Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life

by Nir Eyal

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.

The ancient Greeks immortalized the story of a man who was perpetually distracted. We call something that is desirable but just out of reach “tantalizing” after his name. The story goes that Tantalus was banished to the underworld by his father, Zeus, as a punishment. There he found himself wading in a pool of water while a tree dangled ripe fruit above his head. The curse seems benign, but when Tantalus tried to pluck the fruit, the branch moved away from him, always just out of reach. When he bent down to drink the cool water, it receded so that he could never quench his thirst. Tantalus’s punishment was to yearn for things he desired but could never grasp.

In 1971 the psychologist Herbert A. Simon presciently wrote, “The wealth of information means a dearth of something else . . . a poverty of attention.”

As Jeremy Bentham, the English philosopher and founder of utilitarianism, put it, “Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure.”

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

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

As is the case with all human behavior, distraction is just another way our brains attempt to deal with pain.

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.

If we want to master distraction, we must learn to deal with discomfort.

Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote in 1863, “Try to pose for yourself this task: not to think of a polar bear, and you will see that the cursed thing will come to mind every minute.”

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

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.”

Fun is not a feeling so much as an exhaust produced when an operator can treat something with dignity.”

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

Labeling yourself as having poor self-control actually leads to less self-control.

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.

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The German writer and philosopher Johann Wolfgang von Goethe believed he could predict someone’s future based on one simple fact. “If I know how you spend your time,” he wrote, “then I know what might become of you.”

The Roman Stoic philosopher Seneca wrote, “People are frugal in guarding their personal property; but as soon as it comes to squandering time, they are most wasteful of the one thing in which it is right to be stingy.”

If we don’t plan our days, someone else will.

In business, a residual beneficiary is the chump who gets whatever is left over when a company is liquidated—typically, not much. In life, our loved ones deserve better, and yet, if we’re not careful with how we plan our time, residual beneficiaries are exactly what they become.

The people we love most should not be content getting whatever time is left over. Everyone benefits when we hold time on our schedule to live up to our values and do our share.

satisfying friendships need three things: “somebody to talk to, someone to depend on, and someone to enjoy.”