"It'll get worse if I don't"

The objection to the ten-minute test is the fear underneath the reach. If I don't do something, the feeling will climb. It'll get unbearable. The reach isn't about the two, it's about stopping the two becoming a nine.

Two things. The first is that this is a forecast, and it's one you've never tested, because you've always reached. You don't know what the flicker at twenty past three does at minute eight, because you've never been at minute eight without a biscuit. The belief that it climbs is a belief about a thing you've never observed, made by a mind that's motivated to justify the reach.

The second is what the evidence says about waves. Bowen and Marlatt's smokers felt their urges fully, and the urges didn't climb to somewhere unbearable. They peaked and passed, which is what let the surfers smoke less. Verduyn's durations were set by intensity at the start and importance of the cause. A two from a lull doesn't have anywhere to climb to. It has no fuel. What makes feelings climb is reappearance, the cause coming back, and a lull doesn't come back. It's replaced by the next thing.

There's a version of this fear that's more specific. Some readers know that the two is a two because the remedy is there, and suspect that without the remedy the two would be a five, that the calm they live in is on loan from the biscuit drawer. That may be true for some feelings and some readers, and the ten-minute test is how you find out. If the score goes up, that's information, and chapter 14 is about what to do with it. In my expectation it mostly goes down, because most flickers are small waves with nothing behind them.

The scale exercise from chapter 1 is your own data on this. Look at the scores. If the list is twos and threes, then the fear of the nine is a fear about a different list, and you can put it down. If there are sevens on it, read chapter 14 and the preface again, because a seven that's reached from several times a day is a feeling that wants an answer and not a biscuit.