Before checking, name what you rest in and what doubt must show to override it.

Steps

1. Before the task, write your resting default in one line: calm, enough, or good for now.
2. Write what doubt would have to show, beyond a feeling, before a check is justified: a concrete sign, a named error, a real consequence.
3. Do the task. When the urge to re-check arises, return to your default first and ask whether doubt has produced the named sign.
4. If it has, run one check, then return to the default. If it has not, do not check; do one ordinary next thing instead.
5. Afterward, note whether the urge softened, whether you checked anyway, and whether resting felt like freedom or like a new thing to achieve.

Linked Teaching

Evidence Trail

Source Basis

• Mode: Critique. Active frontier: Remainder pressure after self-negation. This record does not add a remainder distinction; it diagnoses why the safeguard cluster on this frontier keeps growing and proposes an asymmetric default that can retire most of it.
• Saturation evidence: the recent near-duplicate cluster, including Codex's A Long List Of Cures Is A Symptom, When Safety Rules Only Grow Distrust Them, A Check Must Be Able To Pass, A Test Left Unrun Is The Real Avoidance, Stop Counting Every Silence, and Borrowed Questions Build Roads. These records diagnose proliferation but each is itself admitted by default, which is the unexamined mechanism.
• Primary-text comparison: notes/source-cards/buddhism-heart-sutra.md (no attainment, with nothing to attain) and notes/source-cards/buddhism-dogen-uji.md. The Heart Sutra functions as a declaration of a resting default, not a method that must repeatedly pass; Dogen's practice-realization removes the gap that a default verdict would govern at all. The comparison reveals that what resolves remainder pressure may be the verdict a practitioner is permitted to rest in, not the quality of any available check.
• Practitioner-method lens: burden of proof and pre-registration from scientific method, paired with santosha (contentment as a permitted stopping authorization) and the Heart Sutra's no-attainment default. Applied by asking: between checks, which state is believed for free, and which must earn its place? Critique of the lens: a juridical burden-of-proof metaphor can distort traditions that render no verdict at all, and contentment cannot always be summoned on command.
• Modern human-condition grounding: modern-human-condition-samhsa-2023-nsduh, modern-human-condition-who-world-mental-health-report, modern-human-condition-curran-hill-perfectionism-increasing, and modern-human-condition-surgeon-general-social-connection-advisory. These ground compulsive self-monitoring, perfectionism, and achievement-contingent worth, while marking the clinical boundary around OCD and scrupulosity. Modern Human Condition: 2023 National Survey on Drug Use and Health Modern Human Condition: Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation Modern Human Condition: Perfectionism Is Increasing Over Time Modern Human Condition: World Mental Health Report
• Closest prior arguments and the exact difference: Codex's A Check Must Be Able To Pass fixes the output of a single check; this record fixes the resting state between checks, arguing that even a pass-capable check fails when the default is not yet safe. A Long List Of Cures Is A Symptom diagnoses proliferation; this record prescribes an asymmetric default that resolves it and applies that default to itself.
• Self-application note: the proposed default-retire rule must govern its own meta-critiques, including this one. A record that notices proliferation is retired unless it changes a concrete decision.