Indistractable Read online

  Certain desires can be modulated, if not completely mitigated, by how we think about our urges. In the following chapters, we’ll learn how to think differently about three things: the internal trigger, the task, and our temperament.

  REMEMBER THIS

  •Without techniques for disarming temptation, mental abstinence can backfire. Resisting an urge can trigger rumination and make the desire grow stronger.

  •We can manage distractions that originate from within by changing how we think about them. We can reimagine the trigger, the task, and our temperament.

  Chapter 6

  Reimagine the Internal Trigger

  While we can’t control the feelings and thoughts that pop into our heads, we can control what we do with them. Bricker’s work using acceptance and commitment therapy in smoking cessation programs suggests we shouldn’t keep telling ourselves to stop thinking about an urge; instead, we must learn better ways to cope. The same applies to other distractions like checking our phones too much, eating junk food, or excessive shopping. Rather than trying to fight the urge, we need new methods to handle intrusive thoughts. The following four steps help us do just that:

  STEP 1: LOOK FOR THE DISCOMFORT THAT PRECEDES THE DISTRACTION, FOCUSING IN ON THE INTERNAL TRIGGER

  A common problem I have while writing is the urge to google something. It’s easy to justify this bad habit as “doing research,” but deep down I know it’s often just a diversion from difficult work. Bricker advises focusing on the internal trigger that precedes the unwanted behavior, like “feeling anxious, having a craving, feeling restless, or thinking you are incompetent.”

  STEP 2: WRITE DOWN THE TRIGGER

  Bricker advises writing down the trigger, whether or not you subsequently give in to the distraction. He recommends noting the time of day, what you were doing, and how you felt when you noticed the internal trigger that led to the distracting behavior “as soon as you are aware of the behavior,” because it’s easier at that point to remember how you felt. I’ve included a Distraction Tracker at the back of this book on which you can note the triggers you experience throughout the day. You can download and print additional copies at NirAndFar.com/Indistractable; keep it handy for easy access.

  According to Bricker, while people can easily identify the external trigger, “it takes some time and trials to begin noticing those all-important inside triggers.” He recommends discussing the urge as if you were an observer, telling yourself something like, “I’m feeling that tension in my chest right now. And there I go, trying to reach for my iPhone.” The better we are at noticing the behavior, the better we’ll be at managing it over time. “The anxiety goes away, the thought gets weaker or [is] replaced by another thought.”

  STEP 3: EXPLORE YOUR SENSATIONS

  Bricker then recommends getting curious about that sensation. For example, do your fingers twitch when you’re about to be distracted? Do you get a flurry of butterflies in your stomach when you think about work when you’re with your kids? What does it feel like when the feelings crest and then subside? Bricker encourages staying with the feeling before acting on the impulse.

  When similar techniques were applied in a smoking cessation study, the participants who had learned to acknowledge and explore their cravings managed to quit at double the rate of those in the American Lung Association’s best-performing cessation program.

  One of Bricker’s favorite techniques is the “leaves on a stream” method. When feeling the uncomfortable internal trigger to do something you’d rather not, “imagine you are seated beside a gently flowing stream,” he says. “Then imagine there are leaves floating down that stream. Place each thought in your mind on each leaf. It could be a memory, a word, a worry, an image. And let each of those leaves float down that stream, swirling away, as you sit and just watch.”

  STEP 4: BEWARE OF LIMINAL MOMENTS

  Liminal moments are transitions from one thing to another throughout our days. Have you ever picked up your phone while waiting for a traffic light to change, then found yourself still looking at your phone while driving? Or opened a tab in your web browser, got annoyed by how long it’s taking to load, and opened up another page while you waited? Or looked at a social media app while walking from one meeting to the next, only to keep scrolling when you got back to your desk? There’s nothing wrong with any of these actions per se. Rather, what’s dangerous is that by doing them “for just a second,” we’re likely to do things we later regret, like getting off track for half an hour or getting into a car accident.

  A technique I’ve found particularly helpful for dealing with this distraction trap is the “ten-minute rule.” If I find myself wanting to check my phone as a pacification device when I can’t think of anything better to do, I tell myself it’s fine to give in, but not right now. I have to wait just ten minutes. This technique is effective at helping me deal with all sorts of potential distractions, like googling something rather than writing, eating something unhealthy when I’m bored, or watching another episode on Netflix when I’m “too tired to go to bed.”

  This rule allows time to do what some behavioral psychologists call “surfing the urge.” When an urge takes hold, noticing the sensations and riding them like a wave—neither pushing them away nor acting on them—helps us cope until the feelings subside.

  Surfing the urge, along with other techniques to bring attention to the craving, has been shown to reduce the number of cigarettes smokers consumed when compared to those in a control group who didn’t use the technique. If we still want to perform the action after ten minutes of urge surfing, we’re free to do it, but that’s rarely still the case. The liminal moment has passed, and we’re able to do the thing we really wanted to do.

