Moment 149: Why You Are Easily Distracted & How To FIX it! Nir Eyal

Steven Bartlett (0:03)

One of the things this podcast has taught me from speaking to all these people across multiple fields is that sometimes we can feel like our body, our wiring is against us, especially as it relates to health, right? So, you know, we know sugar is bad. So why does our brain send us these cravings to go and eat sugar? And in the case of distractions and sort of behavioral psychology, I know instinctively and intuitively that distractions like hanging out on TikTok for an hour is bad, but my brain is doing it. What does that tell us about how we should go about adopting behavior change?

Nir Eyal (0:43)

Yeah, so that's why it's really about this holistic model. So that's what took me the most time to figure out was what are the four mandatory components of living without regret of doing what you say you're going to do.

So the first step is mastering these internal triggers, figuring out why you feel this way, right? What is that underlying sensation? So if you're trying to avoid that chocolate bar, it might be hunger or it might not be hunger, right? So I used to be clinically obese. And I'll tell you what, I did not eat to excess because I was hungry. I was eating to excess because I was lonely. I was eating to excess because I was bored. I was eating to excess because I felt guilty about how much I had just eaten. It wasn't just about the hunger, right? There are very few people who are obese are just hungry all the time. That's not what's going on. It's because we're eating our feelings. That's what's happening. So that's the first step. We have to understand the deeper reason.

Steven Bartlett (1:33)

How did you understand that?

Nir Eyal (1:36)

A lot of work. A lot of figuring out stuff in my life to help me understand that. And I think actually that's where my fascination with what I do today in terms of it's the same exact reason that we would overdo our use of technology. It's not the technology's fault, guys. I hate to tell you this. I wish I could blame Zuckerberg and TikTok, but these are just tools, right? And before those, there were other tools. They used to call our generation couch potatoes. And before that, it was the radio was the moral panic. And before that, it was comic books. There's always some moral panic around, oh, this is melting our brains, because we don't want to face the facts that we are looking for escape from these internal triggers, right? Time management is pain management. All human behavior is driven by desire to escape discomfort.

So when you realize that, that, you know what? I was just unable to deal with these sensations in a in a healthful way that moved me towards traction. I was trying to escape them with distraction. It's not until you understand what sensations you're trying to escape from that you can deal with them. If you can't sit around the table with a friend without looking at your phone every three minutes, it's not the phone. It's your inability to deal with the discomfort of maybe having silence or boredom or whatever else is going on in your life. So that has to be the first step. It's not the only step, but that's the first step.

Steven Bartlett (2:50)

I'm really compelled by, really interested in how you figured out the thing you were trying to escape from because I think that's the starting point, which is a very difficult starting point for most people. They can see the sort of compulsive behavior that's maybe making them live outside of their values or causing them to excessively eat or excessively watch porn or whatever it might be. But diagnosing the root cause of that is a difficult thing to do. Most of us don't know what we don't know.

Nir Eyal (3:15)

It is and it isn't. I mean, you don't have to go to therapy. Now, there's anything wrong with it. If it's helpful, please do it. But that's not a requirement. Something as simple as, so whenever I work, I have on my desk, I have a little post-it note and a pen handy.

When I get distracted or when I even feel the sense of distraction, just noting down that sensation, just writing down what is it that I felt right before the distraction. So I write every day and all I want to do when I write, you know this, right? When you write, all you want to do is go Google something or do some research or go check email for a quick sec or let me just find that one thing that might be, and they're all distractions. They're all taking you away from the core thing you need to do, which you said you would do, which is right. And so if I can just pause for a second and reflect on what was that sensation that I was feeling right before, it was boredom, it was anxiety, it was fearfulness, it was uncertainty. Just writing it down is an incredible first step towards gaining power over that discomfort because then you can start to identify it. And so what I'll do many times is just pause to reflect on, wait a minute, what's going on there? What is that sensation? Because then you can begin to do what's called reframing the trigger. So now when I feel the sensation of wanting to get distracted, I say, you know what? What's going on here? Okay, I'm feeling this sensation because I'm stressed. Why am I stressed? Because this is really important to me. I want to get this right for my readers and for myself. And so reframing it as not a negative, but something that happens not to me, but for me, that that sensation is a sign that I can listen to. I think most of us, we think when we feel this discomfort, that's happening to us, right? But it's not, it's happening for us. It's a signal for us to listen to. Now, how we interpret it is up to us. And that's where the magic happens. If you interpret it as something that is harmful, is dangerous, that you need to escape, right? You don't want to feel that uncomfortable sensation. You look for distraction. But what we find is that high performers across every field, when you think about the arts, when you think about sports, business, high performers, when they feel those internal triggers, they experience the same internal triggers the rest of us do. They experience loneliness and stress and anxiety, just like everyone else does. But they deal with it by using it as rocket fuel to push them towards traction. Whereas distractible people, as soon as they feel that discomfort, they try and escape it with distraction. That's the big difference.