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 slash podcast.
If change is the only constant, then let's get better at it. Here we go. Hello, everybody. I am thrilled to be here today with Mir Ayol, who writes, consults, and teaches about the intersection of psychology, technology, and business.
Mir founded two tech companies since 2003, has taught at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, and he's 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, Indistractable, How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life. He also blogs at mirandfar.com, and that's spelled N-I-R, in case you want to go check out his writing. Mir, welcome to the show. Jenny, it's so great to be here.
Thanks for having me. A little background, Mir 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, Mir is a really charismatic, wonderful guy in general, but as soon as he said the title of his book, Indistractable, I was like, boom, got out of the podcast. That's what it was like. I didn't even know I was fishing for guest operations, but as soon as I met you, I just thought, we have got to talk about this.
Awesome. Thank you. Also, that we can make it happen. Yeah, and we were talking about Cal Newport before we hit record, whose 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, yeah, I mean, this is really the genesis. There's no way I would have written Indistractable without my history of writing Hooked.
And Hooked, you know, I wrote Hooked about five years ago now. We're just coming up on the five-year anniversary, and I wrote Hooked because I wanted to democratize these techniques that companies like Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and WhatsApp and Slack, you know, these companies that are building products designed to keep you engaged. And that's not necessarily a nefarious thing. I mean, 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, right? 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 it. They don't use it habitually. And so I wrote Hooked so that we could take the same psychology from these big tech companies and use it for good. And that's exactly what happened.
So, you know, apps like Kahoot, which is the largest educational software in the world, uses the Hooked 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. So, you know, 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, you know, 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. 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, you know, prioritizing my screen instead of her. And so that's when I kind of realized, wait a minute, wait a minute, there's a dark side here. And that kind of led me down this path to figure out, you know, not just digital distraction, but I wanted to understand all distraction. Because, you know, 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, right? Either a digital detox or a 30-day plan or get rid of it.
And so 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, or I'm sorry, fat diets don't work.
When I was, I used to actually be clinically obese at one point in my life. I no longer am. I would never know that. Yeah, it's something I've always struggled with.
But I remember when I was trying to lose weight, you know, unsuccessfully trying to lose weight, I would go on these diets where I would, you know, 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.
Oh, yeah. I've been in a total binge. I've been in binge cycles myself. Exactly.
I never did the purge part, but I would definitely just double down. I remember those days. Exactly, exactly. Yeah, so I've definitely experienced that many, many times in my life.
And, you know, the reason I kept going on these yo-yo diets, and the reason they didn't work, and the reason that, you know, these digital detoxes don't work, just like fat diets don't work, is that we're not addressing the real reason we get distracted. So I originally went to write a book about digital distraction, but then I realized, actually, the problem is much, much deeper than that. You know, 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, you know, 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 acracia, this tendency that we have to do things against our better interests, 2,500 years ago. So 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 want to get to the bottom of the psychology around why do we do things against our better interests? Why do we do things that we know we shouldn't? 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 then 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 in the previous interviews on this show. Every now and then when I have an aha, I do feel like Oprah. But you're right.
Social media, we tend to demonize these social media sites that are purposely creating jackpot-like scenarios and keeping us hooked. But at the same time, it must be feeling a need that we want to fill. 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.
It's thrown around everywhere nowadays. Like, oh, are you feeling overwhelmed? Meditate. Meditate.
Yeah. And look, I'll be very clear. I'm not anti-meditation. There's a lot of evidence that shows that it's very effective for people who do it.
The problem is, many people don't do it. It's not the only solution. There's another 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. 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. You know, 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, you know, 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. You don't have to be a manager to do. But the more research I did, I realized that, you know, 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 so that 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 because 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 to open mean 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'd love to catch everybody up very succinctly, well, what is the hook model?
Because maybe people find it interesting to know what tends to create that sense of being hooked on an app or a process or a system of any kind. And then later, I'm sure we'll get to how you can use it for good to where 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 these big companies.
I know how they work. I know what makes them so habit-forming. I wrote a 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.
So 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. So Hooked is all about how these companies do it. And the idea here is that we can use those same lessons for could, right?
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 the products. So 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. And if you think that it's bad now, just wait a few years, right?
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. So 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. In fact, as I talk about in the book, believing that that is true actually makes it worse.
It's called learn 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, right?
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.
And it turns out, you know, 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 affect, 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. It's 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 it's 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. I tweet about it a minute. Wow.
That's great. I love, you know, of course I've heard the unique quality humans have is our own mortality and planning for the future, but I've not heard it applied in this way, that the antidote for impulsive action and distraction is forethought, that actually 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 distraction 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 of 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 for what you want, not just what you're running away from.
Right, right. So maybe it's helpful. This is 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 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, OK, this is the flavor of the day. OK, everybody do this. OK, no, that didn't work.
OK, 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.
I think it's very important to recognize that this is not a book that casts moral judgment. Right. I'm not one of these people that say, you know, video games are bad or watching Netflix is bad or watching YouTube is bad or whatever. You know, 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.
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 tech maker'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. So 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 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 pangs, 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 addresses 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 when I really got down to first principles around distraction, you know, why do we do things against our better interest? I had to start with this question, well, why do we do anything? Right?
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, right? 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 go 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 indistractable model, which are master the internal triggers, make time for traction, hack back the external triggers, and prevent distraction with hacks.
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. Again, 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. It's so subtle and it's so unconscious.
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, I wanted to be a blamer. By the way, there's lots of stuff that tech companies are doing that I don't like.
So, you know, Paul Verilio said that when you invent the ship, you also invent the ship wreck. So we're in the ship wreck 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'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, you know, 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 feelings. This podcast got woo a long time ago, so there's no one still here if they weren't hearing it out by it. Okay, 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, right? I got a feature phone, and I got a word processor from the 1990s, and I thought, okay, well, this is the problem. Technology's the problem. 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 didn't need 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? I'm checking this email right now. That's kind of productive. That's kind of worky, isn't it?
