Nir Eyal || How to Be Indistractable

Nearest formally a lecturer in marketing at Stanford's Graduate School of Business and also tallow the Hasso Platner Institute of Design. His first book, Hooked, How to Build habit forming Products, was an international bestseller. His current book is called Indestractable, How to Control your attention and Choose your Life. This book reveals the Achilles heel of distraction and provides a guidebook for getting the best of technology without letting it

get the best of us. Thanks so much for chatting with me today, Nearer. Oh, my pleasure. Thanks for having me. Yeah's my pleasure as well. So why did you write this book? So I wrote Indistractable for a few reasons. One, I was patient zero. Here I found that I was becoming distracted and I needed to do something about it.

This kind of seminal moment for me in my life was when I was sitting with my daughter one afternoon and we had planned to just spend some quality time together, and we had this book of activities that daddies and daughters could do together, 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 was looking at my phone and I wasn't paying attention to her. She got the message. She realized that whatever was on my phone was more important than she was, and she left the room to go play with some toy outside. By the time I looked up from my device, she was gone, and I realized that something had to be done.

And if I'm honest with you, Scott, that wasn't the only time it happened. And I found that it not only happened in my personal life, it also happened in my professional life. I would sit down to write, I would sit down to do some big project, and I would procrastinate. I wasn't taking care of my body. I wasn't going to the gym, I wasn't eating right. And so I thought to myself, you know, man, if there was one superpower I would really want, it would be the power to just do what I say. Right, we

all know what we need to do. There's no more information gap anymore. We all know how to have a healthier body, we all know how to be more productive at work, we all know basically how to have better relationships with There's no secrets here. It's about doing it, and most importantly, how do we make sure we don't do the things we don't want to do? How do we make sure we don't get distracted? So that's when I decided, you know, if I could have any superpower,

I would want the superpower to become indistractable. So that was kind of the genesis of why I wanted to explore this domain. I didn't know I write a book at first. At first, I just wanted answers to my own problem, thinking somebody had already done the research and written a book about this topic. But the more I read the kind of who's who of books out there on what to do about this problem, specifically around tech distractions. And I tried those solutions. I found they didn't work

for me. That you know, this idea of a digital detos or a thirty day plan, or you know, get rid of the technology the technology is the problem just wasn't true, at least not in my case. I would say to myself, Okay, I'm going to do that big project right now. I'd sit down at my desk and I got rid of the technology. By the way, I got myself a flip phone off of Ali Baba for twelve dollars with no internet, no apps, only text messages and phone calls. I got myself a word processor from

the nineteen nineties that they don't even make anymore. Thinking, okay, now I've excized all the potential distractions. And when I would sit down at my desk, I would look behind me and there was this book, you know, a couple of books that I say, oh, let me just do some research in one of those books, or let me just tidy up my desk, or let me take out my trash, or you know, I would just keep getting distracted because what I realized is that distraction goes much

deeper than what we call the proximal cause. I wanted to get to the root cause of distraction, and so that that was really a big reason why I wanted to explore this solution to the extent that I really wanted to write a book about it because I didn't see any book that that really worked for me. And really, you know, took the existing literature out there on distraction and distilled it down to something that people could actually use in their day to day lives. Yeah, you've done

a really great service along those lines. And I let's really get to the root of this, you know, you you talk about like what really motivates us? Can you tell me I'd like to know? Sure? Sure, So let me let me back up. So, the indistractable has has a few different first principles that we should address. First. For principally, you know, what is this word distraction? Exactly what does that mean? It's not an addiction, that's very very different. We want to define exactly what we mean

by a distraction. So the best way to understand what a distraction is is to understand what it is is not. So the opposite of distraction is not focus. The opposite of distraction is traction. That in fact, both words come from the same Latin root trahare, which means to pull, and you'll notice both words and in the same six letters actio in that spells action. So traction is any action that pulls you towards what you want to do,

things that you are doing with intent. The opposite of traction is distraction, anything that pulls you away from what you plan to do with intent. So my argument is that the time you plan to waste is not wasted time. This isn't a bible for productivity. I don't care what you do with your time as long as you plan what you want to do with intent, as long as

it's according to your values. If you want to watch Netflix videos, or you want to scroll Facebook or Instagram, whatever you want to do, do it as long as you plan to do it with intent. I think that's where I differ from a lot of critics out there who have wrote very moral, panic type books around technology. They put different technologies, particularly the new scary ones that all the kids are using, as inferior, and I think

that's ridiculous. If you want to play Fortnite or candy Crush or scroll Facebook or Instagram, whatever you want to do, as long as you plan to do with that with intent, there's nothing morally inferior to doing that versus you know, watching football for three hours. What's the difference. You know, the average American watches five hours of television at night. I would much rather have people interacting with each other online.

