The decision

You've got the argument and the method. What's left is to decide, and I'd like the decision to be one sentence.

When I feel the flicker and my hand moves, I name the feeling, and I give it ten minutes before I give it anything.

Three parts.

The first is the catch. The body sign, the word, the score. This is the part that takes practice and the part everything else depends on. For the first week, write it down every time.

The second is the ten minutes. Carry on, don't fight, don't feed, breathe out, note the peak, score again. This is where you find out, thirty times a day, that the feeling passes without help.

The third is the two lists. If the score fell, done. If it didn't, or there was a second word, ask what it wants and give it a small answer. If you still want the remedy after all that, have it, as a choice.

There's a form of planning that helps with rules like this, and it's been tested many times. Peter Gollwitzer and Paschal Sheeran reviewed ninety-four studies of it in 2006. You decide in advance what you'll do and when, in the form "when this happens, I'll do that", and people who plan that way follow through much more often than people who only hold the intention. So write three.

When my hand goes towards the drawer or the phone or the bottle, I'll stop, say one word for what I'm feeling, and score it.

When I've scored it, I'll set ten minutes and carry on with what I was doing.

When the ten minutes are up and the score hasn't fallen, I'll ask what the feeling wants and do one small thing towards it.

What to expect. This is my expectation and not a finding. The first two days will feel like a lot of stopping, because the flickers are more frequent than you knew and you'll be catching a fair number of them. Your list will fill up with twos and threes and second scores that are lower than the first. Around day three or four, one of the flickers will surprise you by being gone before the ten minutes are up and before you'd thought about it, and you'll realise you rode it without trying. By the end of the first week you'll have found one or two feelings on the second list, with a second word behind them, and you'll have done one small thing about one of them, and that will feel more like a change than any number of biscuits not eaten. Around the second week, the reaches will have thinned on their own, because the hand learns quickly that a flicker doesn't require it. The remedies will still be there. You'll still have wine with dinner and biscuits with tea. You'll notice that you're choosing them, and that the second feeling has mostly stopped, and that the afternoons have a quiet in them that they didn't have. You'll also notice, some days, that you reached at a flicker without catching it, and chapter 23 is for that.