Letting the doubt be a feeling

You've done the once and left. Now the doubt arrives, in the car or at the desk, and this chapter is about what to do with it. This is my own method, and the reasoning behind it is in chapters 3, 5 and 10.

Expect it. The doubt will come. For the first couple of weeks it will come as strongly as ever, because the habit has taught it to. Its arrival is not evidence that something's wrong. It's the habit doing what it does, and it will do it whether or not the door is locked, because it isn't about the door.

Name it. "That's the doubt." Or "That's the fade." Naming it takes it from something that seems to be about the door and puts it where it belongs, which is in your head as a feeling. It's a feeling you've had thousands of times, and on every one of those occasions the door was locked.

Reach for the sentence, not the picture. "Door locked, twenty past eight." You said it. That's the evidence, and it's complete. Don't try to picture the check. Trying to picture it is the replay, and chapter 5 showed that the replay is a check and fades the memory like any other. One sentence, once, and then you turn to something else.

Don't go back, and don't go over it. No walk to the door. No photo. No app. No asking. No replay. This is the whole of the change, and everything else in the chapter is there to make it possible.

Let it be uncomfortable. The doubt will be unpleasant for a few minutes. It has a shape, and the shape is that it rises, holds, and falls. Time it, if you like. Most people find, in my observation, that it's noticeably smaller within ten minutes and gone within twenty, if it isn't fed. What feeds it is the recheck. What starves it is doing nothing.

Turn to the next thing. The radio, the road, the first job at work. Not as a trick to forget the door, but because the door is finished and the day isn't.

Notice what happens next. Nothing. You get home and the house is as you left it. That's a piece of evidence, and unlike the recheck it's real evidence, because it comes from the world and not from a faded picture. Let it count. Say to yourself, "I did the once and didn't go back and it was fine," and add it to the tally. Each of those is a deposit in the trust that the habit has been withdrawing from for years.

The first week is the hard one. The doubt is loud and the calm of the recheck is very available, and you'll go back a few times. When you do, note it and don't make anything of it. The second week the doubt is usually quieter, because it's been ignored a few times and it's learning. By the fourth, in my expectation, it's a passing thought at the lights, which is what it is for people who don't have the habit.