How To Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life with Nir Eyal | Feel Better Live More Podcast

fundamentally if we don't face the fact that everything we do is about a desire to escape discomfort we will always become distracted by something if we don't understand the root cause of distraction why we get distracted in the first place what internal triggers we are trying to satiate and then it's a lost cause we have to start there [Music] welcome to london and welcome to the podcast thank you so much it's great to be here appreciate it thank you so nia i as i said i can't stop reading this book at the moment and i think you're i think you're talking about a topic that many of us know is a problem but until we give a name to it as you have done i'm not sure we actually look for solutions so i wonder if you could start off by saying why is being indistractible so important right so maybe i should start with describing what it means to be indistractible becoming indistractible means you are the kind of person who strives to do what they say they're going to do you value personal integrity you know we we all know how terrible it is to lie to someone else we would never want to be accused of being a liar to our children to our family to our friends and yet the fact of the matter is we lie to ourselves all the time we say we're going to do one thing and we do something else we say we're going to exercise we don't we say we're going to do that big project at work we procrastinate we say we're going to be fully present with our loved ones and we're not and so this was a very personal challenge uh that i took on because i had this problem i was patient zero where i found that i was getting distracted from the things that i wanted to do with my time my attention to my life and so that's really what started me down this journey yeah i mean i've spoken about stress a lot in the past and there are many sources of stress in the modern world but i think the fact that we're constantly distracted is a huge source of stress and the way i've looked at it before is i talk about micro stress doses and macro stress doses micro stress doses are little hits of stress that in isolation we can handle but when you mount them up on top of one another they start to get you closer and closer to your own stress threshold an example i give is that many of us wake up in the morning these days and before we've left the house we've been exposed to 10 or 15 of these micro stress doses so someone's gone to bed late because they were up binge watching netflix and they wake up at well they know they have to go to work so at 6 30 their alarm goes off and pings them out of a deep sleep so i call that micro stressors number one they realize then that actually you know what i've got a bit more times let me put this on snooze for another six minutes six minutes later another alarm micro stress so it's number two then you realize actually you know i should be getting up now so you quickly look at your phone because that's where your alarm is right and you have a look and you see oh there's three work emails i didn't do yesterday oh you know that adds to your stress in the morning then you think actually let me have a quick look on social media and someone's been mean to you on your last post and a few nodding heads here so um the point i try and make is that actually many of us have left the house having been exposed to multiple of these micro hits of stress and i'm i think i talk about it in terms of stress but you could just as easily make the case that all those micro stress doses are distraction well so maybe it's useful it's a good point to maybe um kind of share this framework that's the backbone of indistractible and define what do i mean by distraction so the best way to understand what distraction is is to understand what it is not the opposite of distraction is not focus the opposite of distraction is traction that in fact both words come from the same latin root trajare which means to pull and you'll notice that both words end in the same six letters a-c-t-i-o-n that spells action so traction is any action that pulls you towards what you want to do with your time things that you do with intent the opposite of traction is distraction anything that pulls you away from what you plan to do with intent so this is this is important for a few reasons uh one i think it frees us from this ridiculous moral hierarchy that a lot of people have that you know what you do with your time that's that's frivolous right checking facebook or candy crush whatever that's frivolous but me spending three hours watching football that's somehow okay in my book anything you do with intent no matter what it is that you do even checking social media even doing those things that you you choose to do as long as you are doing them with intent because you want to as opposed to somebody else is influencing you to do those things there's nothing wrong with it it's still an act of traction the other thing that i think is really important about this is that we oftentimes trick ourselves into thinking that something is traction even when it's distraction so uh you know this would happen to me all the time i would sit down on my desk and i'd say okay now i'm going to do that big project i'm going to do that thing i've been finally you know think procrastinating on i'm finally going to do that thing right after i check email right after i check my slack channels or do some research on google and i would still not do the thing that i had planned to do and so that is just as much of a pernicious distraction so we've got traction we've got distraction now it's important to understand what influences us what prods us to either traction or distraction is one of two things we have our external triggers many of them you've mentioned these are the pings and dings and rings these things in our environment that prompt us to either traction or distraction and those are kind of the usual suspects everybody knows those things we love to blame those those external triggers our devices our computers all of these potential uh triggers towards traction or distraction but it turns out that a much more common source of distraction what i learned in my five years of research writing this book is that while some distraction starts outside of this it turns out most distraction starts from within and so it's not just the external triggers we need to think about it's what we call the internal triggers internal triggers are these uncomfortable sensations that we seek to escape so you know one thing that we need to understand about distraction is that it is not a new problem and in fact plato talked about it 2500 years ago he called it acrasia this tendency that we all have to do things against our better interest and it's it's a fascinating question if we think about it why do we do things we know we shouldn't do and why don't we do the things we know we want to do why do we do things against our better interests but i think in order to answer plato's question we have to dig a layer deeper to understand why do we do anything and everything what's the driver of all human behavior what's the nature of motivation most people will tell you that motivation is about some version of carrots and sticks this is called freud's pleasure principle and so freud says that everything is about the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain that's kind of most people's conception of what drives human motivation but it turns out that from a neurological perspective it's not exactly right turns out that human motivation is not spurred by the desire to pursue pleasure and the avoidance of pain neurologically speaking turns out that all behavior is spurred by one thing and that is the desire to escape discomfort everything we do is about a desire to escape discomfort even the pursuit of pleasurable sensations even the pursuit of pleasure is itself psychologically destabilizing we call this the homeostatic response so we know this is true physiologically that when we feel cold for example we go outside we feel cold we put on a jacket right we put on a coat because that's not comfortable to feel cold and if we walk back inside now we're too hot we take it off and if we're hungry our you know our belly starts to rumble we feel hunger pangs we eat and when we're stuffed that doesn't feel good we stop eating so that's physiologically how this homeostatic response works the same is true psychologically that when we feel an uncomfortable emotional state we also turn to some kind of emotional pacification device to help us cope with that discomfort so when we're feeling lonely where do we go we go to facebook when we're feeling uncertain about something we google it when we're bored we uh check sports uh news uh reddit pinterest all of these products and services cater to these uncomfortable emotional sensations so this means that fundamentally if all human behavior is spurred by a desire to escape discomfort that means that time management is