Four. Praying quickly, or not at all

If prayer is where the thought lives, two things tend to happen and both feed it.

The first is that prayer speeds up. Less room in it, fewer places for the thought to arrive. The second is that it starts getting missed, and then it stops being missed occasionally and starts being avoided.

Nobody decides this. It happens one reasonable evening at a time, and each individual decision looks defensible.

Nothing here is going to tell you to force it. But it is worth knowing that this is the most common thing that happens in this pattern, that it is about anxiety and not about belief, and that people who have never told anybody about it are usually surprised at how ordinary it turns out to be.