve made
a sincere pledge to stop eating junk food, to quit smoking
or commit to a regular exercise program, these small events
can feel like giant setbacks. You may take them as evidence
of personal weakness, lack of will, a doomed effort or even
a signal that you just aren’t cut out for self-improvement.

Technically, these little hiccups are known as relapses.
The dictionary defines relapse this way: “To fall back into
a former mood, state, or way of life, especially a bad or
undesirable one, after a period of improvement.”

On one hand, the word “relapse” carries a deep, negative
association with falling off the wagon, being weak-willed,
moving backward. On the other, it also implies an important
truth: that most of our experiences — successes and failures
alike — are not permanent states; rather, their very nature
is to exist in a particular state only for a while. The most
misunderstood aspect of relapse is that it is a natural part of
the grand cycle of change.

Given this, rather than letting ourselves be ashamed
and discouraged whenever relapses strike, we would do better
to expect them and take them in stride. We must also realize
that, as with any consistent pattern, the cycle of relapsing
can even be employed to our advantage.

Just how can relapsing be seen as a good thing? Well, for one
thing, relapses allow us opportunities for review, reflection and
deep learning. They see to it that we have access to every last
scrap of insight available in our own evolutionary process.

By watching ourselves cycle through periods of commitment,
effort, success, faltering and discouragement, and
then back into recommitment, we learn what our emotional
tendencies and thought processes are in each of those phases
of experience. Each time we go through that cycle, we
have the opportunity to get smarter, deeper, stronger. We
accumulate wisdom and a better sense of what makes us tick.

Relapses also teach us compassion — for ourselves and
for others. They teach us that it is possible for each of us to
be all things: successful and insufficient, powerful and
helpless, conscious and unconscious, clear and confused.
They also teach us humility and save us from becoming selfrighteous
about our own successes. Finally, as I address in
more detail below, relapses can actually help inoculate us
against frustration, dissatisfaction and inertia — if we know
how to handle them.

Perhaps the most important aspect of relapses is
that they demonstrate for us what cycles are all about. Granted,
that sinking “here we go again” feeling isn’t always pleasant.
Particularly when we’ve been feeling really good about a
particular phase or moment of our own accomplishment, we may
just want to camp out there and pretend it’s where we’ve always
been and always will be. But like all life on this planet, human
beings follow cycles — periods of high and low energy, focus
and distraction, enthusiasm and apathy. We’d be bored to
death — and permanently stunted — if it were otherwise.

Consider the way the seasons progress: Spring leads to
summer leads to winter and back to spring. But no two
successive springs are entirely alike. Yes, those same trees
in your backyard are growing leaves again, but
(assuming they are healthy) each one of those trees is also a
little bit bigger, with more branches and more leaves busting
out. They may also have dropped some nuts or seeds last fall
that are just now taking root in the ground. Now, you could
say the trees “relapsed,” in losing all their leaves, getting
brittle and dropping all their stuff to the ground. But would
you have it any other way?

Like trees, we don’t just shoot consistently up and out,
and we aren’t always in our full splendor. Even at our best,
we don’t move ahead in straight lines; we move ahead in
forward-trending spirals. (At certain points, it may feel like
we are moving backward, but as long as we stay conscious
and observant, we can see how those steps back prepare us
for leaps forward.)

What happens in nature happens in our own lives, too. As
new patterns come into play, old patterns crumble and dissolve.
If we learn to recognize where we are in this cycle, we
can begin to predict how and when we will behave in certain
ways. And predictable patterns can be used to our advantage.
Let’s take the example of weight loss. Suppose you
decide you want to lose 20 pounds and improve your fitness.
You’ve long been in a pattern of rushing to work without
breakfast, making no plans for a satisfying lunch, then collapsing
after dinner to snack in front of the TV until bedtime. This is an
established structure, one that has been sustaining your life (such
as it is) for some time.

To successfully change your weight, you will need to alter this
pattern of habits (and, likely, many other, interlocking ones) that
your life is built around. You’ll also need to integrate a whole host
of new habits around eating better and exercising more regularly.
To this end, you know you’ll need to shift some of your energy out
of the old habit structure and invest it into the new one. So you
start making protein shakes in the morning to help you resist the
sweet snacks that often appear around the coffee pot at work. To
reach your goal of consistent exercise, you decide to substitute a
workout for two hours of television three times a week.

