Speaker 1: Welcome to the Psychology Podcast, where we give you insights
Speaker 1: into the mind, brain, behavior and creativity. I'm doctor Scott
Speaker 1: Barry Kaufman, and in each episode I have a conversation
Speaker 1: with a guest. He will stimulate your mind and give
Speaker 1: you a greater understanding of yourself, others, and the world
Speaker 1: to live in. Hopefully we'll also provide a glimpse into
Speaker 1: human possibility. Thanks for listening and enjoy the podcast today.
Speaker 1: It's really great to have near a y'all on the podcast.
Speaker 1: Nearest formally a lecturer in marketing at Stanford's Graduate School
Speaker 1: of Business and also tallow the Hasso Platner Institute of Design.
Speaker 1: His first book, Hooked, How to Build habit forming Products,
Speaker 1: was an international bestseller. His current book is called Indestractable,
Speaker 1: How to Control your attention and Choose your Life. This
Speaker 1: book reveals the Achilles heel of distraction and provides a
Speaker 1: guidebook for getting the best of technology without letting it
Speaker 1: get the best of us. Thanks so much for chatting
Speaker 1: with me today, Nearer. Oh, my pleasure. Thanks for having me.
Speaker 1: Yeah's my pleasure as well. So why did you write
Speaker 1: this book? So I wrote Indistractable for a few reasons. One,
Speaker 1: I was patient zero. Here I found that I was
Speaker 1: becoming distracted and I needed to do something about it.
Speaker 1: This kind of seminal moment for me in my life
Speaker 1: was when I was sitting with my daughter one afternoon
Speaker 1: and we had planned to just spend some quality time together,
Speaker 1: and we had this book of activities that daddies and
Speaker 1: daughters could do together, and one of the activities was
Speaker 1: to ask each other this question, if you could have
Speaker 1: any superpower, what superpower would you want? And I remember
Speaker 1: the question verbatim, but I can't tell you what my
Speaker 1: daughter said because when she was answering, I was looking
Speaker 1: at my phone and I wasn't paying attention to her.
Speaker 1: She got the message. She realized that whatever was on
Speaker 1: my phone was more important than she was, and she
Speaker 1: left the room to go play with some toy outside.
Speaker 1: By the time I looked up from my device, she
Speaker 1: was gone, and I realized that something had to be done.
Speaker 1: And if I'm honest with you, Scott, that wasn't the
Speaker 1: only time it happened. And I found that it not
Speaker 1: only happened in my personal life, it also happened in
Speaker 1: my professional life. I would sit down to write, I
Speaker 1: would sit down to do some big project, and I
Speaker 1: would procrastinate. I wasn't taking care of my body. I
Speaker 1: wasn't going to the gym, I wasn't eating right. And
Speaker 1: so I thought to myself, you know, man, if there
Speaker 1: was one superpower I would really want, it would be
Speaker 1: the power to just do what I say. Right, we
Speaker 1: all know what we need to do. There's no more
Speaker 1: information gap anymore. We all know how to have a
Speaker 1: healthier body, we all know how to be more productive
Speaker 1: at work, we all know basically how to have better
Speaker 1: relationships with There's no secrets here. It's about doing it,
Speaker 1: and most importantly, how do we make sure we don't
Speaker 1: do the things we don't want to do? How do
Speaker 1: we make sure we don't get distracted? So that's when
Speaker 1: I decided, you know, if I could have any superpower,
Speaker 1: I would want the superpower to become indistractable. So that
Speaker 1: was kind of the genesis of why I wanted to
Speaker 1: explore this domain. I didn't know I write a book
Speaker 1: at first. At first, I just wanted answers to my
Speaker 1: own problem, thinking somebody had already done the research and
Speaker 1: written a book about this topic. But the more I
Speaker 1: read the kind of who's who of books out there
Speaker 1: on what to do about this problem, specifically around tech distractions.
