The other account

The next three chapters are the method. This one is the habit that does most of the work, and it takes about a minute.

Write the reading down. When you notice you've taken something personally, put the reading in a sentence on paper or in your phone. "The email was short because the report was poor." "They're quiet because of the bins." Writing it down turns it from a fact about the world into a sentence you wrote, which is what it is.

Write the other account next to it. One explanation that has nothing to do with you, as specific as the reading. Not "maybe it's nothing", which is too vague to compete. Something with a day in it. "The email was short because they had back-to-back meetings and replied on their phone." "They're quiet because the call at eleven went badly." Make it as concrete as the reading, because the reading is concrete and a vague alternative loses to it every time.

Make it about their day, not your virtue. The other account isn't "I'm a good person so it can't be me". It's "here is a plausible day that produces this behaviour". Story and Repetti's finding is the template. A bad interaction at work produces anger and withdrawal at home the same evening. Start from there and fill in the details you'd expect from what you know of their week.

Notice which one you can check. Both are guesses. Only one of them has been treated as a fact for the last hour. Putting them side by side doesn't tell you which is true. It tells you that there are two, and that you'd chosen without looking.

Do it every time for a fortnight. The list from chapter 1 becomes two columns. By the second week, the other account starts arriving on its own, before the pen, and that's the habit forming. After a month, most people find the reading still arrives first, because it always will, and the other account arrives about a second later, which is soon enough to stop the evening.

Add the third column when you find out. Where you learn what the mood was actually about, write it down. This column is the evidence, over months, of which of your two guesses tends to be right, and I'd expect it to be lopsided in a direction that ends the argument.