"It's only a small thing"

Then there's the sense of proportion. A biscuit. Five minutes on the phone. It's not as if you're doing anything. A book about biscuits is a book about nothing.

I'd agree that any one reach is nothing. I want to look at the pattern instead of the item, because the pattern is the habit and it's not small. Thirty reaches a day, each from a flicker, each teaching the same lesson. The lesson is that discomfort is an emergency. Every time the hand moves at a two, the mind learns that a two is a thing that must be dealt with now, and the threshold for what counts as unbearable comes down a little. Over years, that's a person who can't sit through a queue, a lull, a flat half hour, or a cancelled Sunday, and who doesn't know it, because they've never been without a remedy long enough to find out.

There's research on this pattern under the name experiential avoidance, which means the habit of trying not to have unwanted feelings, thoughts or sensations, and doing things to get away from them. Todd Kashdan and three colleagues, in 2006, ran two studies on it. In the first, experiential avoidance accounted for the link between various unhelpful ways of coping and anxiety-related distress. In the second, people were tracked for three weeks, and avoidance went with fewer positive experiences and positive events, more negative events, and more negative feeling day to day. It was a better predictor of how people's days went than the specific strategies they used to manage their emotions. This is correlational work, so it can't say that avoidance causes the bad days rather than the other way round, and the participants were probably students. But the association is there and it runs in the direction you'd expect. People whose policy is to get away from discomfort have worse days, not better ones.

Do the arithmetic once, because it's the only way the pattern becomes visible. Thirty reaches a day is two hundred a week and ten thousand a year. Ten thousand times the hand answered a two. Ten thousand lessons that a two needs answering. Nobody would sign up for a course with that many sessions, and you've been on it for years without a syllabus.

The item is small. The policy isn't. And a policy is made of small items, thirty a day, none of which looks like anything.