There's a lot of good things you can do online if you do them with intent versus just you know, staring at the boob tube. So that's that's point number one, that what you do with intent is traction. Anything that you don't do with intent that takes you off track is a distraction. Now back to your question, Well, let's just stop there, let's do this piecemeal. Yeah, So can I have things that I I don't want to do, but it's it's in my values and I do it

with intent. Like you know, you gave me an example of like, like, well, if you do than ten and you want to do it, it's within your valve. But like you know, like I get like five million emails a day. I don't want I would prefer to delete every single email, but and not have to do and not have to waste seven hours of my day but respond to emails. But I actually it's an it's a part of my value system to to show people, uh to like compassion and to try to help as many

people as I can. So I do try to carve out that time and respond as many as I can, and I don't want to do it. So the one part of it is what I want to understand. Yeah, so there's no easy answer that there's no magic formula that I could say that I can help you do hard things in life easily. That's that's typically snake oil when someone tells you like this is what I what drives me nuts about a lot of the literature out

there on habits. When people say they want a habit, what they're really saying is they want to do something hard without expending an efforts. You want to have it exactly. I want gifting weights. I want the habit of writing a novel. I want the habit of, you know, exercising every day, whatever it might be. But you know what people don't understand is the definition of a habit prevents those things from becoming habits. The definition of a habit is the impulse to do a behavior with little or

no conscious thought. I don't know about you. Writing is hard. That is not something I do with little or no conscious thought. Right, So that's not a habit. That's a routine. Right. A routine is just a series of behaviors done in progression. So that's there's no promise here that this stuff is going to be magically easy. Right. If you want to get better at something, you're gonna have to work at it.

And sometimes that means prioritizing some values above others. And frankly, I don't dive into I don't want to be one of these people who says that you know, I know what your value should be. I think that's ludicrous. I think that's a for for people listening to decide for themselves. What I want to help people do is to do the things that they themselves say they want to do. I want to help them get those things done. Sounds great, Okay,

thanks for thanks for clarifying that a little bit. So well, yeah, let's now talk about what really motivates me? Sure, I want to know. Yeah, So if you think about, okay, what leads you towards traction or distraction? Two things? Two types of triggers. There are external triggers, things in our environment, the pings, the dings, the rings, anything in our environment that composes an external trigger that can prompt you towards

traction or distraction. And they're not all bad. Right. If an external trigger prompts you to get up in the morning and go to the gym and that's what you plan to do, well, now it's leading you towards traction, it's serving you. But if an external trigger is a notification on your phone while you're with your daughter, as I was, and that's not what I planned to do. I didn't plan to check my phone. I plan to be fully present with someone I love. That would have

that led me towards distraction. So I was serving it. And so that's the critical question to add to managing these external triggers is asking ourselves is this external trigger serving me? Or am I serving it? And so there's a lot we can do there. But now we're finally able to answer your question of what really really motivates us?

Because we love to blame these external triggers, that's kind of the the what's in vogue today is that you know, we love to blame the devices, Blame the iPhone, blame slack, blame email, And it turns out that, yes, those do comprise a certain amount of distractions. But it's much more common for distraction to start from within. Oh yeah, it's much more rewarding to blame everyone else for your problems, isn't it. Though I talk about motivated reasoning, right, we

really would like it to be somebody else. But but the darn internal. Exactly the internal? What are internal triggers? Internal triggers are uncomfortable emotional states that we seek to escape from. That. You know, you'll be familiar with Freud's pleasure principle. Most people will tell you that motivation is about seeking pleasure and avoiding pain. Uh, some version of

carrots and sticks. But neurologically that's not exactly true. That Really what's going on is that the way the brain gets us to act is for one reason, and that is to avoid discomfort. The brain doesn't get us to do things that feel good. The brain gets us to do things that felt good, and that's what the wanting system is all about. In the brain, it has memories of what felt good and to incentivize us to act, to move. What it does is put us into a

state of psychological discomfort. Right, So even wanting, craving, desire, there's a reason we say love hurts because neurologically speaking, that's exactly what's going on. So this homeostatic response that we feel in the body is pretty clear. We're all familiar with it. If we go outside and we're cold, we put on a jacket. If we're hot, we take it off. If we're hungry, we feel hunger pangs, we eat, and when we're stuffed, oh that doesn't feel good, we

stop eating. So those are physiological responses to discomfort. The same applies to psychological discomfort. So when we're lonely, we check Facebook. When we're uncertain, we Google. When we're bored, we check stock prices, sports scores, Reddit, Pinterest. All of these services cater to an uncomfortable sensation. So that means that all boils down to this fact that when it comes to time management, we have to acknowledge that if all behavior is driven by a desire to escape discomfort,

that means that time management is pain management. Boom, I was waiting for the punchline. There you go. Did you practice that one in front of the mirror? That's right, I do no awesome, that was like perfectly like deliver it. Actually, yeah cool. You know that's a really cool reframing pain management. What is the what is the role of like boredom in in this in this equation, people who are like

super mindful like like practice mindful aess meditation. The people I know in my own personal circle practice mindful meditation like hours a day. They they tell me, they don't report the feeling of boredom much, and they also don't report much distractability. There's team to tend to go together. Yeah, and that's wonderful. By the way, I touch on mindfulness a little bit, I mostly refer to acceptance of commitment therapy as opposed to mindfulness world. And there's many many

techniques out there. I don't go super deep into mindfulness and indistractable, not that these techniques don't work. I also don't talk about meditation anywhere in the book other than saying I won't talk about it enough, not because they don't work, but because there's just been so much written about it already. I mean, who doesn't know about mindfulness and meditation. It's just been done to death and that's great.

