Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life

by Nir Eyal

As philosopher Paul Virilio wrote, “When you invent the ship, you also invent the shipwreck.

The antidote to impulsiveness is forethought. Planning ahead ensures you will follow through.

After all, the time you plan to waste is not wasted time.

REMEMBER THIS • We need to learn how to avoid distraction. Living the lives we want not only requires doing the right things but also necessitates not doing the things we know we’ll regret. • The problem is deeper than tech. Being indistractable isn’t about being a Luddite. It’s about understanding the real reasons why we do things against our best interests. • Here’s what it takes: We can be indistractable by learning and adopting four key strategies.

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

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.

In the age of increased automation, the most sought-after jobs are those that require creative problem-solving, novel solutions, and the kind of human ingenuity that comes from focusing deeply on the task at hand.

REMEMBER THIS • Distraction stops you from achieving your goals. It is any action that moves you away from what you really want. • Traction leads you closer to your goals. It is any action that moves you toward what you really want. • Triggers prompt both traction and distraction. External triggers prompt you to action with cues in your environment. Internal triggers prompt you to action with cues within you.

Part 1 Master Internal Triggers

REMEMBER THIS • Understand the root cause of distraction. Distraction is about more than your devices. Separate proximate causes from the root cause. • All motivation is a desire to escape discomfort. If a behavior was previously effective at providing relief, we’re likely to continue using it as a tool to escape discomfort. • Anything that stops discomfort is potentially addictive, but that doesn’t make it irresistible. If you know the drivers of your behavior, you can take steps to manage them.

REMEMBER THIS • Time management is pain management. Distractions cost us time, and like all actions, they are spurred by the desire to escape discomfort. • Evolution favored dissatisfaction over contentment. Our tendencies toward boredom, negativity bias, rumination, and hedonic adaptation conspire to make sure we’re never satisfied for long. • Dissatisfaction is responsible for our species’ advancements as much as its faults. It is an innate power that can be channeled to help us make things better. • If we want to master distraction, we must learn to deal with discomfort.

Bricker writes, “Most people don’t think of cancer as a behavioral problem, but whether it’s quitting smoking or losing weight or exercising more, there are some definitive things you can do to reduce your risk and thereby live a longer and higher-quality life.”

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

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.

Certain desires can be modulated, if not completely mitigated, by how we think about our urges.

REMEMBER THIS • Without techniques for disarming temptation, mental abstinence can backfire. Resisting an urge can trigger rumination and make the desire grow stronger. • We can manage distractions that originate from within by changing how we think about them. We can reimagine the trigger, the task, and our temperament.

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

A common problem I have while writing is the urge to google something. It’s easy to justify this bad habit as “doing research,” but deep down I know it’s often just a diversion from difficult work. Bricker advises focusing on the internal trigger that precedes the unwanted behavior, like “feeling...

STEP 2: WRITE DOWN TH...

Bricker advises writing down the trigger, whether or not you subsequently give in to the distraction. He recommends noting the time of day, what you were doing, and how you felt when you noticed the internal trigger that led to the distracting behavior “as soon as you are aware of...

He recommends discussing the urge as if you were an observer, telling yourself something like, “I’m feeling that tension in my chest right now. And there I go, trying to reach for my iPhone.” The better we are at noticing the behavior, the better we’ll be at managing it over time.

STEP 3: EXPLORE YOUR SENSATIONS

One of Bricker’s favorite techniques is the “leaves on a stream” method. When feeling the uncomfortable internal trigger to do something you’d rather not, “imagine you are seated beside a gently flowing stream,” he says. “Then imagine there are leaves floating down that stream. 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...

A technique I’ve found particularly helpful for dealing with this distraction trap is the “ten-minute rule.” 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. This technique is effective at helping me deal with all sorts of potential distractions, like googling something rather than writing, eating something unhealthy when I’m bored, or watching another episode on Netflix when I’m “too tired to go to bed.”

If we still want to perform the action after ten minutes of urge surfing, we’re free to do it, but that’s rarely still the case. The liminal moment has passed, and we’re able to do the thing we really wanted to do.

Techniques like surfing the urge and thinking of our cravings as leaves on a stream are mental skill-building exercises that can help us stop impulsively giving in to distractions. They recondition our minds to seek relief from internal triggers in a reflective rather than a reactive

It’s a curious truth that when you gently pay attention to negative emotions, they tend to dissipate—but positive ones expand.”

REMEMBER THIS • By reimagining an uncomfortable internal trigger, we can disarm it. • Step 1. Look for the emotion preceding distraction. • Step 2. Write down the internal trigger. • Step 3. Explore the negative sensation with curiosity instead of contempt. • Step 4. Be extra cautious during liminal moments.

” he writes, “turns out to be fun even if it doesn’t involve much (or any) enjoyment.

He advises that play can be part of any difficult task, and 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.

“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.”

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

The answer, therefore, is to focus on the task itself. 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. Those new challenges provide the nove...

I write to answer interesting questions and discover novel solutions to old problems. To use a popular aphorism, “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.

But remember: finding novelty is only possible when we give ourselves the time to focus intently on a task and look hard for the variability.

REMEMBER THIS • We can master internal triggers by reimagining an otherwise dreary task. Fun and play can be used as tools to keep us focused. • Play doesn’t have to be pleasurable. It just has to hold our attention. • Deliberateness and novelty can be added to any task to make it fun.

In a study conducted by the Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck and her colleagues, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Dweck concluded that signs of ego depletion were observed only in those test subjects who believed willpower was a limited resource. It wasn’t the sugar in the lemonade but the belief in its impact that gave participants an extra boost.

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

He believes that 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.

Just let that sink in—mind-set mattered as much as physical dependence!

Rather than telling ourselves we failed because we’re somehow deficient, we should offer self-compassion by speaking to ourselves with kindness when we experience setbacks.

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. An individual’s level of self-compassion had a greater effect on whether they would develop anxiety and depression than all the usual things that tend to screw up people’s lives, like traumatic life events, a family history of mental illness, low social status, or a lack of social support.

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.

Self-compassion makes people more resilient to letdowns by breaking the vicious cycle of stress that often accompanies failure.

Instead of accepting what the voice says or arguing with it, remind yourself that obstacles are part of the process of growth. We don’t get better without practice, which can be difficult at times.

A good rule of thumb is to talk to yourself the way you might talk to a friend.