Most psychological interventions have to be administered repeatedly to be effective, but what is the optimal frequency? The answer will depend on how quickly the effects build up and wear off between intervention sessions. We investigated these temporal dynamics in a popular self-regulation intervention – implementation intentions. We combined a novel intervention design with objective high-resolution data of students' learning success during 40 days of preparation for an exam. Students

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... intervention prompts on half of the days, alternating between 2-3 consecutive days of prompting and no-prompting. Leveraging the intensive longitudinal data, we found that the beneficial effect of prompting on learning success built up over consecutive days of prompting and faded out when prompting was discontinued. These results suggest that the beneficial effects of self-regulation prompts on learning success are more volatile than previously believed. Self-regulation interventions may undergo a prolonged acquisition phase that can be accelerated by repeated prompting.