Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life

by Nir Eyal

All sorts of life events we think would make us happier actually don’t, or at least they don’t for long.

dissatisfaction is an innate power that can be channeled to help us make things better in the same way it served our prehistoric relatives.

Dissatisfaction and discomfort dominate our brain’s default state, but we can use them to motivate us instead of defeat us.

It is our dissatisfaction that propels us to do everything we do, including to hunt, seek, create, and adapt.

Dissatisfaction is responsible for our species’ advancements and its faults.

To harness its power, we must disavow the misguided idea that if we’re not happy, we’re not normal—exactly the opposite is true. While this shift in mind-set can be jarring, it can also be incredibly liberating.

It’s good to know that feeling bad isn’t actually bad; it’s exactly what survival...

learning certain techniques as part of acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) can disarm the discomfort that so often leads to harmful distractions.

At the heart of the therapy is learning to notice and accept one’s cravings and to handle them healthfully.

mental abstinence can backfire.

“ironic process theory” to explain why it’s so difficult to tame intruding thoughts.

relieving the tension of desire makes something all the more rewarding.

An endless cycle of resisting, ruminating, and finally giving in to the desire perpetuates the cycle and quite possibly dri...

Chapter 6 Reimagine the Internal Trigger

we shouldn’t keep telling ourselves to stop thinking about an urge; instead, we must learn better ways to cope.

Rather than trying to fight the urge, we need new methods to handle intrusive thoughts. The following four steps help us do just that:

STEP 1: LOOK FOR THE DISCOMFORT THAT PRECEDES THE DISTRACTION, FOCUSING IN ON THE INTERNAL TRIGGER

STEP 2: WRITE DOWN THE TRIGGER

download and print additional copies at NirAndFar.com/Indistractable; keep it handy for easy access.

The better we are at noticing the behavior, the better we’ll be at managing it over time.

STEP 3: EXPLORE YOUR SENSATIONS

Place each thought in your mind on each leaf. It could be a memory, a word, a worry, an image. And let each of those leaves float down that stream, swirling away, as you sit and just watch.”

STEP 4: BEWARE OF LIMINAL MOMENTS

Liminal moments are transitions from one thing to another t...

by doing them “for just a second,” we’re likely to do things we later regret, like getting off track for half an hour or getting into a car accident.

“surfing the urge.” When an urge takes hold, noticing the sensations and riding them like a wave—neither pushing them away nor acting on them—helps us cope until the feelings subside.

As Oliver Burkeman wrote in the Guardian, “It’s a curious truth that when you gently pay attention to negative emotions, they tend to dissipate—but positive ones expand.”

Chapter 7 Reimagine the Task

By relinquishing our notions about what fun should feel like, we open ourselves up to seeing tasks in a new way.

though play doesn’t necessarily have to be pleasurable, it can free us from discomfort—which, let’s not forget, is the central ingredient driving distraction.

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, not because we take them so seriously that we’d have to cut their bitter taste with sugar. Fun is not a feeling so much as an exhaust produced when an operator can treat something with dignity.”

“fun is the aftermath of deliberately manipulating a familiar situation in a new way.”

The answer, therefore, is to focus on th...

the idea is to pay such close attention that you find new challenges you didn’t see before.

We can use the same neural hardwiring that keeps us hooked to media to keep us engaged in an otherwise unpleasant task.

I learned to stay focused on the tedious work of writing books by finding the mystery in my work. I write to answer interesting questions and discover novel solutions to old problems.

“The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.”

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.

the quest to solve these mysteries is what turns the discomfort we seek to escape with distraction into an activity we embrace.

Chapter 8 Reimagine Your Temperament

To manage the discomfort that tugs us toward distraction, we need to think of ourselves differently.

the belief that self-control is limited—that, by the nature of our temperament, we only have so much willpower available to us. Furthermore, the thinking goes, we are liable to run out of willpower when we exert ourselves. Psychologists have a name for this phenomenon: ego depletion.

signs of ego depletion were observed only in those test subjects who believed willpower was a limited resource.

People who did not see willpower as a finite resource did not show signs of ego depletion.

If ego depletion is essentially caused by self-defeating thoughts and not by any biological limitation, then the idea makes us less likely to accomplish our goals by providing a rationale to quit when we could otherwise persist.

willpower is not a finite resource but instead acts like an emotion. Just as we don’t “run out” of joy or anger, willpower ebbs and flows in response to what’s happening to us and how we feel.

when we need to perform a difficult task, it’s more productive and healthful to believe a lack of motivation is temporary than it is to tell ourselves we’re spent and need a break (and maybe some ice cream).

the Craving Beliefs Questionnaire.