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The antidote to impulsiveness is forethought.
Planning ahead ensures you will follow through.
Removing online technology didn’t work. I’d just replaced one distraction with another.
We already know what to do. What we don’t know is how to stop getting distracted.
The first step is to recognize that distraction starts from within. In part one, you’ll learn practical ways to identify and manage the psychological discomfort that leads us off track.
time management is pain management.
Tantalus’s curse was his blindness to the fact he didn’t need those things in the first place. That’s the real moral of the story. Tantalus’s curse is also our curse. We are compelled to reach for things we supposedly need but really don’t. We don’t need to check our email right this second or need to see the latest trending news, no matter how much we feel we must. Fortunately,
Being indistractable means striving to do what you say you will do.
Indistractable people are as honest with themselves as they are with others.
Most people don’t want to acknowledge the uncomfortable truth that distraction is always an unhealthy escape from reality.
the only way to handle distraction is by learning to handle discomfort.
Eons of evolution gave you and me a brain in a near-constant state of discontentment.
Our ancestors worked harder and strove further because they evolved to be perpetually perturbed, and so we remain today.
The untutored mind does not like to be alone with itself.”
Studies have found people are more likely to recall unhappy moments in their childhood, even if they would describe their upbringing as generally happy.
As one study notes, “By reflecting on what went wrong and how to rectify it, people may be able to discover sources of error or alternative strategies, ultimately leading to not repeating mistakes and possibly doing better in the future.”
Hedonic adaptation, the tendency to quickly return to a baseline level of satisfaction,
dissatisfaction is an innate power that can be channeled to help us make things better in the same way it served our prehistoric relatives.
It’s good to know that feeling bad isn’t actually bad; it’s exactly what survival of the fittest intended.
From that place of acceptance, we stand a chance of avoiding the pitfalls of our psyches.
We can recognize pain and rise above it, which is the first step on the road to ...
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we want to master distraction, we must learn to deal with discomfort.
An endless cycle of resisting, ruminating, and finally giving in to the desire perpetuates the cycle and quite possibly drives many of our unwanted behaviors.
If, as this study suggests, a craving for something as addictive as nicotine can be manipulated in this way, why can’t we trick our brains into mastering other unhealthy desires? Thankfully, we can!
Resisting an urge can trigger rumination and make the desire grow stronger.
we shouldn’t keep telling ourselves to stop thinking about an urge;
what’s dangerous is that by doing them “for just a second,” we’re likely to do things we later regret, like
If I find myself wanting to check my phone as a pacification device when I can’t think of anything better to do, I tell myself it’s fine to give in, but not right now. I have to wait just ten minutes.
neither pushing them away nor acting on them—
“It’s a curious truth that when you gently pay attention to negative emotions, they tend to dissipate—but positive ones expand.”
I an Bogost studies fun for a living. A professor of interactive computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Bogost has written ten books, including quirky titles like How to Talk About Videogames, The Geek’s Chihuahua, and, most recently, Play Anything.
Fun and play don’t have to make us feel good per se; rather, they can be used as tools to keep us focused.
“We fail to have fun because we don’t take things seriously enough,
Instead of running away from our pain or using rewards like prizes and treats to help motivate us, the idea is to pay such close attention that you find new challenges you didn’t see before.
Operating under constraints, Bogost says, is the key to creativity and fun.
Fun is looking for the variability in something other people don’t notice. It’s breaking through the boredom and monotony to discover its hidden beauty.
finding novelty is only possible when we give ourselves the time to focus intently on a task and look hard for the variability.
We can master internal triggers by reimagining an otherwise dreary task. Fun and play can be used as tools to keep us focused.
People who did not see willpower as a finite resource did not show signs of ego depletion.
Addicts’ beliefs regarding their powerlessness was just as significant in determining whether they would relapse after treatment as their level of physical dependence.
Several studies have found people who are more self-compassionate experience a greater sense of well-being.
Self-compassion makes people more resilient to letdowns by breaking the vicious cycle of stress that often accompanies failure.
A good rule of thumb is to talk to yourself the way you might talk to a friend. Since
In order to live our values in each of these domains, we must reserve time in our schedules to do so.
Only by setting aside specific time in our schedules for traction (the actions that draw us toward what we want in life) can we turn our backs on distraction.
Without planning ahead, it’s impossible to tell the difference between tr...
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for traction is through “timeboxing.” Timeboxing uses a well-researched technique psychologists call “setting an implementation intention,” which is a fancy way of saying, “deciding what you’re going to do, and when you’re going to do it.”
Keeping a timeboxed schedule is the only way to know if you’re distracted.
By turning our values into time, we make sure we have time for traction.
I won’t do what I want to do if I’m not in the right place at the right time,
