What the drawer costs you

The case for the drawer, as chapter 2 laid it out, is that keeping the thought in costs nothing. No risk, no squirm, no wording, no pause. That's true of each single thought. I want to look at what it adds up to, starting with you, because I think the drawer's first casualty is the person holding it.

The most direct evidence is small and comes from the compliment studies themselves. Boothby and Bohns, in their fourth study, found that despite the anxiety people felt at the prospect of giving a compliment, they felt better after they'd given it. The squirm went one way and the mood went the other. Kory Floyd and colleagues, in a lab study published in 2007, put people through a set of standard stressful tasks and then had some of them write a letter to someone they loved saying what they felt about them, while others thought about the person without writing, or sat quietly. The letter writers' cortisol, a stress hormone, came down faster afterwards. It's one small study and I wouldn't build much on it. But it points the same way. Saying the good thing does something for the person saying it.

The NHS lists giving to others among its five steps to mental wellbeing, and the examples it gives are small, saying thank you, asking how someone is and listening to the answer. I'd put the said good thought in the same list. It's giving, at no cost, and the research suggests the giver gets some of it back.

Now the part that's my reasoning. Think about what's actually in your drawer. It's a running record of everything you admire about the people in your life. Your partner's patience, your friend's eye, your dad's late-arriving gentleness, your colleague's clarity. That's a good record. Most people would be glad to have thought all that. And you've had the pleasure of thinking each one for about four seconds, on the stairs, before it was filed. The said version lasts longer. It gets a face in reply. It becomes a thing that happened between you and another person, rather than a thing that happened in your head on the way to the towel.

There's also what the drawer does to how you come across, and I'd guess you've not thought about it much because it's invisible from inside. The people around you don't see the drawer. They see what comes out, and what comes out, if the good thoughts stay in, is the rest. The question about the car. The sigh. You can be, on the inside, the most admiring person in the house and, on the outside, someone who never says a kind word, and the second one is the one everybody meets.