131: Indistractable with Nir Eyal

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What's next? This is a question we're all having to ask and answer more frequently. I'm Jenny Blake, your host of the Pivot Podcast and author of Pivot. The only move that matters is your next one.

For show notes from this episode, visit pivotmethod.com podcast if Change is the only constant, then let's get better at it. Here we go.

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Hello everybody. I am thrilled to be here today with Nir Eyal, who writes, consults, and teaches about the intersection of psychology, technology and business. Nir founded two tech companies since 2003, has taught at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and he is the author of two books. His first, Hooked how to build habit forming products and his latest, which is the topic of today's show, Indistractible how to control your attention and choose your life. He also blogs@nearandfar.com and that's spelled Nir N I R in case you want to go check out his writing. Nir, welcome to the show.

Jenny, so great to be here. Thanks for having me.

A little background. Nir and I met at an author mixer. That portfolio is a division of Penguin Random House that our publisher was putting on. And of course Nir is a really charismatic, wonderful guy in general. But as soon as he said the title of his book Indistractable, I was like, boom, gotta have you on the Pivot podcast. That's what it was like. I didn't even know I was fishing for guests operations, but as soon as I met you, I just thought we have got to talk about this.

Awesome. Thank you. I'm so glad we can make it happen.

Yeah, and we were talking about Cal Newport before we hit record who's his episodes are some of the most popular on the show and I'm so happy that you're taking it even further to talk about how we actually become indistractable. And I can't help but wonder which I wondered before and then I saw you directly start your book this way. But it must be so interesting for you taking this journey having written a book called Hooked. That became the go to book for so many of these now very addictive apps. To have built that on your first book, I wonder what the journey you've been on of kind of seeing how that book has been taken into practice now and the issues people are having with distraction.

Yeah, this is really the genesis. There's no way I would have written Indistractable without my history of writing Hooked. Hooked. I wrote Hooked about five years ago. Now. We're just coming up on the five year anniversary. I wrote Hooked because I wanted to democratize these techniques that companies like Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and WhatsApp and Slack, these companies that are building products designed to keep you engaged, that's not necessarily a nefarious thing. We want products and services to be engaging. But when I wrote Hooked, it was on nobody's mind that people might start overusing these things. Quite the opposite. The problem I was addressing is that most businesses out there make products that they wish people would use, that if they would only start using them, they could make their lives actually better. But the problem is most products out there people don't use, they don't use habitually. I wrote Hook so that we could take the same psychology from these big tech companies and use it for good. That's exactly what happened. Apps like Kahoot, which is the largest educational software in the world, uses the Hook model. Fitbod, which is a case study I write about in the new edition of Hooked, is a fitness app that uses the Hooked model to help people form a habit around working out in the gym. Paga is a company that brought millions of previously unbanked people in Africa online for the first time. We can use these habits for good now. What I realized shortly after writing Hooked is that I was becoming hooked myself, and not always in a good way. I talk about this in the book. I talk about how the moment of reckoning for me was when I was with my daughter and I had some time with her just to have some playtime together. And I remember that we had this activity book that daddies and daughters could look at together. And one of the activities in this book was to ask each other this question of if you could have any superpower, what superpower would you want? And I wish I could tell you what she said, but I can't because in that moment, I was distracted. I was looking at something on my phone and she very quickly got the message that I was prioritizing my screen instead of her. That's when I kind of realized, wait a minute, Wait a minute, wait a minute. There's a dark side here. And that kind of led me down this path to figure out not just digital distraction, but I wanted to understand all distraction because when I get into a topic, I go really deep. And so I bought every book I could possibly find on this topic. And they basically say the same thing. Every book on this topic basically says, get rid of the technology. Either a digital detox or a 30 day plan or get rid of it. I did that and it didn't work. It didn't work at all. And it didn't work. I should have realized it wouldn't work because the reason it didn't work is for the same reason that binge diets, sorry, fad diets, don't work. I used to actually be clinically obese at one point in my life. I no longer.

Amy, I would never know that.

Yeah, it's something I've always struggled with. But I remember when I was trying to lose weight, unsuccessful successfully trying to lose weight, I would go on these diets where I would cut out something from my life. Okay, I'm going to go on a 30 day, no fast food diet. But guess what happened on day 31. Right.

You know, I've been in a total binge. I've been in binge cycles myself where exactly. I never did the purge part, but I would definitely just double down. I remember those days exactly.

Exactly. Yeah. So I definitely experienced that many, many times in my life. And the reason I kept going on these yo yo diets and the reason they didn't work and the reason that these digital detoxes don't work, just like fad diets don't work, is that we're not addressing the real reason we get distracted. I originally wanted to write a book about digital distraction, but then I realized actually the problem is much, much deeper than that. There's, I think, a fascinating question when it comes to human psychology around why do we do things we know are bad for us? Why do we do things against our better interests? And we think this is a new problem. We think it's a problem that Facebook and Instagram and YouTube created. And nothing could be further from the truth. Socrates and Plato talk about the nature of Akrasia, this tendency that we have to do things against our better interest. 2500 years ago, the more I dug into this topic, I realized that this is just part of the human condition, that all of us struggle with distraction in one form or another. And so I really wanted to get to the bottom of the Psychology around. Why do we do things against our better interest? Why do we do things that we know we shouldn'? Because, look, if we take a step back, we basically know what to do, right? If you want to lose weight, you know what to do, right? Everyone knows that a chocolate cake is not as healthy for you as a healthful salad. We know that if you want to get closer to your friendships, to your relationships, you have to be there, be fully present for them. You have to make time for them. We know in our jobs that if you want to be better at your job, you have to actually do the work, right? You have to focus and get down to business. We know how to do this stuff and yet we don't do it. And so that was the bigger question for me. Why don't we do the things that we know we should? Why do we get distracted in the first place?

