When you slept till eleven

It'll happen. A month in, a bad week, a Friday that runs late, and Saturday you wake at eleven and lie there until half past, and by Sunday the whole weekend has gone the old way and Monday is the old Monday.

Two things, in order. The first is what it means, which is nothing much. One weekend of drift is one weekend of drift. Your clock has moved forty minutes and it'll move back over two or three mornings of light, the way it always did. The month of level weekends before it isn't undone. Habit isn't a streak, and it isn't broken by a miss, and the research on habit formation that earlier books in this series lean on found that a single missed day made no material difference to how the habit formed. The habit is the wake time, and the wake time is still there next Saturday.

The second is what to do, which is the window, next weekend, with the daylight walk, and nothing extra. Don't get up at five on Sunday to make amends. Don't go without sleep in the week to reset. Don't decide that you're the kind of person who can't hold a schedule. Get up inside the window on Sunday if it's Sunday, and if it's Monday, take the Monday, and get up inside the window on Saturday.

Then, when you're not tired, ask which belief let you back in. Was it "I've earned it" after a hard week, in which case chapter 3 is the one to reread, because the earning is real and the lie-in is the wrong currency. Was it "it's only one morning", which is chapter 4. Was it the lying there, which is chapter 7, and which you can have at seven with the curtains open. Was it a late Saturday night that made Sunday's window impossible, which is chapter 18, and which is the most common way the rule gets lost, because people hold the morning and forget the night.

What you shouldn't do is take the bad Monday as evidence that the method failed. The bad Monday is evidence that the method works, because you've just seen what one weekend off it costs, and a month ago you didn't know that was where the Monday came from. Now you do. That's the whole change this book is after, and a lapse is the clearest lesson in it.