Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life

by Nir Eyal

RELATEDNESS—FEELING IMPORTANT TO OTHERS AND THAT OTHERS ARE IMPORTANT TO THEM

spontaneous socializing simply isn’t happening as much as it used to.

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.

“The more you’re not getting needs satisfied in life, reciprocally, the more you’re going to get them satisfied in virtual realities.”

while my wife and I don’t enforce a strict bedtime for our daughter, we made it a point to expose her to research findings showing the importance of ample sleep during adolescent years. After she realized that sleep was important to her well-being, it didn’t take much for her to conclude that screen time after 9 pm on a school night was a bad idea—a distraction from her value of staying healthy.

change the context of their family conversations around tech—from her screaming “No!” to teaching her kids to tell themselves, “Not yet.”

Empowering children with the autonomy to control their own time is a tremendous gift. Even if they fail from time to time, failure is part of the learning process.

If we want our kids to fulfill their need for relatedness offline, they need time to build face-to-face friendships outside school. These relationships should be free from the pressure of coaches, teachers, and parents telling them what to do. Unfortunately, for the typical child these days, playtime won’t happen unless it’s scheduled.

we can easily think of a host of activities we wouldn’t let our kids experience before they’re ready: reading certain books, watching violent films, driving a car, having an alcoholic drink, and, of course, using digital devices—each comes in its own time, not whenever a kid says so.

Sometimes, as parents, we can be a source of distraction. The dog barking, the doorbell ringing, dad’s subsequent command to answer the door, mom’s question about the baseball team’s game schedule, or a sibling’s invitation to play can all interfere with the time scheduled for something else. Though these interruptions seem trivial, any disturbance at the wrong time is a distraction, and we must do our part to help kids use their time as they planned by removing unwanted external triggers.

When parents impose limits without their kids’ input, they are setting them up to be resentful and incentivizing them to cheat the system.

When one person takes out a phone at dinner, it acts as an external trigger.

The remedy for distraction in social situations involves the development of new norms that make it taboo to check one’s phone when in the company of others.

To help keep things cordial, a simple and effective approach is to ask a direct question that can snap the offender out of the phone zone by giving him two simple options: (1) excuse himself to attend to the crisis happening on his device or (2) kindly put away his phone. The question goes like this: “I see you’re on your phone. Is everything OK?”

Phubbing, a portmanteau of phone and snubbing, means “to ignore (a person or one’s surroundings) when in a social situation by busying oneself with a phone or other mobile device.”

The kids received clear instructions not to interrupt the adults unless someone was bleeding.