Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life

by Nir Eyal

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

Living the lives we want not only requires doing the right things but also necessitates not doing the things we know we’ll regret.

In 1971 the psychologist Herbert A. Simon presciently wrote, “The wealth of information means a dearth of something else . . . a poverty of attention.” Researchers tell us attention and focus are the raw materials of human creativity and flourishing.

Epicurus, the ancient Greek philosopher, said it best: “By pleasure, we mean the absence of pain in the body and of trouble in the soul.”

As the eighteenth-century poet Samuel Johnson said, “My life is one long escape from myself.

What does it feel like when the feelings crest and then subside? Bricker encourages staying with the feeling before acting on the impulse. When similar techniques were applied in a smoking cessation study, the participants who had learned to acknowledge and explore their cravings managed to quit at double the rate of those in the American Lung Association’s best-performing cessation program. 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.”

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.”

What we say to ourselves is vitally important. Labeling yourself as having poor self-control actually leads to less self-control. 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.

Like every valuable thing, you require maintenance and care, which takes time. Just as you wouldn’t blow off a meeting with your boss, you should never bail on appointments you make with yourself. After all, who’s more critical to helping you live the kind of life you want than you?

Input is much more certain than outcome. When it comes to living the life you want, making sure you allocate time to living your values is the only thing you should focus on.

William Rawlins, a professor of interpersonal communications at Ohio University who studies the way people interact over the course of their lives, told the Atlantic that satisfying friendships need three things: “somebody to talk to, someone to depend on, and someone to enjoy.”

The 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.

A study by researchers at Princeton University found people performed poorly on cognitive tasks when objects in their field of vision were in disarray as opposed to neatly arranged.

If we haven’t fundamentally dealt with the internal triggers driving us toward distraction, as we learned in part one, we’ll be set up for failure. Similarly, if we haven’t set aside time for traction, as we learned in part two, our precommitments will be useless. And finally, if we don’t first remove the external triggers that aren’t serving us before we make a precommitment, it’s likely not going to work. Precommitments are the last line of defense preventing us from sliding into distraction.

How does a team—or a company, for that matter—create psychological safety? Edmondson provides a three-step answer in her talk: • Step 1: “Frame the work as a learning problem, not an execution problem.” Because the future is uncertain, emphasize that “we’ve got to have everyone’s brains and voices in the game.” • Step 2: “Acknowledge your own fallibility.” Managers need to let people know that nobody has all the answers—we’re in this together. • Step 3: Finally, leaders must “model curiosity and ask lots of questions.

Studies have found that teenagers in many societies, particularly preindustrialized ones, don’t act especially rebelliously and, conversely, spend “almost all their time with adults.” In an article titled “The Myth of the Teen Brain,” Robert Epstein writes, “Many historians note that through most of recorded human history, the teen years were a relatively peaceful time of transition to adulthood.”

According to a widely accepted theory of human motivation, all people need three things to thrive: a sense of autonomy, competence, and relatedness.

The question goes like this: “I see you’re on your phone. Is everything OK?” Remember to be sincere—after all, there might really be an emergency. But more often than not, he’ll mutter a little excuse, tuck his phone back into his pocket, and start enjoying the night again. Victory is yours!