Right? What creates that opening? Even as you open the book, you say, I love sweets, I love social media and I love television. However, as much as I love these things, they don't love me back. It is that and it's very interesting. I'm kind of having an aha moment, Oprah style, which I've said previous interviews on this show. Every now and then when I have an aha, I do feel like Oprah, but that you're right. Social media, we tend to demonize these social media sites that are purposefully creating jackpot like scenarios and keeping us hooked. But at the same time, it must be filling a need that we wanted filled or some, you know, you say the first step is to recognize that distraction starts from within. And just like you don't recommend people become a Luddite or turn off technology, I love that in your book, you also steer clear of recommending mindfulness and meditation, which is thrown around everywhere nowadays, like, oh, are you feeling overwhelmed? Meditate, Meditate.

Yeah. And look, I want to be very clear here. I'm not anti meditation. There's a lot of evidence that shows it's very effective for people who do it. The problem is many people don't do it.

The only Solution, there's other 23 and a half hours a day.

Right? Right. And so if it works for you, keep doing it. Right. I have nothing against it, but if you're anything like I was, I meditated for a full year. I did it for 365 days. It didn't work for me. It didn't change any. It didn't make me do anything better in my life other than being a better meditator and if that's not the scenario for you, keep meditating. I'm not advising against it, but I wanted other techniques. I wanted more than just meditating. And one of the things I have to. I know I'm going to ruffle up some feathers here, but one of the things I didn't like about this more, let's call it a passive process of dealing with the problems that you have in your life from within, is that I think it's only half of the solution. Half of the solution I advise us in the book is about coping with discomfort. And meditation is one of those techniques. It's just one. I don't actually talk about meditation other than one time in the entire book where I say I will not be talking about meditation anymore. That's the only time I mention it. But there are lots of ways to cope with discomfort. But that's only half of the solution. The other half of the solution is doing something about the problem. Right? Sometimes we need to stop meditating and change the source of our discomfort. And sometimes it's a systemic problem. So there's a whole section in the book about how to change your workplace to become an indistractable workplace. And it's something that you don't have to be a manager to do. But the more research I did, I realized that a lot of what we see in terms of the distractibility that we feel today, it's not that we're addicted to our devices. For many of us, it's that we're addicted to the workplace or that we work in an environment that expects us to constantly be connected. And so that's not something we should blame the tech companies for. It's something that we should look at the company culture and try and change that company culture. But so that we can, we can make sure we can get the best of these technologies without letting it get the best of us.

There's so much great stuff here. I want to get into the distinction between internal and external distractions and even traction versus distraction. These definitions were so good and they just set the tone for the whole book because it just reminded me like an internal distraction is if I go check email every two minutes because I'm procrastinating on a big strategic task in my business. That's me procrastinating. It's not email's fault that I'm going every two minutes and checking it out of wanting a quick dopamine hit. But before we get into those definitions, you mentioned the hook model a couple times when we were just kicking things off and I would love to catch everybody up very succinctly. But what is the hook model? Because maybe people would find it interesting to know what tends to create that sense of being hooked on an app or process or a system of any kind. And then later I'm sure we'll get to how you can use it for good, toward the things you really do want to build as habits.

Yeah, yeah. So let's see, where should we start? So when it comes to this problem of distraction, people tend to be in two camps. They're either the blamers or the shamers. So let's start with the blamers. The blamers are the folks who say it's the distraction doing it. To me, it's the big bad tech companies that are hijacking my brain. And I will tell you that if you do not take steps to become indistractable, they're going to get you in this day and age. I'm telling you from the inside, I've worked with all of these big companies. I know how they work, I know what makes them so habit forming. I wrote the book on it. And I will tell you that they understand what makes you click and what makes you tick better than you understand yourself.

The way the hook model works is basically this four step design process built into the DNA, into the user experience of these products that takes people through a trigger, an action, a reward and finally an investment. And it's through successive cycles, through these hooks that preferences are shaped, that our tastes are formed and that these habits take hold. Hooked is all about how these companies do it. And the idea here is that we can use those same lessons for good. I didn't write the book for Facebook and the gaming companies and YouTube and they already know these techniques and they have for years. I wanted to get this out there for everyone else, building healthy habits inside their products. Again, if we don't take steps to make sure that we don't do something about it, then no doubt about it, these companies are going to get you. If you think that it's bad now, just wait a few years. Just wait until virtual reality becomes mainstream or I don't know, whatever else might capture the public's attention. It's only going to become more pervasive and more persuasive. That's the side of the argument that says let's blame the companies. Now where that argument I think doesn't hold water is that people tend to think it's their fault. It's these companies fault and there's nothing I can do about it. They're addicting us, they're hijacking our brain. And that's not true, right? That's where I draw the line and say actually no. And in fact, as I talk about in the book, believing that that is true actually makes it worse. It's called learned helplessness. And there's studies that find that when we believe we are powerless to resist something, it actually makes it worse. It makes us believe that we are powerless. I talk about in the book about ego depletion and how this idea of thinking that we have run out of willpower actually makes it so. So that can't be the solution. Blaming these distractions isn't the answer. And of course, distractions are always with us and they're never going away, right? We can't go back to 2005, before Facebook, before YouTube, before these companies existed. That's not possible. So we have to learn how to cope with them. So the other side, the other big contingency are the shamers. The shamers say, I'm broken, there's something wrong with me. I have an addictive personality.

