Monday went wrong before breakfast.
The alarm lost. Work ran late. The walk you had planned was forgotten and dinner turned up in a Deliveroo.
Mondays can do that.
The interesting bit is Tuesday.
It is just one miss, no big deal
Not much happens on the Monday. It is something unticked and annoying, but the day carries on.
Something else can happen the morning after, in your head rather than in your calendar. The explaining starts, usually some version of see, I always do this, or typical me, I was never going to keep it up.
Now an ordinary Monday has been promoted from a missed session to evidence of the sort of person you are.
Sometimes the second miss is just Tuesday going wrong as well. Can happen.
Sometimes, though, you have already decided that Monday proved something. Wednesday starts to look less important because the week has gone badly, and before long you are waiting for next Monday so you can begin again properly.
One missed session can become a problem because of what you make it mean afterwards.
The counter resets. You do not
We like clean runs. Seven days, thirty days, closing the rings. There is something satisfying about an unbroken streak, and something quite daft that happens to us when it breaks.
In a study at University College London, 96 volunteers each chose an eating, drinking or activity behaviour to repeat in the same daily context for twelve weeks. The researchers tracked how automatic the behaviour began to feel.[1]
Missing one opportunity did not materially affect the habit-forming process.
There are limits to what we can take from that. The participants were establishing one new behaviour, most were students, and the researchers measured their reported sense of automaticity. It tells us something useful about missing one opportunity, not what happens after six months away from the gym.
For one bad Monday, it is still reassuring.
The app may reset the streak to zero. The walks you already took still happened. The gym sessions still happened. The decent breakfasts still happened. You have not somehow made them count less.
What actually happened?
There is a difference between explaining what happened and deciding what it says about you.
I missed Monday because work overran.
Fair enough. Perhaps Monday evenings have become unreliable. Perhaps this one meeting was unusual and there is nothing to change. Either way, you have some information you can use.
I am useless. I never stick at anything.
There is very little you can do with that, apart from feel bad while continuing not to put your trainers on.
Research on self-compassion and health behaviour gives us some reason to be wary of the second sort of response. A meta-analysis of 94 articles involving nearly 30,000 people found a modest positive association between self-compassion and health-promoting behaviour.[2]
That was largely evidence of an association, so it does not show that being kinder to yourself will cause you to exercise. A separate systematic review found seven studies of self-compassion interventions and concluded that they were about as effective as other behaviour-change techniques at improving self-regulation of health behaviour.[3]
There is no secret fitness hack hiding here. Beating yourself up simply has no obvious advantage when you could be working out what happened and what you want to do next.
Sometimes there is something to learn. Sometimes Monday was just a crap Monday.
Let the next session be ordinary
After missing a session, it is easy to decide that the next one should make up for it.
You add another half hour, choose the harder class or squeeze an extra session into a week that was already too busy. It feels responsible because you are paying back whatever Monday cost you.
That usually makes the return more demanding at the exact point when it needs to be easy to take.
If you normally train on Monday, Wednesday and Friday and Monday disappears, Wednesday is still there. You can do the session you would normally have done, shorten it if the week is difficult, and carry on.
An emergency Tuesday workout may be useful if you genuinely want to do it. Otherwise Wednesday can remain the session it was before Monday went wrong.
The next session helps because it keeps the miss contained. Once you have gone back, Monday becomes one thing that happened during an otherwise fairly normal run of weeks.
Have a plan for the day after
It can help to decide what you usually do after a miss before it happens.
You might return at the next normal opportunity. You might keep a short version ready planned out if the same busy week is still happening. You may decide that genuine illness or injury means waiting until you are ready.
The plan can be very plain:
When I miss one, I carry on with the next thing I had planned. I can make it smaller if I need to.
This saves you from designing a comeback on Tuesday morning, when you are already annoyed and a completely new programme has somehow begun to seem necessary.
Ten minutes can be enough for the return. One set can be enough. A walk can be enough if the run feels like too much today.
You are making the next useful decision and letting the miss go.
Tuesday is still available
The first miss has happened and there is nothing left to do about it.
The useful moment is when I missed it begins turning into I always do this, because the second sentence can start deciding what happens for the rest of the week.
Catch it there if you can. Work out whether Monday taught you anything useful, then leave enough room for Tuesday or Wednesday to be ordinary.
Sometimes that day will go wrong as well. You have not failed a test. The next available day still works, and there is no need to wait for a cleaner week before using it.
Monday has already taken up one day. Tuesday or Wednesday can still be back to normal.
Keep starting.
References
[1] Lally, P., van Jaarsveld, C. H. M., Potts, H. W. W., and Wardle, J. (2010). How are habits formed: Modelling habit formation in the real world. European Journal of Social Psychology, 40(6), 998 to 1009.
[2] Phillips, W. J., and Hine, D. W. (2021). Self-compassion, physical health, and health behaviour: a meta-analysis. Health Psychology Review, 15(1), 113 to 139.
[3] Biber, D. D., and Ellis, R. (2019). The effect of self-compassion on the self-regulation of health behaviors: A systematic review. Journal of Health Psychology, 24(14), 2060 to 2071.