pain management that doesn't matter what kind of life hacks or the latest gurus techniques around how to manage your time in your life fundamentally if we don't face the fact that everything we do is about a desire to escape discomfort we will always become distracted by something and i think what you're noticing is a very interesting phenomenon because these micro doses of stress in fact are spurred by stress in the first place or some type of uncomfortable sensation right so when we get up in the morning we have that desire to check our devices there's always a preceding emotion that we are trying to pacify like baby's sucking on thumbs right we don't want to feel something so the closest thing we can grab to alleviate discomfort we form a habit around and that becomes what we turn to for psychological relief and sometimes it spurs us into this vicious cycle where the more we check the more stress we get and the more stress we get the more discomfort we feel and the more desire we have to keep checking or distract ourselves in one way or another so i think your insight is is right on the good news is and this is a very i think optimistic book because i think uh every other book on this on this topic and i didn't originally plan to write this book i wanted a solution for myself and so i read every book i could find on uh distraction and tech overuse and every book basically said that it's all about technology that the technology is at fault stop using your technologies technology is doing this to you it's rotting your brain it's hijacking your brain it's addicting everyone and so i took their advice i i got rid of my uh iphone and i bought a flip phone that only sent and received phone calls and text messages no apps i got a word processor from the 1990s they don't even make these anymore no internet connection all you could do is type on it and i thought okay great i got rid of all the the modern technology that apparently is so bad for us and i thought okay now i'm finally going to do what i said i'm going to do now i'm not going to be distracted anymore and i would sit down on my desk and i would say okay now i'm gonna get to work right after i you know there's that book that i've been meaning to read on my bookshelf and uh my desk i've been meaning to organize my desk let me just do that real quick or let me take out the trash the trash needs taking out right now and i kept getting distracted even when it wasn't the technology that it was doing it to me and so that's really when i came upon this insight if we don't understand the root cause of distraction why we get distracted in the first place what internal triggers we are trying to to uh to satiate then that then it's a lost cause we have to start there yeah and near i've got to say i think that's one of the things to me that i i literally love about this book is and i wasn't expecting this actually i was expecting um i was supposing a lot of tips and strategies on how you manage the distraction from technology and of course that is there as well but i love this thing about internal triggers and this whole idea that we are using distraction to escape discomfort i think it's very profound and it reminds me a little bit of a speaker who i've interviewed on the podcast before who are actually seen speak in this auditorium gabor mate when he says all addiction comes from childhood trauma and he defines childhood trauma as being either something bad has happened to you or not enough good things have happened to you so essentially there's something missing we don't feel completely whole and so we look to certain behavior certain addictive behaviors uh to sort of fill that hole in many ways um and it for me it was really it was really gratifying to see your view on this and how yes it's about putting in strategies into our daily lives that actually can help reduce distraction but ultimately at its core you're talking about you talk about human behavior what is it that makes us human is you know as many people say you know being alive is pain pain you know life is suffering and actually you're making the case very beautifully that everything we do in life on some level is to alleviate suffering right i think i think that's that's exactly the point i'm making and in fact i i don't like you know sometimes we hear folks that give us the impression that somehow if we're not happy all the time if we're not satisfied if everything in life isn't great then there's something wrong with us and nothing could be further from the truth i mean we have evolved as a species to be perpetually perturbed that's what makes us survive so well i mean if there was ever a branch of homo sapiens that was happy all the time that was satisfied that never wanted for more those people were probably killed and eaten by our ancestors okay they're not with us anymore and in fact i think we need to to uh to accept the fact that discomfort is okay it's all right uh it doesn't mean there's something wrong with you necessarily it doesn't mean that we're somehow broken or deficient and you know i i've talked to many people in researching this book over the years and most people tend to fall into these two categories of what i call blamers or shamers the blamers when they become distracted when they go off track they said oh you see it's my iphone that did it to me it's uh it's slack it's facebook it's that's that's who did it to me the shamers this is the category i used to fall in they say uh i'm deficient somehow you see i i'm i'm lazy i i i have a short attention span maybe i'm not cut out for this maybe i'm not good enough and we shame ourselves and of course this also leads to this terrible uh shame cycle this this this vicious cycle of causing more discomfort and then of course more need to escape that very discomfort and so the way we we short-circuit that process so that it doesn't continue is through many methods i talk about the book it's about mastering these internal triggers there are things that we can do to stop that chain to stop that cycle to get control over these internal triggers you know you can't control how you feel per se but you can control how you respond to those feelings and instead of these behavior these feelings leading to automatic uh distraction we can actually channel these uncomfortable sensations like stress like anxiety like uncertainty for good we can channel that disquiet too towards traction towards acts that move us forward so in terms of some of those actionable tools for people if there is that deep level of discomfort that we're trying to hide from with you know spending too much time on facebook spending too much time on netflix constantly checking email eating sugar at every opportunity you know it's all actually many of these behaviors are rooted in the same same way and i appreciate you saying that because it's you know the book has i think people are at least i was looking for solutions particularly for this tech problem but you're absolutely right i mean distraction comes in all shapes and forms right it can be the fact that you said you were going to go to the gym and you didn't or you said you were going to eat healthy as i used to say and i didn't and spending time with your family or loved ones and your your mind is somewhere else distraction takes many many forms it's not just about technology for sure and for me what you're writing about and indistractible is a universal issue this yes affects your work it affects your productivity but it also affects your health and probably most importantly of all i think it's affecting our relationships i think distraction in our relationships is it's become very erosive um corrosive i should say it's causing so many problems in relationships that i don't think we're taking seriously enough so on the subject of relationships do you do you feel do you see distraction being an important issue to tackle oh absolutely i mean i think we are uh the the the science is pretty conclusive that we know we need quality relationships in our life uh one of the the self-determination theory is a is a body of research i quite i quote quite a bit in in the book and this is you know 40 50 year old research desi and ryan this is the most widely accepted theory of human motivation and psychological well-being and basically the there's these three tenets of uh that every human being on the face of the earth needs these three psychological nutrients so just like our bodies need carbohydrates fat and protein those are the three macronutrients for our body our mind and our psychological well-being turns out is dependent on receiving sufficient doses of competency autonomy and relatedness and so when we are deficient in these three things a couple interesting things happen one we don't flourish this leads to all kinds of of negative psychological outcomes but we also this is called the needs displacement hypothesis when we don't get enough of these things offline guess what we do we look for them online and of course the tech companies are more than happy to give it