Before you start

This is a short book and you can read it in two or three sittings. It's about one habit. You say sorry. Someone bumps into you in a doorway and you say it. You open an email with it. You say it before you ask a question, when the food is late in a restaurant you didn't cook in, when you have a cold, when you have an opinion. By lunch you've said it forty times and none of them was for anything you did. You've been told to stop, more than once, and you've said sorry for that too.

I'm going to argue three things. The first is that the habit makes sense from the inside. Sorry is polite, it's cheap, it keeps things smooth, and the alternative feels rude. The second is that sorry isn't cheap. Every apology trades a little competence for a little warmth, and forty a day is forty trades, and the people around you have been reading the balance. People apologise in proportion to what they count as an offence, so apologising more means counting more of your own ordinary actions as offences, and that counting is the habit. The reflex sorry devalues the real one, so that when you've done wrong your apology sounds like the one you said about the rain. And a sorry before a question frames the question as an intrusion, and teaches everyone that your requests are favours. The third is practical. You say sorry when you've done something wrong, fully and once, and for everything else you say what you mean. Chapters 20 to 23 cover how.

This book doesn't ask you to stop apologising, to become blunt, or to refuse to say sorry when you've caused harm. It asks you to save the word for the times it's true, and it'll show you that those are rarer than you've been treating them, and that the real sorry lands harder once the reflex has gone.

Two cautions.

If the sorry comes from fear, if you apologise to someone you live with to manage their moods and keep yourself safe, that isn't a habit and this isn't the book. The National Domestic Abuse Helpline is free and open day and night on 0808 2000 247.

And if the sense of being in the way has become a low mood that's there most of the day and has been for two weeks, see a GP. The NHS has guidance on low self-esteem and I'll come to it, but low mood is a different thing and needs a different door.

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.