The Six Days Between Sessions.
Therapy happens for one hour. Your life happens for the other 167. What you do in between is not homework — it is where most of the change actually occurs.
A client said something to me a few years ago that I have thought about ever since.
She had been coming for about four months. The work was going well by any reasonable measure — she could name her patterns, trace them back, describe exactly what happened in her body when her manager sent a certain kind of email. She was insightful, articulate and doing the work properly.
Then she said: "I understand all of it. And on Thursday I did exactly the same thing again."
She was not complaining about therapy. She was describing something real, and something I hear often enough that it deserves a proper answer.
One hour, and then one hundred and sixty-seven
A therapy session is fifty minutes. A week is 168 hours.
That arithmetic is not a criticism of therapy — the hour matters enormously, and there are things that can only happen in a room with another person paying close attention. But it does mean that most of your life, including almost all of the moments where change would actually be visible, happens somewhere I am not.
It happens on Thursday, when the email arrives.
It happens at 3am.
It happens in the ten minutes before you walk through your front door carrying the day.
It happens during the argument, not during the retelling of the argument.
This is not a failure of the therapeutic model. It is simply where the material is.
Insight and change are different skills
One of the more frustrating discoveries for thoughtful people is that understanding a pattern does not reliably stop it.
You can trace an anxious response to its origin, name it accurately in real time, explain it to a friend — and still feel it arrive before you have finished reading the first line of the message.
This is not a failure of intelligence, and it is not evidence that the insight was wrong. It reflects something about how the two things are stored.
Insight is conscious and verbal. It explains. Automatic responses are learned through repeated experience and triggered by cues — a tone of voice, a delay, a particular room — often before an explanation has assembled itself. By the time the understanding speaks, the sequence is frequently already moving.
Insight gives you the map. It does not, on its own, walk the route.
Why the session can feel like it worked and the week can feel like it didn’t
There is a particular pattern I see often, especially with people who are good at therapy.
The session goes well. Something clicks. You leave feeling clearer and more settled than you have all week. Then two days later the same thing happens again and the clarity seems to have evaporated.
Part of what is happening is state.
In the room, you are usually relatively settled. Someone is paying attention. Nothing is being demanded of you. Your capacity to think, hold several perspectives and consider alternatives is at its most available.
On Thursday, none of those conditions apply. Under pressure, working memory and cognitive flexibility become less reliable, and the response that is fastest and most practised tends to arrive first. The plan you made in a calm room has to be executed by a body that is not in a calm room.
That is not a reason to give up on the plan. It is a reason to practise it somewhere other than the hardest moment.
What useful between-session practice actually looks like
I want to be careful here, because "therapy homework" has a reputation, and often deservedly.
Worksheets that never get filled in. Thought records that become another item on a list of things you are failing at. Journalling prompts that turn into evidence of your inconsistency. If the practice becomes another demand, it is working against the thing it was meant to support.
The between-session work that tends to help is much smaller than people expect.
Noticing earlier
Not stopping the reaction. Just catching it sooner.
If the pattern usually becomes obvious to you at 8/10, the useful practice is recognising it at 6/10. That is a genuine change and it happens before anything else does. Most of my clients notice earlier for weeks or months before they are able to do anything different, and that sequence is normal rather than disappointing.
One specific cue, not the whole pattern
"Conflict" is too big to practise with. "The particular tightness across my chest when someone goes quiet on me" is something you can actually watch for.
Pick one. Narrow is better than comprehensive.
Something physical, because the body is available
When thinking is the thing that has become less reliable, a purely cognitive intervention is asking the impaired system to fix itself.
Feeling your feet against the floor. Looking slowly around the room until you have found three specific things. Letting one exhale be a little longer than you would have made it. Standing up. Walking to the end of the corridor and back before replying.
These are not profound. That is rather the point — they need to be simple enough to be findable when you are not at your best.
Practising when it is easy
The middle of a 9/10 reaction is a poor time to learn a new skill.
If you want a practice to be available under pressure, rehearse it at 3/10, when nothing much is happening and you do not need it. That is how it becomes familiar enough to find later.
Bring the week back
The most useful thing you can bring to a session is not a summary of your conclusions. It is the raw material.
What happened on Thursday. What you noticed in your body before you noticed the thought. What you tried. What happened next. Where it stopped working.
