The Cycle of Change: Why Breaking an Addiction Isn't a Straight Line
- Conrad Cave
- Jul 27
- 7 min read
If you've tried to change before and it hasn't stuck, you've probably told yourself you failed. You didn't. You almost certainly just misunderstood the process. Change, especially around addiction, doesn't move in a straight line from “I have a problem” to “I'm fixed.” It moves in a cycle, one that most people pass through more than once before anything lasts.
This idea comes from a well-established piece of psychology called the Stages of Change model (also known as the Transtheoretical Model), developed by researchers James Prochaska and Carlo DiClemente in the early 1980s. They studied how people actually change behaviour, in addiction and beyond, and found the same pattern again and again: change happens in stages, not in a single leap. An unofficial sixth stage, relapse, was later added, because in real life almost nobody moves through the five original stages just once. Understanding which stage you're in changes everything about what you need to do next.
Why this matters more than willpower
Most people trying to break a pattern focus entirely on the “doing” part: stopping the drink, deleting the app, staying out of the pub. That's the Action stage, and it's important, but it's only one part of a six-stage cycle. If you try to force Action-stage strategies onto yourself while you're still in an earlier stage, you'll usually fail, and then read that failure as proof you're weak or broken. You're not. You were using the wrong tool for the stage you were actually in.
This is also the single biggest reason generic advice fails people. “Just stop” is Action-stage advice. It's genuinely useless to someone still in Precontemplation or Contemplation, in the same way that telling someone to “just build the house” is useless before the foundations are in. The stage you're in determines the kind of help that will actually work.
Here's the cycle, stage by stage.
1. Precontemplation
This is the stage where change isn't yet on the table. You might not see the behaviour as a problem at all, or you see it as a problem but feel it's simply how things are, or how you are. Other people, a partner, a parent, a doctor, might be raising concerns you brush off. Denial and defensiveness are common here, not because you're being dishonest with people, but because they're protecting you from having to face something uncomfortable.
You might recognise yourself here if you find yourself thinking things like:
• “It's not that bad, other people do far worse.”
• “I could stop any time I wanted to, I just don't want to right now.”
• “Everyone's exaggerating, this is just how I relax.”
The work at this stage isn't to force change, and it isn't to argue yourself into agreeing you have a problem. It's to get honestly curious about the gap between what you're telling yourself and what's actually happening in your life: your relationships, your health, your finances, your sense of who you are. That curiosity, not confrontation, is usually what starts to loosen Precontemplation's grip.
2. Contemplation
Somewhere along the way, awareness creeps in. You start to admit there's a problem, but you're not yet convinced you want to, or can, do something about it. This is the stage of ambivalence: one part of you wants things to be different, another part is attached to what the behaviour gives you, whether that's relief, escape, connection, numbness, or a sense of control.
This is often the longest stage, and the one people get stuck in for years, sometimes decades. It can look like endless research into treatment options you never follow up on, promising yourself “I'll deal with it after this next stressful period,” or swinging between real resolve on a Monday and total resignation by Friday. Research consistently finds Contemplation is where people spend the most time and where they're most likely to feel stuck, precisely because it's a genuinely uncomfortable place to sit.
The work here is to honestly weigh the costs and the pull of the behaviour, rather than trying to think your way past the ambivalence with sheer logic. Ambivalence isn't a character flaw or a sign you're not trying hard enough. It's the accurate emotional response to giving something up that has, at some point, genuinely served a purpose in your life.
3. Preparation
Something shifts and you start moving from “maybe” to “how.” This stage is about practical groundwork: telling someone what's going on, looking into support options, setting a date, working out what your triggers are and planning around them, deciding what needs to change in your environment, your routine, or who you spend time with.
Preparation is easy to skip past, because it doesn't feel like the “real” work yet, it can feel like stalling. But it's one of the most important stages precisely because it's where intention gets turned into a workable plan. People who rush straight from Contemplation into Action, without doing this groundwork, are more likely to be blindsided by the first genuinely hard moment, because they haven't yet built the scaffolding to hold them up when it arrives.
4. Action
This is the stage most people think of as “recovery”: actively changing the behaviour, day to day. It's visible, it takes real and sustained effort, and it's also the stage that gets the most attention and the least understanding from the outside, because it can look like the whole story. It isn't. Action is usually only as strong as everything that came before it.
