The month it stopped working

Everyone who has taken a supplement for long enough has the same sentence ready, and it is always the same sentence. It worked really well for the first month.

It is worth noticing what that sentence does not say. It does not say the jar was fake, or underdosed, or that the second month was worse than taking nothing. It says the difference stopped being noticeable. Those are not the same thing, and treating them as the same is how people end up buying the next jar of something else.

A signal that never varies stops reading as a signal. That is not a claim about any particular ingredient; it is closer to a description of how attention works. The first cold morning of the year is a fact about the weather. The fortieth is a fact about the calendar.

The usual advice is to cycle: take it for eight weeks, stop for four, start again. It is sound advice and almost nobody follows it, for a reason that has nothing to do with discipline. The month off is a month of nothing — no routine, no jar on the counter, no reason to remember. What tends to happen is that the month off becomes two, and then the jar is at the back of a cupboard behind the protein.

The alternative is not to stop but to alternate. Two formulas, neither taken two evenings running, each away long enough to be noticed when it returns. The break is real, and it is a day rather than a month, so nothing has to be restarted.

What that costs is a decision every evening about which jar to open, which is exactly the kind of decision people get wrong at eleven at night. So the decision is handed to the date instead: odd, even, and the calendar keeps count. It is not a clever mechanism. It is a mechanism that does not require anybody to be clever at the end of a long day.