Potential renormalisation, Lamb shift and mean-force Gibbs state – to shift or not to shift?

Often, the microscopic interaction mechanism of an open quantum system gives rise to a `counter term' which renormalises the system Hamiltonian. Such term compensates for the distortion of the system's potential due to the finite coupling to the environment. Even if the coupling is weak, the counter term is, in general, not negligible. Similarly, weak-coupling master equations feature a number of `Lamb-shift terms' which, contrary to popular belief, cannot be neglected. Yet, the practice of vanishing both counter term and Lamb shift when dealing with master equations is almost universal; and, surprisingly, it can yield $better$ results. By accepting the conventional wisdom, one may approximate the dynamics more accurately and, importantly, the resulting master equation is guaranteed to equilibrate to the correct steady state in the high-temperature limit. In this paper we discuss why is this the case. Specifically, we show that, if the potential distortion is small – but non-negligible – the counter term does not influence any dissipative processes to second order in the coupling. Furthermore, we show that, for large environmental cutoff, the Lamb-shift terms approximately cancel any coherent effects due to the counter term – this renders the combination of both contributions irrelevant in practice. We thus provide precise conditions under which the open-system $folklore$ regarding Lamb shift and counter terms is rigorously justified.