Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life

by Nir Eyal

In the case of user-friendly products and services, what makes some products engaging and easy to use can also make them distracting.

The fact is, in this day and age, if you are not equipped to manage distraction, your brain will be manipulated by time-wasting diversions.

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.

I discovered that living the life we want requires not only doing the right things; it also requires we stop doing the wrong things that take us off track.

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.

We’ll also explore how to make just about any task enjoyable

by cultivating the ability to focus intensely on what we’re doing.

You’ll learn to plan your time with intention,

pacts are a proven way of reining ourselves in, ensuring we do what we say we’re going to do.

I promise you that by the time you finish this book, you will discover several breakthroughs that will change the way you manage distraction forever.

We are constantly reaching for something: more money, more experiences, more knowledge, more status, more stuff.

We can think of traction as the actions that draw us toward what we want in life.

distraction, the opposite of traction. Derived from the same Latin root, the word means the “drawing away of the mind.”

Distractions impede us from making progress toward the...

All behaviors, whether they tend toward traction or distraction, are prompted by trigg...

Internal triggers cue us f...

External triggers, on the other hand, are cues in our environment that tell us what to do next,

Whether prompted by internal or external triggers, the resulting action is either aligned with our broader intention (traction) or misaligned (distraction). Traction helps us accomplish goals; distraction leads us away from them.

our world has always been full of things designed to distract us.

enticements, distractions have and always will be facts of life.

Researchers tell us attention and focus are the raw materials of human creativity and flourishing.

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.

We are compelled to reach for things we supposedly need but really don’t.

Part 1 Master Internal Triggers

What Motivates Us, Really?

For hundreds of years, we’ve believed that motivation is driven by reward and punishment.

The reality, however, is that motivation has much less to do with pleasure than was once thought.

Even when we think we’re seeking pleasure, we’re actually driven by the desire to free ourselves from the pain of wanting.

the drive to relieve discomfort is the root cause of all our behavior, while everything else is a proximate cause.

Without understanding and tackling root causes, we’re stuck being helpless victims in a tragedy of our own creation.

Unless we deal with the root causes of our distraction, we’ll continue to find ways to distract ourselves.

Most people don’t want to acknowledge the uncomfortable truth that distraction is always an unhealthy escape from reality.

How we deal with uncomfortable internal triggers determines whether we pursue healthful acts of traction or self-defeating distractions.

without dealing with the discomfort driving the desire for escape, we’ll continue to resort to one distraction or another.

Only by understanding our pain can we begin to control it and find better ways to deal with negative urges.

Chapter 4 Time Management Is Pain Management

the motivation for diversion originates within us.

distraction is just another way our brains attempt to deal with pain.

the only way to handle distraction is by learning to ...

Sorry to say, but odds are you and I are never going to be fully happy with our lives.

Eons of evolution gave you and me a brain in a near-constant state of discontentment.

“If satisfaction and pleasure were permanent, there might be little incentive to continue seeking further benefits or advances.” In other words, feeling contented wasn’t good for the species.

Unfortunately, the same evolutionary traits that helped our kin survive by driving them to constantly do more can conspire against us today.

Four psychological factors make satisfaction temporary.

“People prefer doing to thinking, even if what they are doing is so unpleasant that they would normally pay to avoid it. The untutored mind does not like to be alone with itself.”

The second psychological factor driving us to distraction is negativity bias,

The third factor is rumination, our tendency to keep thinking about bad experiences.

Boredom, negativity bias, and rumination can each prompt us to distraction. But a fourth factor may be the cruelest of all. Hedonic adaptation, the tendency to quickly return to a baseline level of satisfaction, no matter what happens to us in life,