Ask For Help, think of anything else
Gately takes advantage of the fact that he’s already facing ceilingward to seriously Ask For Help with the obsession. He thinks hard about anything else at all.
Context
The countermeasure shown in dumb practical operation: flat on his back, Gately treats the ceiling as a posture of prayer and Asks For Help, then does the crude cognitive work of thinking hard about anything else at all — lobster traps, the Shattuck Shelter, the veil's billow. Recovery here is not insight but this, the effortful redirection of a mind toward literally any other content, the obsession starved by being denied the attention it clamors for.