Before you start

This is a short book and you can read it in two or three sittings. It's about one habit, which is carrying on defending something after you've privately stopped believing it. Not lying, exactly. You said a thing, somebody pushed back, and somewhere in the pushing you saw that they had a point, and the next sentence out of your mouth was a defence anyway. Then another. The argument went on for ten more minutes, or three more days, about a position that had nobody left inside it.

I'm going to argue three things. The first is that holding on makes sense from the inside. Backing down feels like losing standing, in front of a partner, a colleague, a group chat, a teenager, and the feeling arrives faster than any reasoning about it. The second is that the standing you're protecting is mostly not the standing other people are measuring. There's research on how people judge those who admit they were wrong, and it points the other way from the feeling. The third is practical. The moment you privately change your mind is the useful event, and there's a short sentence that goes with it, and the sentence gets easier and the evening gets better every time you say it. Chapters 20 to 23 cover how.

This isn't a book about arguing less. Some things are worth arguing about and some positions are worth holding under pressure, and chapter 15 keeps room for the honest middle, where you're not wrong yet but you're not sure any more. If the argument you keep having is the same one with the same person in a different costume, that's a different habit, and the earlier book You don't have to win this one is about it.

Two cautions.

If the person pushing you to concede is someone who pushes until you give in, about everything, and then holds what you conceded against you, that isn't what this book is about. Chapter 24 says where the line is, and it isn't where they'd draw it.

And if you've noticed that you're holding on harder than you used to, snapping at people over nothing and unable to let a small thing go, and it's come with feeling low or irritable most of the day for a fortnight or more, the NHS says to see a GP. Irritability and intolerance of others are on their list of symptoms of depression. The arguing can wait until you've been.

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.