Up like a rocket, down like a feather — and so is the relief.

This should feel like a good week. The US–Iran war is winding down, petrol has fallen for a third week running, and the Bank of England is widely expected to hold rates when it announces at noon. Objectively, the pressure is easing. Ask anyone filling up whether they feel relief and you will mostly get a shrug. There are good, documented reasons for the gap between the figures and the feeling.

Start at the pump, because that is where most households meet the economy. Petrol averaged 155.54p a litre in the week to 15 June, down more than 2p; diesel dropped over 5p. Good news — except the mind does not weigh a fall the way it weighs a rise. Decades of behavioural work, since Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, show a loss lands about twice as hard as an equal gain. We felt every penny of the climb to a 159.5p peak in late May. The few pennies back down barely register.

Then there is the forecourt itself. Analysts call it "rockets and feathers": pump prices shoot up when oil rises and drift down slowly when it falls. The RAC has said again this spring that prices "aren't falling at the rate" wholesale data says they should, because retailers hold the gain a while in case oil rebounds. So the relief you are owed arrives late and thin — which only confirms the sense that nothing is really getting better.

And the goalposts moved. A year ago petrol was around 132p a litre. "Cheaper" today still means roughly 24p more than the price you have filed away as normal. The number is down; the anchor is up; the relief cancels out.

None of this is irrational, and that is the point — relief is asymmetric by design, and some of the businesses you buy from quietly bank on it. The practical risk is mistaking "it doesn't feel better" for "nothing improved", and then acting on the feeling: not shopping around, not lining up the remortgage, assuming the fall will not come. It is worth checking whether the better week is real even when it refuses to feel real.

There is a larger lesson under the petrol. If unambiguous, this-week good news struggles to land, consider how poorly we are built to register the slow, structural changes that carry no forecourt sign at all — the kind this paper exists to watch. We notice the rocket. We are nearly blind to the feather. Most of what is happening to work is a feather.