to us right so when you don't feel sufficient amounts of connectedness relatedness uh competency autonomy offline you're going to go looking for it uh and i think i'm i'm not anti-social media i think i'm not one of these um luddites that thinks we we we have to stop using these things and that they're melting our brain i don't agree with that i think that we can get the best of these technologies without letting them get the best of us principally by realizing that these things should supplement not uh replace real-life interactions you know we know that this is a 40-year trend uh where where people are suffering from this epidemic of loneliness uh robert putnam wrote about this in the 1990s with his book bowling alone uh this is way before the iphone or facebook this trend of of increasing secularization uh where there are less regular occasions to get together with members of your community and the decline of civic organizations uh that there are fewer people who are joining the bowling league and joining kiwanis club and joining civic organizations and so this has really led to this loneliness epidemic that researchers tell us that loneliness is as detrimental to our health as smoking and obesity and i i think that this is certainly something that we we need to reverse and the good news is i think that we can reverse this and part of how we reverse this is that we begin to prioritize it uh there are basically these four steps to becoming indistractible the first is to master the internal triggers and we touched on a little bit the second step is to make time for traction so you know we talked about traction and distraction so one of the most basic things that we can do and this is backed with a lot of research literally thousands of studies have shown the effectiveness of this technique it's called making an implementation intention which is just a fancy way of saying you plan out what you're going to do and when you're going to do it right so basically making a calendar making a schedule but researchers tell us that about two-thirds of people don't keep a calendar we spend so much time and money protecting our stuff right we put our money in bank accounts and safes we have home security systems we have alarms on our cars uh and yet when it comes to our time sure come on over take as much of it as you want and the fact of the matter is we cannot call something a distraction unless we know what it distracted us from what is the traction so the fact matters we have to start keeping calendars we have to make time for traction by turning our values into time so a big principle in this book is that whatever your values are and it's not up to me to tell you what your values should be that's only for you to decide but i talk about these three life domains of you your relationships and your work that we can use to fill our days so if you know many people start with the ends they start with the big goals in mind and i think that's a that's a problematic technique because it's very difficult to know okay what's my five year plan how about what's your plan for next week right how do you want to spend next week to live out your values to turn your values into time so if personal health and wellness is important to you if that's one of your values do you have time in your calendar for proper sleep to exercise to make healthy meals is that in your calendar if relationships are important to you back to this topic of loneliness is it more than just oh we should grab coffee sometime well you know that you've said that a million times and it doesn't happen right because you haven't put that time on your calendar so one of the techniques i talk about in the book that i think is is uh very appropriate this discussion around around this loneliness epidemic is this group that we call the kibbutz now the kibbutz the word comes from the hebrew it means uh gathering and the idea is that that every two weeks we have these four couples that get together uh and we just get together to talk to be together but the important thing is that it occurs every two weeks same time same place everybody brings their own food right so there's no big mess there's no big planning process but we know we are going to get together every two weeks and if you can't make it no big deal come to the next one but everybody has it on their calendars and this time is critical i mean it is it is really food for the soul we get together and we go around and everybody of the eight adults has their turn and they talk about whatever's on their mind uh so one week somebody came up with a a a parenting question uh the next week somebody was struggling with her with her job and wanted some uh some feedback so we we rotate around the group and people talk about whatever is pressing in their life now children are in invited to listen but they can't interrupt remember i said earlier distraction doesn't just come in the form of the pings and dings from your phone children can be a major source of distraction themselves so the rule is that children can watch they can listen but they can't interrupt unless someone's bleeding that's the rule because of two things one we don't want to kill the vibe right we have this beautiful interaction with our friends where we understand them and they understand us that's so important for us to to have those friendships and most importantly we also want to model what a an adult friendship looks like for our children why is it that only kids have buddies and best friends we want to show them that no friendships are important for the rest of our lives and we want to do that on a regular basis to to show them how important this is which also means sorry i can't talk to you right now because my friends are here and they're very important to me and so unless you're bleeding go away there's a juice box table there's games to play go over there or listen but you but don't interrupt so making time for traction turning our values into time by putting that time on our calendar for the things that are really important to us is is really essential yeah i mean there's so many points i'd like to pick up on um this idea that we allow distractions to basically take us off schedule and the things that really are important to us you know we all know that feeling we just don't have time to do it we don't have time to see our friends we don't have time um you know to spend time with our kids we're to be doing emails or checking our notifications at the weekend whatever it is um i think that whole idea of intention behind what it is we actually want from life what is it we want out of our day is so key but i think in many ways by being constantly distracted and being in reactive mode so from the minute we wake up we're consuming information what other people are sort of putting into our brains we don't have the time to start thinking about what are our intentions i i see this with a lot of my patients that when they really start to get over their chronic health problems and it really starts to make lifestyle changes when some that's an emotional switch that changes they're not just doing it because i said reduce your alcohol or i said reduce your sugar intake because those things are serving a purpose for them they are alleviating something and and that's why i think you're really at the heart of something very very important here but story you mentioned that that you shared it also reminded me of um a jewish family who i uh went around for sunday lunch at about six months ago and they have always they've got teenage kids husband and wife and it was really striking for me that they have um they observe the sabbath religiously you know they're very strict and from a young age was talking to their kids about this and what they do and it was really incredible to me because i didn't grow up with in this environment and their kids love it you know they've never they never go out and they don't go on social media they can't even do sports classes or anything that is family connection time and i i found that incredible and i thought did we actually have some of these systems in place before did society whether it's uh you know a variety of different religions did we have these systems in place as we become more secular actually these things that are so so important have vanished from our daily lives absolutely i i couldn't agree more and i consider myself a secular person i'm i don't believe in the supernatural per se uh but i'm jealous frankly i'm jealous of the benefits of uh of institut of how institutionalized religion brings people together there's a lot of good there that unfortunately people who don't attend these these type of ritualized institutional settings we really miss out on to a large degree that that need that we have to understand others and to be understood only comes from regular interactions and it doesn't mean we all have to you know uh necessarily go to an institution where we don't believe in the in the ideology i think it necessitates us facilitating new ways to have regular