Abstinence Violation Effect

You give up sugar. On Tuesday a colleague offers a biscuit, and you eat it. Then the mind says a strange thing: "Well, the day is ruined. Have the whole packet."

Why does it do this? Because the mind likes clean boxes — saint or sinner, success or failure. One slip moves you from one box to the other, and once you are in the failure box, restraint feels pointless. The damage is not done by the biscuit. It is done by the story you tell about the biscuit.

See the arithmetic. One biscuit is two hundred calories of slip. The packet is two thousand calories of story.

The repair is a sentence: a slip is a fact, not a verdict. Note it, and continue. The people who keep resolutions are not the ones who never slip. They are the ones who refuse to turn a slip into a season.