Before you start

This is a short book and you can read it in two or three sittings. It's about one habit, and the habit has many faces. Something in you goes slightly wrong. Bored, flat, tense, awkward, sad, restless. And before you've named it, your hand has moved. Towards the biscuit drawer, the phone, the wine, the basket on a website. The thing you reach for changes with the hour and the room. The move is the same every time.

I'm going to argue three things. The first is that the habit makes sense from the inside. The feelings are unpleasant, the reach does seem to end them, and each reach is small. The second is that the feelings you reach away from have a shape of their own. They rise, they peak, and they fall, on a clock set by what caused them, and most of the ones you reach from are small enough that the whole thing would have been over in minutes. The remedy arrives at the point where the feeling was about to fall, and takes the credit for a fall that was coming anyway. The third is practical. You catch the flicker, you name the feeling, and you give it ten minutes before you give it anything. Chapters 18 to 21 cover how.

This book doesn't ask you to give up biscuits, wine, your phone or shopping. It asks you to stop using them as a remedy for feelings that don't need one, and to find out, for the first time, what those feelings do when nothing is done about them.

Four cautions, and I'd ask you to read them even if you're sure they don't apply.

If you drink every day and you feel shaky, sweaty or sick when you don't, don't cut down suddenly on the strength of a book. Stopping heavy daily drinking without medical advice can be dangerous. See a GP first, and let them help you plan it.

If the reach is for food in large amounts, with a feeling of being unable to stop, that's not what this book is about. The eating disorder charity Beat and your GP are the right places, and they're used to being asked.

If the feeling you're reaching from has been there most of the day for a fortnight, or nothing has felt good for that long, that's a change in your health. See a GP. In England you can also refer yourself to NHS talking therapies without going through a GP if you're eighteen or over.

And if the discomfort is panic, or you've had thoughts of harming yourself, that's urgent and not a habit. Talk to a GP or call 111, and call 999 if you're in immediate danger. Samaritans are on 116 123 at any hour.

The notes at the back give my sources and their limits. Where I'm giving my own reasoning and not a finding, I'll say so.