Ask Dr. Schwarz

What is wrong with me? I cheated this weekend and then I blew it completely, as usual.

Let’s put your question another way. Let’s ask, what is it that caused you to cheat this time? Notice, we left out the part what is wrong with me. We deleted the “what is wrong with me” part for a good reason. The psychologist G. Alan Marlatt studied self-perception as it relates to addictive behavior. He and his colleagues found that when someone is trying to control a behavior such as drinking too much or overeating, if she blames herself for a lapse, she is more likely to relapse completely back into her old behavior. There is a great deal of subsequent research to support this idea.

Does it work this way with you? You’re on a diet. You’ve committed yourself to this diet. Then you have a cheating episode. Do you attribute this instance of falling off your diet to your basic lack of willpower or your inability to change or a weakness in your character? Blaming such a lapse on internal causes such as these can be problematic for you. Thinking like this leads to a decreased sense of your own competence. Attributing a momentary failure to a rigid and unyielding personality characteristic makes you much more vulnerable to total relapse.

Try this out. Go back on that diet. The next time you slip, instead of attributing the cause of your slip to internal “self” factors, turn your attention outward and consider the external situational factors.

Take a careful look at the situation you were in when you slipped off your diet. Pay attention to the details. Where were you? Who were you with? What was going on around you? What was the occasion? What time of day was it? Try to consider this a specific, circumscribed situation that you couldn’t cope with so well. This way, you open up a world of possibilities. For example, you can see that with more practice in situations like this, you’d be able to change your reaction. Or, you could try to keep yourself away from such a situation. Or, you could anticipate a situation like this and prepare yourself better for it.

Thinking this way leads to a greatly increased sense of self-efficacy―that is, a sense of yourself as being truly capable of changing your behavior. This increased sense of self-efficacy is the very thing to prevent a lapse from becoming a total relapse.