The decision

Here's the decision, and it's small. When I feel the beam, I count the shoes.

That's the rule. Not never feel watched, which isn't a thing you can decide, and not stop caring, which you shouldn't. The rule is about what you do in the second after the heat arrives in your face. The old response was to look down, walk faster, monitor your arms, and start the sting early. The new one is to make the headcount, look at the room, and count. It takes a minute and you can do it in any room in the world.

It helps to have three plans in the when-then form, which Peter Gollwitzer and Paschal Sheeran found, in a review of many studies, to be reliably better than an intention on its own. When I walk into a room and the beam comes on, then I'll pick a number and count. When I catch myself in a run-up, rehearsing the walk or the sentence, then I'll write the one point I want to make and stop rehearsing. When the sting starts on the way home, then I'll say the headcount and the shoe count out loud and let it go at that. Write them down. The rule does most of the work, but the plans are what get it done in the room.

What to expect, and this is my expectation rather than a finding. The first few counts will feel absurd, because you're standing in a café looking at people, and the beam will insist that this makes it worse. It doesn't, because looking at people is what everyone in the room is not doing, and nobody notices you doing it. After a week, the headcount starts arriving lower. After a fortnight, in some rooms, the beam doesn't come on at all, and you'll notice that after the fact. In some rooms it still will, the meeting especially, and that's fine, because the rule doesn't need the beam to stop. It needs you to count.

Phillippa Lally and colleagues, following people forming a daily habit, found that it took weeks for a new response to become automatic, with wide variation between people, and that missing a day didn't set the process back much. This is a response to a feeling rather than a daily task, so I'm borrowing loosely. But the shape is the same. It'll be deliberate for a while, and then one day you'll walk in and count without deciding to, and not long after that you'll walk in and not need to.