Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - #120 How To Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life with Nir Eyal

Episode Date: July 7, 2020

We are living through a crisis of distraction. Plans get sidetracked, friends are ignored, work never seems to get done. You sit down at your desk to work on an important project, but a notification on your phone interrupts your morning. Later, as you're about to get back to work, you receive an email that you need to reply to. At home, screens get in the way of quality time with your family. Another day goes by, and once again, your most important personal and professional goals are put on hold. What would be possible if you followed through on your best intentions? What could you accomplish if you could stay focused? What if you had the power to become ‘indistractable?’ My guest on today’s conversation is an international bestselling author, former Stanford lecturer, and behavioral design expert, Nir Eyal. Nir started his career by helping tech-companies develop products that are intentionally habit-forming. Now, Nir has written a new book, Indistractable: How To Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life, which explains how to get the best of technology and reclaim your attention, without letting it get the best of you. Nir believes that we all have the power to become indistractable and in today’s conversation he reveals how. He explains what really drives human behavior and why ‘time management is pain management’. Nir also shares actionable techniques that will help you design your time, realise your ambitions, and live the life you really want. I hope you find this conversation empowering. Show notes available at: https://drchatterjee.com/120 Follow me on instagram.com/drchatterjee/ Follow me on facebook.com/DrChatterjee/ Follow me on twitter.com/drchatterjeeuk DISCLAIMER: The content in the podcast and on this webpage is not intended to constitute or be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your doctor or other qualified health care provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of something you have heard on the podcast or on my website. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Fundamentally, if we don't face the fact that everything we do is about a desire to escape discomfort, we will always become distracted by something. If we don't understand the root cause of distraction, why we get distracted in the first place, what internal triggers we are trying to satiate, then it's a lost cause. We have to start there. Hi, my name is Rangan Chatterjee. Welcome to Feel Better Live More. Hello and welcome back to another episode of the podcast. Here we are at episode 120. So I'm recording this intro as we speak in a hotel room in London. I've not been away from

my house since the lockdown started, so that's about four months ago. I have to say it feels really, really strange. I certainly think that being on the road again is going to take a little bit of getting used to. It was really interesting that when I'm in a hotel room away from my family, I start to engage in behaviours that I don't tend to do as much when I'm at home. I look at my phone a lot more in the evening. I find myself flicking from website to website, from Instagram to Twitter to Facebook and then back again. And there's nothing inherently wrong with doing these things, but I do think it's helpful to understand why. What I'm really doing is distracting myself,

distracting myself from the feeling of boredom or stress or loneliness. And distraction is the topic of today's conversation. My guest is Nir Eyal, best-selling author, former Stanford lecturer and behavioral design expert. Now, Nir started his career by helping tech companies develop products that are intentionally habit-forming. And now, he's written a fabulous new book called

Indistractable, where he explains, amongst other things, how to get the best out of technology and reclaim your attention without letting it get the best of you. Now, this is a conversation that took place way back in October 2019 when Nir was in London doing promotion for his book. I interviewed him live on stage at the Tabernacle Theatre in Notting Hill, London. Because this was a conversation that took place in front of a live audience, I think it has a slightly different feel to my usual conversations, but nonetheless, I think it's a conversation that you will really enjoy and get a lot of value out of. So as a society, I think we're living through an epidemic of distraction. We all know that feeling where our plans get sidetracked, friends are ignored, work never seems to get done, you sit down at your

desk to work on an important project, but a notification on your phone pops up and interrupts your morning. When we're at home, we're often trying to spend quality time with our family and our loved ones, but screens often get in the way. Day after day goes by. And often our most important personal and professional goals are put on hold because of distraction. So what would be possible if you actually followed through on your best intentions? What could you accomplish if you could stay focused? What if you had the power to become indistractable?

Well, Nir believes that we all have the power to become indistractable, and today's conversation, he reveals how. He explains what really drives human behaviour and why time management is actually pain management. Nir shares actionable techniques that will help you design your time, realise your ambitions, and live the life you really want. The essence of this conversation is about how do we go about living an intentional life. I really hope you enjoy it. Now, before we get started, just a quick shout out to some of the sponsors who are essential in order for me to put out weekly episodes like this one. Vivo Barefoot, the minimalist footwear company, are sponsoring today's show.

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Zendium is the very first toothpaste brand that I've come across that aims to support the health of the oral microbiome. It uses natural enzymes and proteins that aim to increase the numbers of good bacteria, which protect your mouth naturally and reduce bad bacteria to protect it against dental problems. The very best way to try out Zendium is to go onto Amazon and order. That is the online store Amazon, where you can go and order Zendium toothpaste today. Now, on to today's conversation. Good evening, I'm John Gordon from the HowTo Academy and delighted to see you this evening. We're hugely honoured to be able to have with us today Nir Eyal. I'm going to leave Dr. Rangan Chatterjee to introduce him. So it's just for me to introduce Dr. Chatterjee. He's a best-selling author. His podcast is one of the most, if not the most,

downloaded podcasts on health. He's one of the most influential doctors in the UK, and I'm sure many of you will have seen him in Doctor in the House. He's a pioneer of integrative medicine and getting to the root causes of why we're sick. It's a great pleasure to be able to welcome him here. He's going to be in conversation interviewing Nir Eyal, and thank you very much. And without further ado, please extend a very warm welcome to both our speakers this evening. Thank you. Good evening. How are you all doing? You're okay? Good. So it's a very kind introduction from John.

I'm sure many of you are already familiar with Nia, but for those of you who are not, Nir is a behavior designer, a former Stanford lecturer. He's the author of the international bestseller, Hooked, and also the author of the quite brilliant new book, which I cannot stop reading at the moment, Indistractable. Nir, welcome to London and welcome to the podcast. Thank you so much. It's great to be here. Appreciate it. Thank you. So Nir, as I said, I can't stop reading this book at the moment. And I think you're talking about a topic that many of us know is a problem. But until we give a name to it, as you have done, I'm not sure we actually look for solutions. So, I wonder if you could start by saying, you know, why is being indistractable

so important? Right. So maybe I should start with describing what it means to be indistractable. Becoming indistractable means you are the kind of person who strives to do what they say they're going to do. You value personal integrity. You know, we all know how terrible it is to lie to someone else. We would never want to be accused of being a liar to our children, to our family, to our friends. And yet the fact of the matter is we lie to ourselves all the time. We say we're going to do one thing and we do something else.

We say we're going to exercise, we don't. We say we're going to do that big project at work, we procrastinate. We say we're going to be fully present with our loved ones and we're not. And so this was a very personal challenge that I took on because I had this problem. I was patient zero where I found that I was getting distracted from the things that I wanted to do with my time, my attention to my life. And so that's really what started me down this journey.

I mean, I have, I've spoken about stress a lot in the past, and there are many sources of stress in the modern world. But I think the fact that we're constantly distracted is a huge source of stress. And the way I've looked at it before is I talk about micro stress doses and macro stress doses. Micro stress doses are little hits of stress that in isolation we can handle, but when you mount them up on top of one another, they start to get you closer and closer to your own stress threshold. An example I give is that many of us wake up in the morning these days, and before we've left the house, we've been exposed to 10 or 15 of these micro-stress doses. So someone's gone to bed late because they were up binge-watching watching Netflix and they wake up at,

well, they know they have to go to work. So at 6.30, their alarm goes off and pings them out off a deep sleep. So I call that micro stress dose number one. They realize then that actually, you know what, I've got a bit more time. So let me put this on snooze for another six minutes. Six minutes later, another alarm, micro stress says number two. Then you realize, actually, you know, I should be getting up now. So you quickly look at your phone because that's where your alarm is, right? And you have a look and you see, oh, there's three work emails I didn't do yesterday. Oh, you know, that adds to your stress in the morning. Then you think, actually, let me have a quick look on social media and someone's been mean to you on your last post. And a few nodding heads here. So