If it works for you, wonderful. However, I think there is a bit of warning here that I think for

some people, not everyone. I don't want to generalize to everyone who practices mindfulness and meditation, but some people are of the belief that you can mindful all your problems away, and I think they discount the fact that some problems you need to fix right when it comes to managing internal triggers, some times the solution is to either fix the source of the discomfort, or if you can't fix the source of this discomfort, then learn tactics to cope

with it. So half of my book is about things that you can do yourself right, things that you can learn to cope with discomfort. To you know, there's four steps to becoming indistractable, things that you yourself can do. But I'm not so naive to not acknowledge that we

work in environments, and environments can shape our behavior. So the fact is, you know, if you are super mindful and you meditate every day, and you do everything I tell you to do to become indistractable, but then your boss calls you at eight pm on a Friday night and he says, you know, did you check your email because there's something really important. You need to see what's going on there? Is it? Is it the technology that did it to you? Is it, you know, your lack

of practicing mindfulness and meditation or indistractable techniques. No, it's the fact that you work with a crappy boss who doesn't appreciate your time, and you work in a company with bad company culture. And so that's why, you know, we have to also acknowledge the environments that we work in. So there's a section on how to build an indistractable workplace, and we talk about psychological safety and all kinds of other things that build a culture where distraction isn't a problem.

There's a section on how to raise indistractable kids, and there's a section on how to have indistractable relationships. So there is you know, there are things that we can do ourselves, but there's also these things that we have to do within our larger context and environment. How do you become indistractable against kids? Against kids? Kids are a distraction? Yeah, yeah, exactly, Okay,

good you you have kids? No I don't, but I hear a lot of people are, like I would love to find out a way to not be so distracted by by my kids once and needs. And so isn't that the opposite of what you were talking about? I love it? Actually, Okay, so this is fantastic. So I talk about in the book, that's not exactly what I was I was referring to. There's a section on how to raise indistractable kids. But I know, I know, yeah, but there is a part of the book. So there's

three there's sorry, there's four parts to becoming indistractable. The third step is to figures should we do all four? To be sure? Cool, maybe it'd be best to like start with the first one. Okay, sure, sure, But let's get back to this question on how do you how do you remove the external trigger of your kids? Because people think about distraction just being you know, their technologies,

but I would totally agree. I think kids, your co workers, lots of things other than technology can be distractions and there's ways we can cope with that as well. Yes, that's absolutely you know that. The word distraction, it really it depends on like what what do you want to be the foreground? What do you want to be the background? People assume that certain things should be the foreground. Certain things should be the background. But isn't that up to

the person to decide. I'm not saying child abuses. I'm not advocating for that to be or to be clear, but it's a great point. I mean, let me, let me just dive into the real quick because we're on the point. I mean, you know something that I value, you know, back to back to your individual values that you know. I'm not saying my values need to be anyone else's values. But one of my values is to spend time with my friends. Okay, it's one of my values.

And every time we would get together, you know, we all have kids. I have a daughter, many of my friends have children as well. We would get together and invariably some kid would interrupt the conversation every time, right. I remember one time we were talking about this good friend of mine was really struggling at work. He had started a startup and it was very difficult, and he was feeling a lot of pressure from his investors and

he was almost on the verge of tears. And then one of our kids walks up and says, I want a juice box, and that completely derailed the conversation. And so now one of the things we've done to hack back the external triggers is now we have not only have we scheduled time to be with our friends. We call it the kibbutz. Kibutz means a gathering in Hebrew. We just picked that word. It doesn't have any religious

connotations or anything. And the idea is that it has time on our schedule, and we set a rule that no child is allowed to interrupt. They can listen, but they can't interrupt unless someone's bleeding. Okay, so we put out all the juice boxes, we put out all the snacks, we put out all the board games that could ever want, but you cannot interrupt unless someone's bleeding. And then, so here's another way that we deal with this problem when

we're at home. Okay, my wife and I both work from home, and we both found that one of the you know, there's a lot of great things to working from home, but there's also some bad things, and including distraction. We'll get to office distraction a minute as well. But when it comes to in home distraction, you know, kids

play a big part of that. So when my wife and I would would take duty for watching my daughter, sometimes my daughter would sneak into the office and just talk to talk to my wife or talk to me while we're in the middle two. So we have a very small like closet little office at home, a little home office. And what we found was, you know, so what I preach in the book is to find ways to hack back external trigger. So here's how we hacked back external triggers in the home. When the external trigger

is another person. So my wife bought this what we call lovingly, the concentration crown. And the concentration crown is this five dollars little wreath that we found on Amazon that has these LED lights all over it and when you turn on the LED lights, it glows and you cannot miss it. And the idea is when you see my wife with this concentration crown, it tells everyone around her,

leave me alone. I am concentrating right now. And it arrests that behavior in my daughter and Frankly and myself to want to say, hey, Hanny, can I ask you a quick question? When she's wearing the concentration CROWND that means leave me alone, I'm doing focused work. We actually adapted that for the workplace. So every copy of indistractable comes with a card stock what I call a screen sign.

