The two ways out

There are two, and both work, and which you take depends on what you found in the fortnight and what you want back. Neither is giving up the treat.

Keep the treat and drop the earning. This is for the reader who looked at the record, saw a run of A's, and thought, fair enough, I like a glass at six and I'm going to have one. Fine. Have it. What changes is the earning. You don't say you've earned it, because you haven't checked and you'd say it either way. You don't say you deserve it. You say, I'm having a glass of wine, because I like one, and that's the whole reason. That sounds like nothing. It isn't. The earning was the licence, and it was carrying the guilt, and once you stop using it two things happen. The treat is a little less nice, for the reason in chapter 13, and you start to notice the days when you don't actually want it, because there's no sentence any more telling you that you do. On those days you don't have it. Over a month or two the daily thins out on its own, without a rule, because the hour was only ever running on the sentence.

Keep the earning and make the treat rare. This is for the reader who wants the treat to mean something again, and wants "I've earned it" to be true when they say it. The rule is that the earning has to pass the three questions. Decided before the hour, a reason you'd say aloud, noticed while it's happening. If it can't pass, there's no treat that day. That's stricter, and it produces more blank days, and it gets the marker back faster. Within a few weeks the treat is happening two or three times a week, on the days that had something in them, and it's better each time, for the reasons in chapter 16.

Which one. If your record had some C's and you can see what made them, take the second way. You already know what a chosen treat looks like and you can build on it. If your record was all A's and the thought of a rule makes you want the glass now, take the first way. It's gentler and it works on the earning rather than the hour, and the hour follows. If the treat is alcohol and the count in chapter 6 came out well over, take the second way and read chapter 22 first.

Either way, the daily goes. Not the treat. The daily. The thing that comes at six whatever the day was, without a decision, with a sentence attached that was never a decision either. What's left is a treat you chose, on a day that had a reason, that you noticed while you had it. That's what a treat was before it became the habit.