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Companies making their products more engaging isn’t necessarily a problem – it’s progress.
‘When you invent the ship, you also invent the shipwreck.’
The antidote to impulsiveness is forethought.
I discovered that living the life we want requires not only doing the right things, it also requires that we stop doing the wrong things that take us off-track.
‘the wealth of information means a dearth of something else … a poverty of attention’.6
Loneliness, according to researchers, is more dangerous than obesity.
We are compelled to reach for things we supposedly need but really don’t.
Though it’s not our fault distractions exist (as they always have), managing them is our responsibility.
Being indistractable means striving to do what you say you will do. Indistractable people are as honest with themselves as they are with others.
Even when we think we’re seeking pleasure, we’re actually driven by the desire to free ourselves from the pain of wanting.
‘By pleasure,’ he wrote, ‘we mean the absence of pain in the body and of trouble in the soul.’
Simply put, the drive to relieve discomfort is the root cause of all our behaviour, while everything else is a proximate cause.
Without understanding and tackling root causes, we’re stuck being the helpless victims in a tragedy of our own creation.
Unless we deal with the root causes of our distraction, we’ll continue to find ways to distract ourselves.
Most people don’t want to acknowledge the uncomfortable truth that distraction is always an unhealthy escape from reality.
How we deal with uncomfortable internal triggers determines whether we pursue healthful acts of traction or self-defeating distractions.
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 behaviour, distraction is just another way our brains attempt to deal with pain.
If distraction costs us time, then time management is pain management.
Thankfully, we can take solace in knowing we are hardwired for this sort of dissatisfaction.
Aeons of evolution gave you a brain in a near-constant state of discontentment.
‘If satisfaction and pleasure were permanent, there might be little incentive to continue seeking further benefits or advances.’
Four psychological factors make satisfaction temporary.
Let’s begin with the first factor: boredom.
‘People prefer doing to thinking, even if what they are doing is so unpleasant that they would normally pay to avoid it.
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 drive us to distraction.
Hedonic adaptation – the tendency to return quickly to a baseline level of satisfaction no matter what happens to us in life – is Mother Nature’s bait-and-switch.
Dissatisfaction and discomfort dominate our brain’s default state, but we can use them to motivate us instead of defeat us.
Even selfless acts, like helping someone, are motivated by our need to escape feelings of guilt and injustice.
Dissatisfaction is responsible for our species’ advances and its faults.
Bricker’s approach involves harnessing the power of imagination to help his patients see things differently.
Instead of suppressing urges, ACT prescribes a method for stepping back, noticing, observing and finally letting the desire disappear naturally.
It turns out mental abstinence can backfire.
The ‘ironic’ part of the ironic process theory is the fact that relief of the tension of wanting makes relieving it all the more rewarding, and therefore habit-forming.
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.
Certain desires can be modulated, if not completely mitigated, by how we think about our urges.
While we can’t control the feelings and thoughts that pop into our heads, we can control what we do with them.
Look for the discomfort that precedes the distraction, focusing in on the internal trigger
Bricker advises focusing on the internal trigger that precedes the unwanted behaviour, like ‘feeling anxious, having a craving, feeling restless, or thinking you are incompetent’.
Write down the trigger
The better we are at noticing the behaviour, the better we’ll be at managing it over time.
Explore your sensations
Bricker encourages staying with the feeling before acting on the impulse.
Beware of liminal moments
I have to wait just ten minutes.
This rule allows time to do what some behavioural psychologists call ‘surfing the urge’.
Techniques like surfing the urge and thinking of our cravings as leaves on a stream are mental skill-building exercises that can help us stop impulsively giving in to distractions.
‘It’s a curious truth that when you gently pay attention to negative emotions, they tend to dissipate – but positive ones expand.’
