290. Finding Balance in a Distracted World: Nir Eyal's Guide to Traction and Productivity

Welcome to episode 290 of the Brainy Business Understanding the Psychology of why People Buy Today's episode is all about becoming indistractable with Near Ayal.

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You are listening to the Brainy Business Podcast where we dig into the psychology of why people buy and help you incorporate behavioral economics into your business, making it more brain friendly. Now here's your host, Melina Palmer.

Hello hello everyone. My name is Melina Palmer and I want to welcome you to the Brainy Business Podcast. Today's episode is all about becoming indistractable with the amazing Nir Eyal. Nir was one of my very first guests on the show and I'm so delighted and honored to have gotten to know him over the years. He's been kind enough to write endorsements for both of my books and I have of course featured his amazing work in both of them as well as I have also featured his work on being indistractable and his hooked model in my column for Inc.com and in my classes. He has made something that is incredibly complex, like getting distracted, and made it so easy for anyone to master and overcome to help us be indestructible. Near will of course talk all about that in this refreshed episode, which originally aired in December of 2019. So if you're wondering why this episode and why now, well, it's because the guest I'm speaking with on Friday, Sam Evans, has worked with near in the past and we talk about him on the episode. And I love any excuse to share near with everyone.

So here we are.

Trust me when I say you're going to love this. Whether you've heard it before or it's brand new to you, know that there will be at least one gem or ten that will resonate with you today. As you prepare to listen to the episode, I encourage you to think about your goals. How distracted are you regularly? How productive, and not just getting through busy work, but really productive toward those goals. Where can you improve? Where and when are you most likely to get distracted? Be honest with yourself and just have that in mind. Hit pause and take some notes if you want and then get ready to have your whole world changed. Thanks to the amazing Near Real. Before we jump into the episode, I do want to remind you that the show notes with links to past episodes and books including Hooked and Indistractable, as well as articles and ways to connect with near, are all waiting for you in the show notes for this episode, which are found within the app you're listening to and@the brainybusiness.com 290.

All right.

Let'S get to Indistractable. Nira Al, welcome to the Brainy Business podcast.

Thank you.

So great to be here.

Absolutely. As you know, I love, love, love Indistractable. It's a wonderful book and I've talked about it a couple times I believe on the podcast already and haven't really talked much about Hooked, your first book. You do so much amazing work. Can you just give for anybody in the audience that's not familiar with you yet, can you tell us a little bit about near?

Sure, yeah.

Happy to.

So yeah, I would call myself what is starting to become a more popular job title of behavioral designer, meaning that I use consumer psychology, behavioral economics to.

Shape customers behavior through the technology we.

Use as well as helping people shape.

Their own behavior by understanding their cognitive.

Quirks and heuristics in their day to day life in order to form healthy.

Habits with different products and services.

So my first book, Hooked, was all about how to build habit forming products.

It's about how to create habits.

And my second book, Indistractable, is about how to break habits and how to make sure that we can get the.

Best out of these technologies without letting them get the best of us.

Absolutely. I love the way that it kind of came together. I was thinking about it as we were preparing for the interview, just that I'm sure when you wrote Hooked, you weren't even thinking about the second book of Indistractable, but how it really came full circle. And I love the story just as far as the root of how you came to decide to write the book Indistractable and the story with your daughter. Can you share that with the audience here?

