When the glass was in your hand at six

It'll happen. A Tuesday, an ordinary one, and six o'clock came and the glass was in your hand before the question got asked, and you had it, and you had another, and now it's Wednesday and the thought in your head is that you're back where you started.

You aren't. Look at what happened. The hour reached, and you were somewhere else, and the hand did what it had done a thousand times. Lally's study found that a missed day didn't do much to a habit being formed, and I'd extend that to a missed evening for a habit being unlearned, which is the same thing from the other side. One evening on the daily is one evening. The hour hasn't relearned anything from one evening. It's the run of them that trains it, and a run is what you've stopped.

Then ask which belief it was. Not whether you're weak, which is the earning in a different coat, but which of the chapters was running. Was it a bad day, and chapter 9's belief that a bad day needs one? Was it that the day had nothing in it, and chapter 15's empty day, in which case the fix is tomorrow's afternoon and not tonight's glass? Was it the bag from the shop? Was it just the hour, running without you, and the answer is that you hadn't decided in the morning and so there was nothing to decide with at six? Each of those points to a different move tomorrow, and none of them is a resolution.

What not to do. Don't count. The blank days you'd had aren't cancelled by one that wasn't, and a tally of days without the treat turns the whole thing into a streak, and a streak is a thing you break, and breaking it is the thought that sends people back. Don't punish, which chapter 10 covered, by making tomorrow a blank day as penance. Tomorrow is whatever you decide in the morning, and if you decide on a treat, chosen, for a reason, that's the method, not a lapse. And don't drop the earning's replacement. If you'd been saying "I'm having a glass because I like one", keep saying it, including tonight, in the past tense. I had two glasses because the hour reached and I let it. That's a sentence with a fact in it, and the facts are what the method runs on.

If the evening on the daily becomes a week on the daily, that's not a lapse either. It's the habit back, and you go to chapter 17 and start the record again, because the record is where it stopped being a habit the first time.