It's a piece of thick card stock that you tear out of the book, you fold it into thirds, and you put it on your computer monitor, and it tells your work colleagues, I'm indistractable right now, please come back later. And so it's just this way to tell your colleagues no, no no, no, right now, I need to do focused work. It's incredibly important to do this kind of practice because you know a lot of people think, oh, well, I'll just put on headphones. And if I put on headphones

and my colleagues will know that I'm busy. Not really. Let me tell you a secret. If you just wear headphones, people think you're watching YouTube, right, That's what they think you're doing. So we want to create this culture that it's okay to disconnect for some time during the day in order to do our best work. I love that you should give those sirens that card. I know, I'm sorry, one of the joys of living in New York. Unfortunately, No, obviously,

I'm joking. If someone's probably like in pain right now or something, and it's like the ambulance and yeah, that probably that definitely takes priority over this podcast. Okay, you know so much to think about here, and I do want to go through the four steps to becoming and this is like that's like, you know, everyone's on the

edge of their seats to hear those four us. So I'm going, so let's let's let's let's talk about some other things first before we get to that, and we'll keep like wetting the appetite and so then we get to it. Be so excited. You talk about the critical question that you suggest people ask, what is that question? Yeah? So the critical question I glanced over it earlier that when it comes to hacking back external triggers, and why

do I use that term hacking back? The idea here is that you know your your attention is being hacked by these devices. I mean, you know, my first book was called Hooked, How to Build Habit Forming Products. I understand how these products are built, and they are clearly designed to hack your attention. That's what they are meant to do. They want to be engaging. But as good as they are at hacking your attention, many people don't realize that it is much easier for us to hack back.

That it's really not that difficult to do that. We have way more power than these tech companies do at hacking our attention. So they might want to might want us to use their products, and they want to build products that are engaging, and frankly, we want that right Well, you know it's ridiculous to think, Hey, Facebook, can you please make your product less user friendly? iPhone? You know your product is so easy to use, I want to use it all the time. Netflix, you make such good shows.

Can you please stop making such good shows because I want to watch them all the time. That's ridiculous. That's not going to happen. We want these products to be engaging, but there's nothing that says we can't hack back. So how do you hack back? We can morph these technologies to serve us. And this is the critical question. The critical question is the external trigger serving you or are

you serving it? So as much as people complain about notifications on their phone, they act like it's something they can't do anything about. And that's ridiculous. You know, two thirds of people with a smartphone, two thirds of people with a smartphone never change their notification settings. Can we really say the technology is so addictive that it's hijacking our brains when we haven't taken ten minutes to change

our notification settings. So I devote like a page and a half to that idea of how we can remove these external triggers on our phones and our laptops. That's kindergarten, that's baby stuff. Of course we have to do that, But there are all these other pernicious external triggers we don't think about. Email, for example, right, email is the

mother of habit forming technology. Turns out that if you combine just those two places where people spend their time in the modern American workplace, between meetings and email, the average knowledge worker in America has only about an hour and a half to do everything else they have to do in their day. Oh my gosh. So that means that real work doesn't get done at work. Real work gets done. You know where it gets done. It gets

done after work. And who pays the price. Your health pays the price, your kids pay the price, your for relationships pay the price, because that's where the real work gets done. So what I'm advocating for is for prioritizing that time in your day by hacking back the external triggers. Not only like the ones that come on our devices, but also the ones that come from the workplace, group, chat, meetings, email. I walk through how every single one of these external

triggers can be hacked back. I love that, and I don't know if you talked about that story, but how can you prevent distraction with packs pacts? Yeah? Yeah, so we've we've gone kind of in a funny order, but we've covered the four steps, which is great, there's no problem, but we've done it in a sneaky way. Yeah, that's fine, that's fine. Let me go over. This is a good time because that's the fourth step. So let me just reiterate the first three before we get to the fourth.

The first step is to master our internal triggers by truly understanding why we are prompted to distraction, what we are trying to escape psychologically, what's that uncomfortable emotion that we have habitually attatched some kind of products used to how do we break that bad habit? That's the first step mastering the internal triggers. The second step, which we didn't talk about as much but I'm happy to go more into it, is about making time for traction. So

we talked about traction and distraction. So the fact is, we can't do those things we want to do if we don't make time for it. So the thing is, you know a lot of people complain about how distracted they are, but when you look at their calendars, their calendars are blank. They haven't planned what they want to do with their time. So here's the thing. You have no right to call something a distraction unless you know what it distracted you from. Everything is a distraction if

you don't plan your time. So that's the second step, is to turn your values into time by keeping some kind of a calendar. And I tell you exactly how to do that, how to synchronize that with your stakeholders, et cetera. The third step, which we covered a bit of, which is about hacking back those external triggers. And finally, the fourth step, and it's the fourth because it must be done last, because this is the only one of the fourth steps that can can backfire, can be dangerous

in fact, and this comes down to pre commitments. And pre commitments have been studied extensively. It's a technique that's been used. It's at least as old as the Odyssey written by Homer, So twenty five hundred years ago. And the idea of a pre commitment is to make some kind of promise, some kind of packed with yourself, with someone else, perhaps where you become more likely to do something when you commit to what you are going to do.

