Track your temptation-to-confidence ratio
Confidence in your ability to resist temptation must outpace the pull of the old behavior.
Key takeaways
- What it is: Confidence in your ability to resist temptation must outpace the pull of the old behavior.
- Why it works: TTM measures "self-efficacy" and "temptations" as two competing forces. Maintenance is stable when self-efficacy across all relevant situations exceeds temptation. Tracking both — rather than just confidence — reveals which specific situations remain high-risk and need targeted coping plans before relapse occurs.
- Evidence: Backed by observational / correlational evidence.
- Avoid: Monitoring only general confidence ("I feel good about this") without mapping high-temptation situations — the ones that don’t feel like risks until they are.
Why it works
TTM measures "self-efficacy" and "temptations" as two competing forces. Maintenance is stable when self-efficacy across all relevant situations exceeds temptation. Tracking both — rather than just confidence — reveals which specific situations remain high-risk and need targeted coping plans before relapse occurs.
How to do it
- 1Rate your confidence on a 1–10 scale in several specific situations (stressed, socializing, bored).
- 2Rate your temptation in each of those same situations.
- 3Any situation where temptation ≥ confidence is a relapse risk; build a coping plan for it.
- 4Revisit the comparison monthly — the gap should widen over time.
What the evidence says
ObservationalTTM measures self-efficacy and situational temptations as key predictors of relapse. Higher self-efficacy and lower temptation have been shown to predict maintenance of behavior change across a range of health behaviors.
Honest caveat: Self-efficacy is a general predictor of performance in many frameworks; the TTM-specific situational confidence measure adds granularity but the comparative advantage over simpler self-efficacy measures is unclear.
- — Velicer et al. (1990), "An expert system intervention for smoking cessation", Addictive Behaviors
Common mistake
Monitoring only general confidence ("I feel good about this") without mapping high-temptation situations — the ones that don’t feel like risks until they are.
IX Coach tracks which situations trigger the strongest pull toward old habits and builds situation-specific coping plans before you encounter them.
Practice this with IX Coach →