interactions with the important people in our lives not only our friendships but i think even our closest relationship so my wife and i we've been married for 18 years and we met in college we actually met in an undergraduate economics class and we i remember we we had this term that we learned in economics uh that is is called the residual the residual beneficiary the residual beneficiary is the person the chump that gets whatever is left over when a company is liquidated so first debt holders get their share then equity holders then procedural beneficiaries they get whatever's the scraps the pennies on the dollar and i remember a few years ago my wife came to me and she said you know you have turned me into the residual beneficiary yeah because work comes first you know your your buddies come first uh your writing comes first all this stuff comes first and i get the scraps of what is whatever's left over and she was absolutely right she she really had me there and so we had to prioritize and you know if this was according to my values and again i'm not preaching what your value should be but if your values are like mine where i believe that you know i i want an equitable marriage i want to be a good partner for my wife well that means that we have to schedule the time for those things as well even some of the household admin stuff i mean this this literally saved my marriage we would constantly fight about the household responsibilities and it turns out that we're not alone that uh studies find that in heterosexual yeah big surprise right that in heterosexual households even when there is dual income uh women still take on a disproportionate share of household admin duties i see a lot of women's heads nodding no men like this uh and so and so i thought okay that can't be my family right we we don't do that but of course i was absolutely wrong because we were having these fights about why i wasn't pulling my weight right my wife couldn't understand you know the trash is full take it out or the laundry's not done do the laundry and i would always say to her you know look instead of being mad at me for not mind reading right how am i supposed to know what you want me to do just tell me what to do right just tell me and i'll do it and of course what i didn't realize is that asking her to be the boss the boss is a job and i was asking her to do work by telling me what to do right i'm not a child and so why do i need to be told what to do and so what i was asking her to do was was not only infantilizing for me it was also placing a burden on her here was the solution the magic solution was planning ahead was sitting down together took us 30 minutes we had had hours of fights over this stuff we sat down together and for 30 minutes we wrote down all the stuff that needs to get done we put those things in a calendar it's not good enough just to write down to do's to do there's a big myth out there that if you just put stuff on a to-do list that stuff will get done okay that's not true and let me just tell you right now it's not true because that's the output right if you went to a baker and you said hey i need 100 loaves of bread can you make me 100 loaves of bread the baker would say sure i'm going to need flour i'm going to need yeast i'm going to need sugar i'm a salt where is all the input to make the output but when we only put stuff on to-do lists that's just the output the input is our time so step one is making the to-do list step two is putting it on your calendar so now we do what's called a weekly schedule sync and with this weekly schedule sync we sit down it takes us 15 minutes every sunday sunday evening we sit down together we look at each other's calendars for the week we use this technique called time boxing where we plan out our days problem is gone we do not have these fights anymore because i know exactly what i need to do and what i need to do it and so she's not waiting for me to do one thing so she can do the next it literally saved my marriage so this is not a tech book it's a relationship book that too yeah well it generally is actually because these problems as you say a lot of your relationship problems actually sorry let me rephrase that you didn't say you had relationship problems um some of these um mild disagreements challenges yeah sort of went away once you'd actively prioritize what needed to get done and i guess that's a wider point isn't it we we let these distractions um suck up our entire day and you're right that our loved ones get the leftovers they get whatever we've got left and in many ways i guess what you're saying is let's look at your week and start by figuring out what are your intentions what do you value get those things locked in first and then fit everything else in around them right right right as opposed to starting with you know the big hairy goal or the big audacious plan the five year plan start with okay do you need time to commute do you need time for personal hygiene taking a shower do you need time for quality sleep this is simple stuff and then with whatever's left over after you've done the domain of time for you time for your relationships time for work i mean look work takes up the greatest chunk of most people's day and so by planning out even in the workplace you know one simple solution people talk about how distracted they are all day because of email and slack channels and this and that you know planning out the time when you will check email as opposed to using it when we're feeling stressed or anxious or uncertain it's as opposed to letting these internal triggers guide us towards distraction we can turn a distraction into traction by making time for it so this is what happened with me with with email email was my emotional coping device when i was stressed about work check email right when i was bored check email for you it might be social media or who knows something else and so what i did i just planned time for it so in my day in my calendar there's a specific time when i'm going to do that when i'm going to check email when i'm going to check social media there's nothing wrong with the technology what's wrong is that we use it without intent we let these products use us as opposed to us using them well that was the topic of your first book wasn't it it's how you create products that you know keep people hooked in many ways um so i guess in some ways it's it's quite striking that you've gone from writing the book on how to create products that keep us hooked to writing the book on how we i guess it's not just about technology but how we actually um you know cope with all these tips and tools and and strategies that these big tech companies are using to keep us hooked to their products it's kind of i mean how did you get from you know in those five years how did you get from one book to the next yeah so i i think what's important to understand is that maybe this is best phrased by paul verillio the philosopher who said that when you invent the ship you invent the shipwreck every new technology has a downside of course there's a downside to a technological revolution of the scale of the internet there will be lots of problems but of course there's a lot of benefits and solutions so my goal with writing hooked and this was five years ago it's hard to remember but five years ago believe it or not people were complaining about how technology only geeks know how to use technology because it's so difficult to use tech right that before the iphone uh and the ipad my mom never touched a computer before the ipad that was her first computing device she was she was not on the internet in any shape or form before the ipad made it usable and so the fact that these products have now you know now we're not complaining about products not being usable we complain about them being too good products that we overuse but the idea you know i really do think that we can we can have our cake and eat it too that we can get the best out of technology without letting it get the best of us and the goal for hooked was not for the benefit of the social media companies or for the gaming companies they've been using these techniques for years that's where i learned these techniques the idea was can we use the same psychology that makes a game habit-forming that makes it engaging that makes it fun to make all sorts of other products more engaging so kahoot is the world's largest educational software if you have school-age kids chances are your kids are on kahoot and the goal of kahoot is to get kids hooked to in-classroom learning uh the goal of fit bod is to get people hooked to exercising in the gym my clients have included the new york times which wants to get people hooked to consuming the news apps like calm or headspace want to get people hooked to the daily meditation practice so the book is not about how to addict people that that's not the title the title is not how to build addictive products the book is about how to build habit-forming products because addictions are always bad right addictions by