If there is one mantra I want people to remember from this interview and from this book is that the antidote to impulsiveness is forethought. The antidote to impulsiveness is forethought. That as much as we complain of how distracting the world is today and how manipulative all these businesses are, the fact is we have way more power because we

can plan ahead. So if the chocolate cake is on the fork on its way to your mouth too late, right, there's debate whether free will even exists at that moment. It's too late, and you are going to lose. If the cigarette is lit and it's in your hand and you're about to take a puff too late, you've lost. You're going to smoke. If you sleep next to your cell phone equally distant from your lover, then you're going to pick up that phone first thing in the morning,

you've already lost. But the thing that we can do that no other animal on the face of the earth can do. One of the things that we can do, I should say, is that we can see the future with higher fidelity than any other animal. We can predict what we think is going to happen better than any other creature. So the antidote to that impulsiveness in the moment, and the reason why this book doesn't advocate for self control,

self discipline, and willpower. What I advocate for is a system, is a plan, is planning ahead, and that's what these pre commitments are all about. So there are three types of pre commitments. An effort packed, a price packed, an identity packed. And these are three things that we can do to make sure that when the time comes when we might get distracted, we don't do something that we don't want to do. We don't give in to that distraction.

So hacking back the external triggers are about keeping the triggers out. Pre commitments and packs are about keeping ourselves in nice. Well, that's good, that's good, and that that can apply to all sorts of things that we are quote addicted to, and sometimes it's confusing to know whether or not you're actually addicted to something. Is everyone addicted

to checking their email. No, okay, uh, And this is this is a big reason why I wrote the book because I am up to my eyeballs in frustration over the overuse of this term. Yeah, it's it's it's it's so overused, and it's and here's the thing. It's hurting people because we know that, you know, from studies on alcoholics, we know that the number one determined of whether someone will will stay sober after rehab is not what's going on in their body. It's what's happening in their brain.

The number one determined is not physical dependency, it's their belief in their own power to change. And so what we're doing when we tell people that technology is addictive, that it's hijacking your brain, what we're telling people is that they're powerless. Right, This leads to learned helplessness because oh, my kid is just addicted to Fortnite. What can I do? I'm addicted to Instagram. There's nothing I can do about it. And that is bullshit. Now, I will say some people

are addicted. Some people do have the pathology of addiction, just like some people get addicted to all kinds of substances. Right, So, you know, a lot of people have a glass of dinner, a glass of wine with dinner, but they're not. You know, not all of us are alcoholics. Not everyone who has sex as a sex addict. Not everyone who plays poker with their buddies once in a while is a problem gambler. Lots of things that are addicted to someone but don't

addict everyone. Why should it be any different with technology? So some people are pathocologically addicted, of course, and I think companies have a special responsibility to help them. I've been writing about this and advocating for what I call a use and abuse policy, and I've met with all the big tech companies to try and move this forward. But for the rest of us, if you are not a protected class, so children are a protected class, they do lots of things kids can't do in our society

that they need to be protected from. And I think and yeah, exactly, thank good. And I think that people who are pathologically addicted also should be a protected class. But we are not all addicted, and so we need to stop talking about this pathology as if everyone is to coming to it, because it's not helping anybody. Can you become addicted to being uh indiestractable. Can you like, can this can this be such a compulsion and such an interest that it's like it's I don't know, that's

just I'm cheeky. I mean there are there are certainly you know, here's the thing. Any you could be perfectionistic, right, and that's not good. So the fact is so this is this is the rule. Any analgesic is potentially addictive. And you can find cases of people becoming addicted to literally anything that solves pain. I did an article for The Atlantic a few years ago, and I'm not making this up. I mean, just look on the internet for this.

There are people out there who are addicted to Q tips. Wow, that is not I'm not I'm not joking. This is a real tips but but I'm not going to say that I'm addicted to it. Yeah, I mean people get addicted. Anything that solves pain is potentially addicted to somebody. Now, what you find is that addiction is never about the product.

It's never just about the product. I should say, of course the product plays a role, But when we look at the science of addiction, you know, nobody steps on a heroin needle and becomes addicted that's not how it works. Millions of women every year in the United States of America are given fentanyl when they deliver a baby by sea section. Fentanyl. This is the most addictive substance we know of, right, this is what everyone's scared of when

it comes to the opio epidemic. This is the substance that police officers won't even touch because they're so scared of it getting into their bodies. And yet, how is it that millions of women get fentanyl when they go to the hospital to deliver a baby VC section? Because it's never just about the substance, right, A tiny fraction those women ever become addicted to fentanyl because addiction is

never just about the product. It's also about the person and their predilection towards addiction and the pain they are going through in their life that they would otherwise not be able to cope with. And it's only in the confluence of those three things, the person, the product, and

the pain that you get addiction. So addiction does happen to I'm sure there's lots of people out there who are addicted to the Internet, addicted to pornography, addicted to social media even but that's not the majority of people, and those people who do suffer from an addiction, there's always something else going on. There's some kind of abuse, there's some kind of extreme trauma, there's many times cool morbidity with obsessive compulsive disorder, there's something else going on.

