"Distraction works, everyone says so"

Here's a belief with a lot of support behind it. When you feel bad, distract yourself. It's what everyone says, and there's evidence that it works. The phone in the queue is distraction, and the queue is more bearable for it.

Distraction does work, for a while. That's not in dispute. The question is what happens afterwards, and here Verduyn's third predictor matters. The thing that most extended the duration of a feeling, in those diary studies, was the reappearance of its cause, physically or in the person's mind. Distraction is a way of getting the cause out of your mind for a stretch. It's also, by the same token, a way of ensuring that it reappears, because you didn't deal with it and it's still there when the phone goes back in the pocket. The feeling comes back. Sometimes it comes back with interest, because now there's the second feeling too, the mild verdict about the twenty minutes on the phone.

There's a study that put distraction up against the alternative this book will recommend, and it's worth describing carefully because the result was mixed. Katharina Kircanski, Matthew Lieberman and Michelle Craske, in 2012, worked with people afraid of spiders. Each person was exposed to a live spider in short sessions, and was told to do one of four things during the exposure. Put their feelings into words, which the researchers called affect labelling. Reappraise, meaning think about the spider differently. Distract themselves from it. Or nothing beyond the exposure. A week later, with a different spider in a different room, the labelling group had lower physiological fear, measured by skin conductance, than the other three groups, and were marginally more willing to approach than the distraction group. On self-reported fear, there was no difference between groups. People who'd used more fear words during exposure showed larger reductions.

So naming the feeling beat distracting from it on the body's measure a week later, and not on the questionnaire. I'd hold that lightly. But the direction fits Verduyn. The feeling you distract from returns. The feeling you name has been attended to, and has less reason to.

That's why chapter 18 begins with a word rather than a remedy. The word does what the phone claims to do, and the feeling doesn't return to collect.