Three. The counting

Three reasons the counters make this worse, and they are worth having in full because you may well have one installed.

The first is the rule. A counter is the all or nothing rule rendered as a user interface. It takes a lapse and attaches a visible number to it, and the number going to zero is what turns one evening into a fortnight.

The second is that a counter makes the behaviour the measure, and the behaviour is not the mechanism. The best reading of the evidence is that shame makes the next time more likely rather than less, though the studies behind that are in other behaviours and none of them settles the question here. A counter is a device that generates shame continuously, all day, in the background, whichever way the number is going.

The third is the strangest one. How distressed a person is about this and how much they are actually doing it are separate things that come apart, which lesson six sets out properly. A counter takes somebody whose distress is already decoupled from their behaviour and hands them a daily quantified reason to feel worse, without changing the behaviour at all.