The Importance of Bright Lines: When Clean Breaks Might Be Necessary

Anyone dealing with addiction or strongly entrenched habits realizes sooner or later that gradualist approaches might not do the trick. Of course, only we can know whether that is the case with us. Personally, I have benefited both from incrementalist and radical gestures, the latter coming to the fore when more moderate strategies failed to do their job. In that regard, I found the concept of “bright lines” that Tierney and Baumeister mention in their book Willpower incredibly helpful. Bright lines, on their terms,

are clear, simple, unambiguous rules. You can’t help but notice when you cross a bright line. If you promise yourself to drink or smoke ‘moderately,’ that’s not a bright line. It’s a fuzzy boundary with no obvious point at which you go from moderation to excess. Because the transition is so gradual and your mind is so adept at overlooking your own peccadilloes, you may fail to notice when you’ve gone too far. So you can’t be sure you’re always going to follow the rule to drink moderately. In contrast, zero tolerance is a bright line: total abstinence with no exceptions anytime. It’s not practical for all self-control problems—a dieter cannot stop eating all food—but it works well in many situations. Once you’re committed to following a bright-line rule, your present self can feel confident that your future self will observe it, too. And if you believe that the rule is sacred—a commandment from God, the unquestionable law of a higher power—then it becomes an especially bright line. You have more reason to expect your future self to respect it, and therefore your belief becomes a form of self-control: a self-fulfilling mandate. I think I won’t, therefore I don’t.

Eric Clapton discovered that bright line in one moment at Hazelden, and he appreciated its power once again when he chaired an AA meeting not long after the death of his son. He spoke about the third of the twelve steps—handing your will over to the care of a higher power—and told the group how his compulsion to drink had vanished the instant he got down on his knees at Hazelden and asked for God’s help. From then on, he told them, he never doubted he would have the will to remain sober, not even on the day his son died. After the meeting, a woman came up to him. “You’ve just taken away my last excuse to have a drink,” she told him. “I’ve always had this little corner of my mind which held the excuse that, if anything were to happen to my kids, then I’d be justified in getting drunk. You’ve shown me that’s not true.” Upon hearing her, Clapton realized that he had found the best way to honor the memory of his son. Whatever you call his gift to that woman—social support, faith in God, trust in a higher power, a bright line—it left her with the will to save herself. (185-186)

I can relate to these words, viscerally so.