The trigger map
It was a Sunday morning in May, a clear sky, a kitchen table in front of me, and a sheet of butcher's paper with a black pen on it. The kettle was on. The kids were at their mother's. I had eighteen months of intermittent attempts behind me at quitting evening drinking, and a quiet sense that willpower was not the missing piece. The missing piece was that I had never sat down and actually mapped, on a single page, the conditions under which I drank. So I sat down and did it, and the exercise took just under an hour, and it was the single most useful hour I have spent on this in my entire life.
I am going to walk you through it. The exercise works for any habit you are trying to stop. Drinking, smoking, scrolling, porn, pokies, food. The five categories below are the ones that map cleanly onto every habit I have ever seen, and the eighty-twenty rule that emerges at the end of the exercise is the thing that will surprise you most.
The five trigger categories
There are five, and only five, that matter. Anything more granular than this is decoration. Anything less granular than this and you will miss the pattern.
Time. The hour of day, the day of the week, the season of the year. Habits live in slots. Most men can name their habit's slot to within thirty minutes if they sit and think. Mine was eight to nine in the evening, every night, but particularly Friday and Sunday.
Place. The room, the chair, the shop, the route home. Habits are spatial. The chair you drink in is a cue more powerful than the bottle. The route past the bottle shop is part of the habit, even if you do not stop. The aisle in the petrol station is a cue if you used to buy cigarettes there. The phone, in the bedroom, on the bedside table, is a place.
People. Who you are with, or the absence of who. Most men focus on the people present (the friend who drinks, the colleagues at the pub) and miss the equally powerful people absent (the partner away for the weekend, the kids at their other parent's, the witnesses gone). The absence is a trigger.
Emotion. The internal weather. The big four are stress, sadness, anger, and the one nobody expects, which is boredom. We will come back to boredom because it is the surprise of the exercise.
Body state. Tired, hungry, drunk already, hungover, post-workout, post-illness, post-sex, jet-lagged, wired. The body's chemistry sets the volume on the urge, and most men are wildly unaware of how much their body state is driving the reach for the substance.
Five categories. That is the alphabet. Now we use it.
The sixty-minute exercise
You need a piece of paper, a pen, an hour, and the absence of distractions. Phone in another room. Coffee or tea in front of you. Door shut.
Step one, ten minutes. Across the top of the page, write the five categories: Time, Place, People, Emotion, Body. Underneath each one, list every trigger you can think of from the last ninety days. Do not edit. Do not rank. Just dump.
Step two, twenty minutes. For each of the last ten times you used (drank, smoked, watched, gambled), write a single line. Date if you can remember it. The five categories. What triggered the use. Be specific. Not stress. The specific email at four-fifteen. Not boredom. The specific Sunday afternoon at three with the kids gone and nothing on.
Step three, fifteen minutes. Look across the ten incidents. Circle the patterns. Most men, by the end of this step, are looking at three or four triggers that account for seven or eight of the ten incidents. This is the eighty-twenty finding and we will discuss it next.
Step four, fifteen minutes. For each of the top three or four patterns, write two columns. Avoid: how could I make this trigger less likely to happen, or less likely to find me. Substitute: if the trigger does happen, what is the specific other thing I will do instead.
Total time: sixty minutes. Output: a single sheet of paper that is the most useful artefact you will produce on your recovery work for the next year.
The eighty-twenty finding
This is the part that will probably surprise you. When you do the exercise honestly, you will find that around eighty per cent of your incidents trace to twenty per cent of the triggers. For most men, three or four specific triggers account for the bulk of their use.
For me, the four triggers that accounted for nearly all my drinking were: Friday after work between five and seven (Time plus Body, transitioning out of work brain), Sunday afternoon between two and five with the kids gone (Time plus People plus Emotion, the Sunday hollow), social events with three specific friends (People), and any night where I was already two drinks in and a fourth was offered (Body, the chemistry making the next decision easier than it should have been).
Four triggers. Ninety per cent of my drinking. Once I saw it on paper, the work was finite. Not infinite. It was four specific situations to design around. That was the gift of the exercise. The fight had been going on inside my head, in the abstract, where every situation felt like a war. On paper, in concrete, it was four definable problems.
