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Without understanding and tackling root causes, we’re stuck being helpless victims in a tragedy of our own creation.
distraction is always an unhealthy escape from reality.
acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT)
Timeboxing
You can’t call something a distraction unless you know what it is distracting you from.
Forest, SelfControl, Focusmate, or kSafe, effort pacts
After spending nearly five years conducting the research for this book, I knew it was finally time to start putting words on the page, but I found it difficult to get down to writing each day and instead found myself doing even more research, both online and offline.
Eventually, I’d had enough of my false starts, half-finished chapters, and incomplete outlines. I decided to put some skin in the game and enter a price pact to hold myself accountable to my important goal of finishing this book.
I committed to a minimum of two hours of distraction-free writing time six days per week, added it to my timeboxed schedule,
By thinking of yourself as indistractable, you empower yourself through your new identity.
You can also use this identity as a rationale to tell others why you do “strange” things like meticulously plan your time, refuse to respond to every notification immediately,
These acts are no more unusual than other expressions of identity, like ...
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Telling others about your new identity is a great way to solidify your pact.
simple rituals can help us build personal discipline and self-control.”
I have a ritual of repeating a series of short mantras every morning.
self-determination theory
human psyche needs three things to flourish: autonomy, competence, and relatedness.
Mayan parents “feel very strongly that every child knows best what they want and that goals can be achieved only when a child wants
“The Myth of the Teen Brain” in Scientific American, has a similar conclusion:
“One can thus feel freedom, competence, and connection online, especially when the teenager’s contrasting environments are overly controlling, restrictive, or understimulating.”
parents who address internet use or screen time with kids in an autonomy-supported way have kids who are more self-regulated with respect to it, so less likely to use screen time for excessive hours,” he says.
Somehow, as a society, we have come to the conclusion that to protect children from danger and to educate them, we must deprive them of the very activity that makes them happiest and place them for ever more hours in settings where they are more or less continually directed and evaluated by adults, settings almost designed to produce anxiety and depression.
Ryan believes many kids aren’t getting enough of the three essential psychological nutrients—autonomy, competence, and relatedness—in their offline lives.
The more you’re not getting needs satisfied in life, reciprocally, the more you’re going to get them satisfied in virtual realities.”
limits should be set with the child, and not arbitrarily enforced because you think you know best.
parents should model how to be indistractable.
Knowing what’s really driving their overuse of technology is the first step to helping kids build resilience instead of escaping discomfort through distraction.
all people need three things to thrive: a sense of autonomy, competence, and relatedness.
