Tuesday, twenty past eight

It's twenty past eight on a Tuesday morning. You've locked the front door and you're halfway to the car when you stop. Did you lock it? You remember the key going in. You think you remember the click. You go back and push the handle, and it's locked, and you walk to the car again, and as you put your seatbelt on you find that the memory of pushing the handle is already less clear than it should be. You look at the door from the driver's seat. It looks locked. Doors do.

At the lights at the end of the road you think about the straighteners. You turned them off. You can see yourself doing it, sort of. You can also see yourself doing it yesterday, and the two pictures are hard to tell apart. You consider going back. You don't, and the thought sits in your chest until about ten, when work crowds it out.

At eleven you send an email to a client. It took twenty minutes to write and you read it through before sending. After it's gone you open it in the sent folder and read it again. There's a comma that could have been a full stop. You read it a third time, looking for something worse, and don't find anything, and don't feel better.

In bed at eleven you check that the alarm is set. It's set. You put the phone down and pick it up again, because you can't quite remember whether the little bell symbol was there or you just expected it to be. It's there. You lie down. A minute later you wonder whether you checked the right day.

Nothing has gone wrong. Nothing has gone wrong for years. The door has always been locked and the hob has always been off and the emails have all been fine. That, oddly, is part of what keeps the habit going, because every check has confirmed that checking was sensible, and none of them has confirmed that it was needed.

I'll use a few terms throughout. The check is the act of looking to confirm that something's as it should be. The once is the first check, done at the right moment, and it's the one this book will defend. The recheck is any check after that, including the one from the car and the one in the sent folder. The doubt is the feeling that arrives after a check, that you can't be quite sure you did it, or did it properly. The picture is your memory of the check, which starts clear and, as chapter 3 will show, gets less clear each time you go back. And the fade is that loss of clarity, which is the thing you've been mistaking for a bad memory.

The habit has some regular features. This list is my own observation and not a research finding.

The recheck finds nothing. Almost always. The door was locked. The hob was off. You've done thousands of rechecks and they've caught, perhaps, one thing, years ago, and you remember it perfectly.

Each recheck makes the next one likelier. You didn't feel sure after the second look either.

The doubt is about your memory and not about the door. You don't think the lock is broken. You think you might not remember locking it.

The picture gets worse the more you look at it. By the third check you can't say whether you're remembering this morning or Monday.

And you know it's excessive. You've said so to yourself while going back. Knowing hasn't helped, because the doubt feels like information and you can't argue with information.

Try one thing before reading on, and don't change anything yet. For a week, keep a tally. Each time you recheck anything, make a mark, and note what it was and whether it was fine. At the end of the week count the marks and count the times something wasn't fine. Keep the two numbers.