A client who arrives and says "I got overwhelmed on Tuesday, I tried the thing with my feet, it did nothing, and then I snapped at my partner" has given me far more to work with than a client who arrives with a tidy account of their patterns. The second version is easier to tell. The first version is where the change is.
It is also worth saying: if a practice did not help, that is information rather than failure. It might have been the wrong practice for the state you were in, the wrong dose, or the right thing at a moment when something else was needed — rest, food, a boundary, or a different conversation entirely.
Some things practice cannot fix
I would rather say this plainly than have it implied.
Between-session practice is not a substitute for treatment, and building a capacity to tolerate a situation is not always the right goal. Some circumstances need to change rather than be met more skilfully — an unsafe relationship, an impossible workload, an environment that keeps producing the thing you are practising to survive.
Regulation practices should never become a reason to stay somewhere harmful, and if you find that is what is happening, that is worth bringing into the room rather than practising your way around.
Where the change actually lives
People sometimes measure therapy by how they feel walking out of the session.
A more accurate measure is what happens on Thursday. Not whether the reaction stopped — usually it will not, for a while — but whether you saw it coming, whether there was a moment where something else seemed possible, whether you came back to yourself sooner afterwards.
That is slower and less dramatic than the version of change most of us are hoping for. It is also the version that tends to last.
The hour matters. But the six days are where it lands.
One practical footnote: for years I recorded short guided practices for clients to use between sessions, because a technique described in a room is easy to forget by Thursday. Those recordings eventually became Soma Circuit, a small app of short body-based exercises. Clients at In Health- Byron Bay Psychology are welcome to use it — though a piece of paper with one sentence on it works perfectly well too.
Try it in the nervous system regulation app
If you are looking for support in the Northern Rivers, our team at In Health offers therapy for anxiety, depression, stress, burnout, trauma and adult ADHD assessment — in person in Byron Bay and online. Meet the team or get in touch. Medicare and WorkCover rebates available with a referral.
Frequently asked questions
What should I do between therapy sessions?
Keep it small and specific. Pick one cue to notice earlier, have one simple physical practice available, and rehearse it when you do not need it rather than in the hardest moment. Bring the raw material of what happened back to the next session rather than a tidy summary.
Why do I understand my patterns but keep repeating them?
Because understanding and automatic responding are stored differently. Insight is conscious and verbal; automatic responses are learned through repeated experience and triggered by cues before an explanation assembles. Insight gives you the map, but the body still takes the route it has practised most.
Is therapy homework actually necessary?
Formal homework is not essential, and worksheets that go unfilled can become another source of failure. What does help is small, specific between-session attention — noticing one cue earlier, trying one simple practice, and reporting honestly on what happened. The scale should be minutes, not hours.
Why does therapy feel like it works in session but not during the week?
Partly because of state. In session you are relatively settled and nothing is being demanded of you, so your capacity to think flexibly is at its most available. Under real pressure, working memory and cognitive flexibility become less reliable, and the fastest, most practised response arrives first.
How long does it take for therapy to change a pattern?
There is no fixed timeline, and it varies by person and pattern. A more useful marker than the reaction disappearing is earlier noticing — catching the cue sooner, pausing slightly longer, recovering faster. Those shifts usually appear well before the original pattern stops arriving.
Related reading
• Our services at In Health – Byron Bay Psychology
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This article is general education and does not replace individual psychological assessment or treatment. If you are experiencing persistent or worsening distress, please speak with your GP or a qualified mental-health professional.
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Written by Gerry Bronn — Director, Clinical and Coaching Psychologist at In Health – Byron Bay Psychology. BPsych (Hons), MPsych (Clinical), MAPS, MACPA, FCCLP. Endorsed Clinical Psychologist with the Psychology Board of Australia · Member, Australian Clinical Psychology Association · Training as a certified Hakomi Psychotherapist · Registered Medicare and WorkCover provider.
Published August 2026
References and further reading
1. Shields GS, Sazma MA, Yonelinas AP. The effects of acute stress on core executive functions: a meta-analysis.Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews. 2016.
2. Schwabe L, Wolf OT. Stress-induced modulation of instrumental behaviour: from goal-directed to habitual control.Behavioural Brain Research. 2011.
3. Kazantzis N, Whittington C, Dattilio F. Meta-analysis of homework effects in cognitive and behavioural therapy.Clinical Psychology: Science and Practice. 2010.
4. Cohen N, Ochsner KN. From surviving to thriving in the face of threats: the emerging science of emotion regulation training.Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences. 2018.