I have a short attention span. And I want to asterisk this by saying there are people out there with an actual pathology, people who do have a real diagnosis. And that's a special category of people. But it turns out these are single digit percentages. What I find is much more common is people who do not have the diagnosis, who do not have a pathology, but act like they do. And this is a really self harming behavior. Because when we tell ourselves that we are deficient, that we're broken, it becomes so. It's almost like a placebo effect or what we call a nocebo effect, something that we believe that affects the way we act throughout the day. So neither of these two strategies of being a blamer or a shamer is very helpful. And the reason it's not helpful is because both of them utilize what psychologists call an external locus of control. Meaning that what happens to me is because of things outside of me. It turns out sometimes that very well is the case. You can't control the weather. That's something that happens outside of you. But it turns out that people who have an internal locus of control, people who think that they can affect the world based on their behaviors, those people turn out to be much happier in life, much more successful, even if they operate in the same socioeconomic circumstances. So the answer is not to be a blamer, is not to be a shamer. The Answer is to understand that these are behaviors. And behaviors can change. How do our behaviors change? The human species has this amazing quality that no other animal in the animal kingdom has, which is the ability to see the future. We can dream, we can plan ahead, and no other animal can do it the way we can. So the thing I want people to remember listening right now is that the antidote for impulsiveness, the antidote for distraction, is forethought that by planning ahead, we can beat these distractions if we know what to do. So it doesn't matter what kind of fancy algorithms or artificial intelligence, whatever they come up with, I believe. And the research I've done over the past five years has made me believe this stronger than ever is that we are more powerful than we think we are if we know what to do in advance to make sure that we don't get distracted later on.

So, so good. There's just. Oh my gosh, so much gold in there. A tweetable a minute. Wow, that's great. I love. I. You know, of course I've heard, you know, the unique quality humans have is our own mortality and planning for the future, but I've never heard it applied in this way that the antidote for impulsive action and distraction is forethought. That actually if we, if we the one of the biggest tools in our tool belt around all this is planning. And that's something I know you do talk about in the book around pacts and pre commitment. And I just want to read. There were these super helpful diagrams in the beginning. I know I mentioned traction versus distraction, but just you separating out these two things was so helpful. So you say that traction are actions that move us toward what we really want and distraction are actions that move us away from what we really want. And he has arrows, of course, going in either direction. And I love that you say.

You can't call something a distraction unless you know what it's distracting you from. And this is something I really emphasize in pivot and the pivot method as well, which is that you're not really going to get anywhere just thinking about what you're trying to avoid or what you don't like anymore, what you don't want, what you don't know, what you don't have, that doesn't propel you forward. And so it was very interesting to see the parallels here, that just identifying distractions isn't really enough to develop traction, to know what it is that you want. Instead, what are these distractions keeping you from? And then you can start to plan for that future state or plan your work environment as you said, to build toward what you want, not just what you're running away from.

Right, right. So maybe it's helpful. This is the kind of the limitations of this audio format. I wish I could put a picture in front of all your listeners eyes right now. But I'll try and paint that picture because I think it's a very useful model. Because look, some of these techniques you will have surely heard before. But what I discovered is even when people know some of these techniques, they don't use them holistically. They say, okay, this is the flavor of the day, everybody do this. Okay, no, that didn't work. Okay, everybody do something else. And it turns out that many of these techniques, just by sorting them into what category of problem they help us solve, we can know when to use the right tool for the job. So let me just paint this picture real quick so that we can kind of get this mental imagery in our head. So I want everyone to imagine a horizontal line and to the right there's an arrow that points towards traction. On the left there's an arrow that points to distraction. So traction, as you said, is any action that pulls us toward what we want. It's things that we do with intent. The opposite of traction is distraction. Anything that we do, any action we take that moves us away from what we really want to do. Now both words actually come from the same Latin root meaning to pull, trahare, which means to pull. And so we can think very clearly here about the difference between traction and distraction. Why? I think it's very important to recognize that this is not a book that casts moral judgment. I'm not one of these people that say.