Sure, yeah. So for me it was a very personal reason for writing a book. So the reason I write is not because I know the answer, but because I want to know the answer. If the answer is already out there, then I don't need to write a book to rehash something that's already been written. So I only write books when I can't find a satisfactory answer somewhere else. So with Hooked, I really wanted to uncover these techniques that companies like Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and WhatsApp and Slack all use to form such engaging habit form, you know, habit inducing products. Because I figured, you know, look, if they could do it, why can't we use the same techniques to help all sorts of companies use these tactics for good. Right? And that's exactly what's happened in the past five years, quarter million copies sold. And so many companies are using these techniques to help people form healthy habits in their day to day lives. So Kahoot gets kids hooked onto in classroom learning. Fitbod gets people hooked to exercising in the gym. There are apps that help people eat and get hooked on healthy foods like Bite foods. And I mean the list goes on and on of all sorts of industries that use these same tactics for good. And so that's really heartening. I'm really happy to see that. It's been a wonderful byproduct of writing this book that I wrote frankly for myself and then found that a lot of other people benefited from it as well. And then with indistractable. The reason I wrote that is because when I first started researching Hooked about what, seven, eight years ago, it's hard to remember this, but back then people were complaining about how technology is so hard to use and how it's only made for nerds. And wouldn't it be great if products were more usable and user friendly? Was kind of a buzz, buzzword back then. Well, today the tides have really turned. People are complaining about how products are so easy to use that we want to use them all the time, which was unheard of back then. And so now what we found is that, you know, sometimes these products are so well made and because they're made to be so persuasive and pervasive, sometimes it's hard for us to stop using these things. And that's kind of the situation I found myself in that a few years ago I was with, with my daughter one afternoon and we had this beautiful afternoon planned where we could just spend time together. And we had this activity book that daddies and daughters could use to kind of get closer to each other and just do various games and activities. One activity was to make an origami boat and another one was to fly paper airplanes. And one of them was to ask each other this question of if you could have any superpower, what superpower would you want? And I remember her asking this question and I remember it verbatim, but I can't tell you what her answer was because in that minute I was distracted. I was looking at my phone. I don't remember what I was looking at on my phone, but I know that it was not very important that I did not need to be looking at my phone. And my daughter got the message that whatever was on my device was more important than she was. And so when I, you know, finally looked up from my phone, I realized that she had left the room, she went to go play with some toy outside. And I got the message that this was a problem, that this, this wasn't a healthy thing to do. And as an industry insider, you know, I know how these products work and I know how they are designed to hook us. I wrote the book, after all. And so I figured that, look, if I was struggling with this, that maybe others would have a similar problem. And so I decided to read about everything that's been written about this. I bought, you know, seemingly 100 books on the topic, and they all basically came to the same conclusion, which is that the technology is the problem. Get rid of the tech. And so I did that. I went on a digital detox and I got myself a flip phone with no apps. And all it did was send calls and receive text messages. And I got myself a word processor from the 1990s, no Internet connection. And I figured, okay, now I'm going to be able to focus on my work now. I'm going to do what I finally say I'm going to do. And I would still get distracted. I would clean my desk, I would take out the trash. I would, you know, see a book on my bookcase and say, oh, you know what, I probably should do some more research instead of doing what I really wanted to do, which was to actually write the darn book I was working on. That's when I realized that the problem was much deeper than the technology. That the technology is what's called a proximal cause it's the symptom of a larger dysfunction. Because how could it be that even though I got rid of the technology, I still got distracted? And when we look at the history of this topic, it turns out that people have always been distracted. This generation, people are complaining about the mind melting powers of smartphones. But before that, I remember when I was a kid, it was about Super Mario Brothers and Dungeons and Dragons and television. And before that, it was the radio and the phonograph and the novel. I mean, literally every single one of these things, you can look back and people use the exact same words word for word that people are using today to describe the mind melting, distracting powers of technology were used to claim all of these things for distracting us all the way far back as Plato. Plato talked about this 2500 years ago. He called it a krasia, the tendency that we all have to do things against our better interest. And so, you know, this made me wonder that, you know, wow, if distraction is such an old problem, if it's been with us for at least the past 2,500 years. Maybe it's not really the technology that's the root cause. Maybe there's something else going on here. And so that's when I started to decide to use what I learned building habit forming products to try and understand how to break these bad habits that don't serve us. And so that's when I started this journey to find an answer that actually worked. Because a lot of the books that say, well, just get rid of your technology. It's really nice for a professor who doesn't have a social media account to say, but, you know, I live in the real world where I want to connect with my friends on social media. I want to reach my audience through these tools. They're wonderful. And so the answer can't be so black and white. It's lazy thinking, I think, because I really do believe we can find ways to get the best of these tools without letting them get the best of us.

Oh, absolutely. And I know we talked a little bit before we started recording about. I wrote an ink article for my column about the book and some of the ways that I've been able to use the advice from Indistractable, including. So I have two things that I want to make sure we talk about. One is, I love this. It's such a silly thing that I never really put two and two together. As far as, you know, the opposite of distraction is traction, which is the silliest thing to say.

That took me five years.

Okay, that's not silly.

Okay, I feel better. I feel better. It's so obvious. You know, the best ideas and the, the most solid concepts are the ones that you look at and, you know, kind of that smack my head emoji comes into your brain to keep it in the tech space. But of course, of course, the opposite of distraction is traction. It's so simple. But then applying that beyond to like you were saying about social media in today's world, if you want to write books and have a podcast or whatever it is that you're wanting to do, consulting people look to channels to see how many people are engaging with you, where are they, what are they doing? And so there's this need to be on social media to gain traction toward the goal of being a thought leader, let's say. But then there's a point where you can very quickly stumble into distraction. Like you're saying of, you know, I'm just going to research a few more things or, you know, I need to be on instagram for my business. So I'm just going to scroll through stories for an hour and be inspired or something. So can you talk a little bit about some of the tools for helping to find balance? One of the things I love, actually, is the book is just full, full, full of. You know, try this app, try this thing. I use this on my phone. I use this on my computer. So if you have also some of your favorite tools that you use that are worth mentioning and knowing that they're referenced in the book as well, that would be great.

Sure. Yeah.

Yeah.

So that. So you've read the book and digested it. I'm so honored that you did. But let me just back up a little bit to kind of get everyone on the same page who's listening. So it's important to understand. I'm a big semantics guy. I really care about how we use language because it's hard to understand an idea unless you understand precisely what both parties are talking about. So the best place to understand, to start understanding distraction is to understand the opposite of distraction. And so, as you said, the opposite of distraction, most people will say it's focus. I disagree. It's not focused. The opposite of distraction is traction. That if you actually look at the entomology of both words, they both come from the same Latin root trajare, which means to pull, and they both end in the same six letters. A, C, T, I, O, N. That spells action. So traction is any action that pulls you towards what you want to do. And the opposite of traction is distraction, any action that pulls you away from what you plan to do. So this is really important for two reasons. One, anything can be a distraction.

So, as you said, you know, this.

Would happen to me all the time. I would sit down at my desk and I'd say, okay, now I'm gonna write. Now I'm gonna do what I said I'm gonna do.

