Let’s start with something that should be said more often: you have tried to change something about yourself, struggled, and felt like a failure. And almost certainly, you were not failing. You were just being human, doing what humans do, in a process that turns out to be considerably more complicated than the wellness industry is willing to admit on a glossy infographic.
Whether it’s weight loss, quitting smoking or vaping, cutting back on alcohol, breaking a gambling habit, or prying yourself away from the dopamine slot machine that is social media — all behaviour change follows a surprisingly predictable path. The problem is that most of us don’t know what that path looks like, so we assume the difficulty must mean something is wrong with us.
It isn’t. The problem is that nobody handed you the map. Consider this your map.
Enter DiClemente and Prochaska
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, two psychologists — James Prochaska and Carlo DiClemente — were studying how people quit smoking. What they noticed was that successful quitters didn’t just wake up one morning, stub out a cigarette, and never look back. They went through a series of distinct psychological stages, often over years, often cycling back and forth, before change finally stuck.
Their work became the Transtheoretical Model of behaviour change, though most people know it by its friendlier name: the Stages of Change. It has since been applied to everything from addiction to diet to exercise to social media use. Whether you’re trying to put down a vape or pick up a yoga mat, the underlying psychological mechanics are remarkably similar.
There are six stages. And critically, they are not a ladder you climb once. They are more like a revolving door — most people cycle through them multiple times before change sticks. This is not weakness. It is, in fact, the norm.
The Six Stages
01 Precontemplation — “I don’t have a problem.” Not ready to change, or not yet aware change is needed.
02 Contemplation — “Maybe I should do something about this.” Aware of the problem, but ambivalent. The classic pros-and-cons tug-of-war.
03 Preparation — “I’m going to make a change soon.” Planning, researching, telling people. Getting ready to get ready.
04 Action — “I’m doing it.” Active, visible change. The stage most people think of as “the whole thing.”
05 Maintenance — “I’m keeping it going.” Sustaining the change. Quieter than action, but arguably harder.
06 Relapse — “I slipped.” Not a stage of failure — a stage of the process. Most people visit here more than once.
Stage 1: Precontemplation — “I don’t have a problem”
This is the stage where someone isn’t thinking about changing yet — either because they genuinely don’t see the behaviour as a problem, or because they’ve tried to change so many times before that they’ve stopped believing it’s possible. If you’re in this stage, nobody can drag you out of it — and anyone who tries is more likely to push you deeper in. What tends to shift things is new information that lands differently, or a moment of clarity that makes the cost of the current behaviour suddenly, viscerally real.
How to move through it: Don’t force it. Instead, get curious. Ask yourself — without judgment — what this habit is costing you. Not dramatically. Just honestly. Sometimes awareness alone is enough to nudge the door open an inch.
Stage 2: Contemplation — the world’s most comfortable purgatory
Ah, contemplation. This is where a great many people live for a great many years. You know you should change. You even want to change. You have Googled how to change approximately forty-seven times. And yet — here you are, still doing the thing.
This is not laziness. This is ambivalence — the completely rational experience of being simultaneously pulled toward change and toward the comfort of the familiar.
“Contemplation is not the waiting room before change. It is the change. The internal shift that happens here is what makes action possible at all.”
How to move through it: Write down your ambivalence. Literally: a column for all the reasons to change, a column for all the reasons not to. Then imagine yourself five years from now having changed — and five years from now having not. The gap between those two images is motivation in concentrate form.
Stage 3: Preparation — getting ready to get ready (and that’s fine)
This is the stage that looks a lot like procrastination from the outside but is actually important scaffolding work. You’re setting a quit date. You’re downloading the app. You’re telling people. You’re buying the running shoes. Preparation is a real stage, not a stall — but it can become one if you stay here indefinitely.
How to move through it: Pick a date. Tell someone. Make one concrete change to your environment — remove the thing that enables the behaviour, add the thing that enables the new one.
Stage 4: Action — the stage everyone thinks is the whole thing
This is the part that makes it onto Instagram. Day one. The first workout. The quit date. And it is genuinely significant — but it is also, statistically speaking, the stage most people leave prematurely.
The biggest trap of the action stage is all-or-nothing thinking. One cigarette, one missed gym session, one late-night scroll — and suddenly the story becomes “I’ve failed.” You haven’t. You’ve had a moment. The question is what happens next.
How to move through it: Treat your action stage like a research project, not a performance. What’s working? What’s not? When are the hardest moments? Curiosity is more useful here than willpower, because willpower runs out and curiosity doesn’t.
Stage 5: Maintenance — the quiet, underrated hero
Nobody posts about maintenance. There’s no “Day 200 and I still haven’t opened TikTok” reel. And yet maintenance is where most relapses happen, because the support disappears and the vigilance slips and the old cues are still out there in the world.
Maintenance is less about willpower and more about identity. Research suggests that the most successful long-term behaviour changers are not those who rely on discipline, but those who have genuinely shifted how they see themselves. Not “I am trying to quit smoking” but “I am a non-smoker.”
How to stay here: Build the new behaviour into your identity and your environment. Find community — people who live the way you’re trying to live. Celebrate time milestones. And create a specific, compassionate plan for what you’ll do if you relapse.
Stage 6: Relapse — not the end of the story
In DiClemente and Prochaska’s original research, relapse wasn’t a failure condition. It was built into the model as an expected, normal part of the process. The average smoker quits seven to ten times before quitting for good. Seven to ten times.
The cruelest thing about how we culturally frame relapse is that we treat it as evidence that the person is not capable of change. This is precisely backwards. Relapse is evidence that the person has tried. The ones who haven’t changed haven’t tried.
“The question after a relapse is never ‘what is wrong with me?’ The question is: ‘what stage did I go back to, and what do I need to move forward again?’”
How to move through it: Notice which stage you’ve returned to. Contemplation? Preparation? The work is different depending on where you land. Most importantly: resist the story that this relapse is different from the others, that this one means something permanent. It doesn’t.
Why this applies to everything — weight, substances, screens, and beyond
One of the most useful things about the Stages of Change model is that it doesn’t care what you’re changing. The person trying to lose weight goes through the same psychological architecture as the person trying to leave an abusive relationship, quit gambling, reduce their wine intake, or stop doom-scrolling at midnight.
Wherever you are right now — whether you’re firmly in “I don’t have a problem,” circling in contemplation, deep in the action stage, or nursing a relapse — you are not lost. You are somewhere on a map. And somewhere on that map, there is a next step.
One last thing
The reason change is hard is not because you lack willpower or discipline or character. It is because change requires you to fight your own nervous system, your own history, your own carefully built survival strategies, and a world that is frequently very well designed to keep you exactly where you are.
That is an extraordinary amount to take on. The least you can do — the very minimum — is to take it on with a little compassion for yourself. Not complacency. Compassion. There is a difference, and it matters more than almost any other variable in whether change sticks.
You are not failing because change is hard. Change is hard because you’re human. And humans, it turns out, can change. They just usually need a few tries.
Based on the Transtheoretical Model of Change, Prochaska & DiClemente (1983). For informational and educational purposes only. If you are struggling with addiction, eating disorders, or other behavioural health concerns, please seek qualified professional support.