Regression to the mean

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My appearance tends to be very sloppy; it's always been like this. There have been many times, however, either due to prompting by others or my getting the idea that I need to finally "grow up" and starting taking care of my appearance, I will attempt to self-impose a regime of improved grooming. It rarely lasts more than a few days and toward the end I am getting exhausted and sick of grooming and I end up becoming even sloppier than I was before, then things kinda stabilize right back to how it is usually is.

My hair usually ends up getting tangled, though I usually go to the hair salon to help it. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to afford it and the hair salons here are way more expensive than the ones where I used to live. I was planning to go the hair salon today, but I found that because of automatic billpay in one of my checking accounts it became overdrawn and I got charged a fee for it before I could move more money in; because I must pay a traffic fine and a parking ticket, total value of about $400, or face arrest, impounding, or both, I am going to hold off.

Thats got nothin' to do with the mathematical concept of "regression towards the mean".

But I suppose that what you are describing IS a psychological phenome that many folks do. Try to go extreme one way- and end up going extreme the other way. For example if you over eat, and then you go cold turkey into a sudden extreme starvation diet to slim down- and then when you achieve your weight goal you might indeed "worse than reverse" once your done with the extreme diet by binge eating worse than before for a short period-before returning to your normal lesser amount of over eating. You would probably gain back all of the weight you lost.