Now I'm gonna do that thing that.

I've been procrastinating on, whatever it might be, right after I check email, right after I check that Slack channel, right after I just Google something real quick. Things that feel worky, they feel like they're productive tasks, but if it's not, what you plan to do are just as distracting. Because by definition, distraction is anything that pulls you away from what you plan to do with intent. And so anything can be a distraction. And this turns out to be a much more pernicious form of distraction. You know, it's pretty obvious when you're checking Facebook, when you're scrolling Instagram when you're watching a YouTube video when you shouldn't? What about when you're checking email when you shouldn't? What about when you're going into a meeting because someone says, oh, you know, come in this meeting real quick when you don't need to be in that meeting? Those are also distractions. So that's very important. Anything can be a distraction. And the converse of that. The second really important point here is that anything can be traction. And I think this is a much healthier perspective when it comes to considering our technology because of all the stupid rhetoric out there about how addictive it is and how it's hijacking your brain and all this rubbish that's perpetuated, you know, ironically, by media that's in the same exact business of selling your eyeballs and selling your attention as these tech companies. You know, the fact is that these tools are not bad. They're great if you use them on your schedule.

And so you can turn anything into traction by planning time for it.

So this ridiculous moral hierarchy that's. That some people profess that, oh, video games, that's inferior to me watching three hours of football on tv. Why? There's no difference. There's no difference. The difference is whether you plan it or it's something that you do that controls you, whether that's something that you did on somebody else's schedule as opposed to on your schedule. So if you make time for it in your day and it's in accordance with your values, enjoy it, do it. And so that's the big idea here, is that we can turn anything into traction as long as we make time for it. And so what I advocate for part of becoming indistractable, just to help define what this word indistractable means. It's about living with personal integrity.

It doesn't mean you never get distracted. It means you know why you got distracted and you can do something about it so that you don't keep getting distracted by it. You know, there's that saying that insanity is defined as doing the same thing, expecting different results. How many of us go day after day after day not doing what we say we're going to do? We say we're going to exercise.

We don't.

We say we're going to eat right?

We don't.

We say we're going to be fully present with our kids and our loved ones, but we check our phones. We say we're not going to procrastinate.

At work, but we do why we.

Keep doing this Day after day, and we don't figure out why. I'm patient zero here. This happened to me more than anyone. And so that's really what I wanted to get down to.

The root cause of is how do we identify distraction? How do we do something about it so that we can live with personal integrity, so that we can be as honest with ourselves and as we are with other people?

I love that. So I guess the most obvious question that follows up from that piece is, so how do we do it? And I know we read the book.

But.

In the short space here, as far as you talk about time, blocking and planning, properly setting goals, right?

So that's step number two. Let's talk about step number one. Step number one has to do with what prompts us to either traction or distraction. And so one thing sends us towards actions that are traction or actions that are distraction. And those are triggers. Now, there are two types of triggers. We have external triggers. These are the pings, the dings, the rings, all of these things in our environment that lead us towards traction or distraction. So if an external trigger, like your alarm clock, your phone, for example, says, hey, it's time for that meeting, or it's time to go work out, or it's time to do that thing you plan to do, well, now it's leading you towards traction. But if it's, you know, notification on your phone that. That. That pings you, because Facebook has a notification for you when you're with your daughter, well, now that's leading you towards distraction because you plan to be with your daughter, as it. As was my case. So they're not necessarily good or bad. It's about to what ends, Right? So is the trigger serving you, or are you serving it? So those external triggers are important. We can get back to what to do about the external triggers. But it turns out that by and.

Large, the most common source of distraction are not the external triggers, not the triggers that start from outside of us, but rather the external. The triggers that start from within.

It's what we call the internal triggers. And this is. This is very, very important, because if we don't understand why we get distracted, what's the real root cause of the problem? We're always gonna blame something, and we're gonna blame the symptom, not the disease. And so what I put forth in this book is that the root cause, the real disease here is that we are uncomfortable with our emotions, that we do not know how to deal with discomfort in a healthy manner. And so what we do to alleviate that discomfort is some source of distraction, whether it's the obvious stuff like spending too much time online or working too much or watching too much television or drinking too much or doing whatever it might be to get out of our heads. So before we talk about why do we do things against our better interests? Plato's question from 2,500 years ago. In order to answer that question, we have to take a more basic question. We have to ask ourselves, what's the nature of human motivation? Why do we do what we do? That's the real first principles question. Not only why do we do things against our better interest, but why do we do everything right? And it turns out if you ask this question, most people will tell you it's about carrots and sticks, right? This is called Freud's pleasure principle. That everything we do is about the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain. But that's not exactly true. That neurologically speaking, really what's going on in the brain is not about the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pleasure, pain. But the way the brain gets us to act is through one thing, and that is by spurring discomfort. That, in fact, we have two neural circuits. We have two brain system. One is the liking system, and one is the wanting system. And the purpose of the liking system is to encode a memory. And the purpose of the wanting system is to create discomfort for us, to get the thing that we have encoded as a pleasurable response. Because, remember, the brain doesn't do what feels good. The brain gets us to do what felt good. And in fact, all motivation is spurred by a desire to escape discomfort. Physiologically, this is obvious, right? So if you go outside and it's cold, you put on a jacket. If you go back inside and now it's too hot, you take it off. If you feel hunger, you feel hunger pangs. That's not comfortable. So you eat. And then when you eat too much, oh, that doesn't feel good. Now you feel stuffed, you stop eating. So physiologically, that's clear. Psychologically, the same principle holds true, that when we are feeling lonely, we check Facebook. When we're uncertain, we Google. When we're bored, we look at sports scores, the news, stock prices, Reddit, Pinterest. All of these things cater to uncomfortable emotional sensations. And so we're using distraction as psychological pacification. Even the pursuit of pleasurable sensations is itself psychologically destabilizing. Wanting, craving, lusting desire. There's a reason we say love hurts. Because neurologically, that's exactly what's going on. So that means the big conclusion here that if all behavior is spurred by a desire to escape discomfort, that means that time management is pain management. That unless we learn tactics to cope with discomfort with the real reasons, we are looking to escape an uncomfortable sensation. If we don't deal with that fact, we're always going to be distracted by one thing or another. And so that's really the first step, is to master these internal triggers.

