I was talking to a client the other day about his experience with developing new habits. As many of us do, he was having some challenges getting into a groove with them. In reflecting on his experience, he said something like, “I skip one day, and before I know it two weeks have gone by and I haven’t done anything!”

There’s a very similar truism told around the rooms of 12-step recovery. It’s conventional wisdom that indulging in a bad habit even once makes it much much easier to indulge the next time. Or, skipping just one meeting makes it so much easier to skip the next meeting.

One of the major reasons behind this is the lies that our heads will tell us about skipping. One of the big ones for me (and many others) is the idea that “skipping just once won’t matter.” And, like all good self-sabotaging lies, this is built around a core of truth.

It’s definitely true that, in the big picture, it doesn’t matter if I skip the gym today. I typically go to the gym 4 times a week, which works out to about 200 times a year, factoring in the occasional vacation where I can’t go, week when I’m sick, or whatever. The difference between going to the gym 200 times a year and 199 times a year is not worth spending any time thinking about.

But, that’s exactly the core of the lie—it isn’t necessarily just the difference between 200 times and 199 times. Skipping today makes it much more likely that I’ll skip tomorrow or next Monday. And, if I skip next Monday, that makes it much more likely that I’ll skip the following Monday. Once I’ve gotten in the habit of skipping Monday, now we’re talking about the difference between 200 times a year and 150 times a year; that’s kind of a big difference.

And, because delayed attribution is hard, it’s hard to see the consequences of skipping this behavior. If I skip the gym every Monday for a year, it will be at least weeks and more likely months before I can notice any differences. Because we’re wired to want to look for causes that are more recent than that, it’s easy to instinctively say that it must be because of the weather this last week, or the Indian food I had last night, or whatever, when the real cause is that I’ve changed my behavior.

Now, I’m a recovering perfectionist. I definitely don’t want to suggest that the only acceptable standard is to do something every single day. But, if something is good for me, what that almost always means is that I like the results. I may not like the process or the execution, but it’s usually not possible to get the results without the process.

So. If you’ve got a routine that helps you—whatever that routine is, and whatever it helps you with—don’t fall for the lie that you can skip it just once. If it helps you, and you like the results, it’s worth doing consistently.