Speaker 1: And I tried those solutions. I found they didn't work
Speaker 1: for me. That you know, this idea of a digital
Speaker 1: detos or a thirty day plan, or you know, get
Speaker 1: rid of the technology the technology is the problem just
Speaker 1: wasn't true, at least not in my case. I would
Speaker 1: say to myself, Okay, I'm going to do that big
Speaker 1: project right now. I'd sit down at my desk and
Speaker 1: I got rid of the technology. By the way, I
Speaker 1: got myself a flip phone off of Ali Baba for
Speaker 1: twelve dollars with no internet, no apps, only text messages
Speaker 1: and phone calls. I got myself a word processor from
Speaker 1: the nineteen nineties that they don't even make anymore. Thinking, okay,
Speaker 1: now I've excized all the potential distractions. And when I
Speaker 1: would sit down at my desk, I would look behind
Speaker 1: me and there was this book, you know, a couple
Speaker 1: of books that I say, oh, let me just do
Speaker 1: some research in one of those books, or let me
Speaker 1: just tidy up my desk, or let me take out
Speaker 1: my trash, or you know, I would just keep getting
Speaker 1: distracted because what I realized is that distraction goes much
Speaker 1: deeper than what we call the proximal cause. I wanted
Speaker 1: to get to the root cause of distraction, and so
Speaker 1: that that was really a big reason why I wanted
Speaker 1: to explore this solution to the extent that I really
Speaker 1: wanted to write a book about it because I didn't
Speaker 1: see any book that that really worked for me. And really,
Speaker 1: you know, took the existing literature out there on distraction
Speaker 1: and distilled it down to something that people could actually
Speaker 1: use in their day to day lives. Yeah, you've done
Speaker 1: a really great service along those lines. And I let's
Speaker 1: really get to the root of this, you know, you
Speaker 1: you talk about like what really motivates us? Can you
Speaker 1: tell me I'd like to know? Sure? Sure, So let
Speaker 1: me let me back up. So, the indistractable has has
Speaker 1: a few different first principles that we should address. First.
Speaker 1: For principally, you know, what is this word distraction? Exactly
Speaker 1: what does that mean? It's not an addiction, that's very
Speaker 1: very different. We want to define exactly what we mean
Speaker 1: by a distraction. So the best way to understand what
Speaker 1: a distraction is is to understand what it is is not.
Speaker 1: So the opposite of distraction is not focus. The opposite
Speaker 1: of distraction is traction. That in fact, both words come
Speaker 1: from the same Latin root trahare, which means to pull,
Speaker 1: and you'll notice both words and in the same six
Speaker 1: letters actio in that spells action. So traction is any
Speaker 1: action that pulls you towards what you want to do,
Speaker 1: things that you are doing with intent. The opposite of
Speaker 1: traction is distraction, anything that pulls you away from what
Speaker 1: you plan to do with intent. So my argument is
Speaker 1: that the time you plan to waste is not wasted time.
Speaker 1: This isn't a bible for productivity. I don't care what
Speaker 1: you do with your time as long as you plan
Speaker 1: what you want to do with intent, as long as
Speaker 1: it's according to your values. If you want to watch
Speaker 1: Netflix videos, or you want to scroll Facebook or Instagram,
Speaker 1: whatever you want to do, do it as long as
Speaker 1: you plan to do it with intent. I think that's
Speaker 1: where I differ from a lot of critics out there
Speaker 1: who have wrote very moral, panic type books around technology.
Speaker 1: They put different technologies, particularly the new scary ones that
Speaker 1: all the kids are using, as inferior, and I think
Speaker 1: that's ridiculous. If you want to play Fortnite or candy
Speaker 1: Crush or scroll Facebook or Instagram, whatever you want to do,
Speaker 1: as long as you plan to do with that with intent,
Speaker 1: there's nothing morally inferior to doing that versus you know,
Speaker 1: watching football for three hours. What's the difference. You know,
Speaker 1: the average American watches five hours of television at night.
Speaker 1: I would much rather have people interacting with each other online.