Ooh, that's a big first step.

It's a big first step, but it's the most important. It's one we can't skip over. Because, look, there are so many books out there with a bunch of tactics. You know, grayscale your phone and turn off notifications and blah, blah, blah. Okay, that's nice, right? That's kindergarten stuff, though, right? The fact of the matter is, if you are in some, you know, I profile in the book a friend of mine. She's become a friend of mine since doing this research by the name of Dr. Zoe Chance, and she teaches at Yale. And it's a fascinating story. The reason I profiled her in the book is because Dr. Zoe Chance became addicted, and I don't use that word sparingly. She became temporarily addicted. Not to a drug, not to a social network, not to her phone, but to her pedometer.

I love this story, right?

It's very strange.

You know, people. And here's the thing. Any analgesic can be potentially addictive. And this is why people get addicted to all sorts of stuff. People get addicted to. To exercise. You've seen them, right? We know these people who exercise way too much. People get addicted to reading too much news. People get addicted to Tylenol. People get addicted to religion. People get addicted to all sorts of things to a detrimental degree. Why? It's never just about the substance or the behavior. It's about what else they are escaping from, right? And so that was exactly the case with Dr. Zoe Chance. I don't want to give away the punchline of what she was escaping, but the fact that she got addicted to this pedometer was not just about the pedometer, right? Many of us would think, oh, I would love to get addicted to my pedometer, then I could get in shape. But for her, it became an unhealthy behavior because she was escaping something. And so something psychological, something that she needed to get away from in her life. And the fact is, if we don't deal with that fact and either fix the source of the discomfort, whether that's a toxic work Environment. You know, there's a whole section of the book about why distraction at work is a symptom of cultural dysfunction. If that's the source of your pain, is that you go to work every day and you feel horrible. You know, I remember when I used to work at my first job out of college. I worked at the Boston Consulting Group, which is one of the companies I profile in the book that has made a massive cultural turnaround. But at the time, my God, every Monday, it was a real struggle. I hated my life back then because I would work in this very toxic work environment that demanded that I was always on. And it's been shown that these type of work environments are actually causally related to depression, anxiety disorder at work. And so there is a type of work environment that is literally driving us crazy. And so we need to address that. And so what we have to do is either fix the source of the discomfort, whether it's a toxic work environment, a difficult home situation, whatever it might be, or for the problems we can't fix in our life, we have to find ways to cope with that discomfort in a healthier manner. And so I show you how to do that.

I love that. And like I said, and we won't give away the punchline of Dr. Chance's full story, but when we say addicted, like when you say she was addicted to her pedometer, it wasn't just that, you know, you want to hit your 10,000 steps a day or whatnot, but that she had. I remember it was, you know, a notification at, you know, 11:00pm or something that if you hit, you know, if you just do, you know, 3,000 more steps, then you can get this little badge or something. And she went and was doing stairs up and down and up and down like a robot instead of going to sleep like she should have been doing.

Yeah, yeah, that's. That's right. So as she kept, you know, the tools clearly was designed to engage her. It was designed to keep her stepping, because for most people, that's what they want. Right. When you buy a pedometer, you buy because you want it to help you be more physically active. But of course, she was using it to such an extent that she was using the device to escape her life. She had some real issues going on in her life that she needed an escape from. And some people escape it with drink. Some people escape it by zoning out, watching too much tv. Some people escape it with. With all sorts of things. And so in her case, she was zoning out. She was escaping her real life through this virtual life that her pedometer was stimulating such a.

It's. It's funny to look back on and see it, but we all know that we've done one of these versions at least once, right? It's not. What I love about the book and the stories and everything that's here is you can relate to every single one. Even where I've never been so inclined to take steps that I, you know, got up and started marching my stairs in the middle of the night. But I understand the desire to, you know, escape from something, whether it's writing an episode in my case, or, you know, working on something else. So.

And by the way, just to interject. Sorry to interrupt. No, that escape is not necessarily bad. Right. One of my beefs with, I think, the self help industry these days is that there's this perception, because you can make a lot of money saying this, that if you're not happy all the time, that something's wrong with you. And then, of course, if you buy my book, if you buy my program, I'll tell you how not to be sad anymore. I'll tell you how to always be happy. And nothing could be further from the truth that we are designed for dissatisfaction. Evolution has made us perpetually perturbed. When you think about. I know the listeners to your show are familiar with things like hedonic adaptation, like rumination, like boredom. I mean, these things are hardwired into us to keep us perpetually searching, perpetually wanting more. You know, we are not designed by evolution to be satisfied.

