"Everyone around me does it"

Some of the reaching is social, and it's worth a chapter of its own, because the social version doesn't feel like a reach. It feels like joining in.

The biscuit tin goes round the office at eleven and you take one because everyone takes one. The drinks after work are how the team talks. Your family's evenings are four people on four phones in one room, and to put yours down is to be the odd one out. The Saturday shopping is the thing you and your sister do together. In each case the remedy is also the company, and to decline the remedy looks like declining the company.

Two things about that. The first is the good-day test from chapter 11, applied to the room. Would you take the biscuit at eleven on a good day, when you weren't flat? Sometimes yes, because it's a nice biscuit and a nice moment, and then it's a reward and you should have it. Sometimes no, and you'd have taken it anyway, because the tin was going round and the flicker was there and the two things arrived together. The room supplies the remedy. It doesn't supply the flicker. The flicker is yours, and so is the choice about what to do with it, even when the tin is in front of you.

The second is that you can keep the company and decline the remedy, and it's less awkward than it seems from the inside. Nobody at the drinks after work cares what's in your glass after the first five minutes. Nobody at the biscuit tin notices who didn't take one. The family evening with three phones and a book in it is still a family evening. The awkwardness you're imagining is a flicker of its own, awkward, two, and it will pass without help, usually before anyone's noticed anything.

There's a version of this that's worth being honest about, which is the room where the remedy is the whole of the company. The team that only talks when it's drinking. The friend you only see in shops. Those aren't rooms this book can fix, and I'd only say that if the company depends on the remedy, it's worth finding out, gently, whether it would survive without it. Most do. The ones that don't were company for the remedy and not for you.