Falling Off Salah Again: Why the Second Restart Feels Harder

Key takeaways

• A second restart can feel harder because it starts after a failed attempt, and in self-efficacy theory repeated failures lower people's sense that they can manage it.
• In research on quitting smoking and other addictive habits, needing more than one attempt is the usual pattern rather than the exception.
• In Marlatt's model of relapse from drinking, blaming a lapse on a fixed, general personal flaw makes giving up likelier than putting it down to poor coping in one situation.
• Behaviour-change theories treat starting and keeping a habit as partly different problems, and in a repeat attempt the keeping is what failed last time.
• None of the research behind these points involves prayer. It comes from addiction, fear-treatment, laboratory and health-behaviour research, so applying it to salah is reasoning by analogy, not evidence.

Coming back to salah again, after a comeback that did not last, is a different problem from the first return, and it can feel heavier before it has even begun.

The second comeback starts with a record

Rebuilding a routine after a long break, with the timetable, the place and the cues put back one at a time, is laid out week by week in a four-week plan for coming back to salah. A second attempt carries something a first does not: the record of an attempt that ended.

The method may still be known; what has changed is the conclusion drawn from the last try. That conclusion is the subject here: what a failed attempt does to the next one, and the question it leaves that a first return never faced.

Is it normal to fall off more than once?

In the addictive habits researchers have followed over time, smoking among them, needing several attempts is the ordinary route to lasting change, not a sign that something is unusually wrong.

Prochaska, DiClemente and Norcross redrew their model of how people change as a spiral because "relapse is the rule rather than the exception with addictions". In their self-change research, about 15 percent of smokers who relapsed went back to not considering a change at all, while for "the vast majority of relapsers", 85 percent of relapsed smokers in that research, the next step was thinking about or preparing another attempt.

Following 1,277 Ontario smokers who had tried to quit, Chaiton and colleagues estimated that the average number of attempts before quitting successfully ranged from 6.1 to 142 depending on the method, with 29.6 under the method they expected to be least biased.

None of these studies concerned prayer, and no study reviewed here follows repeated lapses in religious practice. What carries across is narrow: in those behaviours, a second or third attempt was ordinary.

What a failed attempt does to the next one

In self-efficacy theory, repeated failures lower people's expectation that they can manage something, and that expectation is held to shape how much effort they put in and how long they keep going.

Bandura's statement of the theory is direct: "Successes raise mastery expectations; repeated failures lower them, particularly if the mishaps occur early in the course of events." A comeback that stopped in its first weeks is the kind of experience the sentence describes.

In the same passage, once strong expectations have been built "through repeated success", occasional failures are likely to do less damage, and the effects of failure "partly depend on the timing and the total pattern of experiences in which the failures occur." An early failure is the harder case, which is why the successes that follow it are worth keeping on the record. Much of the evidence Bandura drew on came from treatments for fears such as snake phobia, so for salah this is an analogy.

Why the explanation for the last lapse matters

How the last lapse was explained matters. In Marlatt's model of relapse from drinking, blaming a fixed, general personal flaw makes abandoning an attempt more likely than putting the lapse down to poor coping in one specific situation.

Larimer, Palmer and Marlatt, summarising the model Marlatt developed with Gordon, describe a reaction to a first lapse that "may influence whether a lapse leads to relapse": people who attribute the lapse to "stable, global, internal factors beyond their control", such as having no willpower, "are more likely to abandon the abstinence attempt" than people who put it down to their inability to cope with one specific high-risk situation and treat it as something to learn from.

Attribution theory offers a reason this weighs on the next attempt before it begins. In their reformulation of learned helplessness, Abramson, Seligman and Teasdale suggested that "if the attribution is global or stable, the individual will expect to be helpless in the distant future".

After a comeback that ended, both kinds of explanation are available. "I am not someone who can keep five prayers" is fixed and about the whole person. "I had no plan for the prayers that fell during my night shifts" is about one situation and one gap, and a gap can be closed. Neither source measured prayer: Marlatt's is a model of relapse from drinking, and Abramson's group built theirs on laboratory studies of helplessness.

Starting and keeping are partly different problems

Behaviour-change theories explain starting a behaviour and keeping it partly differently, and a repeat attempt is a case where the keeping is what failed.

Reviewing 100 theories of behaviour change, Kwasnicka and colleagues found "distinct patterns of theoretical explanations for behaviour change and for behaviour change maintenance", and noted that even shared ingredients such as self-efficacy "may change substantially from initiation to maintenance". The review covers health behaviours, and its authors say the degree of generalisability requires testing.

A start date and fresh motivation answer how to begin; a repeat attempt also has to answer what stopped the last one.

What to change this time

Three changes follow, by analogy, from the research above, none of them a rule about the prayer itself: name where the last attempt broke, keep what held, and measure the new attempt in days.

Name where the last attempt broke

Write down where the last attempt ended and what you had no answer for when it came. That is the second kind of explanation, specific and fixable, and several gaps have a worked-through fix:

• It gave way on days off, when the working week's fixed points disappeared: a shape for the day off puts different fixed points in their place.
• It broke when your shifts rotated: plan by shift type, not by weekday, with one short plan per type.
• The adhan kept sounding but stopped registering: a different signal and one decided action are the two levers suggested for a call that no longer registers.
• Asr kept slipping during working days: its window sits inside the working day, and five fixes for a missed Asr start from that.
• Fajr was where it ended: the best-evidenced fixes for waking at Fajr are an anchored wake time and morning light.
• The times themselves kept catching you out: start from a timetable for where you live now.

Keep what held

The last attempt was not only a failure. If some prayers or some times of day held through it, they belong to the record too, and in Bandura's terms they are successes. This is a more accurate reading of the last attempt, not a plan to pray fewer prayers.

Measure in days, not a run

An unbroken run turns any missed prayer into a verdict on the whole attempt, close to the reaction Marlatt's model describes, while complete days add up to the repeated success that, in Bandura's account, is likely to make later occasional failures less damaging.

What can be said about making up prayers and repentance

The four Sunni schools agree that an obligatory prayer a Muslim missed after puberty, whether forgotten, slept through or skipped, is made up, as al-Jaziri's comparison of the four schools sets out, and that prayers not performed during menstruation or post-natal bleeding, or before a person first became Muslim, do not have to be, a point on which the Kuwaiti Encyclopedia of Islamic Jurisprudence records no disagreement. How, when, how many and in what order to make them up, and special cases such as long unconsciousness or loss of reason, are where the schools differ and are questions for a qualified scholar.

On repentance, scholars hold that God accepts sincere repentance, as the Kuwaiti Encyclopedia's entry on repentance sets out, and the Quran tells those "who have transgressed against themselves" not to "despair of the mercy of Allāh" (39:53, Saheeh International). Whether one person's repentance has been accepted is not something an article can say, and two further questions stay with a qualified scholar: how stopping after a restart compares with never having started, and the ruling on someone who abandons prayer altogether.

Where to start this time

Before the first prayer of this attempt, write one sentence about the last one: where it broke, and what you had no answer for at that moment. Keep it somewhere you will see it.

Then treat the first complete day as a success in its own right. In Muslim App, marking all five prayers in a day opens a celebration card, as its prayer guide describes.