Speaker 1: There's a lot of good things you can do online
Speaker 1: if you do them with intent versus just you know,
Speaker 1: staring at the boob tube. So that's that's point number one,
Speaker 1: that what you do with intent is traction. Anything that
Speaker 1: you don't do with intent that takes you off track
Speaker 1: is a distraction. Now back to your question, Well, let's
Speaker 1: just stop there, let's do this piecemeal. Yeah, So can
Speaker 1: I have things that I I don't want to do,
Speaker 1: but it's it's in my values and I do it
Speaker 1: with intent. Like you know, you gave me an example
Speaker 1: of like, like, well, if you do than ten and
Speaker 1: you want to do it, it's within your valve. But
Speaker 1: like you know, like I get like five million emails
Speaker 1: a day. I don't want I would prefer to delete
Speaker 1: every single email, but and not have to do and
Speaker 1: not have to waste seven hours of my day but
Speaker 1: respond to emails. But I actually it's an it's a
Speaker 1: part of my value system to to show people, uh
Speaker 1: to like compassion and to try to help as many
Speaker 1: people as I can. So I do try to carve
Speaker 1: out that time and respond as many as I can,
Speaker 1: and I don't want to do it. So the one
Speaker 1: part of it is what I want to understand. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so there's no easy answer that there's no magic formula
Speaker 1: that I could say that I can help you do
Speaker 1: hard things in life easily. That's that's typically snake oil
Speaker 1: when someone tells you like this is what I what
Speaker 1: drives me nuts about a lot of the literature out
Speaker 1: there on habits. When people say they want a habit,
Speaker 1: what they're really saying is they want to do something
Speaker 1: hard without expending an efforts. You want to have it exactly.
Speaker 1: I want gifting weights. I want the habit of writing
Speaker 1: a novel. I want the habit of, you know, exercising
Speaker 1: every day, whatever it might be. But you know what
Speaker 1: people don't understand is the definition of a habit prevents
Speaker 1: those things from becoming habits. The definition of a habit
Speaker 1: is the impulse to do a behavior with little or
Speaker 1: no conscious thought. I don't know about you. Writing is hard.
Speaker 1: That is not something I do with little or no
Speaker 1: conscious thought. Right, So that's not a habit. That's a routine. Right.
Speaker 1: A routine is just a series of behaviors done in progression.
Speaker 1: So that's there's no promise here that this stuff is
Speaker 1: going to be magically easy. Right. If you want to
Speaker 1: get better at something, you're gonna have to work at it.
Speaker 1: And sometimes that means prioritizing some values above others. And frankly,
Speaker 1: I don't dive into I don't want to be one
Speaker 1: of these people who says that you know, I know
Speaker 1: what your value should be. I think that's ludicrous. I
Speaker 1: think that's a for for people listening to decide for themselves.
Speaker 1: What I want to help people do is to do
Speaker 1: the things that they themselves say they want to do.
Speaker 1: I want to help them get those things done. Sounds great, Okay,
Speaker 1: thanks for thanks for clarifying that a little bit. So well, yeah,
Speaker 1: let's now talk about what really motivates me? Sure, I
Speaker 1: want to know. Yeah, So if you think about, okay,
Speaker 1: what leads you towards traction or distraction? Two things? Two
Speaker 1: types of triggers. There are external triggers, things in our environment,
Speaker 1: the pings, the dings, the rings, anything in our environment
Speaker 1: that composes an external trigger that can prompt you towards
Speaker 1: traction or distraction. And they're not all bad. Right. If
Speaker 1: an external trigger prompts you to get up in the
Speaker 1: morning and go to the gym and that's what you
Speaker 1: plan to do, well, now it's leading you towards traction,
Speaker 1: it's serving you. But if an external trigger is a
Speaker 1: notification on your phone while you're with your daughter, as
Speaker 1: I was, and that's not what I planned to do.
Speaker 1: I didn't plan to check my phone. I plan to
Speaker 1: be fully present with someone I love. That would have
Speaker 1: that led me towards distraction. So I was serving it.
Speaker 1: And so that's the critical question to add to managing
Speaker 1: these external triggers is asking ourselves is this external trigger
Speaker 1: serving me? Or am I serving it? And so there's
Speaker 1: a lot we can do there. But now we're finally
Speaker 1: able to answer your question of what really really motivates us?
Speaker 1: Because we love to blame these external triggers, that's kind
Speaker 1: of the the what's in vogue today is that you know,
Speaker 1: we love to blame the devices, Blame the iPhone, blame slack,
Speaker 1: blame email, And it turns out that, yes, those do
Speaker 1: comprise a certain amount of distractions. But it's much more
Speaker 1: common for distraction to start from within. Oh yeah, it's
Speaker 1: much more rewarding to blame everyone else for your problems,
Speaker 1: isn't it. Though I talk about motivated reasoning, right, we
Speaker 1: really would like it to be somebody else. But but
Speaker 1: the darn internal. Exactly the internal? What are internal triggers?