So far so good: If you give something up, it’s wise to consciously
replace it with something else. Otherwise, you’ll create a
vacuum in your structure and be prone to relapsing as a means of
filling up that uneasy empty space. The only problem is, we don’t
always know just what holes we are creating when we make
changes. Some of our habits serve more than one purpose: For
example, a cookie-snacking habit may be as much about emotional
comfort as it is about food or hunger. So if we attempt to
change the snack habit simply by replacing the problem food with
something healthier (say, carrot sticks), but we ignore the comfort
factor, we are only halfway there. We still have an emotional
vacuum on our hands, and that may be the very thing that pulls
us into a relapse.

But the relapse, when it happens, gives us the opportunity
to ask, “What was I missing there? What’s behind this? What am I
still needing to move forward?” The insights we gain from asking
those questions can propel us into a much stronger growth/
success cycle than simply giving up the cookies on the first try.

We may discover that emotional comfort is really an important
piece of the puzzle that’s lacking from our life’s bigger picture.
The relapse is, in effect, taking our hand and leading us back to
something that needs our attention, not just to improve our diet,
but to improve our life on the whole.

Our relapse may be pointing out our system’s dissatisfaction
with our partial solution and saying, “Excuse me, but I believe
you may have overlooked something.”

It’s important to remember that once the new habits are in
place, the old ones are not necessarily gone. Initially, in
fact, it’s quite likely that the old habits will periodically
exert a stronger pull than the new ones. Recognize that in
some cases these “relapses” are really opportunities for
review. It’s as if, after a certain amount of forward progress,
your body takes you back to where you were before and
says, “Hey, remember when you were way back here? When
this was all you knew?”

Of course, there is a part of you that is thinking, “Wow,
yeah, this was so easy.” But there is likely another part of you
saying, “Huh, you know, this pattern really isn’t that appealing
any more. I think I like what I’ve been doing better than this,
even if it demands a bit more effort and focus.” Then you
have the opportunity to return to your healthy pattern
with more confidence and pride. Without that review, you
probably wouldn’t have realized how far you’ve come, or
taken away the important lesson that it is possible for you to
make dramatic changes in your life by conscious choice.
So next time a setback takes you by surprise, don’t
berate yourself. Instead, use the evaluation stage of the
process to make your new habit structure stronger. Then get
out there and face your next relapse — not as an enemy, but
as an agent for change.

Ready, Set, Relapse

If you’re changing habits in your life, at some point you will probably find yourself slipping back into your old ways. Instead of fearing such slips, plan for them and set up some support strategies.

1. KEEP SOME OF THE NEW HABITS GOING.
Recognize that you’re in a relapse because you still have a large percentage of your energy invested in your old habits. Because they worked for you for so long, you will be drawn irresistibly to your old patterns. The trick is to continue the new structure no matter what. Go ahead, have the doughnut, but if you simultaneously keep up your new gym habit, you are strengthening the new structure. Eventually you will cycle back into your new habits. Because you didn’t let go of the new ways completely, rather than starting all over again from zero, you will have 20 percent of your new habits in place. Then, the next time you relapse, you may start again with 30 percent of the new habits in place. It will get easier each time.

2. PLAN FOR CONSCIOUS, HIGH-QUALITY RELAPSES.
For example, if you’re trying to quit eating junk food every day, don’t fall off the wagon with three bags of M&M’s. Instead, take the time to drive to the truffle shop and buy one expensive and satisfying truffle. Savor it slowly and allow yourself to relapse in style. Write your experience in your journal. Honor the relapse instinct with as much consciousness and purposefulness as you can muster. You are not a victim! You are in partnership with your body, and this is just part of the conversation.

3. PAY ATTENTION TO THE EMOTIONAL STATES
that trigger your relapse. Are you feeling frightened? Hopeless? Angry? Once you can identify what emotions trigger your old behavior, you can be on the alert for how that emotional state is created. By addressing the issue that triggers those feelings, you can be better prepared for subsequent relapses. Eventually, you can begin to substitute new habits and reduce or eventually skip the relapse behavior altogether.

Cat Thompson writes regularly for Experience Life on emotional health.
Learn more about her work at www.emotionaltechnologies.com.