It's working. 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 want to make sure I fit it in. There are times I'm in a down dog, 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 for my yoga, and go fix the books. It's so crazy.
It's like, I love books, but here they are. They've gone in that moment from something that I love, and I do, that's very rewarding, to a distraction. It's like actually in the books. That's my neurosis.
Or maybe me avoiding a pose. Maybe I got even deeper. It's not just that, oh, the book's 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, 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, right? 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, that's something you can fix.
And I talked about how to do that in a section on how to hack back external triggers. If it's not a planning problem where, you know, you clearly made time for yoga, so it's on your schedule. And even that kind of self-talk, with self-compassion, 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, that'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 until I read Nonviolent Communication, which is an incredible book.
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, Kristen Naff 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 self-compassion I saw as over the line, or too fuzzy, or unused for, 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 blaming, shaming. And for me, 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, that I understand 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, they're across everything. 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 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, right? I would eat because I felt crappy, not because I was hungry.
It was an emotional relief. And so that eating, you know, didn't fix the problem. I felt bad because I had eaten so much, and I ate so much because I felt bad. And we see this cycle repeating itself time and time again.
So 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 diffusing 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, 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 that thinks it's being helpful. It has a fear and has a primary motivation, and it thinks it's being helpful to say, you idiot.
How should you have eaten that whole cake by yourself? Because 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 sending it to things that's legitimate, but it just doesn't work. Ultimately, like you said, it creates another open loop that we then distract ourselves. It's fascinating. 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 it appears to be very much so.
But if something is addicted, 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. 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, you know, after the same amount of time had elapsed, you would expect both of them to equally crave a cigarette, right? Because 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, powerful. And 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, you know, not going to the gym when you know you should, whether it's working on a 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 into distraction.
There's another book that I'll put in the show notes. For anyone listening, you can go to pivotmethod.com slash 131. 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.
And he really had 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 books, 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 Johan Hari. 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 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 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. And so the same exact thing applies when it comes to our distractions, right? 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?
You know, 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 of 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 we spend 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 oh definitely my family well if you looked at my calendar would you see time in my calendar for the things I valued most I'm in there so 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 have time fully present with my wife with my friends it's in my calendar now this sounds like it's difficult and 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 scheduled 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 be like okay what do you want to do I don't know what do you want to do and so what would that do that would create this internal trigger of boredom and so we would often times reach for the quickest solution now let's just watch some TV because TV alleviates boredom so I had to find a way to make it easier to do something that was helpful and so we made 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 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 and every time we have some time to get on the calendar we just take out the jar and we pull something out and we do it whether it's going to get an ice cream at an ice cream place we've been willing to go to or go to a park or fly a kite or whatever or go to a museum we just made it easier for us to do the things we want to do without having to sit there and think about it so it's on my calendar and we made it as easy as possible with this particular technique of a fun jar we should all have a fun jar it's 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 other technique again the book is full of them but the other one I really liked and 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 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 all you're a 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 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 like baking a business podcast for me it gets me to do it and it makes it actually joyful to something that I would otherwise dread yes yes so this is a really important technique you probably saw in the book I love overturning apple carts and so a lot of stuff in the book is huh you've been told one thing but actually not so much so another urban legend is this idea that 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 no actually I've done Pilates while listening to a podcast but I've watched the same Pilates video like 100 times so maybe that's why 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 so what this does it uses a technique there's been several studies around called temptation bundling and 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 I 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 etc 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 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 before you know it 45 minutes later you're clicking away and you didn't do what you said you were 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 an article fun jar I love Pocket exactly exactly so it's basically an article fun jar 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 feel like I'm learning from them and growing from them so 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.com slash 131 Mir 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 can set this up man okay I was 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 maybe I'll turn it on to you a little bit was there one thing that 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 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 despair while driving setting on the iPhone that you can actually create an autoresponder for 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 drop all together 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'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 wonder if you're here's me caring what other people think they're going to be like what a jerk like who does she think she is she has an autoresponder on her text but I just want to write something like you know I respond to texts once a week where when I feel like it or when I'm doing that but don't take it personally if you don't get an 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 customize anyone can customize it says I'm indistractable right now but I will get back to you as soon as I can if this is urgent text the word urgent back and so if it really is you know something if my office is on fire or something and somebody needs to contact me right away you got 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 and so I think that's a terrific technique and I turn that on all the time whenever I need to do focus work and people really appreciate it I mean I get way way more text messages back because it's a great idea 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 this is everybody I know is struggling with email this technique I've heard from several folks that I've worked with now over the years and writing distractible has reduced the amount spent on email for some people up to 90% 90% and 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 spend 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 wasn't in the checking and rechecking because they would forget when something needs to 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 until the end of the week I have three full hours of I call it message Mondays three hours on days 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's saved me countless, countless hours that is amazing I indeed label my subject matter so once again so many good ideas my pitfall I'd 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 let you know you build it in you know it's traction for that time period it's actually worked 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 much Mondays and what a guy can you just comment in my email box sure let's do it Nira thank you so much where can people find you if they want to keep in touch absolutely so my website is nearanfar.com Nira spelled like my first name N-I-R anfar.com the book is called Indistractable it will be published September 10th 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 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.com nearanfar.com and yeah this was really fun amazing likewise and everybody the book is called Indistractable How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life and show notes are at pivotmethod.com slash 131 Nira 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 peeking out on sign up at pivotmethod.com slash pivotlist get show notes from this episode at pivotmethod.com slash podcast and connect with me on Twitter at Jenny underscore Blake remember build first then your courage will follow hasn't it always