What it does to the feeling

There's a cost that lands on the feeling itself, and it's worth a short chapter because it explains why the habit gets worse and not better.

A feeling that's reached from never completes. The wave was on its way up when the remedy arrived, and the remedy put a lid on it, and the wave went on underneath, and came back later because its cause came back or because the lid came off. Verduyn's finding was that reappearance extends duration. A feeling interrupted by a remedy is a feeling whose cause will reappear, because nothing was done about it and nothing was learned about it. So it lasts longer, in total, across the day, than it would have if it had been allowed to run once to the end.

The wave never gets learned. If you'd watched a hundred small waves rise and fall, you'd know their shape, and the hundred and first would arrive as something familiar with a known end. You haven't watched one. So each flicker arrives as a stranger with no known end, and a stranger with no known end is frightening in a way that a familiar wave isn't. The reach keeps the feeling strange.

Researchers have a name for the general capacity to bear discomfort, which is distress tolerance. Teresa Leyro, Michael Zvolensky and Amit Bernstein reviewed the research on it in 2010 and found documented links between low distress tolerance and a range of psychological problems, alongside a good deal of muddle about how to define and measure the thing. I'd take from that only the modest claim that the capacity exists, varies between people, and matters, and not any of the stronger claims that get made about it. But it fits everything else here. A capacity that's never used doesn't grow. Thirty reaches a day is thirty times the capacity wasn't used, and after enough years it's smaller than it was, and the flickers are bigger.

That's the loop. Reach, and the feeling stays strange and the capacity stays small, and so the next flicker is more frightening, and so you reach. Ride it once, and the feeling gets a shape and the capacity gets a use, and the next flicker is a little less frightening. Every ridden wave makes the next one easier. Every reach makes it harder. That's the only sense in which this habit is like the more serious ones, and it's the sense that matters.