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.”

you can’t call something a “distraction” unless you know what it is distracting you from.

The amount of information available, the speed at which it can be disseminated, and the ubiquity of access to new content on our devices has made for a trifecta of distraction.

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.

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.

Solely blaming a smartphone for causing distraction is just as flawed as blaming a pedometer for making someone climb too many stairs.

Unless we deal with the root causes of our distraction, we’ll continue to find ways to distract ourselves.

gave me something I could control and succeed at.”

Most people don’t want to acknowledge the uncomfortable truth that distraction is always an unhealthy escape from reality.

without dealing with the discomfort driving the desire for escape, we’ll continue to resort to one distraction or another.

Only by understanding our pain can we begin to control it and find better ways to deal with negative urges.

As is the case with all human behavior, distraction is just another way our brains attempt to deal with pain. If we accept this fact, it makes sense that the only way to handle distraction is by learning to handle discomfort.

If distraction costs us time, then time management is pain management.

If satisfaction and pleasure were permanent, there might be little incentive to continue seeking further benefits or advances.”

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.

It is our dissatisfaction that propels us to do everything we do, including to hunt, seek, create, and adapt.

feeling bad isn’t actually bad; it’s exactly what survival of the fittest intended.

ACT prescribes a method for stepping back, noticing, observing, and finally letting the desire disappear naturally.

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.

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.

STEP 1: LOOK FOR THE DISCOMFORT THAT PRECEDES THE DISTRACTION, FOCUSING IN ON THE INTERNAL TRIGGER

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.”

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.”

“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.

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

signs of ego depletion were observed only in those test subjects who believed willpower was a limited resource.

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

willpower is not a finite resource but instead acts like an emotion.

if mental energy is more like an emotion than fuel in a tank, it can be managed and utilized as such.

it’s more productive and healthful to believe a lack of motivation is temporary than it is to tell ourselves we’re spent and need a break

Addicts’ beliefs regarding their powerlessness was just as significant in determining whether they would relapse after treatment as their level of physical dependence.

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.

A good rule of thumb is to talk to yourself the way you might talk to a friend. Since we know so much about ourselves, we tend to be our own worst critics, but if we talk to ourselves the way we’d help a friend, we can see the situation for what it really is.

People who are more self-compassionate are more resilient.

if we don’t control our impulse to escape uncomfortable feelings, we’ll always look for quick fixes to soothe our pain.

If I know how you spend your time,” he wrote, “then I know what might become of you.”

Instead of starting with what we’re going to do, we should begin with why we’re going to do it. And to do that, we must begin with our values.

values are “how we want to be, what we want to stand for, and how we want to relate to the world around us.”

The Stoic philosopher Hierocles demonstrated the interconnected nature of our lives with concentric circles illustrating a hierarchal balance of duties. He placed the human mind and body at the center, followed by close family in the next ring, then extended family, then fellow members of one’s tribe, then inhabitants of one’s town or city, fellow citizens and countrymen next, finishing with all humanity in the outermost ring.

You can’t call something a distraction unless you know what it’s distracting you from.

checking work email, a seemingly productive task, is a distraction if it’s done when you intended to spend time with your family or work on a presentation.

Exercise, sleep, healthy meals, and time spent reading or listening to an audiobook are all ways to invest in ourselves. Some people value mindfulness, spiritual connection, or reflection, and may want time to pray or meditate. Others value skillfulness and want time alone to practice a hobby.

If you’re not taking care of yourself, your relationships suffer.

“Employed women partnered with employed men carry 65 percent of the family’s child-care responsibilities, a figure that has held steady since the turn of the century.”

figuring out how I could be helpful was itself work.

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

the less time we invest in people, the easier it is to make do without them, until one day it is too awkward to reconnect.