petrochenkov

It's also rather unpleasant to wear clothing in general. If there's an opportunity to reduce it to the minimum, I'd rather use it. That's why I like my commieblocks with central heating.

Elastomania. You can spend an arbitrarily small amount of time on it, like a 1 or 2 minutes. It also turns off the brain well.

If only the task of finding and choosing the therapist, and then actually visiting him didn't also trigger the cycle.

It's kind of strange to me to see Futurological Congress and e.g. Fiasco from the other responses being advised as standalone novels (maybe it has something to do with the history of Lem's English translations).

I'd instead advice to read the whole Ijon Tichy cycle starting from Star Diaries (which are pretty similar to Cyberiad in style), and the whole Pilot Pirx cycle starting from the Pirx Stories.