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Today President-elect Barack Obama and family will move into an historic house on Pennsylvania Ave. in Washington D.C. - and no, it's not the White House. It's Blair House, a complex of four homes right across from 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. where the Obama family will stay for the week leading up to the Inauguration...
That moment of yielding fully to addiction is what Alan Marlatt, director of the Addictive Behaviors Research Center at the University of Washington, calls the abstinence-violation effect (AVE). "The abstinence-violation effect is a form of black-and-white thinking," says Marlatt. "You blame [your failure] on internal factors that you consider beyond your control." (See what makes you eat more food...
...could also call it the "f___ it" effect, the idea that once you cheat, you've blown it, so you might as well binge. In traditional 12-step programs for addiction, that line of thinking is encapsulated in the slogan "A drink equals a drunk." But understanding and overcoming AVE, says Marlatt, is crucial to conquering a problem behavior or dependency in the long term. You have to know what to do when you fall off the wagon to learn how to stay on it. (See the top 10 food trends...
...smoking a single cigarette after their quit date to be a complete defeat and evidence of an innate and permanent lack of willpower were much more likely to let a momentary lapse become a full-blown relapse. That was the start of Marlatt's work on AVE. Since then, he has become one of the world's leading authorities on preventing relapse. (See photos of vintage cigarette...
...meantime, by keeping AVE in mind, perhaps Oprah and the rest of us will have a better chance of sticking with our 2009 resolutions...