the point I try and make is that actually many of us have left the house having been exposed to multiple of these micro hits of stress. And I think I talk about it in terms of stress, but you could just as easily make the case that all those micro stress doses are distraction. Well, so maybe it's useful, it's a good point to maybe kind of share this framework that's the backbone of indistractable and define what do I mean by distraction. So the best way to understand what distraction is, is to understand what it is not. The opposite of distraction is not focus. The opposite of distraction is traction. That in fact, both words come from the same Latin root,

trahare, which means to pull. And you'll notice that both words end in the same six letters, A-C-T-I-O-N, that spells action. So traction is any action that pulls you towards what you want to do with your time, things that you do with intent. The opposite of traction is distraction, anything that pulls you away from what you plan to do with

intent. So this is important for a few reasons. One, I think it frees us from this ridiculous moral hierarchy that a lot of people have that, you know, what you do with your time, that's frivolous, right? Checking Facebook or Candy Crush or whatever, that's frivolous. But me spending three hours watching football, that's somehow okay. In my book, anything you do with intent, no matter what it is that you do, even checking social media, even doing those things that you choose to do, as long as you are doing them with intent, because you want to, as opposed to somebody else is influencing you to do those things. There's nothing wrong with it. It's still an act of traction. The other thing that I think

is really important about this is that we oftentimes trick ourselves into thinking that something is traction, even when it's distraction. So, uh, you know, this would happen to me all the time. I would sit down at my desk and I'd say, okay, now I'm going to do that big project. I'm going to do that thing. I've been finally, uh I've been finally procrastinating on. I'm finally going to do that thing right after I check email, right after I check my Slack channels or do some research on Google. And I would still not do the thing that I had planned to do. And so that is just as much of a pernicious distraction. So we've got traction, we've got distraction. Now it's important to understand what influences us, what prods us to either traction or distraction is one of two

things. We have our external triggers, many of them you've mentioned. These are the pings and dings and rings, these things in our environment that prompt us to either traction or distraction. And those are kind of the usual suspects. Everybody knows those things. And we love to blame those external triggers, our devices, our computers, all of these potential triggers towards traction or distraction. But it turns out that a much more common source of distraction, what I learned in my five years of research writing this book, is that while some distraction starts outside of us, it turns out most distraction starts from within. And so it's not just the external triggers we need to think about. It's what we call the internal triggers.

Internal triggers are these uncomfortable sensations that we seek to escape. So, you know, one thing that we need to understand about distraction is that it is not a new problem. And in fact, Plato talked about it 2,500 years ago. He called it akrasia, this tendency that we all have to do things against our better interest. And it's a fascinating question if we think about it. Why do we do things we know we shouldn't do? And why don't we do the things we know we want to do? Why do we do things against our better interest? But I think in order to answer Plato's question, we have to dig a layer deeper to understand why do we do anything and everything?

What's the driver of all human behavior? What's the nature of motivation? Most people will tell you that motivation is about some version of carrots and sticks. This is called Freud's pleasure principle. And so Freud says that everything is about the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain. That's kind of most people's conception of what drives human motivation. But it turns out that from a neurological perspective, it's not exactly right. Turns out that human motivation is not spurred by the desire to pursue pleasure and the avoidance of pain. Neurologically speaking, turns out that all behavior is spurred by one thing, and that is the desire to escape discomfort. Everything we do is about a desire to escape discomfort, even the pursuit of pleasurable sensations. Even the pursuit of pleasure is itself psychologically destabilizing. We call this the homeostatic response. So we know this is true

physiologically, that when we feel cold, for example, we go outside, we feel cold, we put on a jacket, right? We put on a coat because that's not comfortable to feel cold, for example, we go outside, we feel cold, we put on a jacket, right? We put on a coat because that's not comfortable to feel cold. And if we walk back inside, now we're too hot, we take it off. And if we're hungry, our belly starts to rumble, we feel hunger pangs, we eat. And when we're stuffed, that doesn't feel good, we stop eating. So that's physiologically how this homeostatic response works. The same is true psychologically, that when we feel an uncomfortable emotional state, we also turn to some kind of emotional pacification device to help us cope with that discomfort. So when we're feeling lonely, where do we go? We go to Facebook. When we're feeling uncertain about something, we Google it. When we're bored,

we check sports, news, Reddit, Pinterest. All of these products and services cater to these uncomfortable emotional sensations. So this means that fundamentally, if all human behavior is spurred by a desire to escape discomfort. That means that time management is pain management. That doesn't matter what kind of life hacks or the latest guru's techniques around how to manage your time in your life. Fundamentally, if we don't face the fact that everything we do is about a desire to escape discomfort, we will always become distracted by something. And I think what you're noticing is a very interesting phenomenon because these micro doses of stress, in fact, are spurred by stress in the first place or some type of uncomfortable sensation, right? So when we get up in the morning, we have that desire to check our

devices. There's always a preceding emotion that we are trying to pacify, like babies sucking on thumbs, right? We don't want to feel something. So the closest thing we can grab to alleviate discomfort, we form a habit around, and that becomes what we turn to for psychological relief. And sometimes it spurs us into this vicious cycle where the more we check, the more stress we get, and the more stress we get, the more discomfort we feel, and the more desire we have to keep checking or distract ourselves in one way or another. So I think your insight is right on. The good news is, and this is a very, I think, optimistic book because I think every other book on this topic, and I didn't originally plan to write this book. I wanted a solution for myself. And so I read every book I could find on distraction and tech overuse. And every book basically said that it's all about technology,

that the technology is at fault. Stop using your technologies. Technology is doing this to you. It's rotting your brain. It's hijacking your brain. It's addicting everyone. And so I took their advice. I got rid of my iPhone and I bought a flip phone that only sent and received phone calls and text messages, no apps. I got a word processor from the 1990s. They don't even make these anymore. No internet connection. All you could do is type on it. And I thought, okay, great. I got rid of all the modern technology that apparently is so bad for us. And I thought, okay, now I'm finally going to do what I said I'm going to do. Now I'm not going to be distracted anymore. And I would sit down at my desk and I would say, okay, now I'm going to get

to work right after I, you know, there's that book that I've been meaning to read on my bookshelf and my desk, I've been meaning to organize my desk. Let me just do that real quick. Or let me take out the trash. The trash needs taking out right now. And I kept getting distracted even when it wasn't the technology that it was doing it to me. And so that's really when I came upon this insight that if we don't understand the root cause of distraction, why we get distracted in the first place, what internal triggers we are trying to satiate, then it's a lost cause.

We have to start there. Yeah, and Nira, I've got to say, I think that's one of the things to me that I literally love about this book is, and I wasn't expecting this. Actually, I was expecting a lot of tips and strategies on how you manage the distraction from technology. And of course, that is there as well.

But I love this thing about internal triggers and this whole idea that we are using distraction to escape discomfort, I think it's very profound. And it reminds me a little bit of a speaker who I've interviewed on the podcast before, who I've actually seen speak in this auditorium, Gabor Maté, when he says all addiction comes from childhood trauma. And he defines childhood trauma as being either something bad has happened to you or not enough good things have happened to you so essentially there's something missing we don't feel completely whole and so we look to certain behaviors certain addictive behaviors to sort of fill that hole in many ways um and it for me it was really it was really gratifying to see your view on this and how, yes, it's about putting in strategies into our daily lives that actually can help reduce distraction. But ultimately, at its core, you're talking about human behavior.

What is it that makes us human? As many people say, you know, being alive is pain. Pain, you know, life is suffering. And actually, you're making the case very beautifully that everything we do in life on some level is to alleviate suffering. Right. I think that's exactly the point I'm making. And in fact, I don't like, you know, sometimes we hear folks that give us the impression that somehow if we're not happy all the time, if we're not satisfied, if everything in life isn't great, then there's something wrong with us and nothing could be further from

the truth. I mean, we have evolved as a species to be perpetually perturbed. That's what makes us survive so well. If there was ever a branch of Homo sapiens that was happy all the time, that was satisfied, that never wanted for more, those people were probably killed and eaten by our ancestors. Okay? They're not with us anymore. And in fact, I think we need to accept the fact that discomfort is okay. It's all right.