This is true for almost every habit I have helped friends map. The eighty-twenty finding is reliable enough that you can use it as a check on your own honesty. If your map shows triggers spread evenly across every situation, you have either done the exercise too vaguely (zoom in) or you are using more than you have admitted to yourself (the spread is not real, you are blurring the picture to avoid the pattern).
Designing avoidance
For each of the top three or four triggers, ask one question. Can I make this trigger less likely to find me, in the next thirty days, by changing my environment or schedule. Sometimes the answer is yes and the move is small.
A friend of mine, who quit pokies in 2022, identified that his number-one trigger was driving home past a particular pub on Wednesday and Friday nights. He changed his route. Took an extra eleven minutes. Held his abstinence at fourteen months and counting. The avoidance was a literal avoidance: a different road.
For my Sunday afternoon hollow, I identified that the kids being away was the trigger, and I could not change that. But I could change what I did with that block. I scheduled a long walk with a specific friend every other Sunday from two to four, and a weekly long phone call with my brother on the Sundays in between. The hollow was filled with a planned thing. The trigger no longer had an empty afternoon to fill.
For Friday five to seven, the avoidance move was to leave the office at four-thirty and go straight to the pool. Forty minutes of laps. Showered, fed, in the door at six-fifteen on the other side of the day's transition. The pub-shaped slot was no longer empty by the time the urge would have arrived.
Avoidance is not weakness. Avoidance is engineering. The temperance of removing the trigger is more reliable than the discipline of resisting it. The man who keeps a bottle in the cupboard and resists is doing harder work, every night, than the man who emptied the cupboard once and is now doing nothing.
- Specific routes home that bypass the trigger location
- Specific time slots filled with planned alternative activities
- Specific people who are aware and enlisted in the avoidance plan
- Specific environmental changes (the bottle out of the house, the app deleted, the alert turned off)
- Specific calendar blocks for the high-risk windows
Designing substitution
For the triggers you cannot avoid, the question is what fills the slot. Substitution is harder than avoidance because the substitute has to do similar work to the substance. It has to mark the transition, occupy the body, fill the social slot, regulate the mood. A glass of water does not do what a glass of red does. A herbal tea is closer. A walk around the block is closer still. A ten-minute call with a specific friend who knows what you are working on is the closest of all.
Substitution rules of thumb. The substitute should engage the body, not just the mind. It should be portable, available in the slot you need it. It should not require negotiation in the moment of urge (the choice is pre-decided, sitting on the kitchen bench, ready to be done). And it should be slightly inconvenient, because the inconvenience is part of the recalibration of the reward circuitry.
For my Friday after-work slot, the substitute was the pool. For my Sunday hollow, the substitute was the walk and the phone call. For social events with the three drinking friends, the substitute was an early dinner instead of late drinks, and a clear answer to the offer of a beer (sparkling water with a slice, no negotiation, no apology).
The trigger that surprises you
Boredom. Almost always boredom. It comes up for nearly every man who does this exercise honestly, and it is almost always the one he had not consciously identified. He thought his drinking was about stress. The map shows him that stress accounts for two of ten incidents and boredom accounts for five.
Boredom is the trigger nobody warns you about because nobody wants to talk about it. It feels embarrassing to admit. The man wants his habit to be about something more dignified than the simple fact that there is a quiet hour on a Sunday afternoon and nothing happens to be going on. But the data is clear across every behavioural change study I have read. Boredom is the most common trigger for relapse, particularly for men, particularly in the slot between five and seven on weeknights and between two and five on Sundays.
The good news is that boredom is the most addressable trigger. It is the easiest to design around, because the work is just to fill the slot with something. The bad news is that the something has to be planned in advance, in the same way you would plan a meeting, because in the moment of boredom the brain will not generate options. It will generate the substance. The thinking has to be done on Sunday morning for the Sunday afternoon, not on the afternoon itself.
A bloke I know who has been off methamphetamine for seven years described his boredom strategy in one sentence. He said, I always have one boring useful thing on the bench, and one interesting fun thing in the calendar, and the gap between them is what would have killed me, so I close the gap deliberately. It was the most accurate sentence on triggers I have ever heard.
ENOUGH guessing. Map the eighty per cent.