What the replays cost

The last five chapters argued that the replays don't deliver what they promise. This one is about what they take. I've left it until now because I didn't want to open the book by lecturing you about harm. You know the replays are unpleasant. But it's worth seeing the whole cost in one place, and some of it is less obvious than the bad quarter-hours.

The best summary of the research is a review by Susan Nolen-Hoeksema, Blair Wisco and Sonja Lyubomirsky, which drew together about twenty years of studies on rumination. They list the effects that are well supported. Rumination makes low mood worse. It makes thinking more negative and impairs problem solving. It gets in the way of taking useful action, and it wears down support from other people. They also report that it predicts the onset of depression, and that it's linked to anxiety, binge eating and binge drinking.

Some of that comes from following people over time. In one study, Nolen-Hoeksema, Jannay Morrow and Barbara Fredrickson had 79 people keep a record for thirty days of their moods and what they did when their mood dropped. The more a person responded to low moods by dwelling on them, the longer their low moods lasted. That held even after allowing for how bad the mood was to begin with.

I should be clear about the limits. Much of this research is about dwelling on low mood and its causes in general, and your replays of a particular old mistake are one variety of that. Some of the studies involved people who were already depressed or low. I'm not suggesting the photocopier will make you ill. I'm saying the general direction of the evidence is consistent. This kind of thinking makes people feel worse and work less well, and nobody has found that it makes them wiser.

Here are the costs as I'd list them for an ordinary replayer. These are my own observations.

There's the time. If a replay takes ten minutes and you have three or four events on rotation, that's easily a few hours a month spent watching yourself fail. The hours usually come out of moments that might have been restful, like the shower, the walk or the washing line on a sunny afternoon. The replays take over exactly the parts of the day when your mind was free to enjoy being idle.

There's the mood. A replay leaves a residue. You come in from the garden a little lower than you went out, and you don't always know why. Do that several times a week for years and your background weather is greyer than it needed to be.

There's what it does to your picture of yourself. If the events you revisit most are your worst ones, then your sense of who you are gets built from an unrepresentative sample. In eleven years you've had thousands of conversations that went fine and many where you were kind or funny or useful. You've replayed none of those. If you judged a colleague by the same method, you'd be called unfair.

There's avoidance. This one is easy to miss. After the photocopier, you may have become wary of bereaved people altogether. You send a card in place of speaking, or find you're busy when the colleague with the sick wife comes into the kitchen. The replay has taught you that these conversations are dangerous, so you dodge them, and the people who'd have been glad of a kind word don't get one. That cost is paid by other people.

And there's the present. While you're at the washing line in the corridor of eleven years ago, you're not in the garden. Your child is telling you something and you're half listening. You miss a turning. You make a small new mistake because your attention was on an old one.

Set against all that is what the replays provide, which the last five chapters put at close to nothing. You have the lesson and the conscience already, and other people don't see any of it.

I said in the preface that this isn't a book about caring less. Everything you care about in this area is served better by something other than replaying. That includes learning, accountability, carefulness and being decent to people. The next two chapters are about what that something is, first for mistakes that can still be mended and then for those that can't.