Action needs structure: specific strategies for specific triggers, support that's actually in place rather than theoretical, and realistic expectations about how hard early days can genuinely be. This is where much of the practical, day-to-day coaching work happens, because good intentions rarely survive contact with a bad day unless there's a plan behind them.
5. Maintenance
Once new behaviour has held for a while, weeks, months, the work shifts. It's no longer about the initial effort of stopping; it's about holding the change through ordinary life: boredom, stress, old friendships, anniversaries, good news and bad news, all the everyday triggers that don't look dramatic but add up.
Maintenance is quieter than Action but just as demanding, because the intensity and adrenaline that carried you through the early stage naturally fade, and vigilance can fade along with it. This stage is really about building a life where the old pattern doesn't have an obvious gap to fill: dealing with the underlying stress, loneliness, or unprocessed difficulty that the behaviour was managing in the first place. Skip this deeper work, and Maintenance becomes fragile.
6. Relapse
Prochaska and DiClemente added this as an unofficial sixth stage, because in practice, most people cycle back through earlier stages at least once, often several times, before change holds long-term. Relapse isn't a failure of the model, or a sign the model doesn't apply to you. It's part of it, for the vast majority of people who go on to build a lasting recovery.
This is the piece that gets missed most often, and does the most damage when it's misunderstood. If you slip and believe that means you're back at zero, or that it proves you can't change, you're using an old, inaccurate story to interpret a new event. What actually happened is you moved from Maintenance back into an earlier stage, often Contemplation or Preparation, and the honest task now is working out why, not punishing yourself for a moral failing.
People who go on to build lasting change are very rarely the ones who never relapsed. They're the ones who treated a relapse as information about what still needs addressing, rather than a verdict on who they are.
Why this reframe matters
If you've felt stuck in a loop, another attempt at stopping, back to old patterns, another attempt, it's worth asking a different question than “why can't I just do this?” The better question is: which stage am I actually in right now, and what does this stage need from me?
Someone in Precontemplation needs honest reflection, not a strict plan forced on them. Someone in Contemplation needs to sit with the ambivalence properly rather than force a decision before they're ready. Someone in Preparation needs a workable, specific structure. Someone in Action needs real support and concrete strategy.
Someone in Maintenance needs to address what's underneath the behaviour, not just the behaviour itself. And someone who's relapsed needs to get curious about what happened, and what it's telling them, rather than treat it as proof of failure.
A cycle, not a ladder
It's worth being honest about one more thing: this isn't really a ladder you climb once and leave behind. Most people don't move Precontemplation, Contemplation, Preparation, Action, Maintenance, done. They move round the cycle, sometimes landing back near the start, sometimes skipping stages, sometimes sitting in one stage for years and then moving through the rest quickly once something shifts.
There's no fixed timetable, and there's no version of this where you're “behind” because you've been in Contemplation for longer than someone else was.
This matters because a lot of the shame people carry around addiction comes from measuring themselves against a straight line that was never accurate in the first place. If the honest picture is a cycle, then going round it again isn't evidence you're uniquely bad at this. It's evidence you're doing the thing almost everyone does on the way to lasting change.
How this shapes the way coaching works
This is also why coaching that actually helps has to start with a genuine, unflinching read of where someone is, not a one-size-fits-all programme. Someone in Precontemplation who's handed an Action-stage plan, a strict routine, a list of things to give up starting Monday, will usually disengage, because the plan is answering a question they haven't asked themselves yet. Someone in Preparation who's told to “just keep reflecting” will lose momentum, because they're ready for structure and aren't getting it.
Matching the support to the stage is the practical, structured piece I mentioned at the start: understanding what's actually going on beneath the surface of a pattern, not just the visible behaviour, and then working out what this specific stage, for this specific person, genuinely needs next. That might mean an honest conversation that surfaces ambivalence rather than resolves it prematurely. It might mean building a concrete plan for a specific high-risk situation. It might mean unpacking what a recent relapse is actually telling you, rather than treating it as the end of the story.
Where to start
If you're reading this and recognising yourself somewhere in the cycle, that recognition is itself useful information, wherever you are in it. You don't need to have all the answers, or to already be in Action, to start doing something about it. Most people move through several stages, and sometimes several loops of the whole cycle, before change genuinely holds. That's normal. It's the process working, not failing.
If you want support working out where you actually are and what the right next step looks like for that stage specifically, that's exactly the kind of practical, structured work I do. Get in touch if you'd like to talk it through.
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