It doesn't mean there's something wrong with you necessarily. It doesn't mean that we're somehow broken or deficient. And, you know, I've talked to many people in researching this book over the years, and most people tend to fall into these two categories of what I call blamers or shamers. The blamers, when they become distracted, when they go off track, they said, oh, you see, it's my iPhone that did it to me. It's Slack. It's Facebook. That's who did it to me. The shamers, this is the category I used to fall in, they say, oh, I'm deficient somehow. You see, I'm lazy. I have a short attention span. Maybe I'm not cut out for this. Maybe I'm not good enough. And we shame ourselves. And of course, this also leads to this terrible shame cycle, this vicious cycle of causing more discomfort and

then, of course, more need to escape that very discomfort. And so the way we short-circuit that process so that it doesn't continue is through many methods I talk about in the book. It's about mastering these internal triggers. There are things that we can do to stop that chain, to stop that cycle, to get control over these internal triggers. You know, you can't control how you feel per se, but you can control how you respond to those feelings. And instead of these feelings leading to automatic distraction, we can actually channel these uncomfortable sensations, like stress, like anxiety, like uncertainty, for good. We can channel that disquietude towards traction, towards acts that move us forward. So in terms of some of those actionable tools for people, if there is that deep level of discomfort that we're trying

to hide from with spending too much time on Facebook, spending too much time on Netflix, constantly checking email, eating sugar at every opportunity. You know, it's all actually, many of these behaviors are rooted in the same, same way. And I appreciate you saying that because it's, you know, the book has, I think people are, at least I was looking for solutions, particularly for this tech problem, but you're absolutely right. I mean, distraction comes in all shapes and forms, right? It can be the fact that you said you were going to go to the gym and you didn't, or you said you were going to eat healthy, as I used to say, and I didn't.

Spending time with your family or loved ones and your mind is somewhere else. Distraction takes many, many forms. It's not just about technology. For sure. And for me, what you're writing about in Indistractable is a universal issue. This, yes, affects your work. It affects your productivity, but it also affects your health. And probably most importantly of all, I think it's affecting our relationships.

I think distraction in our relationships is, it's become very erosive, corrosive, I should say. It's causing so many problems in relationships that I don't think we're taking seriously enough. So on the subject of relationships, do you feel, do you see distraction being an important issue to tackle? Oh, absolutely. I mean, I think we are, the science is pretty conclusive that we know we need quality relationships in our life. One of the self determination theory is a body of research I quote quite a bit in the book. And this is, you know, 40, 50 year old research, Desi and Ryan, this is the most widely accepted theory of human motivation and psychological wellbeing. And basically there's these three tenants of, that every human being on the face of the

earth needs, these three psychological nutrients. So just like our bodies need carbohydrates, fat, and protein, those are the three macronutrients for our body, our mind and our psychological well-being, turns out, is dependent on receiving sufficient doses of competency, autonomy, and relatedness. And so when we are deficient in these three things, a couple interesting things happen. One, we don't flourish. This leads to all kinds of negative psychological outcomes. This is called the needs displacement hypothesis. When we don't get enough of these things offline, guess what we do? We look for them online. course, the tech companies are more than happy to give it to us, right? So when you don't feel sufficient amounts of connectedness, relatedness, competency, autonomy offline, you're going to go looking for it. And I think I'm not anti-social media. I think I'm not one of these Luddites that thinks we have to stop using these things and that they're melting our brain. I don't agree with that.

I think that we can get the best of these technologies without letting them get the best of us, principally by realizing that these things should supplement, not replace real-life interactions. We know that this is a 40-year trend where people are suffering from this epidemic of loneliness. Robert Putnam wrote about this in the 1990s with his book Bowling Alone. This is way before the iPhone or Facebook, this trend of increasing secularization, where there are less regular occasions to get together with members of your community, and the decline of civic organizations. people who are joining the bowling league and joining Kiwanis Club and joining civic organizations. And so this has really led to this loneliness epidemic that researchers tell us that loneliness is as detrimental to our health as smoking and obesity. And I think that this is certainly something that we need to reverse. And the good news is, I think, that we can reverse this. And part of how we reverse this is that we begin to prioritize it. There are basically these four steps to becoming indistractable. The first is to master

the internal triggers, and we touched on a little bit. The second step is to make time for traction. So we know we talked about traction and distraction. So one of the most basic things that we can do, this is backed with a lot of research, literally thousands of studies have shown the effectiveness of this technique. It's called making an implementation intention, which is just a fancy way of saying you plan out what you're going to do and when you're going to do it, right? So basically making a calendar, making a schedule. But researchers tell us that about two-thirds of people don't keep a calendar. researchers tell us that about two-thirds of people don't keep a calendar. We spend so much time and money protecting our stuff, right? We put our money in bank accounts and safes. We have home security systems. We have alarms on our cars. And yet when it comes to our time,

sure, come on over, take as much of it as you want. And the fact of the matter is we cannot call something a distraction unless we know what it distracted us from. What is the traction? So the fact of the matter is we have to start keeping calendars. We have to make time for traction by turning our values into time. So a big principle in this book is that whatever your values are, and it's not up to me to tell you what your values should be. That's only for you to decide. But I talk about these three life domains of you, your relationships, and your work that we can use to fill our days. So if, you know, many people start with the ends, they start with the big goals in mind. And I think that's a, that's a problematic technique because it's very difficult to know, okay, what's my five-year plan? How about what's

your plan for next week? Right? How do you want to span next week to live out your values, to turn your values into time? So if personal health and wellness is important to you, if that's one of your values, do you have time in your calendar for proper sleep, to exercise, to make healthy meals? Is that in your calendar? If relationships are important to you, back to this topic of loneliness, is it more than just, oh, we should grab coffee sometime? Well, you know, you've said that a million times and it doesn't happen, right? Because you haven't put that time on your calendar. So one of the techniques I talk about in the book that I think is very apropos to this discussion around this loneliness epidemic is this group that we call the kibbutz. Now, the kibbutz, the word comes from the Hebrew. It means gathering. And the idea is that every two weeks, we have these four couples

that get together, and we just get together to talk, to be together. But the important thing is that it occurs every two weeks, same time, same place. Everybody brings their own food, right? So there's no big mess. There's no big planning process. But we know we are going to get together every two weeks. And if you can't make it, no big deal, come to the next one. But everybody has it on their calendars. And this time is critical. I mean, it is really food for the soul. We get together and we go around and everybody of the eight adults has their turn and they talk about whatever's on their mind. So one week, somebody came up with a parenting question. The next week, somebody was struggling with their turn and they talk about whatever's on their mind. So one week, somebody came up with a parenting question. The next week, somebody was struggling with their job and wanted some feedback. So we rotate around the group and people talk about whatever is pressing in their life.

Now, children are invited to listen, but they can't interrupt. Remember, I said earlier, distraction doesn't just come in the form of the pings and dings from your phone. Children can be a major source of distraction themselves. So the rule is that children can watch, they can listen, but they can't interrupt unless someone's bleeding. That's the rule. Because of two things. One, we don't want to kill the vibe, right? We have this beautiful interaction with our friends where we understand them and they understand us. That's so important for us to have those friendships. And most importantly, we also want to model what an adult friendship looks like for our children. Why is it that only kids have buddies and best friends?

