Indistractable — how to control your attention and choose your life
Attached are the best excerpts (and summarized texts from yours truly) from the book “Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life” by Nir Eyal
“When you invent the ship, you also invent the shipwreck.” — Paul Virilio
The first step is to recognize that distractions start from within.
The time you plan to waste is not wasted time.
“Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure.” — Jeremy Bentham
Every desirable experience — passionate love, a spiritual high, the pleasure of a new possession, the exhilaration of success — is transitory.
There are evolutionary benefits to hedonic adaptation.
Dissatisfaction is responsible for our species’ advancements as much as it’s faults.
If we want to master distraction, we must first learn to deal with discomfort.
The Fogg Behavior Model states that for a behavior (B) to occur, three things must be present at the same time: motivation (M), ability (A), and a trigger (T). More succinctly, B = MAT.
Social networks are designed to manipulate our behavior via a social-validation feedback loop. It’s exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology.
In Homer’s Odyssey, Ulysses resists the Sirens’ song by making a recommitment and successfully avoiding the distraction. A “Ulysses pact” is defined as “a freely made decision that is designed and intended to bind oneself in the future,” and is a type of precommitment we still use today. For example, we precommit to advanced healthcare directives to let our doctors and family members know our intentions should we lose our ability to make sound judgments. We precommit to our financial security by depositing money in retirement accounts with steep penalties for early withdrawal to ensure we don’t spend funds we’ll need later in life. We covet the fidelity that is promised in a lifelong relationship bound by the contract of marriage.
Precommitment involves removing a future choice in order to overcome our impulsivity.
People are typically more motivated to avoid losses than to seek gains. Losing hurts more than winning feels good. This irrational tendency, known as “loss aversion,” is a cornerstone of behavioral economics.
Innovations and new technologies are another frequent target of blame. In 1474 Venetian monk and scribe Filippo di Strata issued a polemic against another handheld information device, stating, “the printing press [is] a whore.” An 1883 medical journal attributed rising rates of suicide and homicide to the new “educational craze,” proclaiming “insanity is increasing… with education” and that education would “exhaust the children’s brains and nervous systems.” In 1936, kids were said to “have developed the habit of dividing attention between the humdrum preparation of their school assignments and the compelling excitement of the [radio] loudspeaker,” according to Gramophone, the music magazine. It seems hard to believe that these benign developments scared anyone, but technological leaps are often followed by moral panics. “Each successive historical age has ardently believed that an unprecedented ‘crisis’ in youth behavior is taking place,” Oxford historian Abigail Wills writes in an article for BBC’s online history magazine. “We are not unique; our fears do not differ significantly from those of our predecessors.”
Richard Ryan and his colleague Edward Deci are two of the most cited researchers in the world on the drivers of human behavior. Their “self-determination theory” is widely regarded as the backbone of psychological well-being, and countless studies have supported their conclusions since they began research in the 1970s. Just as the human body requires three macronutrients (protein, carbohydrates, and fat) to run properly, 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.
Unfortunately, distraction is contagious. When smokers get together, the first one to take out a pack sends a cue, and when others notice, they do the same. In a similar way, digital devices can prompt others’ behaviors. When one person takes out a phone at dinner, it acts as an external trigger. Soon, others are lost in their screens, at the expense of the conversation. Psychologists call this phenomenon “social contagion,” and researchers have found that it influences our behaviors, from drug use to overeating. It’s hard to watch your weight if your spouse and kids insist on mowing down a dozen frosted donuts as you pick at your kale salad.
The only way to make sure certain unhealthy behaviors are no longer acceptable is to call them out and address them with social antibodies that block their spread. This tactic worked with smoking and it can work with digital distractions. Let’s imagine you’re at a dinner party when someone takes out his phone and starts to tap away. While you likely already know that spending time on a device in an intimate social setting is rude, there’s often at least one person who hasn’t learned the new social norm. Embarrassing him in front of others isn’t a good idea, assuming you want to stay friends; a subtler tactic is required. 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?” Remember to be sincere — after all, there might really be an emergency. But more often than not, he’ll mutter a little excuse, tuck his phone back into his pocket, and start enjoying the night again. Victory is yours! You’ve succeeded in tactfully spreading the social antibody against “phubbing” a word coined by the ad agency McCann for the Macquarie Dictionary. 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 dictionary assembled experts to create the word in order to give people a way to call out the problem. Now it's up to us to start using the term so that it may become another positive social antibody in our arsenal against distractions in social settings.