It's never only about the product being abused. That's a really, really good point. We've had a guest Maya Solovitz on our podcast about a couple of years ago, and she talked about addiction. So I actually want to direct my listeners to after they listen to this episode to listen to that one as well if they want to follow up on that topic. Showed a whole book on addiction,

Rethinking Addiction. No, it's a really good point. And there's even debates in the field about whether or not sex addiction is a thing, you know, or porn addiction, like if that's you know, really ever, it counts as an addiction. Yeah, yeah, I mean in the research for the book, I talked to a lot of therapists, particularly those who work with children, because now there is a designation for problem problem online, you know, a problem gaming use. And what they told

me was that they in their experience. They had never seen a child who came in without something else going on. It was never, you know, a perfectly healthy child who had a perfect home life started playing video games and now was addicted. There was always something else going on. There was OCD. Typically, there was some kind of trauma. And by the way, this is exactly what we the exactly what we went through sixty five years ago during

the Senate hearings about comic books. Experts went to the Senate just like experts are going to the Senate now to give these testimonies we've seen recently about how terrible, you know, screen time is, and they said, verbatim the same thing that we hear people saying today, that it's causing suicide, that it's causing mental health issues, that it's causing this, and it's causing that, and it's not causing it's correlative because we don't know whether people who are

looking for escape from this discomfort. As I said before, you know, any analgesic is potentially addictive to someone. And so that's the same exact story. It's exactly what was said in front of those Senate hearings about comic books is being said today about screen time. Not that I think upset that excessive screen time is not harmful. I think it is likely harmful. But of course what we need to ask ourselves is, you know, where we see

harm is not two hours or less. No study of children using screens extracurricular age appropriate screen time for two hours or less has been shown to have any delatarious effects. Where we start seeing negative effects is five, six, seven hours a day of extracurricular screen time. But of course the question is you know that much screen time, or that much time with any media is probably indicative of something else going on. And I think that's what we

need to be asking around. Yeah, that's kind of like a one of the rules of psychotherapy. You expect that whatever the patient presents, whatever the problem you know they present with, is not the root problem. It always comes out to be or most likely always comes out to be larger or Gottlieb talked about that in her in her new book. So yeah, so you're really you're really shattering this conventional narrative that the problem with the distractibility

is the gadgets. Almost gadgets have become like the scapegoat it. You know, you are pinpointing this inner desire for escape, and yeah, I just keep keep leaking that to boredom in my own head. There is a lot too bored. I mean, look, you know there's that wonderful work by Timothy Wilson where he puts subjects in a room and

you know, they could do nothing but electrocute themselves. Yeah, and it was something like twenty something percent of women and sixty something percent of men would rather have delivered an electrical shock that they were told would be painful. They would rather do that than feel nothing. Yeah, then just sit in silence. So clearly I think there is an evolutionary adaptation to boredom getting off our butts, right, That's what kept us striving and searching and looking to

improve our lot. Was that sitting around and doing nothing. If the species didn't have this trait of wanting more, of feeling boredom, that would be not as evolutionarily beneficial as a species that was perpetually perturbed. And so that's why I talk about in the book how I bristle at the self help industry's idea that somehow, if you're not happy, if you're not satisfied with life all the time,

that somehow something's wrong with you. I think nothing could be further from the truth that our species is designed to want more. It's about how we channeled these internal triggers towards traction versus distraction. That really matters. Thanks Snir. I appreciate that you make this like a very fundamentally

human problem. I appreciate that for you know, people who struggle with add or ADHD, they can be stigmatized very easily, kind of othered, and they just you know, that tendency that a lot of them have is really just a more extreme version of something that we all struggle with, right, I think that that's that's likely, right, I mean, I think you know, you know, I'm sure you know better than I do that you know, some folks do have extreme forms of the pathology and they do need special assistance.

And while I didn't write indistractable specifically for people with ADHD, I have heard from several folks that there is a lot of overlap with techniques that they've learned to manage ADHD, and those techniques can be useful as well. Yeah. Yeah, and in mindfulness has been shown to be useful. Sure, yeah, absolutely, people with a do do Okay, so let's return to

kids for a second. I know that I know that this conversation itself feels a bit add but something I like is how it all like, it all does tie together at the end, you know, and I love to like call back things that we talked about earlier. So let's talk about kids again and the overuse of technology. What are some tips to help them focus in an increasingly distracting world? Yeah? Yeah, So this was my favorite section of the book because it really overturned what I learned.

You know, I write books not because of what I know, but because of what I want to know. And so when I was struggling with figuring out how to raise our daughter, you know, of some of her first words were iPad time, iPad time. I remember her saying that incessantly, and it would drive us crazy and we didn't know

what to do about it. And you know, so that's when I really tried to figure out, Okay, how you know, if you think the world is distracting today, just wait a few years, right, It's not going to become less distracting. If anything, it's going to become more potentially distracting as technology improves and it becomes more pervasive and persuasive. That's not going to change, and so it was really imperative that we figure out how to raise is an indistractable child.

And you know, let me just say some obvious stuff first and foremost obvious stuff are things like the fact that if a technology company tells you not to let your kid use the product before a certain age, please

believe them. Okay. I can't tell you how many people would I've talked to since writing this book, and even before I finished writing the book, just interviewing folks and trying to figure out what works and what doesn't out there, how many people are tell you know, told me how distracted their kids were and how terrible social media is. And then I asked them, well, how old is your child?

