Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life

by Nir Eyal

In the future, there will be two kinds of people in the world: those who let their attention and lives be controlled and coerced by others and those who proudly call themselves “indistractable.”

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

I love sweets, I love social media, and I love television. However, as much as I love these things, they don’t love me back.

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.

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

We are compelled to reach for things we supposedly need but really don’t. We don’t need to check our email right this second or need to see the latest trending news, no matter how much we feel we must.

motivation has much less to do with pleasure than was once thought. 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.

Eons of evolution gave you and me a brain in a near-constant state of discontentment.

Four psychological factors make satisfaction temporary. Let’s begin with the first factor: boredom.

when left alone in the room with the machine and nothing else to do, 67 percent of men and 25 percent of women shocked themselves, and many did so multiple times. The study’s authors conclude their paper by saying, “People prefer doing to thinking, even if what they are doing is so unpleasant that they would normally pay to avoid it. The untutored mind does not like to be alone with itself.”

The second psychological factor driving us to distraction is negativity bias, “a phenomenon in which negative events are more salient and demand attention more powerfully than neutral or positive events.”

The third factor is rumination, our tendency to keep thinking about bad experiences.

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

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 of the fittest intended.

Wegner later dubbed this tendency “ironic process theory” to explain why it’s so difficult to tame intruding thoughts. The irony being, of course, that 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 drives many of our unwanted behaviors.

smoke. It appeared the duration of the trip and the time since their last cigarette didn’t affect the level of the flight attendants’ cravings. What affected their desire was not how much time had passed after a smoke, but how much time was left before they could smoke again.

Without techniques for disarming temptation, mental abstinence can backfire. Resisting an urge can trigger rumination and make the desire grow stronger.

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.”

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.

We’ve all heard Mary Poppins’s advice to add “a spoonful of sugar” to turn a job into a game, yes? Well, Bogost believes Poppins was wrong. He claims her approach “recommends covering over drudgery.” As he writes, “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.

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 novelty to engage our attention and maintain focus when tempted by distraction.

Operating under constraints, Bogost says, is the key to creativity and fun.

I knew the ice cream and the sitting weren’t good for me, but I justified my actions by telling myself I was “spent,” acting as if my ego were depleted (even if I’d never heard the term). This theory would seem to perfectly explain my after-work indulgences. But is ego depletion real?

Recently, however, scientists have examined the theory more critically, and several have soured on the idea. Evan Carter at the University of Miami was one of the first to challenge Baumeister’s findings. In a 2010 meta-analysis (a study of studies), Carter looked at nearly two hundred experiments that concluded ego depletion was real. Upon closer inspection, however, he identified a “publication bias,” in which studies that produced contradictory evidence were not included. When factoring in their results, he concluded there was no firm evidence supporting the ego depletion theory. Furthermore, some of the more magical aspects of the theory, like the idea that sugar can increase willpower, have been thoroughly debunked.

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.

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

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.”

Show up when you say you will. You can’t always control what you get out of time you spend, but you can control how much time you put into a task. • 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.

ason Fried says group chat is “like being in an all-day meeting with random participants and no agenda.” This is especially notable because the company Fried founded, Basecamp, makes a popular group-chat app. But Fried understands it’s in his company’s interests to make sure his customers don’t burn out. He offers several pieces of advice for teams using a group-chat app, whether they use Basecamp, Slack, WhatsApp, or other services. “What we’ve learned is that group chat used sparingly in a few very specific situations makes a lot of sense,” Fried wrote in an online post. “What makes a lot less sense is chat as the primary, default method of communication inside an organization. A slice, yes. The whole pie, no . . . All sorts of eventual bad happens when a company begins thinking one-line-at-a-time most of the time.”

Part of the problem is that too often people schedule a meeting to avoid having to put in the effort of solving a problem for themselves. To some, talking it out with colleagues feels better than working it out alone. Certainly, collaboration has its place, but meetings should not be used as a distraction from doing the hard work of thinking.

Meetings are for consensus building. With few exceptions, creative problem-solving should occur before the meeting, individually or in very small groups.

Christopher Bryan designed a study to test the effects of priming individuals to think of themselves in slightly different ways. First, he asked two groups of registered voters to complete questions related to an upcoming election. One group’s survey questions included the verb “to vote”—for example, “How important is it to you to vote?” The second group answered similar questions that included the noun “voter”—such as “How important is it to you to be a voter?” The difference in wording may seem minor, but the results were extraordinary.

Depression costs the US economy over $51 billion annually in absenteeism, according to Mental Health America, but that number doesn’t even scratch the surface of the lost potential of millions of Americans who suffer at work without a medical diagnosis. Furthermore, it doesn’t account for the mild depression-like symptoms caused by unhealthy work environments that lead to unwanted consequences, such as distraction. Because we turn to our devices to escape discomfort, we often reach for our tech tools to feel better when we experience a lack of control. Checking email or chiming in on a group-chat thread provides the feeling of being productive, regardless of whether our actions are actually making things better.

Jobs where employees encounter high expectations and low control have been shown to lead to symptoms of depression.

Depression-like symptoms are painful. When people feel bad, they use distractions to avoid their pain and regain a sense of control.

Lack of control over their schedules and the expectation that they would be constantly connected were major reasons why people left the firm.

Companies consistently confuse the disease of bad culture with symptoms like tech overuse and high employee turnover.

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.

If there’s one technology that embodies the unreasonable demands of the always-on work culture that pervades so many companies today, it’s Slack.

An exhaustive meta-analysis of sixteen studies “found that sugar does not affect the behavior or cognitive performance of children.”

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.” Apparently, our teenagers’ brains are fine—it is our brains that are underdeveloped.

Ryan and Deci proposed the human psyche needs three things to flourish: autonomy, competence, and relatedness. When the body is starved, it elicits hunger pangs; when the psyche is undernourished, it produces anxiety, restlessness, and other symptoms that something is missing.

When kids aren’t getting the psychological nutrients they need, self-determination theory explains why they might overdo unhealthy behaviors, such as spending too much time in front of screens. Ryan believes the cause has less to do with the devices and more to do with why certain kids are susceptible to distraction in the first place.

Most formal schooling in America and similar industrialized countries, on the other hand, is the antithesis of a place where kids have the autonomy to make their own choices. According to Rogoff, “It may be the case that children give up control of their attention when it’s always managed by an adult.” In other words, kids can become conditioned to lose control of their attention and become highly distractible as a result.

Since about 1955 . . . children’s free play has been continually declining, at least partly because adults have exerted ever-increasing control over children’s activities . . . Somehow, as a society, we have come to the conclusion that to protect children from danger and to educate them, we must deprive them of the very activity that makes them happiest and place them for ever more hours in settings where they are more or less continually directed and evaluated by adults, settings almost designed to produce anxiety and depression.