What the tin costs you

The last few chapters took the jobs one at a time. This one adds up what the whole arrangement costs, leaving aside anything that needs a blood test to detect. These are my observations, and you can check each of them against your own week.

The first cost is your afternoons. On the evidence in chapter 5, the three o'clock chocolate bar is followed by a dip that makes four o'clock worse. If that's a daily event, then some of the grey, slow quality of your late afternoons is self-inflicted, and you've been blaming it on your job or your age.

The second is how your evenings end. On Thursday you went to bed with a verdict on yourself. If the tin comes out most evenings, you're ending most days with a small dose of self-disgust and a resolution you know you won't keep. That repeated failure wears down your confidence in promises you make to yourself, and that spreads to things well beyond biscuits.

The third is your teeth, for the reason in chapter 9. Frequent sugar between meals is the pattern dentists worry about most. The bill for it comes years later and it's a large one.

The fourth is what the three jobs lose by being done badly, which is what I most want you to see. Each job stands for a real need, and the tin has been meeting each one with a token.

Your need to have your work acknowledged has been met, for years, with a biscuit eaten standing up. Nobody, including you, has properly registered most of what you've achieved. You might ask yourself when you last finished something hard and felt satisfied with it for longer than a digestive lasts.

Your tiredness in the afternoon carries information. It might be telling you that you slept badly, or that lunch was a sandwich at the desk, or that you've been sitting motionless in a stuffy room for three hours. The chocolate bar covers the message without fixing any of those things, so they stay the same, and tomorrow afternoon is no better.

Your upset after the call with Claire was about something that matters, which is your mother's care and your relationship with your sister. Four biscuits helped it fade a little faster, or seemed to. They also meant you didn't ring a friend or talk to your partner, and you didn't work out what you want to say to Claire. The upset faded, and next month it'll be back.

This is what I mean by the subtitle's question of what sugar gives back. It gives back three minutes of pleasure, followed by a dip, and then a verdict. Meanwhile you still haven't felt proud of your work, you're still tired in the afternoons, and you still haven't talked to anyone about your mum.

I should put the other side. None of these costs is a catastrophe. Plenty of people use the tin this way all their lives and come to no great harm, and if you've read this far and decided that your elevenses biscuit is a pleasure you understand and want to keep, that's a reasonable decision for an adult to make. The argument of this book is aimed at the person who ends most days displeased with themselves over it, and who's been trying to solve with willpower a problem that doesn't call for it.