  Techniques like surfing the urge and thinking of our cravings as leaves on a stream are mental skill-building exercises that can help us stop impulsively giving in to distractions. They recondition our minds to seek relief from internal triggers in a reflective rather than a reactive way. As Oliver Burkeman wrote in the Guardian, “It’s a curious truth that when you gently pay attention to negative emotions, they tend to dissipate—but positive ones expand.”

  We’ve considered how we might reimagine our internal triggers; next we’ll learn how to reimagine the task we’re trying to stay focused on.

  REMEMBER THIS

  •By reimagining an uncomfortable internal trigger, we can disarm it.

  •Step 1. Look for the emotion preceding distraction.

  •Step 2. Write down the internal trigger.

  •Step 3. Explore the negative sensation with curiosity instead of contempt.

  •Step 4. Be extra cautious during liminal moments.

  Chapter 7

  Reimagine the Task

  I an Bogost studies fun for a living. A professor of interactive computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Bogost has written ten books, including quirky titles like How to Talk About Videogames, The Geek’s Chihuahua, and, most recently, Play Anything. In his latest book, Bogost makes several bold claims that challenge the way we think about fun and play. “Fun,” he writes, “turns out to be fun even if it doesn’t involve much (or any) enjoyment.” Huh?

  Doesn’t fun have to feel good? Not necessarily, Bogost says. By relinquishing our notions about what fun should feel like, we open ourselves up to seeing tasks in a new way. He advises that play can be part of any difficult task, and though play doesn’t necessarily have to be pleasurable, it can free us from discomfort—which, let’s not forget, is the central ingredient driving distraction.

  Given what we know about our propensity for distraction when we’re uncomfortable, reimagining difficult work as fun could prove incredibly empowering. Imagine how powerful you’d feel if you were able to transform the hard, focused work you have to do into something that felt like play. Is that even possible? Bogost thinks it is, but probably not in the way you think.

  Fun and play don’t have to make us feel good per se; rather, they can be
used as tools to keep us focused.

  We’ve all heard Mary Poppins’s advice to add “a spoonful of sugar” to turn a job into a game, yes? Well, Bogost believes Poppins was wrong. He claims her approach “recommends covering over drudgery.” As he writes, “We fail to have fun because we don’t take things seriously enough, not because we take them so seriously that we’d have to cut their bitter taste with sugar. Fun is not a feeling so much as an exhaust produced when an operator can treat something with dignity.”

  Bogost tells us that “fun is the aftermath of deliberately manipulating a familiar situation in a new way.” The answer, therefore, is to focus on the task itself. Instead of running away from our pain or using rewards like prizes and treats to help motivate us, the idea is to pay such close attention that you find new challenges you didn’t see before. Those new challenges provide the novelty to engage our attention and maintain focus when tempted by distraction.

  Countless commercially produced distractions, like television or social media, use slot machine–like variable rewards to keep us engaged with a constant stream of newness. But Bogost points out that we can use the same techniques to make any task more pleasurable and compelling.

  We can use the same neural hardwiring that keeps us hooked to media to keep us engaged in an otherwise unpleasant task.

  Bogost gives the example of mowing his lawn. “It may seem ridiculous to call an activity like this ‘fun,’” he writes, yet he learned to love it. Here’s how: “First, pay close, foolish, even absurd attention to things.” For Bogost, he soaked up as much information as he could about the way grass grows and how to treat it. Then, he created an “imaginary playground” in which the limitations actually helped to produce meaningful experiences. He learned about the constraints he had to operate under, including his local weather conditions and what different kinds of equipment can and can’t do. Operating under constraints, Bogost says, is the key to creativity and fun. Finding the optimal path for the mower or beating a record time are other ways to create an imaginary playground.

  While learning how to have fun cutting grass may seem like a stretch, people find fun in a wide range of activities that you might not find particularly interesting. Consider my local coffee-obsessed barista who spends a ridiculous amount of time refining the perfect brew, the car buff who toils for countless hours fine-tuning his ride, or the crafter who painstakingly produces intricate sweaters and quilts for everyone she knows. If people can have fun doing these activities by choice, what’s so crazy about bringing the same kind of mind-set to other tasks?

  For me, I learned to stay focused on the tedious work of writing books by finding the mystery in my work. I write to answer interesting questions and discover novel solutions to old problems. To use a popular aphorism, “The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.” Today, I write for the fun of it. Of course, it’s also my profession, but by finding the fun I’m able to do my work without getting as distracted as I once did.

  Fun is looking for the variability in something other people don’t notice. It’s breaking through the boredom and monotony to discover its hidden beauty.

  The great thinkers and tinkerers of history made their discoveries because they were obsessed with the intoxicating draw of discovery—the mystery that pulls us in because we want to know more.

  But remember: finding novelty is only possible when we give ourselves the time to focus intently on a task and look hard for the variability. Whether it’s uncertainty about our ability to do a task better or faster than last time or coming back to challenge the unknown day after day, the quest to solve these mysteries is what turns the discomfort we seek to escape with distraction into an activity we embrace.