We want to show them that, no, friendships are important for the rest of our lives. And we want to do that on a regular basis to show them how important this is, which also means, sorry, I can't talk to you right now because my friends are here and they're very important to me. And so unless you're bleeding, go away. There's a juice box table, there's games to play, go over there or listen, but don't interrupt. So making time for traction, turning our values into time by putting that time on our calendar for the things that are really important to us is really essential. Yeah. I mean, there's so many points I'd like to pick up on. This idea that we allow distractions to basically take us off schedule and the things that really are important to us, you know, we all know that feeling. We just don't have time to do them anymore. We don't have time to see our friends. We don't have time, you know,

to spend time with our kids. We're too busy doing emails or checking our notifications at the weekend, whatever it is. I think that whole idea of intention behind what it is we actually want from life, what is it we want out of our day is so key. But I think in many ways, by being constantly distracted and being in reactive mode, so from the minute we wake up, we're consuming information what other people are sort of putting into our brains. We don't have the time to start thinking about what are our intentions. I see this with a lot of my patients that when they really start to get over their chronic health problems, they really start to make lifestyle changes. When there's an emotional switch that changes, they're not just doing it because I said, reduce your alcohol, or I said, reduce your sugar intake, because those things are serving a purpose

for them. They are alleviating something. And that's why I think you're really at the heart of something very, very important here. The story you mentioned that you shared, it also reminded me of a Jewish family who I went around for Sunday lunch at about six months ago. And they have always, they've got teenage kids, husband and wife. And it was really striking for me that they have, they observe the Sabbath religiously. You know, they're very strict. And from a young age, I was talking to their kids about this and what they do. And it was really incredible to me because I didn't grow up in this environment and their kids love it. You know, they've never, they never go out. They don't go on social media. They can't even do

sports classes or anything. That is family connection time. And I found that incredible. And I thought, did we actually have some of these systems in place before? Did society, whether it's a variety of different religions, did we have these systems in place as we become more secular? Actually, these things that are so, so important have vanished from our daily lives. Absolutely. I mean, I couldn't agree more. And I consider myself a secular person. I don't believe in the supernatural per se, but I'm jealous, frankly. I'm jealous of the benefits of how institutionalized religion brings people together. There's a lot of good there that unfortunately people who don't attend these type of ritualized institutional settings, we really miss out on to a large degree. That

need that we have to understand others and to be understood only comes from regular interactions. And it doesn't mean we all have to necessarily go to an institution where we don't believe in the ideology. I think it necessitates us facilitating new ways to have regular interactions with the important people in our lives. Not only our friendships, but I think even our closest relationships. So my wife and I, we've been married for 18 years and we met in college. We actually met in an undergraduate economics class. And I remember we had this term that we learned in economics that is called the residual beneficiary. The residual beneficiary is the person, the chump,

that gets whatever's left over when a company is liquidated. So first, debt holders get their share, then equity holders, then residual beneficiaries, they get whatever's the scraps, the pennies on the dollar. And I remember a few years ago, my wife came to me and she said, you know, you have turned me into the residual beneficiary. Yeah. Because work comes first, you know, your buddies come first, your writing comes first, all this stuff comes first, and I get the scraps of whatever's left over. And she was

absolutely right. She really had me there. And so we had to prioritize, you know, if this was according to my values. And again, I'm not preaching what your values should be. But if your values are like mine, where I believe that, you know, I want an equitable marriage, I want to be a good partner for my wife. Well, that means that we have to schedule the time for those things as well. Even some of the household admin stuff. I mean, this literally saved my marriage. We would constantly fight about the household responsibilities. And it turns out that we're not alone, that studies find that in heterosexual, yeah, big surprise, right? That in heterosexual households, even when there is dual income, women still take on a

disproportionate share of household admin duties. I see a lot of women's heads nodding, no men like this. And so I thought, okay, that can't be my family, right? We don't do that. But of course, I was absolutely wrong because we were having these fights about why I wasn't pulling my weight, right? My wife couldn't understand, you know, the trash is full, take it out, or the laundry's not done, do the laundry. And I would always say to her, you know, look, instead of being mad at me for not mind reading, right?

How am I supposed to know what you want me to do? Just tell me what to do, right? Just tell me and I'll do it. And of course, what I didn't realize is that asking her to be the boss, the boss is a job. And I was asking her to do work by telling me what to do, right? I'm not a child. And so why do I need to be told what to do? And so And I was asking her to do work by telling me what to do, right? I'm not a child. And so why do I need to be told what to do? And so what I was asking her to do was not only

infantilizing for me, it was also placing a burden on her. Here was the solution. The magic solution was planning ahead, was sitting down together, took us 30 minutes. We had had hours of fights over this stuff. We sat down together and for 30 minutes,. We had had hours of fights over this stuff. We sat down together and for 30 minutes, we wrote down all the stuff that needs to get done. We put those things in a calendar. It's not good enough just to write down to-dos. There's a big myth out there that if you just put stuff on a to-do list, that stuff will get done. Okay, that's not true. And let me just tell you right now, it's not true because that's the output, right? If you went to a baker and you said, hey, I need a hundred lo And let me just tell you right now. It's not true because that's the output, right? If you went to a baker and you said,

hey, I need 100 loaves of bread. Can you make me 100 loaves of bread? The baker would say, sure, I'm going to need flour. I'm going to need yeast. I'm going to need sugar. I'm going to need salt. Where's all the input to make the output? But when we only put stuff on to-do lists,

that's just the output. The input is our time. So step one is making the to-do list. Step two is putting it on your calendar. So now we do what's called a weekly schedule sync. And with this weekly schedule sync, we sit down, it takes us 15 minutes every Sunday, Sunday evening, we sit down together, we look at each other's calendars for the week.

We use this technique called time boxing where we plan out our days. Problem is gone. We do not have these fights anymore because I know exactly what I need to do and what I need to do it. And so she's not waiting for me to do one thing so she can do the next. It literally saved my marriage. So this is not a tech book. It's a relationship book. That too. Yeah. Well, it generally is actually, because these problems, as you say, a lot of your

relationship problems actually, sorry, let me rephrase that. You didn't say you had relationship problems. Some of these mild disagreements. Challenges. Yeah, sort of went away once you'd actively prioritise what needed to get done. And I guess that's a wider point, isn't it? We let these distractions suck up our entire day. And you're right that our loved ones get the leftovers. They get whatever we've got left. And in many ways, I guess what you're saying is, let's look at your week and start by figuring out what are your intentions? What do you value? Get those things locked in first and then fit everything else in around them right right right as opposed to starting with you know the big hairy goal or the big audacious plan that the five-year plan start with okay do you need time to commute do you need time for personal

hygiene taking a shower do you need time for quality sleep this is simple stuff and then with whatever's left over after you've done the domain of time for you, time for your relationships, time for work. I mean, look, work takes up the greatest chunk of most people's day. And so by planning out, even in the workplace, you know, one simple solution, people talk about how distracted they are all day because of email and Slack channels and this and that, you know, planning out the time when you will check email, as opposed to using it when we're feeling stressed, or anxious, or uncertain, as opposed to letting these internal triggers guide us towards distraction, we can turn a distraction into traction by making time for it.

So this is what happened with me with email. Email was my emotional coping device. When I was stressed about work, check email, right? When I was bored, check email. For you, it might be social media or something else. And so what I did, I just planned time for it. So in my day, in my calendar, there's a specific time when I'm going to do that, when I'm going to check email, when I'm going to check social media. There's nothing wrong with the technology. What's wrong is that we use it without intent. We let these products use us as opposed to us using them. Well, that was the topic of your first book, wasn't it? How you create products that keep people hooked in many ways. So I guess in some ways, it's quite striking that you've gone from writing the book on how to create products that keep us hooked to writing the book on how we,

to create products that keep us hooked to writing the book on how we, I guess it's not just about technology, but how we actually, um, you know, cope with all these tips and tools and strategies that these big tech companies are using to keep us hooked to their products. It's kind of, I mean, how did you get from, you know, in those five years, how did you get from one book to the next? Yeah. So I, I think what's important to understand is that maybe this is best phrased by Paul Virilio, the philosopher who said that when you invent the ship, you invent the shipwreck. Every new technology has a downside. Of course, there's a downside to a technological revolution of the scale of the internet. There will be lots of problems. But of course, there's a downside to a technological revolution of the scale of the internet. There will be lots of problems. But of course, there's a lot of benefits and solutions.