I mean, think about it.

If there was ever a tribe of Homo sapiens that was happy all the time, that was satisfied with life, that everything was just hunky dory, well, that tribe was probably killed and eaten by our ancestors. That would not be an evolutionary beneficial thing. The fact that we are constantly striving and searching and wanting and craving is what helped our species progress. Right. It's what helped us hunt and create and search for more. So the idea here isn't to beat ourselves up when we have these uncomfortable sensations. That's part of being a human being. It's about channeling them towards traction rather than distraction.

Yeah, absolutely. This. So one of the reasons that I love the timing of when this book came out works really well with. I'm in the midst of, basically this quarter is really focusing on mindset and all the different aspects of how we approach our life and work. And I've been saying through all of it, this same issue that you're talking about here where our brains are wired for mindset issues. And if you have somebody that says, you know, you do the thing and you can get over it and then you'll be done, that doesn't happen. That's not the way that it works. You know, there you pull the big dandelion, and you see three smaller weeds below it that you had never noticed before because this one was taking up so much space and mental attention. But now that it's gone, you can focus on the next thing and like you said, you know, getting at the root, the main cause of what's there. But the distraction could always be there. And if you don't know what I love you say in the book, if you don't know what you're distracting yourself from, you can't call something a distraction unless you know what it's distracting you from. Which I think gets back to the point of goals and setting those proper goals for yourself.

Yeah, no, that's a great lead into the next step. So we talked about traction. We talked about distraction. Step two to becoming indistractable after we master those internal triggers. There's many. We're just touching the tip of the iceberg here. But there's a lot of things that we can do to make sure that we can master those internal triggers. I basically break it down to three things. We can reimagine the task, reimagine the trigger, and reimagine our temperament. And a lot of this back to mindset. A lot of this actually has to do with reimagining our temperament. And it turns out that the way we view these problems in our life makes a huge difference. And I just to back up a bit, because mindset is so important. You know, we know that the number one determinant of whether an alcoholic can stay sober after rehab is not their level of physical dependency. It's their belief in their own power to change. That's amazing. Right? Think about that. It's not what's going on chemically in their body. It's what's going on in their heads, right? If they believe they can do something about the problem, they can do it. Whereas if they believe, oh, there's nothing I can do, of course they don't do anything about the problem. And so this is why I'm on this mission. This is why I'm so adamant about this. Because the popular narrative these days has moved from skepticism about technology, which I think is a healthy trait. We should be skeptical about any new technology, because every new technology on a massive scale is going to have problems along with solution. However, I think we're moving towards this state of cynicism that there's this popular fear as happens with every moral panic. By the way, this is not unprecedented. It's happened with every moral panic throughout the years that now these technologies can do no right. And I think that's very dangerous because we know that there's this phenomenon of learned helplessness. This is exactly why alcoholics who believe they're powerless don't get better because they believe there's nothing they can do about the problem. And so this leads to learned helplessness. And I think that's exactly what's happening today when it comes to our relationship with technology and other distractions. People are telling us it's hijacking your brain. They're telling us that everyone's getting addicted and believing this rubbish that is not scientifically supported is making it true.

Right.

And that's what is so dangerous about this, that if you believe, oh, well, there's nothing I can do. My kids are acting crazy because of Facebook and Fortnite. Well, then you don't ask yourself, what are they doing? What are they getting out of these things? Why are they using them so much? And you don't uncover the deeper truths of what's really happening.

Absolutely. That's. I'll make sure to link to the episode on availability bias in the show notes for the episode, which is that, you know, when we see something a lot, we believe it more.

Right.

Frequency becomes truth in a lot of that. I believe. Was it in the book. I believe you talk about how sugar and the parents treated their children differently when they were. When they were told that they had had a lot of sugar versus when they hadn't and thought that they were acting up even though there was no truth.

Yeah. I like to. If you're the kind of person who likes to read a book and say, huh, I didn't know that there's a lot of that in this book.

Because I love that.

Like, when someone can overturn my apple card, I love it. That's the kind of book I most love to read. And so the book is full of myths from the ego depletion myth. This idea that willpower is a limited resource. That's not really true, it turns out. Well, we don't think it is. The studies don't replicate to this idea of the sugar high that I'm very convinced does not exist. There's been meta studies now that show that this idea that your kid becomes crazy when he eats Too much sugar. That's definitely not true. What is true is that parents act crazy when their kids are given sugar. In this study, they gave kids a placebo and they told their parents that they'd been given sugar. And the parents were recorded to follow their kids around and to rate their kids as acting more crazy and treating them differently even when their kid wasn't given sugar. And so it turns out that what's making kids crazy is their parents berating them too much. And yet we as parents, we all believe in this sugar high myth, right?

Because it's very convenient.

It's called motivated reasoning.

We really want to believe that there's something that's making our kids act like jerks, right? And so today it's social media, right? And it turns out that the evidence is really, really scant that there's really not much good science that shows that's the case. Not that there aren't negative effects, but the story is much more, more nuanced that it's really about who is using, how much they are using, what they are doing when they are using, and what are they doing instead of using.

