"The feeling won't go on its own"

The belief at the bottom of the habit is this. If you don't do something about the feeling, it'll stay. Boredom doesn't end by itself. Flatness doesn't lift by itself. Something has to be done, and the remedy is the something.

Philippe Verduyn and four colleagues ran two studies, published in 2009, in which people recorded, day by day, how long their episodes of fear, anger, joy, gratitude and sadness lasted, and what was going on when each one started. The point of the studies was to find out what sets the duration of a feeling. Three things did, across all five emotions. How important the situation that caused it was. How intense the feeling was when it started. And whether the thing that caused it came back, in reality or in the person's mind, while the feeling was running. Important causes, intense starts and reappearing triggers made feelings last longer. Trivial causes, mild starts and triggers that stayed away made them short.

I'd like you to hold that against the list from chapter 1. What caused the flicker at twenty past three? A lull in the afternoon. How intense was it? A two. How important? Not at all. On Verduyn's three predictors, that feeling was set up to be brief. It had a wave shape, a small rise, a low peak, a fall, and the whole thing would have been over in a few minutes, provided the cause didn't come back, and a lull in the afternoon doesn't come back. It just ends.

That's the wave. Every feeling has one. Some are tall and long, and a bereavement is a wave that lasts months, and I'm not talking about those. I'm talking about the twos and threes, the flickers you reach from thirty times a day. They're small waves with low peaks and short tails, and the reason you believe they won't pass on their own is that you've never once watched one to the end. The remedy always arrived first.

Take the queue at the post office. The cause is a queue. The intensity at the start is low, a mild restlessness. The cause won't reappear once you've left the building. On all three predictors that feeling was going to last as long as the queue and not a minute longer, and it would have fallen before the end of the queue anyway, because restlessness in a queue does that, once you've stopped attending to it. The phone didn't shorten it. The phone was what you did instead of finding out how short it was.

This is the first thing I'd like you to take from the book. The feeling was always going to pass. It had a shape and a clock, and the clock was short, because the cause was small. You've been treating a wave as a tide.