"I don't even notice I'm doing it"

A lot of readers will say, quite reasonably, that the method assumes a moment that doesn't exist. Catch the flicker. But there's no flicker to catch. The biscuit is in your mouth before there's been any feeling at all. The phone is out before the queue has registered. The reach is faster than noticing, and a method that starts with noticing starts too late.

I'd agree that the reach is fast. I'd put it differently, though. The reach isn't faster than the feeling. It's faster than your attention to the feeling. The flicker was there. The hand answered it. What was missing was you, in the half-second between the two, and that half-second can be widened. Not by trying harder to notice in the moment, which doesn't work, but by learning, in advance, what the flicker looks like in your body, so that it announces itself.

That's why chapter 18 starts with the body sign and not with the feeling. A feeling is hard to catch. A slackening in the chest, or the eyes going to the drawer, or the hand already lifting, is a physical event, and physical events can be learned. Spend a day watching for yours, after the fact if necessary. Each time you find the biscuit half eaten, ask what your body was doing just before. Most people find one or two signs that come every time, and once you know them, they start arriving in awareness a second earlier, which is the second you need.

There's a second answer, and it's the one for the reaches that get through anyway, which will be many at first. The word works late. If the biscuit is already in your mouth, name the feeling now. "That was flat." It's not the catch, but it does most of what the catch does. It puts a word on a thing that had no word, it tells you what the reach was for, and it starts the list that will show you, over a week, what the flickers are and when they come. A week of late names becomes a map of your flickers, and the map is what turns late names into early ones.

Not noticing isn't a reason the method can't work. It's the reason the method exists. If you noticed already, you wouldn't be reaching.