Right?

So one of the things that we don't hear much about is all the good stuff that's happened over the past several years. So for example, with the one exception of teen suicide, which is now from a historic low around 2014, now we see it's gone up to around the level of the 1980s. So it's not at an all time high. It's about where it was in the 1980s.

We don't know why it's gone up.

It's only going up in rural America. That's not a fact that many people know. It's not happening in cities, it's not happening in other OECD countries, which doesn't really make sense with the hypothesis that the technology is doing this to our kids. There's some cancer going on in the heartland that we don't really understand. It might be lack of availability to healthcare, we're not really sure, but it's not the technology. The data just doesn't support that. And furthermore, if we're going to blame technology and what's happened to kids since around 2008 to now, what people don't often think about is, you know, look, this stuff doesn't exist in a vacuum, right? What about all the good stuff that's happened from, from, if you look at from 2008, from the time that cell phones started to really proliferate among teenagers and adults, this has Become the safest time in history to be a kid in America.

Right?

So truancy, record lows. Pregnancy, record lows. Smoking, record lows. Drug use, record lows.

Murder rates, record lows.

Remember, this was the generation of the super predator. This was the generation that was supposed to terrorize us.

Remember?

You know, they built, in the 1990s and the early 2000s, they built prisons for this generation, expecting this boom of kids who would someday be these hardened criminals. That never happened. There are juvenile detention centers around the country, across the country, that are empty.

Why?

Well, let's ask ourselves. If you were to build a device to keep kids safe indoors, off the roads, right. Traffic accidents also, by the way, all time lows. Maybe you would invent a device like the computer game, like social media. So we have to also remember that we're not living in a vacuum here. If Facebook and Twitter shut down tomorrow, do we really think people would start reading Shakespeare and Chaucer in their free time? I don't think so. Go back to what they've always done to distract themselves. Right? So we have to.

We have to.

What I'm advocating for is not that tech is good, tech is bad.

Distraction.

You know, it can take many, many forms. It's not a new problem, and it's a nuanced discussion. And I think that's what's really missing is that our brain craves simple answers, and simple answers always get us into trouble.

Right?

Whether it's scapegoating a particular race, a particular political affiliation, Anytime we want a simple solution to our problems, that simple solution most of the time is dead wrong. And that's exactly what we see happening today with this boogeyman of technology distraction.

Absolutely. And I actually just wrote an article about the Nobel Prize in economics, went to, you know, research in trying to encourage education in schools and some amazing work that they had done in Kenya and India. And it seemed that the obvious answer of what was causing children to not do well in school was either that they were hungry or that they didn't have textbooks. That seems pretty. Those are pretty important things we would probably say. And so many people would have gone and said, you know, the problem must be that they don't have textbooks or that they're hungry. So we're going to. We started the nonprofit, we're going for it. Here we go. We're raising money to get, you know, textbooks for Kenya. But then this team actually ran a study and found out that actually neither of those had a statistically significant impact on the behavior in schools. And performance.

The problem was that teachers weren't showing up.

They had no incentive to be there. And so if they would have not looked for beyond what seemed like the really obvious cause, then they wouldn't have actually solved the problem and impacted millions of children in these areas that now are able to get to school because the teachers are incentivized properly to be there as well. Right.

So fascinating. There's always a deeper story, right?

Absolutely, Absolutely. And I love where you were saying too, about those just what seems like the. That will always find something to get us distracted. I was remembering as you were talking about, I've been doing some work for one of my corporate clients and to where the sales of gum went way down once the iPhone came out. And it's because we don't need to distract ourselves with chewing gum because we have a phone.

Interesting. I hadn't heard that stud.

Right. And so when you think about the checkout or all these places where you're now not paying attention because you can distract yourself with the phone so you're not looking up in the same way as you used to. So I'm really intrigued by that whole space right now. It's just fascinating to me.

Very interesting.

Yeah.

There's so many of these unintended benefits and unintended harms when we don't look at the big picture. But the idea with the book is really on a personal basis, you know, how can we ourselves not that I'm advocating for these tools. I mean, I want people to stop using the tools that they don't like that don't benefit them. Whether these tools are too much television, too much Fox News, too much, too.

Much work, too much whatever.

If it's not serving you, if it's something that you feel like you're serving as opposed to it serving you, I want to help you disconnect. And if that means, you know, not using Facebook anymore, that's fine with me. I'm not an advocate for these tools. It's really about doing what you want with intent as opposed to just letting.

These things distract you from what you really want.

Absolutely. Yeah. I think there's so much to be learned. And I'm going to also link to the episode, one of the episodes on defaults, because I know you talk about the default settings and how so many people are going to just use the screensaver that came with their computer or the default of how often something's going to ping you or notifications and whatnot, and you do have the power to turn those off. Just because they're the default doesn't mean they're the best for you, right?

That's absolutely true. So this leads us to the third step. So step number one is master the internal triggers. Step number two is about making time for traction. And then we didn't get into too much depth. Basically it's about using what's called an implementation intention where you're planning out what you're going to do and when you're.

Going to do it.

