Stopped a habit and want it back? How to restart it without starting from zero

To get back into a habit, restart the next time it would normally happen, and make the first week smaller than where you stopped. A long break usually means your days changed, or one slip started to feel like a verdict. Rebuild the cue, leave the guilt out, and plan for the next interruption.

Here is how a pause turns into a quit, without anyone deciding to quit.

1. back on Monday

   Day 1

   You have a cold and skip your workout. It is a perfectly good reason, and you tell yourself you'll be back on Monday.

2. the hour is gone

   Day 8

   You feel fine again, but the week has a new shape. The hour you used to train is taken by something else.

3. 

   Day 15

   You think about restarting and it feels heavy. The old routine was four sessions a week, and you are not sure you could manage one.

4. when things calm down

   Day 31

   The plan is now "when things calm down". Nothing has been cancelled. It has just moved to a day that has not arrived.

5. never switched back on

   Day 60

   You haven't thought about it for a week. The habit was never dropped on purpose. It was paused for a good reason and never switched back on.

Why a break turns into quitting

A pause rarely ends because someone decides to stop. Two quieter things tend to happen first.

The cue goes missing

Wendy Wood, Leona Tam and Melissa Guerrero Witt followed students who moved to a new university and tracked three habits: exercising, reading the paper and watching TV. A habit tended to carry over to the new campus mostly when some part of the setting it happened in stayed the same. When the surroundings changed, the habit lost its footing, and in some cases what the students did followed what they intended at that moment instead.

A move is an extreme case. A trip, an illness, a new shift or a very busy month changes where, when and with whom you do things in the same way, only less. My reading, not theirs: a habit doesn't always fade after a break. Sometimes the moment it lived in has simply gone, and "I'll just pick it up again" has nothing to pick it up from. My post on being consistent without motivation is about those cues.

One slip feels like the whole plan

Dieting researchers Janet Polivy and C. Peter Herman gave a name to what dieters do after a slip, the what-the-hell effect: once a diet feels broken, they tend to abandon it for a while instead of going back to it. In one of their experiments, people who restrained their eating went on to eat more cookies when they believed they had been served a bigger slice of pizza than someone else, while people who didn't restrain their eating tended to eat fewer. The slices were in fact all the same size, and only the belief differed: bigger, smaller, or nothing to compare with. The cookies came afterwards, as a tasting. The authors tie the difference to how each group felt about having overeaten.

That is an eating study with a lab task, and I found no test of the same pattern for the gym or for reading. My reading, not theirs: a week that grows out of one sick day has the same shape. Once the plan is broken, the rest of it feels pointless. In the UCL habit study I wrote about in my post on why habits fade, one missed day changed little, so the skipped day isn't what hurts. What hurts is what we do with it.

Does feeling guilty help you restart?

Two studies point the other way, with limits.

Michael Wohl, Timothy Pychyl and Shannon Bennett followed first-year students across two rounds of exams. Students who had forgiven themselves for putting off studying for the first exam reported less negative mood in between, and they put off studying less before the second. The authors' explanation is that feeling better is what got them back to work. The key measures were self-reported, and nobody was asked to forgive themselves, so the study shows an association, not that forgiveness caused the change.

Claire Adams and Mark Leary studied college women, including some who worked hard at steering clear of unhealthy food. The women differed in whether they first ate such a food and in whether they were encouraged to think about their eating with kindness. For the ones who steered clear of it hardest, the kind framing went with less distress and less eating afterwards.

Both studies are small, use students, and are about studying and eating, not about habits in general. They hint that treating a lapse kindly can make the next step easier. They don't show that guilt is what keeps you from restarting.

How to get back into a habit in 5 steps

1. Restart at the next normal moment, not at a perfect one. Look at when the habit would usually happen and restart there, today or tomorrow. A landmark such as a Monday or the first of the month can add a push, which is the fresh start effect that Dai, Milkman and Riis described, and my post on where to start goes into it. My rule of thumb: use the landmark if it is a few days away, and if it is further off, go tomorrow.
2. Describe the gap in one flat sentence. "I stopped for five weeks after the move." Leave out the adjectives, such as lazy or pathetic. This is my way of applying the self-forgiveness research, not something those studies prescribed. A plain sentence is easier to act on than a verdict.
3. Find what the break took away. Ask what used to set the habit off: a time, a place, a person, the end of another routine. Then check whether it still exists. If it doesn't, pick a new moment that already happens in your current day, like the first coffee or the walk home. That is the Wood, Tam and Witt idea in practice, and my post on starting tiny shows how to hang a habit on a moment.
4. Restart smaller than where you stopped. If you used to train four times a week, do one short session. If you read thirty pages, read five. The restart's job is to put the habit back into your day, not to get you to your old level at once. This is my suggestion, not a finding, and it is the same shrinking as in the tiny-habits post. Raise it when it starts to feel like nothing.
5. Plan for the next interruption. Name the ones you can see coming, such as a trip, a heavy work week or a cold, and decide now what the habit will look like then and when you will restart. For example: "If I travel, I do the five-minute version in the room. If I'm ill, I restart on the first day I feel fine, with the small version." Sniehotta, Schwarzer, Scholz and Schüz call a plan for obstacles like this coping planning. They followed 352 cardiac rehabilitation patients for four months after discharge, and people who reported more coping planning after leaving rehab also reported more exercise at four months. Planning was measured, not assigned, so it's an association. Writing the restart day into the plan is my own addition.

Examples: the old routine next to a restart

Habit	What stopped it	The old routine	The restart
Working out	A holiday	Four sessions a week	One 15-minute session on the weekday you used to train
Reading	A busy month	An hour every evening	Five pages after dinner
A language	Exams	Thirty-minute lessons	One short lesson on the way to work
Running	A cold	Three runs a week	One ten-minute easy jog, once you feel fully better
Journaling	A move to a new flat	Morning pages at the old desk	One sentence at the new kitchen table
Meditation	A stretch of bad sleep	Twenty minutes a day	Three slow breaths while the kettle boils
Studying	A bad week	Three-hour sessions	Twenty minutes with a timer, same desk
Cooking	A hectic month	Every meal from scratch	One home-cooked dinner a week

When it doesn't work

• When the break was an answer. If you stopped because you no longer want the habit, restarting it is the wrong fix. Ask whether you want it at all before you plan the restart.
• When the cause is still there. If you are still ill, injured, grieving or burned out, the break isn't over. Get a doctor's advice before you return to exercise after an illness or an injury.
• When the old moment is gone for good. A new job or a new home may not bring the old cue back. Step 3 is there for that, and it may take a few tries to find a moment that holds.
• When the restart becomes the ceiling. If you do five pages for a year and never go beyond them, you have a habit, but maybe not the change you wanted. Raise it a little when it feels easy.
• When kindness turns into a free pass. The studies measured less distress and less later procrastination. They did not show that skipping is fine. If the same gap keeps coming back, change the plan, not your opinion of yourself. That is my judgment, not a finding.
• When the evidence is thin. I found no study of restarting a habit as such. The steps borrow from students who moved, eaters, exam-takers and cardiac patients. Treat this as a reasonable way to restart, not a proven recipe.
• When it isn't a habit problem. If everything has felt flat and hard to start for weeks, not only one habit, it may be depression, burnout or something else that a habit cannot fix. Talk to a doctor or a therapist.

How I do it myself

In Habit Bank I switch on Holiday Mode before a trip. It is a Pro feature that stops penalties being charged and doesn't reset streaks, so a break I planned doesn't count against me. When a gap isn't planned, I leave the red days on the calendar as they are and restart with the small version of the habit on the first evening I can.

I don't get to explain myself to a number.