"I'd be miserable without it"

You'd be flat without it, for a while, and I'd rather say so than pretend. The first evening without the daily has a hole in it at six, and the hole is uncomfortable, and if you've tried it before you know that the discomfort is what sent you back. So the belief has evidence. What it doesn't have is a fair reading of the evidence.

Jordi Quoidbach and Elizabeth Dunn ran a small study that's worth knowing about. Participants ate a piece of chocolate in a lab session, then were sent away for a week, assigned by chance to one of three groups. One group was told to give up chocolate for the week. One was told to eat as much as they could. One was told nothing. A week later they came back and ate a piece of chocolate again. The people who'd given it up savoured it more than either of the other groups, and reported better mood afterwards. The people who'd eaten as much as they could enjoyed it least. The abstract doesn't give the number of people, and it was one week and one chocolate, so it's a small finding. But it's the right shape. A week without the treat didn't make the treat worse. It made it better.

What the flat evening is, then, is not what life without the treat is like. It's the expecting with nothing at the end of it. From about four o'clock the day has been leaning towards six, and at six there's nothing, and the lean has nowhere to go. That's uncomfortable in the way that an unanswered message is uncomfortable. It isn't the misery of a life without pleasure. It's a habit reaching for its cue and missing. And the lean fades, because it was learned and can be unlearned, which is the point of the blank day in chapter 19. The first one is flat. The fourth one is an evening.

There's a version of this belief that's more serious, and I don't want to pass it. If the treat is the only thing that makes any evening bearable, and that's been true for weeks, then the treat isn't the problem and removing it won't help. The preface says where to go, and it's a GP. But for most people reading this, the misery they're forecasting is the first flat evening, and they're forecasting it as permanent. It isn't. Quoidbach's chocolate-free week ended with the chocolate tasting better, and my guess is that the same goes for the glass, and for the episode, and for the rest.