Video games are bad or watching Netflix is bad, or watching YouTube is bad or whatever. People have been looking for pastimes forever. They need a way to decompress. There's nothing wrong with these things. And I'm not going to tell you to stop using these technologies if you find them entertaining, they're great. Right? There's nothing wrong with a pastime. The difference is that if you do something that's not on your schedule, something that you didn't do with intent, something that you were doing on the app maker's schedule, on the techmaker's schedule, as opposed to your schedule, that's when it's a problem. So I love this quote that I put in the book that says that the time you plan to waste is not wasted time. So for example, in my case, I Love social media. There's nothing wrong with social media. I use it every day. It helps me connect with friends, with loved ones, with my readers. I love it. But it has a place on my calendar. There's a place on my calendar every evening for social media, and that's when I use it again. By doing that, I took something that was previously a distraction, and by making time for it on my calendar, now, I have turned it into traction. That's exactly what I wanted to do. So now we've got. Okay, so we've got this number line. We've got this horizontal line. Traction on the right, distraction on the left. And now if you can imagine a vertical line with two arrows pointing to the center of the horizontal line. Now, those two arrows represent our triggers. And there are two types of triggers, external triggers and internal triggers. External triggers, you know these things, right? These are the pings, dings, rings, other things that prompt you to either traction or distraction. So if an external trigger on your phone says, hey, guess what? It's time to go work out, and then you do go work out, well, then that's an external trigger that prompted you to traction. That's great. However, if you get a notification, as I did when I was with my daughter and I had planned to be with my daughter, and yet I did something else, I started checking my phone. Now, that's an external trigger that prompted me towards distraction. Okay, so that's the external triggers. Finally, you have the internal triggers, which actually turns out to be the most important place to start. And this is where I didn't find any other book on the topic that really addressed this. And it turns out to be by far the most important part of becoming indistractable is learning to master these internal triggers. Internal triggers are uncomfortable states that we seek to escape. And so one of the. When I really got down to first principles around distraction, why do we do things against our better interest? I had to start with this question of, well, why do we do anything? What's the core of human motivation? And so many people will tell you that motivation is about the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain. This is called Freud's pleasure Principle. Turns out it's not true. Turns out all human behavior is motivated by a desire to escape discomfort. It's called the homeostatic response. So physiologically, we feel this, right? If you go outside and it's cold, that doesn't feel good. You put on a coat. When you go back inside, now it's hot, you take it off. So physiologically, we Know this all the time. We adjust our behavior, we adjust our environment to make us feel better. But the same exact rules apply to our psychological state. So when we're feeling lonely, where do we go? We check Facebook. When we're uncertain and we don't know the answer to something, where do we go? We Google it. And when we're bored, what do we do? Well, boredom doesn't feel good. So we go check the news. We look at Pinterest, we check Instagram, stock prices, sports scores, you name it. All of these products cater to this uncomfortable emotional itch that we seek to scratch. So one of my biggest revelations through this book was that if all behavior is prompted by a desire to escape discomfort, what that means is that time management is pain management.

So at the core of managing all our behaviors is understanding how to manage this emotional discomfort. I call it mastering internal triggers. So with this diagram of internal triggers, external triggers, traction, distraction, we have the four basic steps of the indistractible model, which are master the internal triggers, make time for traction, hack back the external triggers, and prevent distraction with pacts.

And what a beautiful picture you have just painted. So good. I'm so thankful that you just did paint that picture so beautifully and in a way, set the whole context of what we're talking about in these four dimensions. That line was yet another one of your brilliant game changers. If distraction costs us time, then time management is pain management.

Right?

Right Again, I've been reading, I've been geeking out on time management and productivity books because I love systems. I really do love systems and efficiency. I even love coding as a hobby kind of thing that I do. I don't do it full time, but I have never read those two things together. That time management is pain management and going to those internal triggers that try to minimize discomfort. And it's so subtle. It's so subtle and it's so unconscious.

Right. And it's not something. I'll be honest with you, it's not something I wanted to believe. Because what I wanted to believe was that technology is doing it to me. I wanted to believe. Right. I wanted to be a blamer. And this is what you said.

Monopolies.

Yeah. They're all doing it. By the way, there's lots of stuff that the tech companies are doing that I don't like. Right. Lots and lots of bad stuff.

So Paul Varillio said that when you invent the ship, you also invent the shipwreck. We're in the shipwreck phase right now. Lots of bad things going on out there. However, this one aspect, when it comes to distraction, this one aspect of Are they hijacking our brains? Are they getting us to do things we don't want to do?

Are we powerless to resist? The answer is no. And this is really what I want to fight. I want to fight this perception that we're somehow powerless because there is. There's so much we can do if we take these steps, if we use forethought to take these four relatively simple steps to make sure that we can get the best out of these technologies without letting it get the best of us. The trouble is that when we admit this icky, sticky, uncomfortable truth that time management is pain management, a lot of people are like, ooh, that's too woo woo for me. I'm not sure about all that. I don't want to deal with my.

Don't worry. This podcast got woo a long time ago. There's no one still here if they're weirded out by it.

Okay, good, good. So this is a friendly territory here. But this is so super important because the fact is, if we acknowledge that distraction starts from within, we realize that simply removing the tool of distraction, as I did, I talk about in the book how I went on this digital detox and I did digital minimalism, and I got rid of everything, and I got a feature phone and I got a word processor from the 1990s, and I thought, okay, well, this is the problem. Technology is the problem. If I just get rid of the technology, I'll be able to focus. But then when I sat down to write, I noticed that on the bookcase behind me, there was that one book I'd been meaning to check out. And my desk was a little cluttered. I should probably clean it up. And the trash, you know what? I should probably take out the trash. That's a good thing to do. That feels productive, right? Wrong. It's all distraction. Why? Because even if something feels productive in the moment, distraction tricks you. It makes you feel like, oh, you know what? Checking this email right now, that's kind of productive. That's kind of worky, isn't it?

It's working. That's great work.

Pseudo work. It's not real work. It's still distraction because it's not what you planned to do. So anything that you do without intent is a distraction.