definition are these persistent compulsive dependencies on a behavior or substance that harms the user so we would never want to do that to a user at least not intentionally sometimes addiction is an unfortunate byproduct but we would never intentionally want to do that however habits are just defined as impulses to do a behavior with little or no conscious thought and of course we have many good habits that help us live better lives so hooked was about how do we build those healthy habits into people's lives but indistractible looks at the other side the products that we sometimes overuse if people listen to this and you know i saw a lot of nodding heads when you mentioned you know when you feel a bit uncertain or a bit stressed you'll turn to your emails other people may turn to social media i think we all know that feeling when you know we've sort of got nothing better to do we're feeling a little bit angsty we pull out our phones and you know we might get that reward we're seeking on instagram but if not we'll flick on to something else and you will keep searching on these endless feeds for something to distract us so if someone is nodding their head to that as many people were um what practical tips can you give them how can they start the process of actually becoming indistractible sure yeah so there's basically so remember we had traction distraction we had external triggers and we had internal triggers prompting us to these it's it's very difficult to do this in sign language and hand motions here but you kind of get the idea it's there's a picture in the book it's a beautiful graphic but the idea here is that we're basically working around these four points of of this model starting with mastering the internal triggers that if we don't master the internal triggers we will always be distracted by something so how do we do that there's three big techniques and the three big techniques are to first reimagine the trigger reimagine the task and reimagine our temperament so reimagining the trigger is about responding to discomfort in a new way is so there's a few techniques that i draw mostly upon from acceptance and commitment therapy uh and one of the so one of the the tools i provide is to start by noting the sensation we use what's called a distraction tracker and what we want to do is to identify the preceding emotion to that distraction what were you feeling before you reached for your phone before you ate that chocolate cake before you procrastinated what was the preceding sensation that prompted you to want to get distracted just writing that down has been shown to be incredibly empowering just the act of writing it down the next step is to explore that sensation with curiosity rather than contempt most people as we talked about earlier the blamers and the shamers right they get contemptuous with that feeling as opposed to just identifying it and then what we want to do is to surf the urge surfing this er surfing the urge is this idea again from acceptance of commitment therapy that recognizes that emotions when we experience an emotion in the moment it feels like it's going to last forever when we're upset we feel like we're always going to be upset when we're happy we feel like we're always going to be happy but of course that's never true that emotions crest and subside like a wave and we can ride that wave like a surfer on a surfboard one technique i use almost every day is called the 10-minute rule the 10-minute rule tells us that we can have anything we want we can give in to that temptation in 10 minutes and this technique has been shown to be much more effective in strict abstinence strict abstinence says nope i can't have it and of course this oftentimes backfires particularly with something that you can't completely abstain from right it's it's one thing to abstain from from hard drugs and you can remove yourself from the environment for example but how do you abstain completely from technology it's very difficult how do you abstain completely from food we need it to survive right so instead of strict abstinence which often times backfires and let me let me tell you an example of how i want everyone listening whatever you do do not think about a white bear don't do it what are you all thinking about of course you're all thinking about a white bear it's impossible not to think about a white bear and so what we find when it comes to these this idea of strict abstinence it's almost like pulling a rubber band that if you pull a rubber band you pull pull pull pull pull and then you release it the rubber band doesn't go to where you started to pull it no it bounces further and so this is what happens when we try and do use strict abstinence when we pull we say no don't do it don't do it don't do it don't do it okay fine do it releasing that tension is registered in the brain as pleasurable because remember what we said earlier that if all behavior is prompted by a desire to escape discomfort if smoking that cigarette if giving in to that chocolate cake if checking uh my news feed is something that i've been telling myself don't do don't do it don't do don't do now it feels good just to relieve the tension of not telling myself to not do it anymore and so instead of that strict abstinence approach we can use this 10-minute rule where we tell ourselves that when we feel that the temptation to give into distraction we can give into it in 10 minutes of surfing the urge and we have a choice to make we can either get back to the task at hand or spend those 10 minutes getting curious about that sensation so sometimes i'll pick up my phone i'll say set a timer for 10 minutes i'll put my phone down and i'll just be with that sensation and the goal is to reimagine that sensation in a way that serves us as opposed to hurts us so what we find is that self-compassion is a very effective technique that when many people berate themselves as i used to do i would tell myself how i'm you know this blaming mantra of oh i'm not good enough and i maybe i'm not cut out for this and oh nobody's gonna like this and you know that shaming cycle or that that we that we go through instead we try and talk to ourselves the way we would talk to a good friend right we would ask ourselves well maybe i'm feeling discomfort maybe i'm feeling bored anxious stress whatever it be and whatever it might be because this is the process of getting better right getting better at something is effortful it's part of the process stress is not you know when i came on stage here i was getting kind of nervous there was a little bit of strange stage fright and i used to say to myself oh this is terrible i'm going to do really poorly and everybody's going to know that you know maybe i'll mess up and i'll screw it up but instead now i refrain that internal trigger to tell myself wait a minute this stress is my body getting ready to perform my heart is pumping not because i'm nervous and i'm going to screw up but because my brain needs more oxygen in order to know these words i'm telling you right now and so that process of reframing those internal triggers goes a long way to help us reimagine them so that we can gain great greater control greater control over the response yeah and reframing our stress you you also mentioned the story of bruce springsteen day in the book and how he reframes the stress in terms of he before he goes on stage when he's feeling palpitations when he's feeling pins and needles he reframes to go right you know i'm ready to give a legendary performance now my body is priming me for that so it's i love that whole idea about reframing our stress i think it's very very powerful um now i want to talk about relationships but particularly with our children um there's a story you share um in indistractible that really reminded me of the story that i've spoken about before and that story is when my daughter was four years old and i was alone with her it was a sunday and you know i thought you know i'm quite conscious of my tech use in front of the kids so i put my phone in a different room in the dining room when i was actually in the living room playing with her i can't remember what was going on something was going on in the world or on social media something so i kept disappearing every few minutes you know just have a quick look um i'm sure no one in here has ever done anything like that before um but it was quite interesting cause i kept doing that and i thought hey it's not in front of us so i'm i'm being present and she she said to me at one point said daddy you're not really here are you and you share a very similar story don't you yeah yeah so in my occurrence and this was really the seminal moment when i when i realized i had to do something about this we had this beautiful afternoon planned with my daughter and we had this daddy and me book full of different activities that daddies and daughters could do to to feel close to one another and you know one of them was make a paper airplane and you know different activities and one of the activities was to ask each