"The remedy is what ended it"

Now the alibi, because it's the mechanism that keeps the belief in chapter 3 alive.

Think about when the reach happens. Not at the very first flicker, usually. A few seconds or a minute in, when the discomfort has become noticeable enough to move your hand. That's near the peak of a small wave. The remedy arrives, you eat the biscuit or open the phone, and over the next couple of minutes the feeling falls. The remedy was there when it fell. So the remedy gets the credit.

But the fall was coming. On Verduyn's findings, a small feeling from a trivial cause has a short duration, and the part of that duration you'd already spent before reaching was most of it. A witness who arrives at the end of a fight and sees it stop doesn't get to say they stopped it. The remedy is that witness, thirty times a day.

There's a study that separates the two. Sarah Bowen and Alan Marlatt, in 2009, took a hundred and twenty-three student smokers who wanted to change and exposed them to cues that provoke the urge to smoke. Half were given brief instructions in what Marlatt called urge surfing, which is a way of attending to an urge as it rises and falls without acting on it. The other half got nothing. The urges themselves weren't different between the groups. The people who'd been taught to ride the urge felt it just as much. But over the following week they smoked significantly fewer cigarettes. The researchers' reading was that the instructions didn't reduce the urge. They changed the response to it, and the urge, unfed, went away by itself.

That was cigarettes and students, and I'm reaching from it to biscuits and jackets. I think the reach is fair because an urge is a wave like any other, and the finding is that the wave passes without being fed. But it's my extension.

There's a test you can run yourself, and it's the most useful thing in this half of the book. Next time the flicker comes and your hand moves, don't. Score the feeling out of ten. Set a timer for ten minutes and do whatever you were doing. When it goes off, score it again. Most people find the second score is lower than the first, and that nothing was done to make it so. That's the wave falling on its own. Once you've seen it, the alibi doesn't work any more, because you've seen the fight end with no witness.

For food specifically, an earlier book in this series, named in the notes, goes through the evidence that eating doesn't shorten a bad mood by more than doing nothing does. The point here is the general one. Whatever the remedy, the timing of its arrival is what makes it look like a cure.