Speaker 1: Internal triggers are uncomfortable emotional states that we seek to
Speaker 1: escape from. That. You know, you'll be familiar with Freud's
Speaker 1: pleasure principle. Most people will tell you that motivation is
Speaker 1: about seeking pleasure and avoiding pain. Uh, some version of
Speaker 1: carrots and sticks. But neurologically that's not exactly true. That
Speaker 1: Really what's going on is that the way the brain
Speaker 1: gets us to act is for one reason, and that
Speaker 1: is to avoid discomfort. The brain doesn't get us to
Speaker 1: do things that feel good. The brain gets us to
Speaker 1: do things that felt good, and that's what the wanting
Speaker 1: system is all about. In the brain, it has memories
Speaker 1: of what felt good and to incentivize us to act,
Speaker 1: to move. What it does is put us into a
Speaker 1: state of psychological discomfort. Right, So even wanting, craving, desire,
Speaker 1: there's a reason we say love hurts because neurologically speaking,
Speaker 1: that's exactly what's going on. So this homeostatic response that
Speaker 1: we feel in the body is pretty clear. We're all
Speaker 1: familiar with it. If we go outside and we're cold,
Speaker 1: we put on a jacket. If we're hot, we take
Speaker 1: it off. If we're hungry, we feel hunger pangs, we eat,
Speaker 1: and when we're stuffed, oh that doesn't feel good, we
Speaker 1: stop eating. So those are physiological responses to discomfort. The
Speaker 1: same applies to psychological discomfort. So when we're lonely, we
Speaker 1: check Facebook. When we're uncertain, we Google. When we're bored,
Speaker 1: we check stock prices, sports scores, Reddit, Pinterest. All of
Speaker 1: these services cater to an uncomfortable sensation. So that means
Speaker 1: that all boils down to this fact that when it
Speaker 1: comes to time management, we have to acknowledge that if
Speaker 1: all behavior is driven by a desire to escape discomfort,
Speaker 1: that means that time management is pain management. Boom, I
Speaker 1: was waiting for the punchline. There you go. Did you
Speaker 1: practice that one in front of the mirror? That's right,
Speaker 1: I do no awesome, that was like perfectly like deliver it. Actually,
Speaker 1: yeah cool. You know that's a really cool reframing pain management.
Speaker 1: What is the what is the role of like boredom
Speaker 1: in in this in this equation, people who are like
Speaker 1: super mindful like like practice mindful aess meditation. The people
Speaker 1: I know in my own personal circle practice mindful meditation
Speaker 1: like hours a day. They they tell me, they don't
Speaker 1: report the feeling of boredom much, and they also don't
Speaker 1: report much distractability. There's team to tend to go together. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and that's wonderful. By the way, I touch on mindfulness
Speaker 1: a little bit, I mostly refer to acceptance of commitment
Speaker 1: therapy as opposed to mindfulness world. And there's many many
Speaker 1: techniques out there. I don't go super deep into mindfulness
Speaker 1: and indistractable, not that these techniques don't work. I also
Speaker 1: don't talk about meditation anywhere in the book other than
Speaker 1: saying I won't talk about it enough, not because they
Speaker 1: don't work, but because there's just been so much written
Speaker 1: about it already. I mean, who doesn't know about mindfulness
Speaker 1: and meditation. It's just been done to death and that's great.
Speaker 1: If it works for you, wonderful. However, I think there
Speaker 1: is a bit of warning here that I think for
Speaker 1: some people, not everyone. I don't want to generalize to
Speaker 1: everyone who practices mindfulness and meditation, but some people are
Speaker 1: of the belief that you can mindful all your problems away,
Speaker 1: and I think they discount the fact that some problems
Speaker 1: you need to fix right when it comes to managing
Speaker 1: internal triggers, some times the solution is to either fix
Speaker 1: the source of the discomfort, or if you can't fix
Speaker 1: the source of this discomfort, then learn tactics to cope
Speaker 1: with it. So half of my book is about things
Speaker 1: that you can do yourself right, things that you can
Speaker 1: learn to cope with discomfort. To you know, there's four
Speaker 1: steps to becoming indistractable, things that you yourself can do.