Without sufficient amounts of autonomy, competence, and relatedness, kids turn to distractions for psychological nourishment.
Varicela Correa- Cháver and Barbara Rogoff, professors at the University of California, Santa Cruz, conducted an experiment in which two children were brought into a room where an adult taught one of them how to build a toy while the other one waited. The study was designed to observe what the nonparticipating child, the observer, would do while they waited in America, most of the observer children did what you’d expect them to do: they shuffled in their seats, stared at the floor, and generally showed signs of disinterest. One impatient boy even pretended a toy was a bomb and threw his hands in the air to mimic an explosion, making loud disruptive noises to match the carnage. In contrast, the researchers found that Mayan children from Guatemala concentrated on what the other child was learning and sat still in their chairs as the adult taught the other child. Overall, the study found that American children could focus for only half as long as Mayan kids. Even more interesting was the finding that the Mayan children with less exposure to formal education “showed more sustained attention and learning than their counterparts from Mayan families with extensive involvement in Western schooling.” In other words, less schooling meant more focus. How could that be? Psychologist Suzanne Gaskins has studied Mayan villages for decades and told NPR that Mayan parents give their kids a tremendous amount of freedom. “Rather than having the mom set the goal — and then having to offer enticements and rewards to reach that goal- the child is setting the goal. Then the parents support that goal however they can,” Gaskins said. Mayan parents “feel very strongly that every child knows best what they want and that goals can be achieved only when a child wants it.”
Most formal schooling in America and similar industrialized countries, on the other hand, is the antithesis of a place where kids have autonomy to make their own choices. According to Rogolf, “It may be 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. Ryan’s research reveals exactly where we lose kids’ attention. “Whenever children enter middle school, whenever they start leaving home-based classrooms and go into the more police-state style of schools, where bells are ringing, detentions are happening, punishment is occurring, they’re learning right then that this is not an intrinsically motivating environment,” he says. Robert Epstein, the researcher who wrote “The Myth of the Teen Brain” in Scientific American, has a similar conclusion: “Surveys I have conducted show that teens in the U.S. are subjected to more than ten times as many restrictions as are mainstream adults, twice as many restrictions as active-duty U.S. Marines, and even twice as many restrictions as incarcerated felons.”
While such a restrictive environment isn’t every American student’s experience, it’s clear why so many struggle to stay motivated in the classroom: their need for autonomy to explore their interests is unfulfilled. “We’re doing a lot of controlling them in their school environments and it’s no surprise that they should then want to turn to an environment where they can feel a lot of agency and a lot of autonomy in what they’re doing,’ Ryan says. “We think of [tech use] as kind of an evil in the world, but it’s an evil we have created a gravitational pull around by the alternatives we’ve set up.” Unlike their offline lives, kids have a tremendous amount of freedom online; they have the autonomy to call the shots and experiment with creative strategies to solve problems. “In internet spaces, there tends to be myriad choices and opportunities, and a lot less adult control and surveillance, says Ryan. “One can thus feel freedom, competence, and connection online, especially when the teenager’s contrasting environments are overly controlling, restrictive, or understimulating.”
Research studies overwhelmingly support the importance unstructured playtime on kids’ ability to focus and to develop capacity for social interactions. Given that, unstructured play is arguably their most important extracurricular activity. In addition to helping kids make time for unstructured play, we also need to carve out time for them to spend time with us, their parents. For example, scheduling family meals is perhaps the single most important thing parents and kids can do together. Studies demonstrate that children who eat regularly with their families show lower rates of drug use, depression, school problems, and eating disorders. Unfortunately, many families miss meals together because they “play it by ear,” a strategy that often leaves everyone eating alone on their own schedules. Hence, it’s better to set aside an evening, even if only once a week, for a device-free family meal.
