What the replays seem to be for

If replays were plainly useless, you'd have stopped long ago. People don't keep up a habit for eleven years unless it seems to be doing something. So this chapter takes the replays' side and asks what they appear to offer. I count five things.

They seem to be how you learn. You made a mistake, and thoughtful people look at their mistakes. Going back over it feels like study.

They seem to be how you understand. Why did you say that? What's wrong with you that those were the words that came out? It feels as though the answer is in there somewhere, and one more pass might find it.

They seem to be how you pay. You hurt someone, or embarrassed yourself, or wasted something valuable. Feeling bad about it seems only right. The flinch at the washing line is a small instalment on what you owe.

They seem to keep you careful. As long as the photocopier stays fresh, you won't do it again. The replay works as a warning sign that you keep freshly painted.

And they seem to show what kind of person you are. Someone who could say a thing like that and never think of it again would be callous. You're not callous, and the replays are your proof.

I take all of these seriously. Each one is attached to a real need. You do want to learn from what goes wrong, and to understand yourself. You want to take responsibility for harm you've done, to avoid doing it again and to be a person with a conscience. None of that is up for debate in this book. If the replays delivered those things, I'd tell you to carry on.

There's research showing how convincing the sense of usefulness is. Sonja Lyubomirsky and Susan Nolen-Hoeksema ran a set of studies in the early 1990s on what psychologists call rumination, which means dwelling repeatedly on your troubles and what they say about you. They asked some people to spend time focusing on themselves and their feelings, and asked others to think about neutral things. Among people who were already in a low mood, those who'd been dwelling reported feeling that they were gaining insight into themselves and their problems. They were also less willing to go and do something pleasant, even when they agreed they'd enjoy it. The researchers' suggestion was that the two go together. If dwelling feels like the route to understanding, then going for a walk feels like running away from the work.

So the sense of insight is a regular product of dwelling. It comes whether or not any insight has arrived, which is why it can't be used as evidence. You'll know the feeling. Partway through a replay there's often a sense of getting close to something, as if this time you'll finally see why you did it. Then you reach her face and "Yes", and you're where you were.

Other researchers have looked at what people believe about this kind of thinking. Costas Papageorgiou and Adrian Wells built a questionnaire to measure positive beliefs about rumination, and went on to propose a model in which those beliefs keep the dwelling going. As later researchers summarise it, believing that going over things will help you solve your problems is part of what sends you back to go over them. You return to the scene because you think the return is productive.

Here's the approach for the next five chapters. Each takes one of the jobs the replays seem to do, and asks whether they do it. I'll look at learning, understanding how you could have done it, what others think, paying, and staying careful. I'm not going to argue that you should care less. The argument is that the replays aren't how the caring gets anything done.