So my goal with writing Hooked, and this was five years ago, it's hard to remember, but five years ago, believe it or not, people were complaining about how technology, only geeks know how to use technology because it's so difficult to use tech, right? That before the iPhone and the iPad, my mom never touched a computer before the iPad. That was her first computer device. She was not on the internet in any shape or form before the iPad made it usable. And so the fact that these products have now, you know, now we're not complaining about products not being usable. We complain about them being too good, products that we overuse. But the idea, you know, I really do think that we can have our cake and eat it too, that we can get the best out of

technology without letting it get the best of us. And the goal for Hooked was not for the benefit of the social media companies or for the gaming companies. They've been using these techniques for years. That's where I learned these techniques. The idea was, can we use the same psychology where I learned these techniques. The idea was, can we use the same psychology that makes a game habit forming, that makes it engaging, that makes it fun to make all sorts of other products more engaging? So Kahoot is the world's largest educational software. If you have school-age kids, chances are your kids are on Kahoot. And the goal of Kahoot is to get kids hooked to in-classroom learning. The goal of Fitbod is to get people hooked to exercising in the gym. My clients have included the New York Times, which wants to get people hooked to consuming the news.

Apps like Calm or Headspace want to get people hooked to the daily meditation practice. So the book is not about how to addict people. That's not the title. The title is not how to build addictive products. The book is about how to build habit-forming products. Because addictions are always bad, right? Addictions, by definition, are these persistent, compulsive dependencies on a behavior or substance

that harms the user. So we would never want to do that to a user, at least not intentionally. Sometimes addiction is an unfortunate byproduct, but we would never intentionally want to do that. However, habits are just defined as impulses to do a behavior with little or no conscious thought. And of course, we have many good habits that help us live better lives. So Hooked was about how do we build those healthy habits into people's lives, but Indistractable looks at the other side, the products that we sometimes overuse.

Really hope you're enjoying the conversation so far. Just taking a very quick break to give a shout out to the sponsors. Athletic Greens have always been a big supporter of my show and they are a company that I really like. They make one of the most nutrient-dense whole food supplements that I've ever come across and I myself take it regularly. Now this podcast is all about empowering you to become the architect of your own health and of course today's topic of conversation is about focus and how to not let things that are not priorities distract you. Now for me taking athletic greens each morning as part of a daily routine helps me feel as if I've taken a positive

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policy to make sure that you are meeting your nutritional needs, I can highly recommend it. For listeners of the show, if you go to athleticgreens.com forward slash live more, you will be able to access a special offer where you get a free travel pack box containing 20 servings of Athletic Greens, which is worth around £70 with your first order. You can check it out at athleticgreens.com forward slash live more. techgreens.com forward slash live more. If people listen to this and, you know, I saw a lot of nodding heads when you mentioned, you know, when you feel a bit uncertain or a bit stressed, you'll turn to your emails. Other people may turn to social media. I think we all know that feeling when, you know, we've sort of got nothing better to do. We're feeling a little bit angsty. We pull

out our phones and, you know, we might get that reward we're seeking on Instagram, but if not, we'll flick onto something else. And you will keep searching on these endless feeds for something to distract us. So if someone is nodding their head to that, as many people were, what practical tips can you give them? How can they start the process of actually becoming indistractable? Sure. Yeah. So there's basically, so remember we had traction distraction, we had external triggers and we had internal triggers prompting us to these. It's, it's very difficult to do this in sign language and hand motions here, but you kind of get the idea. It's, there's a picture in the book.

That's a beautiful graphic. Yes, there's a useful graphics. But the idea here is that we're basically working around these four points of this model, starting with mastering the internal triggers, that if we don't master the internal triggers, we will always be distracted by something. So how do we do that? There's three big techniques. And the three big techniques are to first reimagine the trigger, reimagine the task, and reimagine our temperament. So reimagining the trigger is about responding to discomfort in a new way. So there's a few techniques that I draw mostly upon from acceptance and commitment therapy. And one of the tools I provide is to start by noting the sensation. We use what's called a distraction

tracker. And what we want to do is to identify the preceding emotion to that distraction. What were you feeling before you reached for your phone, before you ate that chocolate cake, before you procrastinated? What was the preceding sensation that prompted you to want to get distracted? Just writing that down has been shown to be incredibly empowering, just the act of writing it down. The next step is to explore that sensation with curiosity rather than contempt. Most people, as we talked about earlier, they're the blamers and the shamers, right? They get contemptuous with that feeling as opposed to just identifying it. And then what we want to do is to

surf the urge. Surfing the urge is this idea, again, from acceptance and commitment therapy that recognizes that emotions, when we experience an emotion in the moment, it feels like it's going to last forever. When we're upset, we feel like we're always going to be upset. When we're happy, we feel like we're always going to be happy. But of course, that's never true. That emotions crest and subside like a wave. And we can ride that wave like a surfer on a surfboard. One technique I use almost every day is called the 10-minute rule. The 10-minute rule tells us that we can have anything we want. We can give in to that temptation in 10 minutes. And this technique has been shown to be much more effective than strict abstinence. Strict abstinence says, nope, I can't have it. And of course, this oftentimes backfires,

particularly with something that you can't completely abstain from, right? It's one thing to abstain from hard drugs, and you can remove yourself from the environment, for example. But how do you abstain completely from technology? It's very difficult. How do you abstain completely from food? Well, we need it to survive, right? So instead of strict abstinence, which oftentimes backfires, and let me tell you an example of how, I want everyone listening, whatever you do, do not think about a white bear.

Don't do it. What are you all thinking about? Of course, you're all thinking about a white bear. It's impossible not to think about a white bear. Don't do it. What are you all thinking about? Of course, you're all thinking about a white bear. It's impossible not to think about a white bear. And so what we find when it comes to this idea of strict abstinence, it's almost like pulling a rubber band. That if you pull a rubber band, you pull, pull, pull, pull, pull, pull, pull, and then you release it, the rubber band doesn't go to where you started to pull it. No, it bounces further. And so this is what happens when we try and do use strict abstinence. When we pull and we say, no, don't do it. Don't do it. Don't do it. Don't do it. Okay, fine. Do it. Releasing that tension is registered in the brain as pleasurable.

Because remember what we said earlier, that if all behavior is prompted by a desire to escape discomfort, if smoking that cigarette, if giving into that chocolate cake, if checking my newsfeed is something that I've been telling myself, don't do, don't do, don't do, don't do, now it feels good just to relieve the tension of not telling myself to not do it anymore. And so instead of that strict abstinence approach, we can use this 10-minute rule where we tell ourselves that when we feel the temptation to give into distraction, we can give into it in 10 minutes of surfing the urge. And we have a choice to make. We can either get back to the task at hand or spend those 10 minutes getting curious about that sensation. So sometimes I'll pick up

my phone, I'll say, set a timer for 10 minutes, I'll put my phone down, and I'll just be with that sensation. And the goal is to reimagine that sensation in a way that serves us as opposed to hurts us. So what we find is that self-compassion is a very effective technique that when many people berate themselves, as I used to do, I would tell myself how I'm, you know, this blaming mantra of, oh, I'm not good enough. And I, maybe I'm not cut out for this and, oh, nobody's going to like this. And you know, that shaming cycle that we go through, instead we try and talk to ourselves the way we would talk to a good friend, right? We would ask ourselves, well, maybe I'm feeling discomfort, maybe I'm feeling bored, anxious, stressed, whatever it be, whatever it might be,

because this is the process of getting better, right? Getting better at something is effortful. It's part of the process. Stress is not, you know, when I came on stage here, I was kind of nervous. There was a little bit of stage fright. And I used to say to myself, oh, this is terrible. I'm going to do really poorly. And everybody's going to know that, you know, maybe I'll mess up and I'll screw it up. But instead, now I reframe that internal trigger to tell myself, wait a minute, this stress is my body getting ready to perform. My heart is pumping, not because I'm nervous and I'm going to screw up, but because my brain needs more oxygen in order to know these words I'm telling you right now. And so that process of reframing those internal triggers goes a long way to help us reimagine them so that we can gain

greater control over the response. Yeah. And reframing our stress, you also mentioned the story of Bruce Springsteen, don't you, in the book, and how he reframes the stress in terms of he, before he goes on stage, when he's feeling palpitations, when he's feeling pins and needles, he reframes to go, right, you know, I'm ready to give a legendary performance now. My body is priming me for that. So it's, I love that whole idea about reframing our stress. I think it's very, very powerful. Now, I want to talk about relationships, but particularly with our children. There's a story you share in Indistractable that really reminded me of a story that I've spoken about before. And that story is when my daughter was four years old and I was alone with her.