other this question if you could have any superpower what superpower would you want and i remember the question verbatim but i can't tell you what my daughter said because when she was answering i told her hold on one second honey i got this one thing i just really need to do real quick and she recognized that whatever was on my phone was more important than she was and she left the room and she started to play with some toy outside instead and i'll add another story to this i told my friend this story and we have children of a similar age and so he asked his daughter this question and she said that the superpower she would want would be the power to talk to animals and he said oh the power to talk to animals why is that and she said so that when you and mommy are on your phones i'll have someone to talk to i know and so you know we have to set the example you know kids are hypocrisy detection devices they are hardwired scanning for hypocrisy wherever they find it and so we can't tell our kids get off fortnight stop being on facebook stop you know do this and do that while we're checking email on our phones and if there is one skill we have to teach our kids it's the power to be indistractible not by stopping the use of technology that's ridiculous we know the jobs of the future require our kids to be tech literate we can't tell them to be scared of technology we can't tell them it's going to hijack their brains it's going to melt their their synapses that's ridiculous we don't want them to be technophobes we want them to be comfortable with technology so we have to teach them how to be indistractible and that starts there's a lot there's a whole section in the book around how we raise indistractible kids but the first step is really to become indistractible ourselves as adults yeah i mean that's the common theme in parenting wherever you look i spoke to philippa perry recently he's written a book about parenting and it it comes down to the same thing you want to sort your kids out sort yourself out first uh it's the kind of uncomfortable truth for many of us parents or we can do it together i think a lot of parents they feel like sharing vulnerability about their struggle somehow makes them weak in their kids eyes and i don't think so i think when it comes to this problem of of distraction i think it's a good idea to tell our kids look you know these products are designed to be engaging right they are built to hack our attention i'm telling you this as an industry insider that of course they are we and we want them to be we want these products to be engaging that's why we use them right we don't want to tell netflix netflix stop making your show so interesting i want to watch them uh apple please make your device less less user-friendly we want these things to be engaging that's what that's what they're meant to do but we can hack back and our kids need to know that this isn't something that that we should give up on or or excise from our life we should learn tactics to use these products in in the right way and we should tell them that we ourselves are struggling and how can we work together to make sure that we can put them in their place it seems that one of the most important skills that we can possibly teach the younger generation and teach our children is how to be indistractible but that's not really what schools are teaching our kids today is it yeah i think so there's there's a really interesting um body of research i mentioned earlier self-determination theory um that really opened my eyes to i think what's really going on with our kids these days and so i think what we have to do is to ask ourselves why do kids overuse technology then the root cause is that children are deficient in those three psychological nutrients let me walk through them real quick competency this idea of competency that all of us need the sense that we are getting better at something you know that how good it feels when you're good at something right whether it's giving a talk or parallel parking whatever it might be that skill that you have that you're good at something that feels good and it turns out for psychological flourishing according to desi and ryan this 50 year old research that is the most widely accepted theory of human motivation and flourishing that we all need that feeling but one thing that has occurred synchronously with the rise of of cell phones the the the increasing use of cell phones is the the rise of teachers teaching towards tests i'm not as familiar with what's going on in the uk i suspect it's similar but in the u.s we have this very high emphasis on standardized testing that started rolling out around 2006 2007 and we teach our kids towards the test teachers get paid based on the kids test results many kids starting in kindergarten are subjected to standardized tests multiple times per year and so they are told repeatedly you're not competent not all kids right not all kids struggle with too much technology use but a subset of children is constantly told you're not competent and so back to that needs displacement hypothesis if we don't get our needs met offline where do we go well the tech companies are very happy to give our kids products that make them feel competent minecraft makes you feel amazing right you can master it you can build your own universe it feels great now let's look at autonomy autonomy is this feeling that we have agency and control over our environment it's freedom we all crave it we need the feeling of freedom we hate being told what to do but this is the most regulated generation in history a study by peter gray found that children today have 10 times as many restrictions placed on them as the average adult twice as many as an incarcerated felon there are two places in society where you are allowed to tell people where to go what to think what to wear who to be friends with what to eat and that's prison and school that's it and so is it any surprise when the school system puts kids through this regimented system and treats them like chattel and tells them what to do all day long long is it any surprise when they come home they want freedom they want to do what they want to do which by the way kids have been doing for a very long time now let's talk about the third point here about relatedness again relatedness is this idea that you know every human being on the face of the earth we want to be understood by others and have under others understand us we need this this is part of our of what helps us flourish psychologically but kids today are deficient in this psychological nutrient of relatedness because they have no time for what's called free play since statistics were collected kids today have less time for free play than ever before free play is when kids can interact with each other without the supervision of coaches and parents and teachers telling them what to do it's kids being kids and unfortunately today kids have less time for free play than ever the economically advantaged schedule the hell out of their kids they send them to tutoring and swimming and ballet and mandarin and they have no time to just play anymore those that are don't have the means many of them are so terrified by the media telling us that kids will get abducted in stranger danger even though that's ridiculous this is the safest time in history to be a child that many of these parents are so scared they keep their kids indoors under lock and key and what the heck are kids supposed to do right they're looking for something a way to interact with their friends so where do they go if you don't get relatedness offline well you use twitter you use instagram you use tiktok you use snapchat because they're desperate to have that sense of relatedness met they need that interaction with their friends just like we used to do in our generation talking on the phone until the wee hours of the night we were interacting with our friends we just wanted to relate to people and they're desperate for it so one of the best things that you can do to raise an indistractable child is to plan time for free play it's one of the most psychologically nourishing things you can do for them and i think this is part of why we see such a fragile generation of of kids growing up these days that they haven't had that experience of a free play i mean free play is where we learn our place in the world it's one thing if a teacher or a parent tells you what to do it's a whole nother story if one of your friends says hey if you act like a jerk to me i'm not going to be friends with you we're not going to play right that's where you learn your place in the world and kids need more of it so we have to schedule it just like we talk about making time for our own traction one of the things we can do is make time for traction for our kids you know it involves in finding another parent who understands how important it is to give kids this psychological nourishment of free play and we schedule time for play unfortunately that's what's become i mean it used to be a kid you know