Introduction
This is the other side of the same question, and it's the one asked by the person who keeps trying. How many times is normal? How many before it's fair to conclude that you're one of the ones it doesn't work for?
The expectation most people carry — that this is a chronically relapsing condition requiring endless attempts — is not what the research shows. It's worth knowing what the numbers actually are, and why the wrong one is usually quoted.
The Number
A nationally representative study of US adults who once had a significant alcohol or drug problem and no longer do asked how many serious recovery attempts it had taken them.
The median was two.1 The middle half of respondents reported between one and four. The single most common answer — the mode — was one. About 13% said they had made no attempt they would call serious.
Attempts did not differ meaningfully by primary substance. Opioids, alcohol, everything else: roughly the same.
Why You've Never Heard That Number
Because the average is 5.35, and the average is the figure that circulates.
The distribution is heavily skewed. Reported attempts ranged from zero to one hundred, and a small number of people at the far end — generally those with the greatest severity and co-occurring psychiatric conditions — pull the mean upward and make the typical experience look far worse than it is.
The researchers were explicit about this. They concluded that the median is the more fitting estimate for clinical and policy communication, and warned that the cultural expectation of "seemingly endless tries" may reduce hope, motivation, and help-seeking, because the threshold for success is perceived as impossibly high.
In other words: the discouraging figure you've absorbed is a statistical artifact, and its circulation does harm.
Counting Attempts Is Not the Same as Counting Failures
A frame worth adjusting.
An attempt that ended in relapse was not a wasted attempt. It generated information — about which cue, which hour, which rationalization, which support was missing. The next attempt is made by someone carrying that information.
This is why the count is a poor measure of anything. Two attempts by someone who learned nothing are worth less than five by someone who mapped their own pattern each time. The number is a description of how long it took, not of how much was accomplished along the way.
Nobody arrives at recovery having wasted the previous tries. They arrive having been assembled by them.
What the Higher Numbers Actually Track
The people who needed more attempts were not weaker.
More attempts were associated with prior use of treatment and mutual-help groups, with a history of psychiatric comorbidity, and with greater severity. That is: with having more to overcome, and with having sought help for it.
More attempts were also associated with greater current distress — meaning that the people who took longer are carrying more now, which is worth knowing if you are one of them, because it identifies something treatable rather than something shameful.
The Related Finding Worth Having
Two more things from this literature, both underreported.
Around three-quarters of people who seek recovery from a substance problem achieve it.
And nearly half of people who resolve a significant alcohol or drug problem do so without formal treatment or assistance. That's not an argument against getting help — help clearly increases the odds for people who need it. It's an argument against the belief that recovery requires a specific institutional path, and that failing to follow it means you can't.
What "Attempt" Even Means
An honest complication.
These are self-reports of what people considered a serious attempt, and people differ in what clears that bar. The 13% reporting zero attempts may have resolved a less severe problem, or may not have counted what they did. Sensitivity analysis showed that even assuming everyone had at least one attempt, the median moved only from two to three.
So the figure is robust, and it is not a promise. It describes the people who resolved their problem. It does not describe the people who didn't, and it cannot tell you which group you're in.
What to Do With This
Not complacency. A recalibration.
If you have relapsed twice, you are at the median. You are not an unusual failure; you are an unremarkable case of how this generally goes. That's worth knowing at 3am.
If you have relapsed a dozen times, you are in the tail — and what the tail correlates with is severity and untreated psychiatric conditions, which is a description of a treatment gap rather than a character flaw. It suggests something specific: get assessed for what else is going on.
Either way, the number of previous attempts does not predict the next one. Each attempt is made by a person who knows more than the last one did.
For the People Waiting
If someone is asking you this question because their family has run out of patience, one thing is worth passing on.
The expectation of endless relapse is doing damage on both sides. It exhausts the people who love you, and it lowers the hope of the person trying. It is also, according to the best available national data, simply wrong about the typical case.
The Bottom Line
The median number of serious attempts before people resolve an alcohol or drug problem is two; the most common answer is one. The frightening figure of five is a mean distorted by a small number of extreme cases, and the researchers who produced it said explicitly that reporting it that way discourages people. Around three-quarters of those who seek recovery achieve it, and roughly half of those who resolve a problem do it without formal treatment. More attempts track severity and untreated psychiatric illness — not weakness.
Sources
- Median 2 serious recovery attempts — Kelly JF, Greene MC, Bergman BG, White WL, Hoeppner BB (2019). How Many Recovery Attempts Does it Take to Successfully Resolve an Alcohol or Drug Problem? Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research, 43(7):1533-1544. View source ↗