  The last step in managing the internal triggers that can lead to distraction is to reimagine our capabilities. We’ll start by shattering a common self-defeating belief many of us tell ourselves daily.

  REMEMBER THIS

  •We can master internal triggers by reimagining an otherwise dreary task. Fun and play can be used as tools to keep us focused.

  •Play doesn’t have to be pleasurable. It just has to hold our attention.

  •Deliberateness and novelty can be added to any task to make it fun.

  Chapter 8

  Reimagine Your Temperament

  To manage the discomfort that tugs us toward distraction, we need to think of ourselves differently. The way we perceive our temperament, which is defined as “a person’s or animal’s nature, especially as it permanently affects their behavior,” has a profound impact on how we behave.

  One of the most pervasive bits of folk psychology is the belief that self-control is limited—that, by the nature of our temperament, we only have so much willpower available to us. Furthermore, the thinking goes, we are liable to run out of willpower when we exert ourselves. Psychologists have a name for this phenomenon: ego depletion.

  Not so long ago, my after-work routine looked like this: I’d sit on the couch and veg out for hours, keeping company with Netflix and a cold pint of ice cream (Ben & Jerry’s Chocolate Fudge Brownie, to be exact). I knew the ice cream and the sitting weren’t good for me, but I justified my actions by telling myself I was “spent,” acting as if my ego were depleted (even if I’d never heard the term). This theory would seem to perfectly explain my after-work indulgences. But is ego depletion real?

  In 2011, the psychologist Roy Baumeister wrote the best seller Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength with New York Times journalist John Tierney. The book cited several of Baumeister’s studies demonstrating the ego depletion theory, including one notable experiment that showed a seemingly miraculous way to restore willpower—consuming sugar. The study claimed that participants who had sipped sugar-sweetened lemonade demonstrated increased self-control and stamina on difficult tasks.

  Recently, however, scientists have examined the theory more critically, and several have soured on the idea. Evan Carter at the University of Miami was one of the first to challenge Baumeister’s findings. In a 2010 meta-analysis (a study of studies), Carter looked at nearly two hundred experiments that concluded ego depletion was real. Upon closer inspection, however, he identified a “publication bias,” in which studies that produced contradictory evidence were not included. When factoring in their results, he concluded there was no firm evidence supporting the ego depletion theory. Furthermore, some of the more magical aspects of the theory, like the idea that sugar can increase willpower, have been thoroughly debunked.

  What might explain the ego depletion phenomenon? The results of early studies may have been authentic, but it appears the researchers jumped to the wrong conclusions. New studies show that drinking lemonade can improve performance, but not for the reason Baumeister believed. The bump in performance had nothing to do with the sugar in the drink and everything to do with the thoughts in our heads. In a study conducted by the Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck and her colleagues, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Dweck concluded that signs of ego depletion were observed only in those test subjects who believed willpower was a limited resource. It wasn’t the sugar in the lemonade but the belief in its impact that gave participants an extra boost.

  People who did not see willpower as a finite resource did not show signs of ego depletion.

  Many people still promote the idea of ego depletion, perhaps because they are unaware of the evidence that exists to the contrary. But if Dweck’s conclusions are correct, then perpetuating the idea is doing real harm. If ego depletion is essentially caused by self-defeating thoughts and not by any biological limitation, then the idea makes us less likely to accomplish our goals by providing a rationale to quit when we could otherwise persist.

  Michael Inzlicht, a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto and the principal investigator at the Toronto Laboratory for Social Neuroscience, offers an alternative view. He believes that willpower is not a finite resource but instead acts like an
emotion. Just as we don’t “run out” of joy or anger, willpower ebbs and flows in response to what’s happening to us and how we feel.

  Seeing the link between temperament and willpower through a different lens has profound implications on the way we focus our attention. For one, if mental energy is more like an emotion than fuel in a tank, it can be managed and utilized as such. A toddler might throw a temper tantrum when refused a toy but will, with age, gain self-control and learn to ride out bad feelings. Similarly, when we need to perform a difficult task, it’s more productive and healthful to believe a lack of motivation is temporary than it is to tell ourselves we’re spent and need a break (and maybe some ice cream).

  While we can stop believing our willpower is limited, our perception of willpower is just one facet of temperament. Several recent studies have found a strong connection between the way we think about other aspects of human nature and our ability to follow through.

  For example, to determine how in control people feel regarding their cravings for cigarettes, drugs, or alcohol, researchers administer a standard survey called the Craving Beliefs Questionnaire. The assessment is modified for the participant’s drug of choice and presents statements like “Once the craving for prescription opioids starts, I have no control over my behavior”; “The cravings for prescription opioids are stronger than my will power”; and “I’ll always have cravings for prescription opioids.”

  How people rate these statements tells researchers a great deal about not only their current state but also how likely they are to remain addicted. Participants who indicate they feel more powerful as time passes increase their odds of quitting. In contrast, studies of methamphetamine users and cigarette smokers found that those who believed they were powerless to resist were most likely to fall off the wagon after quitting.