Most people’s list from the last lesson is short and made of objects. The objects are the easy half.

The evidence is emphatic that the subtle forms count too: ‘All obvious and subtle forms of avoidance (e.g., distraction, minimal symptom induction) should be prevented in order to obtain the most benefit from these exposures.’⁸

Here’s what tends to be missing from a first list:

• Distraction. Phone out, podcast on, counting things, conversation kept going. You were there — but attention was elsewhere on purpose, and it was elsewhere so that the situation would be bearable.
• Going, but not really. Going at 7am when it’s empty. Sitting where you can leave. Staying eleven minutes because that’s tolerable. The phrase is ‘minimal symptom induction’⁸ — technically present, arranged so that nothing much happens.
• Bracing. Getting through it clenched, waiting for it to end. Physically there and internally somewhere else.
• Reassurance. Asking someone if you look all right. Looking up symptoms. A quick check for a specific answer before you’ll continue.
• Checking. Pulse, chest, breathing, the pavement’s distance. Monitoring is not neutral — it finds sensations, and finding sensations is where Lesson 4’s loop starts.

Why are these worse than the water bottle? Not because they’re more damaging, but because they’re invisible. A bottle can be left at home. Distraction goes with you, doesn’t feel like a precaution, and quietly guarantees that every trip teaches nothing.

So a fair test of whether something belongs on the list is not does this feel like a crutch. It’s: would I still do this if I weren’t afraid? Music on a walk you’d enjoy anyway is music. The same music, on so you don’t notice your heart, is a safety behaviour — same headphones, different job.

The instruction, when the time comes, has two halves and they fit together. Inside any one practice, the crutch is out completely — the evidence doesn’t say reduce them: removing safety behaviours and safety signals altogether is what matters, and the fuller you can go into the practice without one, the more the habit breaks.⁸

Across practices, you drop them one at a time. Taking all of them out at once is meant for a course someone else is pacing; done wholesale and alone it tends to produce one dreadful afternoon followed by not trying again. The image for the pace is weaning — coming off one crutch at a time, the way you’d wean yourself off any other habit built for safety.⁸ Unit 3 starts with exactly one.