Nir EyalSpeaker on Behavioral Science, NYT Bestselling Author, Former Stanford Lecturer

Why You Become Distracted #shorts

Name: Why You Become Distracted #shorts
Uploaded: 2023-08-23T14:30:07+00:00
Duration: 54 s
Channel: Nir Eyal
Description: A short YouTube clip by Nir Eyal explaining that most device-checking is driven not by external notifications but by "internal triggers": uncomfortable…

23 Aug 2023 · 1 min

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0:54

A short YouTube clip by Nir Eyal explaining that most device-checking is driven not by external notifications but by "internal triggers": uncomfortable emotional states we try to escape. Eyal cites a study-like claim that only ~10% of phone checks are due to pings/dings and argues that mastering internal triggers is central to becoming "indistractable."

Chapters

When most people think about distraction, they think about all the pings and dings that come from their cell phones or their computers. But it turns out that studies find that only 10% of the time that you check your phone because of some ping, ding, or ring. So what's the other 90%? Studies find the other 90% of the time that we check our devices, we're not checking them because of external triggers, things outside of us, but rather because of internal triggers, something that's going on inside of us. What are these internal triggers? Internal triggers are uncomfortable emotional states that we seek to escape from. And it is the cause of nearly all of our behavior, this desire to escape discomfort. So what we have to do if we are about to become indistractable is learn to master these internal triggers that overwhelmingly, distraction begins from within.