I'm laughing because I'll often do a home yoga practice instead of going if I just. Just want to make sure I fit it in. There are times I'm in A down dog. Or I'm in some pose, a twist on the floor, and I look at a book. I have a stack of books in my room, and I look at it and I hone in and there's a book out of order. And I get up from my yoga and go fix the books. It's so crazy. It's like, I love books, but here they are. They've become. They've gone in that moment from something that I love and I do. That's very rewarding to a distraction. So I can't blame the books, but that's my neuroses. Or maybe me avoiding a pose. Maybe I got maybe even deeper. It's not just that, oh, the books were out of order, but maybe I was in a pose I was bored in. Or maybe I was just uncomfortable or I didn't really want to be doing the practice and instead of staying engaged, I just thought, well, no, now's the perfect time for me to go fix this.

Right? Right. And so a big part of look, being indistractable is not never getting distracted. Okay? That's not the definition of being indistractable. Being indistractable means we strive to do what we say we're going to do. It's about personal integrity. And what's funny is, you know, we are taught to never lie to other people, to always, you know, be good for our word. You never want to be called a liar. I can't think of a worse put down than someone saying, you're a liar. And yet we lie to ourselves all the time. We know what we want to do, and yet we don't do it. Now, that might sound harsh, but the idea here is that we can't begin to be honest with ourselves unless we can recognize the root cause of the problem. And so that's where taking a step back and saying, oh, okay, Nir talked about these internal triggers. Well, what's my internal trigger right now? What's causing me to want to get distracted? If it's not an external trigger, if it's not a ping, ding or ring telling you to do something you might not want to do, right, that's something you can fix. And I talk you to about how to do that in the section on how to hack back external triggers. If it's not a planning problem where you clearly made time for yoga so it's on your schedule, that's what making time for traction is all about. But if it was something else, there's only one other reason, and that's because it was an internal trigger. But simply recognizing that and saying, ah, I see what you're doing there, brain. I see what you're doing. You have an uncomfortable sensation and you're trying to get me to escape that uncomfortable sensation by making me do something I don't want to do. And even that kind of self talk, right? Even that kind of. With self compassion, right? We don't want to beat ourselves up. We don't want to be blamers and shamers. What we want to do is to talk to ourselves in a compassionate way, but in a thoughtful, understanding way to understand the deeper psychology behind why we do these things that we didn't want to do.

I'm glad you mentioned self compassion because that is an area that even though I had probably been reading personal development books for 10 years, I remember bristling like, ugh, self compassion. It's so annoying. And I just thought it was this annoying phrase. And then it's one of the things that changed my life. I mean, of course it's so vital to so much high functioning and I didn't really have it. I was often hard on myself. I was a perfectionist. And it wasn't till I read nonviolent Communication, which is incredible book. But there was specifically a chapter on self compassion and self talk. And I don't know why it was that book at that moment. And that chapter, it changed everything. I just really saw the importance of changing my own internal narrative around self compassion. And of course, Kristin Neff also has a book called Self compassion. But it was interesting that you could talk to me about mindfulness and meditation all day long. But there was such a period of time where someone self compassion I saw as over the line or too fuzzy or unuseful or. Or who has self compassion all the time. But especially around this. I'm just glad you mentioned it. Of taking that approach of well, isn't that interesting, brain? You know, it's not exactly waving shaving.

And for me, I wanted to, you know, I'm always very skeptical about these personal development tactics. I want to see the science. And it wasn't until I realized the science.

Understanding the science that I really bought into why self compassion is so important. And the evidence is really hard to refute. There's so much evidence out there that people who are more self compassionate are more likely to achieve their goals. They're happier in life.

Everything, it changes conflict.

Yeah, right. So many ways. But here's why it's so effective. Here's why self compassion is such an amazing thing to learn. I talk about in the book how to to be self compassionate. But the reason it works so well is that it diffuses this cycle of pain. If you think about it, right, if all behavior is motivated by a desire to escape discomfort, what happens when I do something I didn't want to do and then I beat myself up over it? I'm not self compassionate, right. I shame myself. What happens? I feel worse. And now when I feel worse, I need something to relieve that discomfort. Well, for many people it's to do more of that bad behavior. In my case, it was eating. I would eat because I felt crappy, not because I was hungry. It was an emotional relief. And so that eating didn't fix the problem. I felt bad because I had eaten so much, and then I ate so much because I felt bad. And we see this cycle repeating itself time and time again. When you insert self compassion, when you learn how to talk to yourself in a way that a friend would talk to you, that's when things change. That's when you can diffuse this cycle of beating yourself up in this constant pain cycle and instead do something that actually helps you out of that cycle of pain by defusing it with self compassion.

Thank you. I'm really glad you brought the science in as well. And it makes intuitive sense. Even if you're listening and you just think, oh yeah, why would beating myself up actually be productive? But that inner voice, that inner drill sergeant.

What I like, I like to do this exercise with coaching clients of the boardroom. In your brain, you're the CEO, but who are the characters? Who's on the board? There's maybe the rebellious child, there's the super strict school teacher or drill sergeant. There is some voice in your head, it thinks it's being helpful. It has a fear and it has a primary motivation. And it thinks it's being helpful to say, you idiot, how could you have eaten that whole cake by yourself? But then, you know, I. Cause I used to do that too. And I would think, well, food is my friend, it is comforting. But then I would beat myself up again that I had eaten whatever I just ate. And so that voice is trying to protect you from something it thinks is legitimate, but it doesn't work. You know, it's like ultimately, like you said, it creates another open loop that we then distract ourselves.