Speaker 1: But I'm not so naive to not acknowledge that we
Speaker 1: work in environments, and environments can shape our behavior. So
Speaker 1: the fact is, you know, if you are super mindful
Speaker 1: and you meditate every day, and you do everything I
Speaker 1: tell you to do to become indistractable, but then your
Speaker 1: boss calls you at eight pm on a Friday night
Speaker 1: and he says, you know, did you check your email
Speaker 1: because there's something really important. You need to see what's
Speaker 1: going on there? Is it? Is it the technology that
Speaker 1: did it to you? Is it, you know, your lack
Speaker 1: of practicing mindfulness and meditation or indistractable techniques. No, it's
Speaker 1: the fact that you work with a crappy boss who
Speaker 1: doesn't appreciate your time, and you work in a company
Speaker 1: with bad company culture. And so that's why, you know,
Speaker 1: we have to also acknowledge the environments that we work in.
Speaker 1: So there's a section on how to build an indistractable workplace,
Speaker 1: and we talk about psychological safety and all kinds of
Speaker 1: other things that build a culture where distraction isn't a problem.
Speaker 1: There's a section on how to raise indistractable kids, and
Speaker 1: there's a section on how to have indistractable relationships. So
Speaker 1: there is you know, there are things that we can
Speaker 1: do ourselves, but there's also these things that we have
Speaker 1: to do within our larger context and environment. How do
Speaker 1: you become indistractable against kids? Against kids? Kids are a distraction? Yeah, yeah, exactly, Okay,
Speaker 1: good you you have kids? No I don't, but I
Speaker 1: hear a lot of people are, like I would love
Speaker 1: to find out a way to not be so distracted
Speaker 1: by by my kids once and needs. And so isn't
Speaker 1: that the opposite of what you were talking about? I
Speaker 1: love it? Actually, Okay, so this is fantastic. So I
Speaker 1: talk about in the book, that's not exactly what I
Speaker 1: was I was referring to. There's a section on how
Speaker 1: to raise indistractable kids. But I know, I know, yeah,
Speaker 1: but there is a part of the book. So there's
Speaker 1: three there's sorry, there's four parts to becoming indistractable. The
Speaker 1: third step is to figures should we do all four?
Speaker 1: To be sure? Cool, maybe it'd be best to like
Speaker 1: start with the first one. Okay, sure, sure, But let's
Speaker 1: get back to this question on how do you how
Speaker 1: do you remove the external trigger of your kids? Because
Speaker 1: people think about distraction just being you know, their technologies,
Speaker 1: but I would totally agree. I think kids, your co workers,
Speaker 1: lots of things other than technology can be distractions and
Speaker 1: there's ways we can cope with that as well. Yes,
Speaker 1: that's absolutely you know that. The word distraction, it really
Speaker 1: it depends on like what what do you want to
Speaker 1: be the foreground? What do you want to be the background?
Speaker 1: People assume that certain things should be the foreground. Certain
Speaker 1: things should be the background. But isn't that up to
Speaker 1: the person to decide. I'm not saying child abuses. I'm
Speaker 1: not advocating for that to be or to be clear,
Speaker 1: but it's a great point. I mean, let me, let
Speaker 1: me just dive into the real quick because we're on
Speaker 1: the point. I mean, you know something that I value,
Speaker 1: you know, back to back to your individual values that
Speaker 1: you know. I'm not saying my values need to be
Speaker 1: anyone else's values. But one of my values is to
Speaker 1: spend time with my friends. Okay, it's one of my values.
Speaker 1: And every time we would get together, you know, we
Speaker 1: all have kids. I have a daughter, many of my
Speaker 1: friends have children as well. We would get together and
Speaker 1: invariably some kid would interrupt the conversation every time, right.
Speaker 1: I remember one time we were talking about this good
Speaker 1: friend of mine was really struggling at work. He had
Speaker 1: started a startup and it was very difficult, and he
Speaker 1: was feeling a lot of pressure from his investors and
Speaker 1: he was almost on the verge of tears. And then
Speaker 1: one of our kids walks up and says, I want
Speaker 1: a juice box, and that completely derailed the conversation. And
Speaker 1: so now one of the things we've done to hack
Speaker 1: back the external triggers is now we have not only
Speaker 1: have we scheduled time to be with our friends. We
Speaker 1: call it the kibbutz. Kibutz means a gathering in Hebrew.
