Stop now rather than finishing the session. Tell one person in a single sentence. Find the one condition that let it happen and change that, not everything. Then restart today, not Monday. Four steps, in that order, and none of them involve deciding what this says about you.
A slip is an event. What turns it into a fortnight is the six hours afterwards.
Do these four things
1. Stop the session, mid-thing if necessary
The most expensive belief in this whole area is that today is already ruined, so you may as well finish. That belief converts one lapse into an evening, and an evening into a week.
Close it now. Not at the end of the episode, not once you have got to a sensible stopping point. Now, incomplete, annoying. Put the phone in another room, leave the shop, shut the laptop, walk out. Whatever you would have done in the next hour is worth much less than the pattern it would set.
2. Tell one person, in one sentence
"I slipped tonight." That is the whole disclosure. No account of why, no list of the circumstances that made it understandable.
This is the step people skip and it is the one that stops the slip disappearing into private accounting, which is where it grows. If there is nobody yet, [telling someone when it sounds ridiculous](/guides/other/telling-someone-when-it-sounds-ridiculous) is about getting a first person in place, and the Samaritans are on 116 123, free, at any hour, in the meantime.
3. Change one condition, not everything
There is a reason and the reason is probably true. That is not the useful question.
The useful question is what made it easy. Ask it precisely:
- Was the app back on the phone, the card back in the wallet, the object back within reach?
- Was it an hour you had not planned for?
- Had you been awake too long, or eaten nothing, or spent the evening alone?
- Had you told someone you were stopping, or had it stayed private?
- Did something specific happen first: a message, a row, a bill, a piece of news?
One of those will stand out. Change that one thing tonight, physically, before you go to bed. Deleting the app again, or moving the object, is worth more than a resolution, because a resolution is made by tonight's version of you and tonight's version has just been outvoted.
Resist the urge to overhaul everything. Big plans made after a slip are made in a bad mood and they collapse by Thursday, which then counts as a second failure.
4. Restart today
Not tomorrow, not Monday, not the first of the month. Waiting for a clean start is how three days become three weeks, and the waiting period is nearly always spent doing the thing, because the rules are suspended until the start date.
If you count days, reset the counter and carry on. If the counter is the problem, and for some people it is, count something else: episodes per week, hours reclaimed, the number of times friction worked.
What the guidance actually says about relapse
There is only one UK clinical guideline covering a behavioural compulsion, and it is NICE's gambling guideline. That is a different behaviour with its own evidence base, and its wording on relapse is the best available and transfers cleanly.
It says that "relapse is not shameful and it may be part of a recovery journey or learning event", and that "relapse does not indicate individual failure".
Written by a guideline committee, not by a motivational poster. Worth reading twice if the loudest voice in your head right now is telling you the opposite.
The shame loop is the actual danger
Here is the sequence, and you will recognise it.
You slip. You feel like a fraud. Feeling like a fraud is unpleasant. The fastest, most reliable way you know to stop feeling unpleasant is the behaviour. So you do it again, more thoroughly, and now the evidence against you is stronger, which makes the feeling worse, which makes the next episode more likely.
The loop runs on a belief that feeling bad enough about it is what will stop you. It is not. It is the fuel.
Two things interrupt it, and they are steps two and three above. Saying it out loud to one person takes about eight seconds and removes the secrecy the loop needs. And making the recovery small and specific gives the loop nothing to feed on, whereas a grand plan you abandon by Thursday gives it a full meal.
One safety exception that can kill people
This stream covers every behaviour, so this has to be said.
If what you went back to is a substance, and you have had a break from it, your tolerance is lower than it was. UK clinical guidance on alcohol puts it plainly: "After a period of abstinence, tolerance is greatly reduced", and someone returning to their old amount "may even experience fatal alcohol poisoning". The same principle applies to opioids, where the risk of overdose is highest after a period of not using.
So if your slip involved a substance, do not go back to your previous amount, do not use alone, and read the guide for that substance rather than this one. If someone cannot be woken, is breathing slowly or irregularly, or has blue or grey lips, call 999.
For behaviours, there is no equivalent physical danger, and the same rule about not treating a lapse as a licence still applies.
What to salvage from it
A slip contains information that a clean week does not, and it is the only good thing about it. Before you go to bed, write four lines:
- **What time it started.**
- **What happened in the sixty seconds before.**
- **Which piece of friction had gone missing.**
- **What you would have needed at that exact moment.**
That fourth one is the useful one and people rarely ask it. Usually the answer is small: to not be alone, to have eaten, to have had somewhere to be, to have had the object out of reach, to have gone to bed an hour earlier.
If you are getting several of these, the four lines start forming a pattern, and turning them into one page is [writing your own trigger map](/guides/other/writing-your-own-trigger-map).
If this is the fifth slip this month
Then it is not a slip, it is the current pattern, and repeating the same four steps harder will not change it. Two things are worth doing differently.
**Raise the friction rather than the resolve.** If it keeps coming back, the door you closed was too easy to reopen. Move up a rung: someone else holds the password, the card or the second factor. [Friction, the one move that works for everything](/guides/other/friction-the-one-move-that-works-for-everything) has the ladder.
**Get another person properly involved.** Not for surveillance. Because at five slips a month, doing this alone has been tested and the result is in. SMART Recovery UK runs free meetings scoped to problem behaviours generally rather than one substance, on 0330 053 6022. A GP is worth seeing too, particularly if low mood or anxiety is driving the episodes rather than the other way round.
Renovyn can log the slip and the restart, and let one person you choose see it, which is more honest than your own memory at the end of a bad month. It is a tracking tool, not treatment.
Common questions
Does one slip undo all my progress?
No. Whatever changed in your habits, your friction and what you know about your own triggers is still there in the morning. What a slip mainly does is test how you respond to it, and the response is the part you control.
Should I reset my day count to zero?
If counting helps you, reset it and carry on, since the number is a tool rather than a verdict. If the reset feels catastrophic, that is a sign the counter has too much power, and switching to a weekly measure, like episodes per week, removes the all-or-nothing quality without giving up on measurement.
Why did I slip when things were going well?
Very common. Good stretches remove the sense of urgency, friction quietly gets dismantled because it seems unnecessary, and celebrations are their own trigger. Look for what you took away in the fortnight before rather than for what went wrong on the night.
How do I stop the guilt spiral afterwards?
Mostly by not treating the guilt as useful information. It shows up regardless, it gets louder with attention, and it is reliably quietened by the behaviour, which is the trap. Say it to one person, change one condition, go to bed, and let the feeling be there without acting on it.
Sources
- [NICE NG248, Harmful gambling: identification, assessment and management](https://www.nice.org.uk/guidance/ng248/chapter/recommendations). That relapse is not shameful, may be a learning event, and does not indicate individual failure. Written for gambling, the only behaviour with its own UK guideline.
- [GOV.UK, Clinical guidelines for alcohol treatment, chapter 8](https://www.gov.uk/guidance/clinical-guidelines-for-alcohol-treatment/8-harm-reduction). Greatly reduced tolerance after a period of abstinence, and the risk of fatal poisoning.
- [NHS, Addiction: what is it?](https://www.nhs.uk/live-well/addiction-support/addiction-what-is-it/). The control definition, that it is possible to be addicted to just about anything, and the Samaritans line.
- [SMART Recovery UK](https://smartrecovery.org.uk/). Free mutual-aid meetings grounded in cognitive behavioural therapy, covering problem behaviours generally.