my generation we just walked outside and we could find our friends because they'd all be playing you don't see that anymore you know the neighborhoods don't sing with the sound of kids playing anymore they don't do it and so unfortunately but this is this is our salvation we have to make time for that as well yeah i mean as you're sort of talking through that i'm reflecting on many of my own uh patterns as a parent and literally just this week my wife and i decided to cut back on how many after-school activities our kids do because we thought this is getting a bit ridiculous now and the tricky thing is you look around you and you see what everyone else is doing and you know there is this feeling sometimes that you're missing out unless you do that but we just thought come on we've just got to stand on our own and go look this is getting ridiculous now we don't feel that this is helpful and and i think your your idea of actually scheduling free play and unstructured free play is probably one of the most influential things that we can do right i think this skill set and teaching this skill set of becoming indistractible this is the skill the century i mean if you think if the world is distracting today just wait a few years the world of our that our children will inhabit when they're adults is going to be only more distracting this trend is not reversing folks right yeah and so if we can raise a generation of children who are indistractible that is the skill of the century something that is distracting me at the moment a little bit is that i was told that this would be a clock on stage and i haven't seen one yet and i'm looking around for it to see what time it is it is how much are we 10 to eight ten to eight okay so we have about ten minutes or so okay so um let's sort of try and wrap up this a little bit one of the things that i find intensely irritating is when you're out with a group of friends um and people are looking at their phones okay in terms of you're trying to connect and we all i'm sure i have also done it to somebody else i'm not sort of uh casting blame here in any way but it's it is in many ways it's something that i think we've all got used to and i think it's incredibly problematic in the same way that i mentioned relations before if we're distracted whilst we're having the interactions with our partners i think that's that's incredibly problematic and you do cover this in your book and you mentioned a phrase that i've not heard before about a social contagion i wonder if you could just expand on what it is yeah so um uh we've been here before the good news is we've been here before and we've made it through okay we're still making it through and the the story i provide is this idea of around smoking uh that in the united states it used to be that 60 of the adult population smoked today it's around 14 percent uh and one of the phenomenal things is that even without legislation things have really changed in particular circumstances let me explain further so when i was a kid i grew up in the 1980s those are some of my first memories were from the 1980s and i remember in my household my parents didn't smoke my dad had given it up years ago my mom never smoked and yet we had ashtrays all over our house why did we have ashtrays in our house we had ashtrays because when someone came to your house in the 1980s they just expected to light a cigarette in your living room can you imagine if someone came to your house and just lit up if i you know i just assumed i could light a cigarette right now that would be ridiculous right how awkward would that be why why did that change he said okay well legislation changed smoking laws yes but no law ever mandated that you can't smoke in someone's living room there's no law like that why did people change well we adopted what's called social antibodies social antibodies is when a society changes their behavior because they see some kind of unhealthy behavior they want to weed out of the population so what we did we made it socially untenable to smoke in someone's living room we made that rude we made that something that is now something you would never dream of doing and so i think we see something similar happening when it comes to our tech use and i think it's happening with or without my book but i hope to accelerate this process we you know even today i have to say it is what a wonderful crowd i mean when i started teaching this this subject matter not with this book but with my first book pretty much half the room when i would give a public talk would be on their phones maybe i used to be a very boring speaker i don't know but but today look nobody is on their devices maybe one or two people i don't know i very very few now there's anything wrong with it by the way if you want to tweet you don't feel bad if you want to feel bad no skills here but we've learned you know i see this also with my students i used to teach for many years at the stanford design school in the business school and my students when i first started teaching they'd be on their phone in the middle of class and then they started seeing the negative repercussions that you know you can't be fully present and listen to the professor uh while you're on your device and so today almost none of my students do this uh and so people are getting the message there's this new word called fubbing maybe you've heard it phubbing was a recently invented word that's the combination of phone snubbing if it's practice when you're sitting with someone across the table and you're trying to have a discussion they think it's a good time to take out their vi their device that's called fubbing and so what do we do with fubbing how do we inoculate our population how do we inoculate our friends and spread these social antibodies here's how we do it we ask one sincere question the question is i see you're on your phone is everything okay now what do i do what have i done when i asked that question i'm not assuming that i know what's going on if you say get off your phone i want to talk to you right don't be rude that's not going to work you're going to lose a friend one you don't know what's actually happening on the other end of the line there might be really some kind of emergency but by sincerely asking that question of hey is everything okay you give them an out to say oh you know what i'm so sorry there's just this emergency i really have to take care of right now in which case they'll excuse themselves and take care of that problem or nine times out of ten they'll get the hint and say oh i'm so sorry and they'll put it away right so we are learning this social antibody we're spreading the social antibody and i'm pretty optimistic i see this happening already hopefully that process will accelerate by by this discussion yeah i love that i love the term fubbing that's uh that's incredible have you actually used that strategy with any of your friends all the time really all the time all the time and and frankly you know look i told you at the very beginning when we started about when i defined the term indistractable becoming indistractible does not mean we never get distracted that's impossible becoming indistractible means we are the type of people who strive to do what we say we're going to do and the idea is that we learn from when we got to get distracted and there's this saying that insanity is doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results so many of us myself included i mean i wrote this book for me more than anyone i would constantly get distracted day in and day out by the same thing well that doesn't happen anymore now when i get distracted i know why there are only three reasons an external trigger an internal trigger or a planning problem and i can do something about it in the future so i'll be totally honest with you sometimes i get called out my daughter in particular right so if i if i'm taking my daughter to uh to a class or something and i'll i'll be you know just taking her and going from one place another and i'll check something because my wife is texting me and then i'll get caught in by one of these external triggers sometimes and she'll say hey daddy is everything okay right good point let me put that away right so and i want that i think that's a healthy that's a healthy thing for us all to help each other spread the social antibody yeah for sure look i've got to say another thank you again for actually writing the book which i think is brilliant but also really i love the fact that you've given a name now to this problem so it's not this thing that we all sort of know we're suffering from this there's a name you know and we can think about how can we become indistractible and often it's by naming a problem but actually we start to think about solutions so thank you for that as you know this conversation is going to go out on my own podcast feel better live more i always end it a particular way and i wonder if we could try that here so it's called feel better live more because i genuinely have seen time and time