Stages of Change: Which Stage Is Your Life Actually In?

Most people who announce that they are going to fix their life are in contemplation, not action, and the two stages need opposite advice. That is the part of the stages of change model that holds up. The rest, the idea that you can sort people into boxes and treat each box differently for better results, has been tested in trials and mostly did not pay off.

So this is a quiz, not a prescription. The stages come from Prochaska and DiClemente’s work on smokers, and I will tell you which parts are solid, which are shaky, and how to use the thing anyway.

Where do the stages of change come from?

James Prochaska and Carlo DiClemente published “Stages and processes of self-change of smoking: toward an integrative model of change” in the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology in 1983 (volume 51, pages 390 to 395). The abstract describes 872 people, mean age 40, who were changing their smoking on their own, without treatment. They were sorted into stages, and the paper reports that self-changers used the fewest change processes in precontemplation, and used counterconditioning and stimulus control most in action and maintenance.

Two details get lost in the popular versions. The 1983 abstract lists precontemplation, contemplation, action, maintenance and relapse. Preparation is not in that list. And relapsers, the abstract says, “responded as a combination of contemplaters and people in action would.” Going backwards was in the model from the start, as its own group, not as a footnote.

The version you will meet in a wellness article came later. In their 1997 review in the American Journal of Health Promotion, Prochaska and Velicer describe six stages (adding preparation and termination), ten processes of change, and a rule of thumb for at-risk populations: 40 percent in precontemplation, 40 percent in contemplation and 20 percent in preparation. That last number is a useful correction to every fantasy about how many people are “ready.”

What does each stage sound like from the inside?

The researchers defined the stages by behavior and timing. I have translated them into the sort of thing you actually say to yourself, and added what tends to help. The “what helps” column is my reading of the model, not a tested protocol.

Stage	What it sounds like in your head	What helps
Precontemplation	“It’s fine. Everyone’s tired. My life is not a problem, my boss is.”	Information you chose to look at, a person who will describe the cost without lecturing. Not a plan.
Contemplation	“I really should. Maybe in January. Is this even the right thing to fix?”	Weighing pros and cons on paper, naming what the old pattern gets you, one tiny test. Not a 30-day challenge.
Preparation	“Okay. Starting Monday, and I’ve told one person.”	A date, a first step small enough to do on a bad day, removal of the obvious obstacles.
Action	“I’m doing it. It is annoying. Ask me tomorrow whether I still am.”	Daily structure, a record, other people who can see it, cues set up in advance.
Maintenance	“It’s been months. I’m getting bored and a little cocky.”	Plans for the slip, a reason that does not depend on novelty, watching for the quiet return of old routines.

For smoking, the Cochrane reviewers defined the stages with cut-offs: preparation is planning to quit in the next 30 days, action is quitting successfully for up to six months, and maintenance is more than six months. Those numbers were chosen for smoking. Nobody knows what the right cut-off is for “get my finances under control” or “stop living like a raccoon,” and that is the first sign of trouble.

Which stage are you in right now?

Pick one area, not your whole life. The model is about a specific behavior, and “my life” is not a behavior. Then answer in order:

1. Do you currently see this as a problem you would want to change? If no, you are in precontemplation, and that is allowed.
2. Do you see the problem but have no date and no first step? Contemplation. This is where most readers of a post like this one are.
3. Do you have a date, a first step and at least one other person who knows? Preparation.
4. Have you been doing the new thing for less than about six months? Action.
5. Longer than that, and mostly on autopilot? Maintenance.

Be suspicious of any answer that flatters you. “Preparation” is a popular self-diagnosis among people whose entire preparation is a notes app. If the date has been “soon” for three months, you are contemplating, and contemplating is a legitimate place to be. It is a stage with its own work, not a failing.

What actually goes wrong at each mismatch?

The survivor of the model, in my view, is a plain rule: do not give action-advice to someone in contemplation.

Someone who is still weighing whether to change does not need a 5 a.m. routine, a color-coded planner and a cold shower. They need the weighing to finish. Hand them an action-stage program and one of two things happens. They try it, it collapses within a week because the decision underneath was never made, and they file the collapse under “I have no discipline.” Or they quietly decline to start and feel guilty. Neither teaches them anything about the actual question, which was whether they want this.

The reverse mismatch is rarer but real. Someone in action who is handed more reflection (“but what does this mean to you?”) when they need a checklist and a witness will drift.

This is the same shape as the older argument in Rock Bottom Is Not a Prerequisite for Change, which used the stages to say that readiness can be built without a crisis. This post goes in a different direction: it asks what to do once you know where you are, and how far to trust the map.

Does matching help to your stage actually work?

Less than the theory promised. The best summary is the Cochrane review by Kate Cahill, Tim Lancaster and Natasha Green, “Stage-based interventions for smoking cessation,” published in the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews in 2010. They found 41 randomized trials with more than 33,000 participants. Four trials compared the same intervention in a stage-based version and a standard version, and found no clear advantage for the staging component. Two trials of self-help materials gave a relative risk of 0.93 (95% CI 0.62 to 1.39) and two of counselling gave 1.00 (0.82 to 1.22). A relative risk of 1.00 means no difference.