It was a Sunday. And, you know, I thought, you know, I'm quite conscious of my tech use in front of the kids. So I put my phone in a different room, in the dining room, and I was actually in the living room playing with her, but I can't remember what was going on, something was going on in the world, or on social media, something, so I kept disappearing every few minutes, you know, just have a quick look, I'm sure no one in here has ever done anything like that before, but it was quite interesting. So I kept doing that.

And I thought, hey, it's not in front of us. So I'm being present. And she said to me at one point, she said, daddy, you're not really here, are you? And you share a very similar story, don't you? Yeah, yeah. So in my occurrence, and this was really the seminal moment

when I realized I had to do something about this. We had this beautiful afternoon planned with my daughter and we had this daddy and me book full of different activities that daddies and daughters could do to feel close to one another. And one of them was make a paper airplane and different activities.

And one of the activities was to ask each other this question. If you could have any superpower, what superpower would you want? And I remember the question verbatim, but I can't tell you what my daughter said because when she was answering, I told her, hold on one second, honey, I got this one thing I just really need to do real quick. want? And I remember the question verbatim, but I can't tell you what my daughter said. Because when she was answering, I told her, hold on one second, honey, I got this one thing I just really need to do real quick. And she recognized that whatever was on my phone was more important

than she was. And she left the room. And she started to play with some toy outside instead. And I'll add another story to this. I told my friend this story, and we have children of a similar age. And so he asked his daughter this question and she said that the superpower she would want would be the power to talk to animals. And he said, oh, the power to talk to animals. Why is that? And she said, so that when you and mommy are on your phones, I'll have someone to talk to. I know. And so, you know, we have to set the example. You know, kids are hypocrisy detection devices. They are hardwired, scanning for hypocrisy wherever they find it.

And so we can't tell our kids, get off Fortnite, stop being on Facebook, you know, do this and do that while we're checking email on our phones. And if there is one skill we have to teach our kids, it's the power to be indistractable. Not by stopping the use of technology. That's ridiculous. We know the jobs of the future require our kids to be tech literate. We can't tell them to be scared of technology. We can't tell them it's going to hijack their brains. It's going to melt their

synapses. That's ridiculous. We don't want them to be technophobes. We want them to be comfortable with technology. So we have to teach them how to be indistractable. And that starts, there's a lot, or there's a whole section in the book around how we raise indistractable kids. But the first step is really to become indistractable ourselves as adults. Yeah. I mean, that's a common theme in parenting, wherever you look. I spoke to Philippa Perry recently, who's written a book about parenting and it comes down to the same thing. You want to sort your kids out, sort yourself out first. It's the kind of uncomfortable truth for many of us parents. Or we can do it together. I think a lot of parents, they feel like sharing vulnerability about their struggle somehow makes them weak in their kids' eyes. And I don't think so. I think

when it comes to this problem of distraction, I think it's a good idea to tell our kids, look, you know, these products are designed to be engaging. They are built to hack our attention. I'm telling you this as an industry insider that of course they are, and we want them to be. We want these products to be engaging. That's why we use them. We don't want to tell Netflix,

Netflix, stop making your show so interesting. I want to watch them. Apple, please make your device less user-friendly. We want these things to be engaging. That's what they're meant to do. But we can hack back. And our kids need to know that this isn't something that we should give up on or excise from our life. We should learn tactics to use these products in the right way. And we should tell them that we ourselves are struggling. And how can we work together to make sure that we can put them in their place? It seems that one of the most important skills that we can possibly teach

the younger generation and teach our children is how to be indistractable, but that's not really what schools are teaching our kids today, is it? Yeah, I think so. There's a really interesting body of research I had mentioned earlier, self-determination theory, that really opened my eyes to, I think, what's really going on with our kids these days. And so I think what we have to do is to ask ourselves, why do kids overuse technology? And the root cause is that children are deficient in those three psychological nutrients. So let me walk through them real quick. Competency. This idea of competency, that all of us need the sense that we are getting better at something. You know how good it feels when you're good at

something, right? Whether it's giving a talk or parallel parking, whatever it might be, that skill that you have that you're good at something, that feels good. And it turns out for psychological flourishing, according to Dessie and Ryan, this 50-year-old research that is the most widely accepted theory of human motivation and flourishing, that we all need that feeling. But one thing that has occurred synchronously with the rise of cell phones, the increasing use of cell phones, is the rise of teachers teaching towards tests. I'm not as familiar with what's going on in the UK. I suspect it's similar. But in the US, we have this very high emphasis on standardized testing that started rolling out around 2006,

2007. And we teach our kids towards the test. Teachers get paid based on the kids' test results. Many kids, starting in kindergarten, are subjected to standardized tests multiple times per year. And so they are told repeatedly, you're not competent. Not all kids, right? Not all kids struggle with too much technology use, but a subset of children is constantly told you're not competent. And so back to that needs displacement hypothesis, if we don't get our needs met offline, where do we go? Well, the tech companies are very happy to give our kids products that make them feel competent. Minecraft makes you feel amazing, right? You can master it. You can build your own universe. It feels great. Now let's look at autonomy. Autonomy is this feeling that we have agency and control

over our environment. It's freedom. We all crave it. We need the feeling of freedom. We hate being told what to do. But this is the most regulated generation in history. A study by Peter Gray found that children today have 10 times as many restrictions placed on them as the average adult, twice as many as an incarcerated felon. There are two places in society where you are allowed to tell people where to go, what to think, what to wear, who to be friends with, what to eat, and that's prison and school. That's it. And so is it any surprise when the school system

puts kids through this regimented system and treats them like chattel and tells them what to do all day long, is it any surprise when they come home, they want freedom. They want to do what they want to do, which by the way, kids have been doing for a very long time. Now let's talk about the third point here, about relatedness. They want to do what they want to do, which by the way, kids have been doing for a very long time. Now let's talk about the third point here, about relatedness. Again, relatedness is this idea that every human being on the face of the earth, we want to be understood by others and have others

understand us. We need this as part of what helps us flourish psychologically. But kids today are deficient in this psychological nutrient of relatedness because they have no time for what's called free play. Since statistics were collected, kids today have less time for free play than ever before. Free play is when kids can interact with each other without the supervision of coaches and parents and teachers telling them what to do. It's kids being kids. And unfortunately today, kids have less time for free play than ever. The economically advantaged schedule the hell out of their kids. They send them to tutoring and swimming and ballet and Mandarin, and they

have no time to just play anymore. Those that don't have the means, many of them are so terrified by the media telling us that kids will get abducted and stranger danger, even though that's ridiculous. This is the safest time in history to be a child. That many of these parents are so scared they keep their kids indoors under lock and key. And what the heck are kids supposed to do, right? They're looking for something,

a way to interact with their friends. So where do they go if you don't get relatedness offline? Well, you use Twitter, you use Instagram, you use TikTok, you use Snapchat, because they're desperate to have that sense of relatedness met. They need that interaction with their friends. Just like we used to do in our generation, talking on the phone until the wee hours of the night, we were interacting with our friends. We just wanted to relate to people, and they're desperate for it. So one of the best, we were interacting with our friends. We just wanted to relate to people and they're desperate for it. So one of the best things that you can do