It's fascinating. Yeah, it's really. The more I delve into the science of even addiction, hardcore addictions, we see a very similar cycle. There's this case study I talk about in the book. It's one of my favorite studies in the book about these flight attendants, Remember that part? The flight attendants, the smoking flight attendants, where there's this theory widely held, that nicotine is this highly addictive substance, which appears to be very much so. But if something is addictive, the idea is that as it metabolizes in the brain, eventually you want more of it, right? So they took these two groups of flight attendants, both of them smokers, and one of them left from Tel Aviv on a flight to New York. And this is about an eight hour, nine hour flight. The other group of flight attendants left from Tel Aviv to London, I think it was. And this is like a three hour flight. And they asked these flight attendants to rate their level of cravings every 30 minutes. And so you would expect for these smokers, after the same amount of time had elapsed, you would expect both of them to equally crave a cigarette, right? Because it's, you know, the nicotine is metabolizing in the brain since the time that they had last taken a puff. And so they should both want to start craving a cigarette very, very badly after the same amount of time had elapsed. And that's not at all the case. It's not what happened. What happened was that both groups of flight attendants craved a cigarette most 30 minutes before landing. So it turned out it was the rumination about I can't wait to smoke, I can't wait to smoke, I can't wait to smoke that created this cycle of pain that there was no escape from other than lighting up. So when the flight attendants had landed in London and they were 30 minutes from opening the doors of the plane, that's when they craved it more. But at that exact same minute, the flight attendants who were on their way to New York were high above the Atlantic and they didn't report high cravings at all. So it's not, you know, addiction definitely has a biological component, but it turns out that the psychological component is equally, if not more, more powerful. That it's about how we think about our desires. Do we have tools to help diffuse this cycle of pain that is healthier than the only way to relieve this discomfort of wanting, wanting, wanting is to smoke. But might there be other ways to relieve that discomfort? And so what we learn from smoking actually applies to distraction. Whether it's giving into a chocolate cake you know you don't want to eat, whether it's not going to the gym when you know you should, whether it's working on that big project when you sit down at your desk. We can use these techniques. I cite acceptance and commitment therapy as having many of these techniques that we can use to diffuse this discomfort in a healthier manner as opposed to giving in to distraction.

There is another book that I'll put in the show notes for anyone listening. You can go to pivotmethod.com131 I'll put all the links and notes from this episode. But another book that really transformed how I thought about addiction and even incarceration because I do volunteer work, mentoring, business and career coaching in prison and with people. Post release. Gabor Mate wrote a book called in the Realm of Hungry Ghosts. Maybe you're familiar with. He's so awesome. And he. He really hit it home for me that addiction is not itself the problem. We often attempt to solve the addiction as its own problem. It's a person's attempted solution at a problem, a deeper problem. And almost always the theme in his book. Whether it's addiction, like hardcore drug addiction or even incarceration, every single person had some amount of childhood trauma, if not extreme childhood trauma.

That's right. There's another book that I would add called Lost Connections by Johann Hari.

I'll add it to the notes.

It's great. So he says that the opposite of addiction is not sobriety, it's connection. And why is that? Why is it so? And I think the reason we see this addiction epidemic today and there's a lot of misinformation about why this, this opioid epidemic is happening. Fundamentally, I think it's a connection crisis. It has to do with the fact that people are looking to deal with discomfort any way they can because the traditional systems of social support have collapsed underneath them. And so that's where we find. People are looking for an alternative. They're looking for an escape because of past trauma, because of a lack of a support system. And so we're discovering more and more that it's not just about the drugs. It's not about not just nobody steps on a heroin needle and becomes an addict. That's not the way it works. There's always something else going on in their life. The same exact thing applies when it comes to our distractions, when it comes to our devices and how we seemingly can't focus, we can't control our behavior. We have to ask ourselves, what are we escaping from? If you can't sit with your kid without looking at your phone like I did, let me tell you, the problem is not the phone. There was something deeper going on in my life that I wasn't addressing. And it wasn't until I addressed that stuff and learned healthier ways to cope with that discomfort that I could do what I really wanted to do.

On the flip side, you mentioned your daughter. I loved the part of the book on control, the inputs, not the outcomes. And you gave the example of the fun jar with your daughter. It's such a great idea. Can you just briefly share about it before we wrap up?