again in my practice seeing patients that when people feel better in themselves they get more out of lives and i guess the more indistractible we can become the more we're going to get out of our lives i wonder if you could leave the listeners but also the the live audience here today with some of your most practical tips that they can think about applying into their own life immediately once they've left yeah so uh we only got through two of the four strategies so maybe what i'll do is just kind of do a quick wrap-up on these four strategies and and i think what's more important than the tactics is the strategy tactics are what you do strategy is why you do it and so it's very important to first understand the strategy so frankly you can come up with your own techniques right i give lots and lots of tactics that you can that you can use but it's more important that you develop these for yourself and customize them to your life right because we all have different values we all have different lives we're all on this journey together and so these four steps is first to master these internal triggers we talked about a little bit about how we can reimagine the triggers we can also reimagine the task and our temperament we don't have time to go into that now but there's a lot more there then it's about making time for traction it's about turning our values into time on our calendars and synchronizing our calendars with our loved ones with our stakeholders with our bosses so that we can make sure that we're we're uh we're synchronized around how we spend our time what we didn't get to is is around hacking back the external triggers there's this is a category that's very tactical this is all about taking those uh those external triggers in our environment the pings and dings or whatever else it could be our children as we talked about earlier in the kibbutz it could be superfluous meetings it could be you know emails slack channels whatever it might be and making sure that we ask ourselves this critical question of is this trigger serving me or am i serving it if the external trigger is leading us towards traction it's great let's keep it right if an external trigger on your phone is reminding you hey it's time to work out it's time for that meeting it's time to do whatever it is you plan to do in advance keep it it's wonderful but if you're serving it if it's leading you towards distraction as that external trigger led me to check my phone when i wanted to be my daughter now it's leading me towards distraction it's not serving me it needs to be removed so it turns out two-thirds of people with a smartphone two-thirds of people with a smartphone never change their notification settings this is simple stuff right we can we can all do this that's kindergarten stuff what's much more important uh is the is the external triggers we don't always identify so for example in my research i found that one of the most common sources of distraction in the workplace is other people right especially if you work in an open floor plan office we're kind of leaving ourselves open to someone tapping us on the shoulder and say hey do you hear that little bit of gossip or can you believe what just happened or you know whatever it might be can i just talk to you for a quick sec it's never a quick sec so what we can do is essentially there's there's a a a screen sign in the back of the book you pull it out you fold it into thirds it's this red uh stop sign looking thing that you put on your computer monitor and it tells your colleagues i'm indestructible please come back later right and so you're sending this explicit message to your colleagues you know for the next hour or whatever 45 minutes i need some time to focus i need some time to think and so you're starting to set this culture of it's okay to disconnect for a little bit even if disconnecting means not being reachable all the time in the physical world right in an open floor plan office and then finally the last technique is about preventing distraction with pacts and packs are these pre-commitments that we can use in this category there are three things that we can do we can make a price packed an effort packed and an identity pact these are promises we make to ourselves to other people that help us stay on track that prevent us from getting distracted uh so an effort packed is something that we can do that puts a bit of work between us and something we don't want to do so in my household we talked talked about relationships earlier uh you know my wife and i found that we were going to bed later and later every night this was impacting our relationship it was impacting our sex life because she would fondle her iphone and i would crest my ipad as opposed to being with each other and so here's what we did we went to the hardware store and we bought ourselves this 10 outlet timer and this outlet timer turns anything you plug into it on and off at a certain type of day or night and what do we plug into it our internet router so every night at 10 pm our internet shuts off now could i turn it back on of course i could i could fiddle with it go under my desk unplug it replug it but that takes effort that takes work and that bit of effort makes me insert a bit of mindfulness to ask myself wait do i really need to go online right now or can i wait till later and of course 99 of the time there's nothing all that urgent right in fact now we've trained ourselves we all know okay 10 o'clock the internet shuts off do everything you need to do so we can get to bed uh and then lastly there's there's an uh price pack which is about making some kind of financial commitment but one thing i want to leave you with is this an idea of an identity pact and this was one of the the more interesting bits of research i came across this was research around the psychology of religion and it turns out that when we have some kind of identity some kind of moniker that we can embrace and call ourselves and tell other people about we become much more likely to stick with our goals and a good example of this if you consider someone who's who's devout uh they're not debating with themselves about their behavior every day the way we might if you don't have these type of of beliefs this type of moniker so consider a devout muslim a devout muslim would not say to themselves hmm i wonder if i should have that gin and tonic no a devout muslim doesn't drink alcohol period a vegetarian doesn't say to themselves oh i wonder if i should have that bacon today no they're vegetarian they don't eat meat it's who they are i am a vegetarian i'm not but that's what they would say and so that's why this book is called indistractible indestructible should be the new moniker it should be what we call ourselves because we know that when you have an identity when you have some type of of of of now that you can call yourself you become much more likely to stick with your goals so when people ask you hey how come you're not returning your emails every 30 seconds how come you put this weird screen sign on your screen why do you do these strange things that's who i am and is it any more different than someone who wears unusual religious garb or who has a a a a diet that might not be what everyone else eats no we don't question those things so we need this new moniker and i'm hoping to start this movement i mean with or without the book i want people to proclaim that they are indistractible that we are the kind of people who don't want our lives and our attention and our time control by others we are the kind of people who do what we say we're going to do we control our time and attention by becoming indistractible yeah brilliant just brilliant and nia i'm going to tell you now in front of a live audience i am indistractible okay that's my new identity okay i'll tell my wife want to get home tomorrow um see how that goes down um look thank you for sharing your wisdom this evening thank you for writing such a brilliant book ladies and gentlemen please put your hands together for mr near ayow thanks very much thank you [Applause] press subscribe to get more inspiration and ideas on how to feel better so you can get more out of life and if you have a moment why not check out this conversation that i've picked out as a perfect follow-up remember lifestyle change is always worth it because when you feel better you've lived more

Channel: Dr Rangan Chatterjee

Views: 26,287

Keywords: The Four Pillar Plan, NHS, GP, lifestyle medicine, the stress solution, feel better in 5, feel better live more, fblm, health, paleo, wellness, drchatterjee, rangan chatterjee, how to make disease disappear, vegan, podcast, apple podcast, obesity, joe rogan, jay shetty, health advice, richroll, therichrollpodcast, distraction, indistractable, notifications, social media, technology, personal goals, discomfort, focus, stanford, behavioural science, habits, attention, pain management, time management

Id: SqYojUQAlaU

Length: 67min 10sec (4030 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 07 2020