"I deserve to feel bad about it"

For some mistakes, the replay is mainly about justice. You did something that hurt someone, or you failed someone who was counting on you. It seems wrong that you should be able to hang out the washing on a sunny afternoon with a quiet mind. The flinch feels like the least you owe.

I'm going to be careful here, because there's something right in this. Feeling bad after doing harm is how a conscience works. A large body of research on guilt finds that it pushes people towards repair. They apologise, put things right and treat people better afterwards. If you felt nothing about the photocopier, something would be missing in you. The first flush of "oh no, what did I say" was your conscience doing its job.

But consider what that feeling is for. It's a prompt, and it points at actions. Go after her and say, "I'm sorry, that came out wrong. I'm so sorry about your dad." Or, if the moment has gone, do better next time. Guilt gets you to do those things, and once you've done what can be done, it has nothing more to get you to do.

The replays are something else. They're the prompt going off long after every available action has been taken or has expired, and they've turned from a message into a sentence that you serve. My question about that sentence is who receives the payment. Your colleague gets nothing from your bad quarter of an hour at the washing line. She doesn't know about it. Her father is no less dead, her first morning back was no easier, and whatever she felt at the photocopier isn't soothed by anything you've felt since. If suffering were a currency, yours isn't reaching her.

It's not even clear that the suffering makes you a better person. Juliana Breines and Serena Chen ran four experiments on how people respond to their own failings. They asked some participants to take a kind and understanding attitude towards a weakness or a recent wrong, and compared them with participants who weren't asked to. You might expect the kind attitude to make people complacent. It did the reverse. Those participants were more motivated to make amends and to avoid repeating the wrong, and after failing a test they spent longer studying for the next one. The harsh attitude, which feels like taking the thing seriously, didn't do better at producing change.

There's also correlational evidence. Don Davis and colleagues pooled the studies on self-forgiveness and wellbeing, 65 samples with nearly 18,000 people. People who were more able to forgive themselves had better psychological wellbeing, with a correlation of .45, which is substantial for this kind of research. A correlation can't tell you which causes which, so I won't lean on it hard. But it's the opposite of what you'd expect if endless self-reproach were good for people.

The objection is one I'd make myself. "This is all very convenient. I do something bad and then a book tells me to be nice to myself about it. That's letting myself off the hook."

Think about what the hook is. Being held to account for something means facing what you did without excuses, putting right what can be put right, and changing so that it doesn't happen again. Chapter 9 will ask you to do the first two. The replays do none of the three. They don't look squarely at what happened, because they skid straight to the worst second and your own shame. Nobody is repaid by them. And Breines and Chen's work suggests they're a worse route to changing than kindness is. A person who stops replaying and writes the apology has climbed further on to the hook. The one who replays for another eleven years has found a way to feel responsible without doing anything about it.

I'd also say that the punishment has long since lost any sense of proportion. You wouldn't sentence anyone else to four hundred bad quarter-hours for eight clumsy seconds at a photocopier. If a friend told you they'd been doing this to themselves, you'd be dismayed, and you'd think no less of their conscience for stopping.

So keep the guilt that points at something to do. The rest is suffering that's addressed to no one and improves nothing, and you're allowed to stop it.