Eight nine? Right? No, the tech companies tell you don't let your kid use a social network until thirteen, listen to them. Okay, they say that for a reason. So that's common sense stuff. And then I think the metaphor here is to treat a kid's use of technology and the same way we would think about a swimming pool, that swimming pools can be a lot of fun, and you know, it's great when kids have the opportunity to learn how to swim. But swim pools kill kids, right,

Kids die because they drown in swimming pools. Now, does that mean we should as parents never let kids swim in a pool. No, it means we should teach kids how to swim safely. So just like we wouldn't, you know, give a kid a phone on their birthday and say here, have at it, you know, do anything you want. We have to monitor. We have to make sure that they know how to use the device properly, and so part

of that is teaching them how to become indistractable. These four steps of mastering your internal triggers, making time for traction, hacking back the external triggers, and preventing distraction. With packs, we can teach them this stuff. The most important thing you can do is to set a good example yourself that children are hypocrisy detection devices. And so we as parents cannot tell our kids get off that you know, get off that phone, stop playing Fortnite, get off social

media as we're checking our email. That's ridiculous. So we've got to make sure that we become indistracted by ourselves. Now, those that's the easy stuff. That's the that's the you know, one on one level. When it comes to really digging deep, what I wanted to really understand here was the root

cause of distraction. Mean, that's the real theme throughout the book in the workplace when it comes to raising in distractable kids, when it comes to our own struggle with distraction, I always wanted to get to the root cause of the problem. And I you know, we know that parents have always looked for the proximate causes. And one of the most pervasive myths that I think demonstrates what I think we're doing today with technology is this idea of

a sugar high. You know, we've all heard it, right that if you give a kid sugar, they're going to act crazy and they're going to run around and you know, be disobedient or whatever. And it's not true. There is no there's been meta studies here that show that the sugar high is not true, doesn't exist except when it exists in parents. That when parents were told their child was given sugar, even despite the fact that they were given in inert substance that was not sugar, they acted differently.

The parents follow the kids around, the parents berated their children. The parents to their children's is misbehaving even when they hadn't been given any sugar. And so this is what we are doing, I think, with all sorts of technologies, with all sorts of and this is throughout you know, the history of parenting today at social media and video games. Before that, it was television before that, it was the radio. Before that, it was comic books. I mean, every generation

we parents want something to blame that's not us. Now what I think we need to do. It's about time we think about why kids are over using technology. And this is where we get into self determination theory. So you know, I talked to I did extensive interviews with Richard M. Ryan and you know about his work with self determination theory. This is kind of the most widely accepted theory of human motivation and flourishing. It's you know,

fifty year old research now. And when you look at these three factors of competency, autonomy, and relatedness, these three things that Dessie and Ryan tell us are necessary for human flourishing, we see that children today are deficient in these three things. And Dessie and Ryan called their need to find those things these psychological nutrients online when they can't find them offline. They call this the needs displacement hypothesis. And what we see is, if you think about children's

life today, let's take these one at a time. Competency. One thing that correlates with the rise of tech, of cell phone use and social media, you know around two thousand and seven two thousand and eight, is also the rise in standardized testing. This is around the same time when No Child Left Behind made standardized testing and teaching

towards the test the law of the land. So today children starting in kindergarten receive these standardized tests, and teachers started teaching for the tests in a way that's never been done before. And so kids are told multiple times per year they are not competent. Not all kids, the ones who do well, don't get that message, but many kids who don't do well are constantly told this message.

You are not competent, you are not good enough. And so what a kids do when they feel that, when they don't get enough sense of competency in their life, Well, the tech companies are more than happy to give them a sie of competency. Right, if you go play Minecraft, you feel like God you're the master of this universe,

you feel supremely competent, then take take autonomy. So this need that we all have to feel in control of our environment, turns out that the work of Peter Gray has shown that children today have twice as many, sorry ten times as many regulations and rules placed upon them as an average American adult, twice as many rules as

a convicted incarcerated felon. There are two places in society where we are allowed to tell people what to do, where to go, what to think, what to eat, who to be friends with, and that is school in prison. And so is it any surprise that when kids come home after being told what to do all day long, they want freedom, they want agency, they want autonomy. Now,

in our generation, where did we get that? We went outside, we played, We vandalized things, we did you know, we were rascals, right, That's what we did in our generation, generations before. Well, one thing that you don't hear in the current debate around technology use is people seem to think that technology use lives in a vacuum, that if we just got rid of Facebook and Fortnite and Instagram and Snapchat and TikTok, kids would start reading Shakespeare in

their spare time. Give me a break. Right, What we have not talked about is that all the other things that kids do to hurt themselves and hurt others have all gone down. With the one exception of suicide. Everything else has gone down. And by the way, suicide actually was just as high in the nineteen eighties. It's just that when you hear those statistics about suicide going up, they're always referencing twenty fourteen, which was a record low year. So it's just as high as it was in the

nineteen eighties. We don't know why, but we can talk more about with those suicide rates. But if you think about everything else, so truancy record lows, drug use record lows, pregnancy record lows. This was the generation of the super predator. Right. There are prisons, juveniles, attention centers that are empty. Well why is that? Part of it is because kids are

staying indoors. Right, If you wanted to invent a device to keep it's safe at home, off the streets from not getting in trouble outside, you would probably have been something like a video game, which you know, I'm not saying doesn't have dilitary effects. When it's used in excess, but you know, if it's instead of what the things that kids used to do in their spare time to feel agency, feel freedom, this is a lot less dangerous than other things kids could do. And then finally the

