"It's just how I start the day"

The swing, you'd say, is over by the time you've dressed. A bad morning is a bad ten minutes. It doesn't come to work. So the cost is small and the habit is cheap. I don't think that's what happens, and I'd ask you to check your own sheet from chapter 1, where the one word for the morning was written after the number and not before.

Here's where the swing goes. It goes to breakfast, chapter 9. It goes to the jeans, which on a bad morning become the other trousers, which become a day of feeling as though you're wearing the other trousers. It goes to the mirror at work. It goes into the tone you take with the first person who asks you something. And it goes into a running assessment of yourself that has nothing to do with the number and everything to do with the mood the number set. You wouldn't say it to a friend, in this series, is about that assessment, and I'd only add that the scale is one of its most reliable morning triggers.

There's a longer view. Carly Pacanowski and colleagues followed 1,868 people from adolescence into their late twenties, asking about weighing and about how they felt at three points across ten years. At every point, weighing went with more concern about weight, in both sexes. In women it went with lower self-esteem at every point. And when a woman's weighing increased from one point to the next, her body satisfaction and self-esteem fell and her weight concern and depressive symptoms rose, across the same interval. In men only the weight concern rose. This is a survey and it can't prove the weighing caused the feeling. But it isn't a study of ten minutes in a bathroom. It's a study of years, and the feeling is not confined to the mornings.

I'd put it like this. The number sets the mood, and the mood sets the day, and a few hundred days of that sets something more like a stance. A stance towards your own body that's renewed every morning by an instrument reading water. You'd notice if a person did that to you. It's harder to notice when it's a flat white square on the bathroom floor.

Ten minutes was the claim. Check the sheet. If the word you wrote on a bad morning is the word for the day, it wasn't ten minutes.