Stage-based programs did beat doing nothing: for example, 13 trials of stage-based individual counselling against any control gave a relative risk of 1.24 (1.08 to 1.42). But the reviewers’ reading is that this is consistent with the known effectiveness of those interventions in their non-staged forms. In their words, “the additional value of adapting the intervention to the smoker’s stage of change is uncertain.” They also noted that the evidence does not support restricting quitting advice only to smokers in preparation and action.

Then there is the philosophical complaint. Robert West’s 2005 editorial in Addiction, “Time for a change: putting the Transtheoretical (Stages of Change) Model to rest,” argues the model should be retired. I could confirm the title, journal, year and pages, but I could not open the full text, so I am relying on secondary summaries for the content of his argument, which centers on the stage boundaries being arbitrary. Treat that as a pointer to the source, not a quotation of it.

Two cautions about my own use of all this. First, the Cochrane evidence is about smoking cessation interventions, and I am applying it to the broader question of life changes, which is an inference. Second, the Prochaska and Velicer review is by the model’s authors and is more upbeat: it reports “dramatic improvements in recruitment, retention, and progress” for stage-matched programs. The two literatures disagree, and the trial-level comparison favors the skeptics.

What is the model still good for?

Three things survive the critique, none of which require believing in five discrete boxes.

It gives you a question before a plan. “What am I actually ready to do?” is better than “what is the best routine?” The routine is cheap to find. The readiness is not.

It explains why advice bounces off. A friend in precontemplation hears your advice as nagging. A friend in contemplation hears it as pressure to commit before they are done thinking. Asking which one you are talking to is kinder than another motivational speech.

It says relapse is part of the route. The 1983 paper’s relapsers behaved like a blend of contemplators and doers. That is a cheerful reading: after a collapse you are not at zero, you are somewhere in the middle with data.

If your life is a pile and you need to choose where to begin, the triage method for sorting what to fix first handles the sorting. The stages handle a different question, which is whether you are ready to start at all. And if the pile comes from a long stretch of not acting, the 19th-century novel Oblomov is a very long portrait of permanent contemplation. For the opposite situation, where a disaster has already forced the issue and you are asking what comes after, see post-traumatic growth after everything falls apart.

Why does a wake-up commitment fail in contemplation?

Getting up at a fixed time is an action-stage task. It is daily, it is visible, it is unforgiving, and it only works if the decision was made before the alarm rang. Most people try it from contemplation. They set a 5:30 alarm the night they feel inspired, and the 5:30 person is someone who has not agreed to the plan. The failure is usually a mismatch between the stage and the task, not a character flaw. The diagnosis of why morning commitments break lines up with this: a commitment tends to fail where the decision underneath it was never finished.

A practical version: if you are in contemplation about mornings, spend two weeks answering a single question each night (what would I do with the extra hour?) without moving the alarm. If you cannot answer, you are not ready to move it. If you can, you are in preparation, and the first step is a time you can hit on your worst day, not your best.

DontSnooze is an action-stage tool: when the alarm fires you have 30 seconds to record a video showing you are up, and if you do not, a random photo from your camera roll goes to friends you chose. That deadline-with-witnesses logic is my inference, not something these studies tested. It should help someone who has already decided to get up and mostly add dread for someone still contemplating, so the DontSnooze alarm belongs after you have an answer to the nightly question.

Questions people ask about the stages of change

What are the five stages of change in the transtheoretical model?

Precontemplation, contemplation, preparation, action and maintenance. Prochaska and Velicer’s 1997 review added a sixth, termination, and Prochaska and DiClemente’s 1983 smoking paper listed relapse among its stages instead of preparation. In smoking research the stages were defined by timing: preparation meant planning to quit within 30 days, action meant up to six months of abstinence, maintenance more than six months.

Is the stages of change model scientifically valid?

The stages describe how people talk about their own readiness reasonably well, but the evidence that matching an intervention to a stage works better is weak. A 2010 Cochrane review of 41 trials (over 33,000 smokers) found no clear advantage for the staging component in the four trials that tested it directly. Robert West’s 2005 editorial in Addiction argued the model should be retired.

How long does each stage of change last?

There is no fixed length, which is part of the criticism. Prochaska and Velicer’s 1997 review gave a rule of thumb for at-risk populations of 40 percent in precontemplation, 40 percent in contemplation and 20 percent in preparation, but that describes how people are spread across stages at one moment, not how long anyone stays. The smoking definitions used cut-offs such as 30 days and six months, and critics call those cut-offs arbitrary.

Can you skip a stage of change or go backwards?

People move backwards often. The 1983 paper treated relapse as its own group and found relapsers behaved like a mix of contemplators and people in action. Nothing in the abstract suggests a smooth march from one stage to the next.