to raise an indistractable child is to plan time for free play. It's one of the most psychologically nourishing things you can do for them. And I think this is part of why we see such a fragile generation of kids growing up these days that they haven't had that experience of free play. I mean, free play is where we learn our place in the world. It's one thing if a teacher or a parent tells

you what to do. It's a whole nother story if one of your friends says, hey, if you act like a jerk to me, I'm not going to be friends with you. We're not going to play, right? That's where you learn your place in the world, and kids need more of it. So we have to schedule it, just like we talk about making time for our own traction. One of the things we can do is make time for traction for our kids. You know, it involves finding another parent who understands how important it is to give kids this psychological nourishment of free play. And we schedule time for play. Unfortunately, that's what's become. I mean, it used to be a kid, you know, my generation, we just walked outside and we could find our friends because they'd all be playing. You don't see that anymore. You know, the neighborhoods don't sing with the sound of kids playing anymore. They don't do it. And so,

unfortunately, but this is our salvation, we have to make time for that as well. Yeah. I mean, as you're sort of talking through that, I'm reflecting on many of my own patterns as a parent. And literally just this week, my wife and I decided to cut back on how many after-school activities our kids do because we thought this is getting a bit ridiculous now. And the tricky thing is you look around you and you see what everyone else is doing. And there is this feeling sometimes that you're missing out unless you do that. But we just thought, come on, we've just got to stand on our own two feet and go, look, this is getting ridiculous now. We don't feel that this is helpful.

feet and go, look, this is getting ridiculous now. We don't feel that this is helpful. And I think your idea of actually scheduling free play and unstructured free play is probably one of the most influential things that we can do, right? I think this skill set and teaching this skill set of becoming indistractable, this is the skill of the century. I mean, if you think the world is distracting today, just wait a few years. The world that our children will inhabit when they're adults is going to be only more distracting. This trend is not reversing folks, right? And so, if we can raise a generation of children who are indistractable, that is the skill of the century. Something that is distracting me at the moment a little bit is that I was told there was going to be a clock on stage, and I haven't seen one yet. And I'm looking around for it to see what time it is. It is how much, sorry? 10 to 8. 10 to 8. Okay. So

we have about 10 minutes or so. Okay. So let's sort of try and wrap up this a little bit. One of the things that I find intensely irritating is when you're out with a group of friends and people are looking at their phones, okay, in terms of you're trying to connect. And we all, I'm sure I have also done it to somebody else, so I'm not sort of casting blame here in any way. But it is, in many ways, it's something that I think we've all got used to. And I think it's incredibly problematic. In the same way that I mentioned relationships before, if we're distracted whilst we're having the interactions with our partners, I think that's incredibly problematic. And you do cover this in your book and you mentioned a phrase that I've not heard before about a social contagion. I wonder

if you could just expand on what that is. Sure. Yeah. So, we've been here before. The good news is we've been here before and we've made it through. Okay, we're still making it through. And the story I provide is this idea around smoking, that in the United States, it used to be that 60% of the adult population smoked. Today, it's around 14%. And one of the phenomenal things is that even without legislation, things have really changed in particular circumstances. Let me explain further. So when I was a kid, I grew up in the 1980s. Those are some of my first memories were from the 1980s. And I remember in my household, my parents didn't smoke. My dad had given it up years ago. My mom never smoked. And yet we had ashtrays all over our house. Why did we have ashtrays in our house? We had ashtrays because

when someone came to your house in the 1980s, they just expected to light a cigarette in your living room. Can you imagine if someone came to your house and just lit up? I just assumed I could light a cigarette right now. That would be ridiculous, right? How awkward would that be? Why? Why did that change? You said, okay, well, legislation changed smoking laws. Yes, but no law ever mandated that you can't smoke in someone's living room. There's no law like that. Why did people change? Well, we adopted what's called social antibodies. Social antibodies is when a society changes their behavior because they see some kind

of unhealthy behavior they want to weed out of the population. So what we did, we made it socially untenable to smoke in someone's living room. We made that rude. We made that something that is now something you would never dream of doing. And so I think we see something similar happening when it comes to our tech use. And I think it's happening with or without my book, but I hope to accelerate this process. Even today, I have to say, what a wonderful crowd. I mean, when I started teaching this subject matter, not with this book, but with my first book, pretty much half the room when I would give a public talk would be on their phones. Maybe I used to be a very boring speaker. I don't know. But today, look, nobody is on their devices. Maybe one or two people. I don't know. Very, very few. Not that there's anything wrong with it, by the

way, if you want to tweet. Don't feel bad if you are. Don't feel bad. No guilt here. But we've learned, you know, I see this also with my students. I used to teach for many years at the Stanford Design School and the business school. And my students, when I first started teaching, they'd be on their phone in the middle of the class. And then they started seeing the negative repercussions that, you know, you can't be fully present and listen to the professor while you're on your device. And so today, almost none of my students do this. And so people are getting the message. There's this new word called fubbing. Maybe you've heard it. Fubbing was a recently invented word that's a combination of phone snubbing. It's this practice when you're sitting with someone across the table and you're trying to have a discussion

and they think it's a good time to take out their device. That's called fubbing. And so what do we do with fubbing? How do we inoculate our population? How do we inoculate our friends and spread these social antibodies? Here's how we do it. We ask one sincere question. Here's how we do it. We ask one sincere question. The question is, I see you're on your phone. Is everything okay? Now, what do I do? What have I done when I ask that question? I'm not assuming that I know what's going on. If you say, get off your phone, I want to talk to you, right? Don't be rude. That's not going to work. You're going to lose a friend. One, you don't know what's actually happening on the other end of the line. There might be really some kind of emergency, but by sincerely asking that question of, hey, is everything okay? You give them an out to say, oh, you know what? I'm so sorry. There's just this emergency. I really have to take care of right now. In which case they'll excuse themselves and take care of

that problem. Or nine times out of 10, they'll get the hint. Oh, I'm so sorry. And they'll put it away, right? So we are learning this social antibody. We're spreading the social antibody. And I'm pretty optimistic. I see this happening already. Hopefully that process will accelerate by this discussion. Yeah, I love that. I love the term fubbing. That's incredible. Have you actually used that strategy with any of your friends? All the time. Really? All the time. All the time. And frankly, you know, look, I told you at the very beginning when we started about when I defined the term indistractable, becoming indistractable does not mean we never get distracted. That's impossible.

Becoming indistractable means we are the type of people who strive to do what we say we're going to do. And the idea is that we learn from when we get distracted. There's a saying that insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. So many of us, myself included, I mean, I wrote this book for me more than anyone, I would constantly get distracted day in and day out by the same thing. Well, that doesn't happen anymore. Now, when I get distracted, I know why. There are only three reasons, an external trigger, an internal trigger, or a planning problem. And I can do something about it in the future. So I'll be totally honest with you. Sometimes I get called out,

my daughter in particular, right? So if I'm taking my daughter to a class or something and I'll be just taking her and going from one place to another and I'll check something because my wife is texting me and then I'll get caught in by one of these external triggers sometimes and she'll say, hey, daddy, is everything okay?

Right? Good point. Let me put that away. And I want that. I think that's a healthy thing for us all to help each other spread the social antibody. Yeah, for sure, Nir. Look, I've got to say another thank you again

for actually writing the book, which I think is brilliant. But also, really, I love the fact that you've given a name now to this problem. So it's not this thing that we all sort of know we're suffering from. There's a name, you know, and we can think about how can we become indistractable. And often it's by naming a problem that actually we start to think about solutions. So thank you for that. As you know, Nir, this conversation is going to go out on my own podcast, Feel Better Live More. I always end it a particular way, and I wonder if we could try that here. So

it's called Feel Better Live More because I genuinely have seen time and time again in my practice seeing patients that when people feel better in themselves, they get more out of lives. And I guess the more indistractable we can become, the more we're going to get out of our lives. So I wonder if you could leave the listeners but also the live audience here today with some of your most practical tips that they can think about applying into their own life immediately once they've left. Yeah. So we only got through two of the four strategies. So maybe what I'll do is just kind of do a quick wrap up on these four strategies. And I think what's more important than the tactics is the strategy. Tactics are what you do. Strategy is why you do it. And so it's very

important to first understand the strategy. So frankly, you can come up with your own techniques, right? I give lots and lots of tactics that you can use, but it's more important that you develop these for yourself and customize them to your life, right? Because we all have different values. We all have different lives. We're all on this journey together. And so these four steps is first to master these internal triggers. We talked about a little bit about how we can reimagine the triggers. We can also reimagine the task and our temperament. We don't have time to go into that now, but there's a lot more there. Then it's about making time for traction.

