Indistractable Read online

  These proximate causes have something in common—they help us deflect responsibility onto something or someone else. It’s not that the cue ball and stick don’t factor into the equation, just like the coworker or toilet seat, but they certainly aren’t entirely responsible for the outcome. Without understanding and tackling root causes, we’re stuck being helpless victims in a tragedy of our own creation.

  The distractions in our lives are the result of the same forces—they are proximate causes that we think are to blame, while the root causes stay hidden. We tend to blame things like television, junk food, social media, cigarettes, and video games—but these are all proximate causes of our distraction.

  Solely blaming a smartphone for causing distraction is just as flawed as blaming a pedometer for making someone climb too many stairs.

  Unless we deal with the root causes of our distraction, we’ll continue to find ways to distract ourselves. Distraction, it turns out, isn’t about the distraction itself; rather, it’s about how we respond to it.

  Over several email exchanges, Zoë Chance let me in on the dark truths that drove her extreme behaviors, which she hadn’t revealed in her TEDx talk. “My addiction to Striiv coincided with one of the most stressful periods in my life,” she tells me. “I was just going on the market to look for a job as a rookie marketing professor: a grueling, months-long process involving tremendous uncertainty.” She continues, “It’s not uncommon for academics on the job market to experience physical symptoms of stress. I was losing hair, losing sleep, and getting heart palpitations. I felt like I was going crazy, and that I had to hide it from everyone.”

  Chance was also hiding a secret about her marriage: her husband was a marketing professor, too, which meant that the couple needed to find a joint appointment, either for her at his school or for both of them at another school. “Marketing departments are small,” she explains, “and joint appointments rare as hens’ teeth.”

  Further complicating matters, her marriage was falling apart. “I didn’t know whether my husband and I would be together or not, but because the best-case scenario would be that we worked things out, stayed married, and I got a job at his university, we didn’t want anyone at his university to know we might get divorced, since then they’d be less likely to offer me a job.”

  Chance felt stuck. “I knew that even my best efforts couldn’t guarantee a good outcome for either my marriage or the job market, and in hindsight, I can see that Striiv gave me something I could control and succeed at.” During this particularly difficult time in her life, she says she used her Striiv as a coping device. “It was an escape from reality,” she now admits.

  Most people don’t want to acknowledge the uncomfortable truth that distraction is always an unhealthy escape from reality. How we deal with uncomfortable internal triggers determines whether we pursue healthful acts of traction or self-defeating distractions.

  For Chance, racking up Striiv points provided the escape she was looking for. For other people, the escape comes from checking social media, spending more time in the office, watching television, or, in some cases, drinking or taking hard drugs.

  If you’re trying to escape the pain of something as serious as impending divorce, the real problem is not your pedometer; without dealing with the discomfort driving the desire for escape, we’ll continue to resort to one distraction or another.

  Only by understanding our pain can we begin to control it and find better ways to deal with negative urges.

  Fortunately, Chance was able to come to this realization herself. First, she focused on the real source of discomfort in her life, narrowing in on the internal triggers she was trying to escape. Though she did end up separating from her husband, she says she’s in a much better place in her life now. Professionally, she got a full-time post at Yale, where she still teaches today. She has also found better ways to stay healthy and in control of her time, scheduling regular fitness activities instead of letting her pedometer rule over her.

  Though overcoming her obsession was a positive step for Chance, the Striiv pedometer won’t be the last distraction in her life. But by pinpointing the root cause, rather than blaming the proximate, she’ll be better able to address the real issue next time. When used together, the strategies and techniques you’re about to learn in this section work both immediately and for the long term.

  REMEMBER THIS

  •Understand the root cause of distraction. Distraction is about more than your devices. Separate proximate causes from the root cause.

  •All motivation is a desire to escape discomfort. If a behavior was previously effective at providing relief, we’re likely to continue using it as a tool to escape discomfort.

  •Anything that stops discomfort is potentially addictive, but that doesn’t make it irresistible. If you know the drivers of your behavior, you can take steps to manage them.

  Chapter 4

  Time Management Is Pain Management

  At first, I didn’t want to believe the inconvenient truth behind what really drives distraction. But after digesting the scientific literature, I had to face the fact that the motivation for diversion originates within us. As is the case with all human behavior, distraction is just another way our brains attempt to deal with pain. If we accept this fact, it makes sense that the only way to handle distraction is by learning to handle discomfort.

  If distraction costs us time, then time management is pain management.

  But where does our discomfort come from? Why are we perpetually restless and unsatisfied? We live in the safest, healthiest, most well-educated, most democratic time in human history, and yet some part of the human psyche causes us to constantly look for an escape from things stirring inside us. As the eighteenth-century poet Samuel Johnson said, “My life is one long escape from myself.” Mine too, brother. Mine too.