And then step number number three is hack back the external triggers. And as you said, it turns out 2/3 of people with a smartphone, 2/3 never change their notification settings.

Really?

Yeah.

Can we really complain that it's so addictive and hijacking our brain when we haven't taken 10 minutes to turn off those stupid notification settings? Why do we need Facebook and the New York Times and CNN constantly interrupting us throughout the day? What good does that do us?

And I'll say 10 minutes, that's a stretch. That's a stretch more 10 seconds that it takes to go ahead and change. I mean, you could reprogram your whole phone in 10 minutes.

That's true.

Get rid of everything.

There is a section in the book about how to hack back your phone. I put it in there in case you don't know how. It's not complicated stuff. I think it's like a three page chapter. That's easy stuff. That's kindergarten. I think the more pernicious distractions are the ones we don't realize are distracting us. So for example, one of the most important sections in the book is around this idea of hacking back the open floor plan office. Right? How much distraction comes to us from, you know, the form of a colleague saying, hey, can I tell you a bit of gossip? Or oh, I just need to talk to you for a quick sec. And it's never a quick sec. So one of the things that I discovered in this book is that we can use a very simple, explicit message to tell people, hey, I just need some time right now, okay? Please come back later. So every copy of the book comes with this screen sign. It's a piece of cardstock in the book that you can pull out, you fold into thirds and you put it on your computer monitor. And this came out of research that was done by a group of nurses at UCSF that found that this was a very effective technique. They use these plastic vests to reduce prescription mistakes by 88% by just telling their colleagues, hey, when I'm doing my drug rounds, please leave Me alone, right? And this simple technique saved countless lives. And the funny thing, or that's not funny, it's actually quite tragic that the nurses, when they were making these mistakes, they didn't even realize that the mistakes were occurring. They thought they were doing a great job until someone was killed or injured because they were given the wrong medication. And so the parallel here is very apt to the modern knowledge worker. We think we're doing a great job, right? We think we're awesome, right? And meanwhile we're making all these mistakes because we're interrupted and we don't even realize it. And so that's why something as simple as a piece of paper, a piece of cardstock that you put on your computer monitor that tells your colleagues, I'm indistractable, please come back later is incredibly effective. That simple message that says, I'm indistractable, please come back in a bit, it's a bright red sign, you can't miss it. And it's a life changer. And it's so simple, I love it.

I think that that's such a great tool. And for those of us that work from home, I believe your wife had something a little bit different that she uses.

Yeah, that's right. So my wife uses what we call affectionately the concentration crown because we both work from home. We have a little girl at home, my daughter, and many times she would come in and interrupt her. And so now she has this crown that she bought on Amazon that has these LED lights on it so you can't miss it. And when mommy is wearing the concentration crown, that means that she needs to be left alone for a bit. And it's very effective. Now, I don't think you should use a concentration crown at work.

Hey, you never know, Maybe, maybe work.

With children might not be a bad idea, but very effective technique for the home. But what's more important than the tactics is the strategy. It's more important that we understand that, look, distraction can really be boiled down to just these four big strategies. Mastering the internal trigger, making time for traction, hacking back the external triggers wherever we might find them. And then the fourth step is to prevent distraction with pact, which is where we make these pre commitments to keep us on track, to make sure we do what we say we're going to do. And so there's lots and lots of tactics in the book. But again, I think that tactics are what we do, strategy is why we do it. And so the more important thing I want people to remember are that there's only four steps to becoming indistractable, to doing whatever it is you want to do, spending your time the way you want to spend your time. That's it. I boiled down five years of research into just four steps. That's all you need to do.

Fantastic. Making it easy for us.

That's right.

At least easy to follow. As we were talking about with the mindset work and with everything on indistractable, you know, since we're hardwired to behave in these ways, it's easy to grasp, but getting it done requires diligence and focus. It's not just. And you never are 100% going to be there to where, like you said, you can rest on your laurels and say, oh, good, now I've. I've done it. Now I'll never be distracted again.

Yes. I'm so glad you said that. Because, you know, there's this perception when somebody hears about this topic, they say, wow, this seems like a lot of work. And if you do everything all at once, it's a lot of work. But I'm not asking you to do everything all at once. I'm asking you to find maybe one, one thing that you can do to start on this journey to become indistractable. Because becoming indistractable, you're never done becoming indestructible. It's like saying, you know, you're done becoming creative. That doesn't make sense. Right. Creativity is a macro skill that helps you do lots of things well. So you're never done cultivating patience. You're never done being creative. You cultivate this skill over time. And so the same goes for becoming indistracted. It's something that we can do small things and then add more when we're ready. To help us become indistractable over time, to help us live with personal integrity.

Yeah, absolutely. That's. I end every episode of the podcast and my email signature you potentially saw as we were engaging back and forth is everything I send ends with be thoughtful, you know, and then at the end is, you know, remember to be thoughtful is how I close out every episode of the podcast. Little play on the words of be is capitalized for behavioral economics. But this thoughtfulness that is more than just what you're looking for in the world, but it's about asking questions about to yourself as well as why you do things, why other people do things, just being inquisitive and trying to find what's out there. And I think it aligns so well with what you've uncovered here, with Indistractable. And the lessons and knowing that, you know, we're never done, we're always working toward a better version of tomorrow.

Absolutely. Couldn't say better myself.