Sure, yeah. Yeah. So part of these four steps to becoming indistractable, we spent most of our time on the internal triggers, which is the most important phase, by the way, because none of the other techniques work unless you fundamentally dealt with those internal triggers. But the second technique is about making time for traction. So turning your values into time. So a lot of us talk a good game. I definitely did. Oh, what's important to you in life? Oh, definitely my family. Well, so if you looked at my calendar, would you see time in my calendar for the things I valued most? I'm embarrassed to say you didn't. And it turns out that for two thirds of people, they don't keep a calendar. So one of the most important lessons of writing this book for me was you can't call something a distraction unless you know what it distracted you from. So if there isn't something in your calendar that you plan to do for that minute of time, you have no right saying that Twitter or Facebook or the television, whatever distracted you. You have to plan your day. So part of the way I plan my day to live out my values is I have time in my calendar to be fully present with my daughter as I do to have time fully present with my wife, with my friends. It's in my calendar. Now, this sounds like it's difficult and that I'm super militant about the time. Quite the opposite. I actually do not have anywhere near as much self discipline as it sounds like. These techniques actually make it so that you don't need a lot of self discipline once you put these techniques into practice. In fact, I built an online tool to help me and other people. I'll give you the link for the show notes where you can make a schedule template for your ideal week so that in any given moment, you know, what is traction, whatever's on that calendar, and what's distraction, Anything you do that's not on that calendar, and then you can systematically look back and fix those sources of distraction. So when it comes to the fun jar and my time with my daughter, we have time on my calendar. When I spend with my daughter and to avoid this internal trigger. So what we did. So I would make time in my calendar, and then we'd kind of be like, okay, what do you want to do? I don't know. What do you want to do? What would that do? That would create this internal trigger of boredom. We would oftentimes reach for the quickest solution. Let's just watch some tv. Because TV alleviates boredom. I had to find a way to make it easier to do something that was helpful. One day we sat down and it was actually part of the fun. We wrote down 50 things that we can do in town that would be fun for us to do. When we rolled them up on little pieces of paper and we put it inside this little glass jar, it's actually right behind me right now as I'm talking to you. Every time we have some time to get on the calendar, we just take out the jar and we pull something out of it and we do it. Whether it's going to get an ice cream at an ice cream place we've been wanting to go to or go to a park or fly a kite or whatever it might be to museum. We just, you know, we've made it easier for us to do the things we want to do without having to sit there and think about it, right? So it's on my calendar and we've made it as easy as possible with this particular technique of a fun jar.

We should all have. A fun jar is such a good idea. And then it also removes that uncertainty in the moment or debating. So it's like you pull something from the fun jar. I just love that idea. It's so good for moving to a new place as well. The, the, the other technique, again, the book is full of them, but the other one I really liked and I look, I realized only in hindsight that I was doing is you say we can use the same neural hardwiring that keeps us hooked to media to keep us engaged in an otherwise unpleasant task. I realized I used to hate cooking. I didn't do it. Couldn't do it to save my life. Two things shift shifted that one, getting meal delivery services like plated or hellofresh. I actually have done trials of all of those meal kit services. But really what changed it for me was telling myself, when I'm cooking, I can listen to a podcast and my favorite ones. So now I'll either cook, listening to Super Soul Sunday or business podcasts, and it's a game changer. So now I don't mind cooking. I don't mind the 30 minutes or 40 minutes. Because I'm listening to a podcast and maybe someone might say, oh, I'm not present for the cooking and I'm baking a business podcast into this dinner. But for me, it gets me to do it and it makes it actually joyful to something that I would otherwise dread.

Yes, yes. This is a really important technique you probably saw in the book. I love overturning apple carts. A lot of stuff in the book is, huh? You've been told one thing, but actually not so much. Another urban legend is this idea that you. You can't multitask. Turns out you can multitask if you do it correctly. And so you can't multitask when you have single sensory input. So you can't listen to two podcasts, one in each ear. It doesn't work that way.

I wonder if anyone has ever tried. No, actually, I've done Pilates while listening to a podcast.

Okay.

But I watched the same Pilates video like a hundred times, so maybe that's why.

Oh, okay, so you're following something that's already memorized. So this is actually a really good. This is a really good example because it turns out while you can't multitask on the same sensory input, we are really good at what's called multi channel multitasking. What this does is it uses a technique that there's been several studies around called temptation bundling. This is how I learned to like exercising. I used to hate to go to the gym. As I mentioned, I used to be clinically obese. So I have bad memories of trying to go to the gym. And I just never understood why people liked it. Well, what I did, I used this temptation bundling technique to incentivize me to do something I wanted to do with something otherwise is a reward for me. So if I didn't like exercise, the reward was, and it still is, that I get to listen to podcasts, audio books, et cetera. Read to me. Now, this is so effective. Not just because, hey, you get to go to the gym and get healthy, but it also helps me implement this rule that I have to never consume content on my web browser because you know what I'm talking about. You go and you say, okay, I just want to read that one article. And then those articles, even if it's at the New York Times or whatever publication you read, you start reading that one article and then there are links to other articles, and then the other article and the next article, and before you know it, 45 minutes later, you're clicking away and you didn't do what you said you're going to do. So I have this rule that I never read articles online. Instead I have this chrome extension for an app called Pocket that every time I see an article that I want to read, I don't let myself read it. Instead I save it to Pocket.

Now Pocket is this article Fun Jar. I love Pocket.

Exactly, exactly. So it's basically the article Fun Jar. Exactly. And so what's amazing is Pocket integrates with this other app called Voice Dream and it will read to you your articles.

So now this is this trifecta here where I save the time not going down this content vortex online. I work out in the gym and I get to listen to these articles that.

Most of them are personal development type articles. And I think I'm learning from them and growing from them. I've saved time to do more of what I want, exercise in the gym and I've saved the time of not going down this content vortex online. And so this is a great example of how we can use technology to prevent technology distraction.

I love it. I love how you call it hacking back. And there's so many tips in the book. I will link to the book and many of these in the show notes as well. So again, that's pivotmethod.com131nir I could talk to you about this all day. You've been such a wonderful guest. I'm just so thankful our paths actually crossed in person so that we could set this up, man. Okay. I liked. I'm like, we may have to do a follow up, but first I like to leave listeners with one thing they can try. So maybe just one next action step after they listen and then please do let people know where they can find you online and then we'll wrap up.

