Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life

by Nir Eyal

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, is Mother Nature’s bait and switch.

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.

Several studies have found people who are more self-compassionate experience a greater sense of well-being. A 2015 review of seventy-nine studies looking at the responses of over sixteen thousand volunteers found that people who have “a positive and caring attitude . . . toward her- or himself in the face of failures and individual shortcomings” tend to be happier. Another study found that people’s tendency to self-blame, along with how much they ruminated on a problem, could almost completely mediate the most common factors associated with depression and anxiety.

talk to ourselves in order to harness the power of self-compassion. This doesn’t mean we won’t mess up; we all do. Everyone struggles with distraction from one thing or another. The important thing is to take responsibility for our actions without heaping on the toxic guilt that makes us feel even worse and can, ironically, lead us to seek even more distraction in order to escape the pain of shame.

Fogg Behavior Model states that for a behavior (B) to occur, three things must be present at the same time: motivation (M), ability (A), and a trigger (T). More succinctly, B = MAT.

We should use group chat in the same way we use other synchronous communication channels. We wouldn’t choose to participate in a conference call that lasted for a whole day, so the same goes for group chat. Fried recommends we “treat chat like a sauna—stay a while but then get out . . . it’s unhealthy to stay too long.”

THIS. I hate group chats so much.

teaching empowers us to construct a different identity, as shown by the act of helping other people prevent the same mistakes.