It's about turning our values into time on our calendars and synchronizing our calendars with our loved ones, with our stakeholders, with our bosses, so that we can make sure that we're synchronized around how we spend our time. What we didn't get to is around hacking back the external triggers. This is a category that's very tactical. This is all about taking those external triggers in our environment, the pings and dings or whatever else.

It could be our children, as we talked about earlier in the kibbutz. It could be superfluous meetings. It could be emails, Slack channels, whatever it might be, and making sure that we ask ourselves this critical question of, is this trigger serving me, or am I serving it? If the external trigger is leading us towards traction, it's great, let's keep it, right? If an external trigger on your phone is reminding you, hey, it's time to work out, it's time for that meeting, it's time to do whatever it is you plan to do in advance, keep it, it's wonderful. But if you're serving it, if it's leading you towards distraction,

as that external trigger led me to check my phone when I wanted to be my daughter, now it's leading me towards distraction. It's not serving me. It needs to be removed. So it turns out two thirds of people with a smartphone, two thirds of people with a smartphone never changed their notification settings. This is simple stuff, right? We can, we can all do this. That's kindergarten stuff. What's much more important is the external triggers we don't always identify. So for example, in my research, I found that one of the most common sources of distraction in the workplace is other people, right? Especially if you work in an open floor plan office, we're kind of leaving ourselves open to someone tapping us on the shoulder and say, hey, do you

hear that little bit of gossip or can you believe what just happened or whatever it might be can I just talk to you for a quick sec it's never a quick sec so what we can do is essentially there's a screen sign in the back of the book you pull it out

you fold it into thirds it's this red stop sign looking thing that you put on your computer monitor and it tells your colleagues, I'm indistractable, please come back later. Right? And so you're sending this explicit message to your colleagues, you know, for the next hour or whatever, 45 minutes, I need some time to focus. I need some time to think. And so you're starting to set this culture of it's okay to disconnect for a little bit, even if disconnecting means not being reachable all the

time in the physical world, right? In an open floor plan office. And then finally, the last technique is about preventing distraction with pacts. And pacts are these pre-committments that we can use. In this category, there are three things that we can do. We can make a price pact, an effort pact, and an identity pact. These are promises we make to ourselves, to other people that help us stay on track, that prevent us from getting distracted. So an identity pact. These are promises we make to ourselves, to other people that help us stay on track, that prevent us from getting distracted. So an effort pact is something that we can do that puts a bit of work between us and something we don't want to do. So in my household, we talked about relationships earlier. My wife and I found that we were going to bed later and

later every night. This was impacting our relationship. It was impacting our sex life because she would fondle her iPhone and I would caress my iPad as opposed to being with each other. And so here's what we did. We went to the hardware store and we bought ourselves this $10 outlet timer. And this outlet timer turns anything you plug into it on and off at a certain type of day or night. And what do we plug into it? Our internet router. So every night at 10 PM, our internet shuts off. Now, could I turn it back on? Of course I could. I could fiddle with it, go under my desk, unplug it, replug it. But that takes effort. That takes work. And that bit of effort makes me insert a bit of mindfulness to ask myself, wait, do I really need to go online

right now? Or can I wait till later? And of course, 99% of the time, there's nothing all that urgent, right? In fact, now we've trained ourselves, we all know, okay, 10 o'clock, the internet shuts off, do everything you need to do so we can get to bed. And then lastly, there's a price pact, which is about making some kind of financial commitment. But one thing I want to leave you with is this idea of an identity pact. And this was one of the more interesting bits of research I came across. This was research around the psychology of religion. And it turns out that when we have some kind of identity, some kind of moniker that we can embrace and call ourselves and tell other people about, we become much more likely to stick with our goals.

And a good example of this, if you consider someone who's devout, they're not debating with themselves about their behavior every day the way we might if you don't have these type of beliefs, this type of moniker. So consider a devout Muslim. A devout Muslim would not say to themselves, hmm, I wonder if I should have that gin and tonic. No, a devout Muslim doesn't drink alcohol, period. A vegetarian doesn't say to themselves, ooh, I wonder if I should have that bacon today. No, they're vegetarian. They don't eat meat. It's who they are.

I am a vegetarian. I'm not, but that's what they would say. And so that's why this book is called Indistractable. Indistractable should be the new moniker. It should be what we call ourselves because we know that when you have an identity, when you have some type of noun that you can call yourself, you become much more likely to stick with your goals. So when people ask you, hey, how come

you're not returning your emails every 30 seconds? How come you put this weird screen sign on your screen? Why do you do these strange things? That's who I am. And is it any more different than someone who wears unusual religious garb or who has a diet that might not be what everyone else eats? No, we don't question those things. So we need this new moniker, and I'm hoping to start this movement. I mean, with or without the book, I want people to proclaim that they are indistractable, that we are the kind of people who don't want our lives and our attention and our time controlled by others.

We are the kind of people who do what we say we're going to do. We control our time and attention by becoming indistractable. Yeah, brilliant. Just brilliant. And Nia, I'm going to tell you now in front of a live audience, I am indistractable. Okay, that's my new identity. Okay, I'll tell my wife when I get home tomorrow. See how that goes down.

Look, thank you for sharing your wisdom this evening thank you for writing such a brilliant book ladies and gentlemen please put your hands together for Mr Nir Eyal so what did you think of that conversation has it caused you to reflect on your own life and some of your own behaviors? Do you agree with what Nir said? Or do you have a different perspective? As always, please do let both of us know on social media what you thought of our conversation.

And Nir is someone who I've seen spend a lot of time responding to people's questions on Twitter and Instagram. So please do jump on and ask away if you have any further questions. As always, do think about one thing that you can take from this conversation and apply into your own life. As I mentioned in the intro today, for me, it's not about judgment. We all get distracted from time to time. This is about judgment. We all get distracted from time to time. This is about awareness. If we're going to start changing our behaviors, we simply have to understand what is driving them

in the first place. If you go to the show notes page for this week's episode, which is drchastity.com forward slash 120, you'll see links to all Nia's social media channels, his website, his books, including his fantastic new book Indistractable and a few media articles about his work. Now Nir spoke about how important scheduling the important things in our lives is so they actually do happen and in many ways this is an idea that lies behind my last book, Feel Better in Five. It contains a wide variety of five-minute habits that you can do each day to improve your physical, mental, and emotional health. It's founded on the principles and science of successful behavior change. And it really does work even for the busiest of people. It's been out of the

UK since January 2020 and it's probably had the most impact out of any of my books so far. I'm really excited that it is officially being released in America and Canada on September the 1st. So if you live in those countries or if you know someone who does, please do head over to amazon.com where you can pre-order your very own copy now. It is available, as always, in paperback, ebook, and as an audiobook, which I am narrating. The American Book has actually got a really exciting new yellow cover, which I really like, so do check it out. Of course, please do help me spread the word by sharing this conversation with your friends and family and don't forget you can watch this conversation in full on youtube so if you have friends and family who you feel would benefit from these

conversations but don't listen to audio podcasts please do let them know about my youtube channel a big thank you to vidarta chastity for producing this week's podcast and to Richard Hughes for audio engineering. That is it for today. I hope you have a fabulous week. Make sure you hit press subscribe and I'll be back in one week's time with my latest conversation.

Remember, you are the architects of your own health. Making lifestyle changes always worth it because when you feel better, you live more. I'll see you next time.