third of Dessie and Ryan self determination. These three psychological nutrients. The third is relatedness. And one thing we've seen over the past fifty years is the utter collapse in play time and in what's called free play. So kids today, this is the generation of children who when they come home from school are either you know, locked indoors because their parents are so scared of stranger danger and their kids getting in you know, being abducted, which is ridiculous,

is the safest generation in American history. Or kids are so scheduled these days between Kuman and piano lessons and Mandarin and test prep that they have no time for free play. So when you don't get your psychological nutrients of relatedness fulfilled, where do you find relatedness? Well, you find it on Snapchat, you find it on TikTok, you find on Instagram. Right just like we did in our generation when we would talk to our friends on the

phone for hours on end. That's where they go to socialize. And so that's the big lesson I want to impart to parents that if you really want to get to the root cause of why kids overuse technology, we have to understand these three factors that you know, this is very old, very established research that kids need competency, autonomy, and relatedness and when they don't get that offline, they

look forward online. Hi, everyone, just wanted to take a quick break and talk about my new book that's coming out April seventh. It's called Transcend The New Science of Self Actualization. Really excited to present this book to you all. It represents the culmination of many, many years of hard work and synthesis. What I've what I've done in this book is I've taken Maslow's classic hierarchy of Needs and I've revised it for the twenty first century, trying to

bring back humanistic psychology. I think that the field of humanistic psychology in the fifties and sixties really got a lot right about humanity and the creative possibilities of humans, as well as the humanitarian and spiritual possibilities. I really hope in this book can present a vision of humanity that transcends us all and helps us connect deeper with each other, but also help us reach our greatest potential

individually and collectively. So if you want to check out this book, you can actually pre order it right now in Amazon as well as other there's independent bookstores I think you can pre order it from and then on April seventh. Starting April seventh, that should be in bookstores. A lot of people in wondering throughout the years how they can support me and the Psychology podcast, and here's the time. You know, you're always welcome to contribute money

to the podcast, help support it. If you're a longtime listener or even short time listener, you want to not only support the podcast but dive deeper into a lot of the concepts and ideas we talk about constantly on this show. This is a great way to do that by buying this book. So please check the book out and let me know what you think. Thank you for that. That was a great review of self determination theory as well.

And you know, the big core of self determination theory is the idea of intrinsic motivation being the best kind of motivation. But it doesn't seem like that is true. That that's very helpful when you talk about Yeah, of course, a lot of these kids are intrinsically motivated to do lots of things that are that they probably shouldn't be intrinsically motivated true to do so that they used to do in previous generations. You mean, right, yes, yes, yes, Okay.

So my last question, because I'm a creativity researcher and I'm really interested in that this tension and what we're finding in the brain in our own research that some of the greatest sources of creativity comes from the indistract This comes from the distractable mind trying to reconcile this with each other. You know, if we were indistractable twenty four to seven, is it possible we would be missing out on some really surprising connection creative connections. Yeah, it's

a terrific question. I think it's a semantic question because the way I define distraction, I think the entomology of the word distraction is never good. If distraction is the opposite of traction, it's doing things against your better interest, things that you did not plan to do with intent.

I think distraction is not never good. What I think you're referring to, and I think is very good is diversion of attention, and that is I think that's you know, you can plan to allow your attention to be diverted. If you go watch a movie, read a book, go to a sports game, take a walk, meditate, let your brain wander and daydream. All of those things are fantastic. That's a diversion of attention that you can plan for. And so I think in this day and age, if

we don't plan for it. You know, we know that there are benefits to creativity when we let our minds wander. But the fact of the matter is the cost. The price of this progress, the price of having the world's information at your fingertips, the price of having you know, so much information, so many videos, so many endless articles. You know. Krekergard I think said it best, and he

said that anxiety is the dizziness of freedom. And I think that so perfectly encapsulates what we're feeling right now. You know, we are dizzy with so much choice, we have so many options. So the solution to that harkens back to what I said earlier, that the antido fer impulsiveness is forethought that if we see and the research is bearing this out that, you know, letting your mind wand or having time to just think and daydream for

a sample. What we have to do these days is to schedule time for that, because if we don't, it's just not going to happen. So I don't think I don't think we contradict each other when I say that. I think some diversion, letting your attention wander is wonderful, and I think we should plan time for it. If that's, you know, if it's according to your values that you want to be more creative, that's something that's important to you.

You can have your cake and eat it too, But I think that requires becoming indistractable to make sure we can make time for even things like letting our minds wander from time to time. Thank you. I appreciate that your model still is room for the planned what my advisor, one of my mentors, and a Graduchul Drome singer called positive constructive daydreaming. Yes, absolutely, I think there's definitely a

place for that. Great So I like to end sometimes with one of my favorite quotes from the guest, and I'm going to read one of your quotes. In the future. There will be two kinds of people in the world, those who let their attention and lives be controlled and coursed by others, and those who proudly call themselves in distractable. Thanks so much for chatting with me today and helping me learn how I can be a bit more indistractable my own life. Thank you, Scott A pleasure. Thanks for

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