Yeah. So you know what, maybe I'll turn it on to you a little bit because you obviously read the book, you soaked it up. Was there one thing that you, you weren't doing before that you found has helped you manage distraction in your life after reading the book?

Oh man, that's a great question. I really, I. It wasn't the first time I heard about an autoresponder for texts. There's a guy that has a whole website dedicated to brick mode on his phone, but you actually just gave the directions very clearly, which is that at least on the iPhone there's a do not disturb while driving setting on the iPhone that you can actually create an autoresponder for text texts and up till Now I had 80 unread texts on my phone because I just, I was like hacking back, but in an unsophisticated way because everyone just probably thought I was ghosting them. But I'm the type that I just shut down. Like if my. I call it peak ping. Like once I've had too many pings, I just stop altogether. And I now have gone MIA on everything. I even paused this podcast for six months without explanation. So I love the notion of small things. Like I, I'm not afraid to use an autoresponder on my email, but for text, that's next level. So I'm trying to work up the courage because I, I wonder if you've. See, here's me caring what other people think, but they're gonna be like, what a jerk. Like, who does she think she is? She has an autoresponder on her text. But I just wanna write something like, you know, I respond to texts once a week or when I feel like it, or when I'm doing that. But don't, don't take it personally if you don't get an answer. Instant response back. Because what I don't like about texts is they feel very intrusive. Like by default the expectation is, well, boom. If I text you, you should answer quickly, otherwise there's something wrong. But that doesn't scale.

Let me just jump in real quick. So the beauty of this technique is that if something is actually urgent, so the text message that they receive back, the autoresponder that they receive back, the one that I have that I've customized and anyone can customize it says I'm indefinite distractible right now. But I will get back to you as soon as I can. If this is urgent, text the word urgent back.

If it really is. If my office is on fire or something and somebody needs to contact me right away, God forbid they can do that. They just need to send me the word urgent, but I'm letting them self screen whether it's really necessary to interrupt me. I think that's a terrific technique. I turn that on all the time whenever I need to do focus work. People really appreciate it. I get, I get way, way more text messages back that say, this is a great idea. How'd you do it, by the way? As soon as you go off of that do not disturb function, you get all the sms. They all come in right as soon as you turn it off. So you're not going to miss them. It's just teaching people when they respond to you to use the appropriate channel for the job. So if it's urgent, call or text. If it's not urgent, send me an email. There's techniques in the book. I'll give you the technique I really like that really changed my life. Is this technique around reducing the amount of email that we have to spend, the amount of time we spend on email. Everybody I know is struggling with email. And this technique I've heard from several folks that I've worked with now over the years in writing, Indistractable has reduced the amount spent on email for some people up to 90%. 90%. This technique relies upon using labels the right way. Most people use labels to label an email based on the subject matter. But if you think about it, that is not the most important thing about an email. When it comes to a time management perspective, the most important thing about an email is when does it need a reply. So every time I get an email, I touch it twice. Because in the studies that I did, what I found was that people who spent too much time on email, they all had a common trait. They would check and recheck and recheck their emails. That's where the time was wasted. It wasn't in the replying, it was in the checking and rechecking. Because they would forget when something needs a reply. So instead what you do is you label every email by either this week or today, and then you have time in your calendar. We talked about the importance of time boxing earlier, about how important it is to make time for your values in your schedule. So I have time in my schedule every day to respond to the urgent emails every single day. But then the ones that can wait till the end of the week, I have three full hours of, I call it message Mondays. Three hours on Mondays when I clear through all those messages that can wait a bit. What's interesting is how many of those emails fix themselves and actually don't need a reply if you just let them chill for a little bit instead of playing this email ping pong game that so many of us play every day. So that's one of my favorite techniques. It saved me countless, countless hours.

That is amazing. I indeed label by subject matter. So once again, so many good ideas. My pitfall, I would have to make sure that it didn't become like that. I just didn't put that weekly folder off until a month from now. But I like what you're saying. You build it in.

That's the thing. Now you know what is traction for that time period to actually work through.

Those emails and then it becomes not a self fulfilling prophecy but it improves itself because then the overwhelm is less every Monday because you already have message Mondays and what a guy. Can you just come sit in my email inbox?

Sure, let's do it.

Nir, thank you so much. Where can people find you if they want to keep in touch?

Absolutely. So my website is nearandfar.com, nir is spelled like my first name. N I R anfar.com the book is called Indistractible. It will be published September 10, 2019. If you're listening to this before that day you can actually go to indistractable.com that's I N D I S T R A C T A B L E. You can go to indistractable.com if you buy the book somewhere. I'll actually send you complimentary the entire PDF of the book so you can start reading it right away before it's even published. And yeah, that should be it. Indistractable near and far.com and yeah, this was really fun.

Amazing. Likewise. And everybody, the book is called Indistractable how to Control youl Attention and choose your Life. And show notes are@pivotmethod.com 131 Nir, thanks so much once again.

My pleasure Jenny. Thank you for having me.

Thanks so much for listening to this episode of the Pivot Podcast. Make sure you don't miss an episode or my insider tips and templates by signing up for Pivot List, a curated twice monthly newsletter where I share the inside scoop on what I'm reading, watching, listening to, and the latest tools I'm geeking out on. Sign up@pivotmethod.com pivotlist get show notes from this episode@pivotmethod.com podcast and connect with me on Twitter ennyblake.

Remember, build first, then your courage will follow. Hasn't it always.