Well, well, I appreciate that and I so appreciate you being on the show. Before we get into the. Where people can find you, is there any last tidbit, something that you wish you've been asked on an interview before or a favorite thing or what's next? You know, something along those lines?

Well, I think there's a central message. If I boil the book down to its essential mantra and something that I repeat to myself very frequently, it's that the antidote to impulsiveness is forethought. That as persuasive as these technologies or other distractions or temptations can be in the world, this is always a problem with self regulation in the moment. It's about impulsiveness, control. And so what's the solution to impulsiveness? The solution to impulsiveness is forethought, meaning if the chocolate cake is on the fork on its way to your mouth, it's too late. If the cigarette is lit and you're about to take a puff, you're going to smoke it. If the cell phone is on your nightstand and it's as far away from you as your lover when you wake up in the morning, when you go to bed at night, you're going to reach for it because it's too late. So I'm not a big advocate of willpower and self control and self discipline. Those things tend to peter out. Those are very hard to become practical because you have to expend so much of it. We run out in the moment. So the antidote to impulsiveness is forethought. That by planning ahead, I mean, that is one thing that our species can do better than any other animal on the face of the earth. We can see the future with higher fidelity than any other creature. And so we should use that forethought. We should use this ability to see into the future, to plan ahead. And so that's really what becoming indistractable is about. It's about understanding that if we take steps today, we can prevent doing things we don't want to do tomorrow.

Absolutely. Having those goals, those priorities, everything set up, and then planning for it when you're in a cold state. So by the time you get to the hot state, you're not too tempted.

Exactly. It's about systems more than these. You know, depending on willpower or self control or self discipline, those things you know, are very tough to actually make practical.

Oh, yes, absolutely. Well, again, thank you so much for being on the show today. And where is there will of course be links to Indistractable, the book where people can go and buy that. There'll be a link in the show notes, but I also want to link to where's the best place for people to find and connect with you if they want to, which I'm sure they will. This, this has been a fascinating interview.

Thank you. Yeah, absolutely. So my website is near and far.com near is spelled like my first name, N I r. So that's nirnfar.com and if you go to indistractable.com there is a free video course as well as an 80 page workbook that we couldn't fit into the final manuscript. It was too big. But it's a free tool you can use that's complimentary. You can just get that all@indistractable.com it's spelled in the word distraction A B L E. So indistractable. Com.

Awesome. Love, love, love it. We'll definitely put links to both near and Far and Indistractable in the show notes as well, as I know you're pretty active on Twitter and things like that.

So yes, absolutely.

We'll put some of those in the show notes as well. So thank you so much again for being on the show and hope to.

Speak with you again soon.

Absolutely. Thank you for having me.

Simply amazing. I loved listening back to that and I hope you enjoyed it as much as I enjoyed talking with me Near, I think even half as much and it would have been a really big treat for everyone. So as promised, links to contact near.

And get your own copy of Indistractable or Hooked are all linked in the.

Show notes along with any of the other episodes or things we reference throughout the show. And a huge thank you again to Nir for being here with us today.

So what got your brain buzzing as you learned about becoming Indistractable today? For me, I of course love some of the mic drop moments from near during this conversation. The two that always stick with me are the opposite of distraction is traction. And you can't call something a distraction until you know what it's distracting you from. Amazing. Perfect. Such gems. Don't those just change your whole world? As a reminder, we kicked off the episode with me encouraging you to think about your goal goals. How distracted are you regularly? How productive and not just getting through busy work, but really productive toward those goals. And what's changed in your mindset about that after listening to the episode. Where can you improve? Where and when are you most likely to get distracted? What will you do right now to help yourself become indistractable? And my top recommended next episode for you to listen to before Sam Evans.

Is here on the show on Friday.

Of course is on Bike Shedding, which I also call productive procrastination, as you get stuck on stuff that feels super important, but it's really a distraction that's also getting into bike shedding territory. So as you look for ways to reduce distraction and be more productive, that one's really going to help you on your journey. Whatever you choose to tackle first. It also helps to be accountable so you can overcome time discounting an episode which is also linked for you in the Show Notes. So come name it and claim it on social media. You can find me as the Brainy Biz pretty much everywhere and as Melina Palmer on LinkedIn. I'm sure Nir would love to hear about it as well, so be sure to tag him. He's at near aal n I R E Y A l on Twitter. And yes, all of our social handles are linked for you in the Show Notes as well. And as I mentioned at the top of the show, Nir and his work both on becoming indistractible and on the Hooked Habit model are featured in both what your customer wants and can't tell you and what your employees need and can't tell you. I've also written about near in an article on my Ink column and he has really great content on his blog. All those books and links in past episodes of the show, most of which hadn't been released when this episode first came out, are linked for you in the Show Notes, which can be found within the app you're listening to and at the brainy business.com290 and just like that, episode 290 on becoming indistractable with Nirreal is done. Join me Friday for a brand new episode with Sam Evans on Designing for the decisions. It's going to be a lot of fun. You don't want to miss it. Until then, thanks again for listening and learning with me, and remember to be thoughtful.

Thank you for listening to the Brainy Business podcast. Molina offers virtual strategy sessions, workshops and other services to help businesses be more brain friendly. For more free resources, visit thebrainybusiness. Com.