  Thankfully, we can take solace in knowing we are hardwired for this sort of dissatisfaction. Sorry to say, but odds are you and I are never going to be fully happy with our lives. Sporadic bouts of joy, sure. An occasional feeling of euphoria? Yes. Singing “Happy” by Pharrell Williams in your underwear once in a while? OK, who hasn’t? But the sustained “happily ever after” sort of satisfaction you see in the movies? Forget it. It’s a myth. That sort of happiness is designed to never last for long. Eons of evolution gave you and me a brain in a near-constant state of discontentment.

  We’re wired this way for a simple reason. As a study published in the Review of General Psychology notes, “If satisfaction and pleasure were permanent, there might be little incentive to continue seeking further benefits or advances.” In other words, feeling contented wasn’t good for the species. Our ancestors worked harder and strove further because they evolved to be perpetually perturbed, and so we remain today.

  Unfortunately, the same evolutionary traits that helped our kin survive by driving them to constantly do more can conspire against us today.

  Four psychological factors make satisfaction temporary.

  Let’s begin with the first factor: boredom. The lengths people will go to avoid boredom is shocking, sometimes literally. A 2014 study published in Science asked participants to sit in a room and think for fifteen minutes. The room was empty except for a device that allowed the participants to mildly but painfully electrocute themselves. “Why would anyone want to do that?” you might ask.

  When asked beforehand, every participant in the study said they would pay to avoid being shocked. However, when left alone in the room with the machine and nothing else to do, 67 percent of men and 25 percent of women shocked themselves, and many did so multiple times. The study’s authors conclude their paper by saying, “People prefer doing to thinking, even if what they are doing is so unpleasant that they would normally pay to avoid it. The untutored mind does not like to be alone with itself.” It’s no surprise, therefore, that most of the top twenty-five websites in America sell escape from our daily drudgery, whether through shopping, celebrity gossip, or bite-sized
doses of social interaction.

  The second psychological factor driving us to distraction is negativity bias, “a phenomenon in which negative events are more salient and demand attention more powerfully than neutral or positive events.” As the author of one study concluded, “It appears to be a basic, pervasive fact of psychology that bad is stronger than good.” Such pessimism begins very early in life. Babies begin to show signs of negativity bias starting at just seven months of age, suggesting this tendency is inborn. As further evidence, researchers believe we tend to have an easier time recalling bad memories than good ones. Studies have found people are more likely to recall unhappy moments in their childhood, even if they would describe their upbringing as generally happy.

  Negativity bias almost certainly gave us an evolutionary edge. Good things are nice, but bad things can kill you, which is why we pay attention to and remember the bad stuff first. Useful, but what a bummer!

  The third factor is rumination, our tendency to keep thinking about bad experiences. If you’ve ever chewed over something in your mind that you did, or that someone did to you, or over something that you don’t have but wanted, over and over again, seemingly unable to stop thinking about it, you’ve experienced what psychologists call rumination. This “passive comparison of one’s current situation with some unachieved standard” can manifest in self-critical thoughts such as, “Why can’t I handle things better?” As one study notes, “By reflecting on what went wrong and how to rectify it, people may be able to discover sources of error or alternative strategies, ultimately leading to not repeating mistakes and possibly doing better in the future.” Another potentially useful trait—but, boy, can it make us miserable.

  Boredom, negativity bias, and rumination can each prompt us to distraction. But a fourth factor may be the cruelest of all. Hedonic adaptation, the tendency to quickly return to a baseline level of satisfaction, no matter what happens to us in life, is Mother Nature’s bait and switch. All sorts of life events we think would make us happier actually don’t, or at least they don’t for long. For instance, people who have experienced extremely good fortune, such as winning the lottery, have reported that things they had previously enjoyed lost their luster, effectively returning them to their previous levels of satisfaction. As David Myers writes in The Pursuit of Happiness, “Every desirable experience—passionate love, a spiritual high, the pleasure of a new possession, the exhilaration of success—is transitory.” Of course, as with the other three factors, there are evolutionary benefits to hedonic adaptation. The author of one study explains that as “new goals continually capture one’s attention, one constantly strives to be happy without realizing that in the long run such efforts are futile.”

  Can we cue the sad trombone music now? Is futility our fate? Absolutely not. As we’ve learned, dissatisfaction is an innate power that can be channeled to help us make things better in the same way it served our prehistoric relatives.

  Dissatisfaction and discomfort dominate our brain’s default state, but we can use them to motivate us instead of defeat us.

  Without our species’ perpetual disquietude, we would be much worse off—and possibly extinct. It is our dissatisfaction that propels us to do everything we do, including to hunt, seek, create, and adapt. Even selfless acts, like helping someone, are motivated by our need to escape feelings of guilt and injustice. Our insatiable desire to reach for more is what drives us to overturn despots; it’s what pushes the invention of world-changing and life-saving technologies; and it’s the invisible fuel that drives our ambitions to travel beyond our planet and explore the cosmos.

  Dissatisfaction is responsible for our species’ advancements and its faults. To harness its power, we must disavow the misguided idea that if we’re not happy, we’re not normal—exactly the opposite is true. While this shift in mind-set can be jarring, it can also be incredibly liberating.

  It’s good to know that feeling bad isn’t actually bad; it’s exactly what survival of the fittest intended.

  From that place of acceptance, we stand a chance of avoiding the pitfalls of our psyches. We can recognize pain and rise above it, which is the first step on the road to becoming indistractable.

  REMEMBER THIS

  •Time management is pain management. Distractions cost us time, and like all actions, they are spurred by the desire to escape discomfort.

  •Evolution favored dissatisfaction over contentment. Our tendencies toward boredom, negativity bias, rumination, and hedonic adaptation conspire to make sure we’re never satisfied for long.

  •Dissatisfaction is responsible for our species’ advancements as much as its faults. It is an innate power that can be channeled to help us make things better.

  •If we want to master distraction, we must learn to deal with discomfort.

  Chapter 5

  Deal with Distraction from Within

  Jonathan Bricker, a psychologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, has spent his career helping people manage the kind of discomfort that not only leads to distraction but also to disease. His work has been proven to effectively reduce the risk of cancer by changing patient behavior. Bricker writes, “Most people don’t think of cancer as a behavioral problem, but whether it’s quitting smoking or losing weight or exercising more, there are some definitive things you can do to reduce your risk and thereby live a longer and higher-quality life.”

  Bricker’s approach involves harnessing the power of imagination to help his patients see things differently. His work shows how learning certain techniques as part of acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) can disarm the discomfort that so often leads to harmful distractions.

  Bricker decided to focus his efforts on smoking cessation and developed an app to deliver ACT over the internet. Though he uses ACT specifically to help people quit smoking, the principles of the program have been shown to effectively reduce many types of urges. At the heart of the therapy is learning to notice and accept one’s cravings and to handle them healthfully. Instead of suppressing urges, ACT prescribes a method for stepping back, noticing, observing, and finally letting the desire disappear naturally. But why not simply fight our urges? Why not “just say no”?

  It turns out mental abstinence can backfire.

  Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote in 1863, “Try to pose for yourself this task: not to think of a polar bear, and you will see that the cursed thing will come to mind every minute.” One hundred twenty-four years later, the social psychologist Daniel Wegner put Dostoevsky’s claim to the test.

  In a study, participants who were told to avoid thinking of a white bear for five minutes did so on average once per minute, just as Dostoevsky predicted. But there was more to Wegner’s study. When the same group was told to try and conjure the white bear, they did so much more often than a group who hadn’t been asked to suppress the thought. “The results suggested that suppressing the thought for the first five minutes caused it to ‘rebound’ even more prominently into the participants’ minds later,” according to an article in Monitor on Psychology. Wegner later dubbed this tendency “ironic process theory” to explain why it’s so difficult to tame intruding thoughts. The irony being, of course, that relieving the tension of desire makes something all the more rewarding.

  An endless cycle of resisting, ruminating, and finally giving in to the desire perpetuates the cycle and quite possibly drives many of our unwanted behaviors.

  For example, many smokers believe it’s the chemical nicotine that causes their cravings. They’re certainly not wrong, but they’re not completely right either. Nicotine produces distinct physical sensations. However, a fascinating study involving flight attendants demonstrated how even smoking cravings might have much less to do with nicotine than we once thought.

  Two groups of flight attendants who smoked were sent on two separate flights from Israel. One group was sent on a three-hour flight to Europe, while the other group traveled to New York, a ten-hour flight. All the smokers were asked by
the researchers to rate their level of cravings at set time intervals before, during, and after the flight. If cravings were driven solely by the effect of nicotine on the brain, one would expect that both groups would report strong urges after the same number of minutes had elapsed since their last cigarette; the more time passed, the more their brains would chemically crave nicotine. But that’s not what happened.

  When the flight attendants flying to New York were above the Atlantic Ocean, they reported weak cravings. Meanwhile, at the exact same moment, the cravings of their colleagues who had just landed in Europe were at their strongest. What was going on?

  The New York–bound flight attendants knew they could not smoke in the middle of a flight without being fired. Only later, when they approached their destination, did they report the greatest desire to smoke. It appeared the duration of the trip and the time since their last cigarette didn’t affect the level of the flight attendants’ cravings.

  What affected their desire was not how much time had passed after a smoke, but how much time was left before they could smoke again. If, as this study suggests, a craving for something as addictive as nicotine can be manipulated in this way, why can’t we trick our brains into mastering other unhealthy desires? Thankfully, we can!

  You’ll notice that throughout the book I cite smoking cessation and drug addiction research. I do this for two reasons: first, though studies show very few people are pathologically “addicted” to distractions like the internet, tech overuse can look to many like an addiction; second, I wanted to make the point that if these well-established techniques are effective at stopping physical dependencies to nicotine and other substances, then they can certainly help us control cravings for distraction. After all, we’re not injecting Instagram or freebasing Facebook.