Speaker 1: We just picked that word. It doesn't have any religious
Speaker 1: connotations or anything. And the idea is that it has
Speaker 1: time on our schedule, and we set a rule that
Speaker 1: no child is allowed to interrupt. They can listen, but
Speaker 1: they can't interrupt unless someone's bleeding. Okay, so we put
Speaker 1: out all the juice boxes, we put out all the snacks,
Speaker 1: we put out all the board games that could ever want,
Speaker 1: but you cannot interrupt unless someone's bleeding. And then, so
Speaker 1: here's another way that we deal with this problem when
Speaker 1: we're at home. Okay, my wife and I both work
Speaker 1: from home, and we both found that one of the
Speaker 1: you know, there's a lot of great things to working
Speaker 1: from home, but there's also some bad things, and including distraction.
Speaker 1: We'll get to office distraction a minute as well. But
Speaker 1: when it comes to in home distraction, you know, kids
Speaker 1: play a big part of that. So when my wife
Speaker 1: and I would would take duty for watching my daughter,
Speaker 1: sometimes my daughter would sneak into the office and just
Speaker 1: talk to talk to my wife or talk to me
Speaker 1: while we're in the middle two. So we have a
Speaker 1: very small like closet little office at home, a little
Speaker 1: home office. And what we found was, you know, so
Speaker 1: what I preach in the book is to find ways
Speaker 1: to hack back external trigger. So here's how we hacked
Speaker 1: back external triggers in the home. When the external trigger
Speaker 1: is another person. So my wife bought this what we
Speaker 1: call lovingly, the concentration crown. And the concentration crown is
Speaker 1: this five dollars little wreath that we found on Amazon
Speaker 1: that has these LED lights all over it and when
Speaker 1: you turn on the LED lights, it glows and you
Speaker 1: cannot miss it. And the idea is when you see
Speaker 1: my wife with this concentration crown, it tells everyone around her,
Speaker 1: leave me alone. I am concentrating right now. And it
Speaker 1: arrests that behavior in my daughter and Frankly and myself
Speaker 1: to want to say, hey, Hanny, can I ask you
Speaker 1: a quick question? When she's wearing the concentration CROWND that
Speaker 1: means leave me alone, I'm doing focused work. We actually
Speaker 1: adapted that for the workplace. So every copy of indistractable
Speaker 1: comes with a card stock what I call a screen sign.
Speaker 1: It's a piece of thick card stock that you tear
Speaker 1: out of the book, you fold it into thirds, and
Speaker 1: you put it on your computer monitor, and it tells
Speaker 1: your work colleagues, I'm indistractable right now, please come back later.
Speaker 1: And so it's just this way to tell your colleagues
Speaker 1: no, no no, no, right now, I need to do focused work.
Speaker 1: It's incredibly important to do this kind of practice because
Speaker 1: you know a lot of people think, oh, well, I'll
Speaker 1: just put on headphones. And if I put on headphones
Speaker 1: and my colleagues will know that I'm busy. Not really.
Speaker 1: Let me tell you a secret. If you just wear headphones,
Speaker 1: people think you're watching YouTube, right, That's what they think
Speaker 1: you're doing. So we want to create this culture that
Speaker 1: it's okay to disconnect for some time during the day
Speaker 1: in order to do our best work. I love that
Speaker 1: you should give those sirens that card. I know, I'm sorry,
Speaker 1: one of the joys of living in New York. Unfortunately, No, obviously,
Speaker 1: I'm joking. If someone's probably like in pain right now
Speaker 1: or something, and it's like the ambulance and yeah, that
Speaker 1: probably that definitely takes priority over this podcast. Okay, you
Speaker 1: know so much to think about here, and I do
Speaker 1: want to go through the four steps to becoming and
Speaker 1: this is like that's like, you know, everyone's on the
Speaker 1: edge of their seats to hear those four us. So
Speaker 1: I'm going, so let's let's let's let's talk about some
Speaker 1: other things first before we get to that, and we'll
Speaker 1: keep like wetting the appetite and so then we get
Speaker 1: to it. Be so excited. You talk about the critical
Speaker 1: question that you suggest people ask, what is that question? Yeah?
Speaker 1: So the critical question I glanced over it earlier that
Speaker 1: when it comes to hacking back external triggers, and why
Speaker 1: do I use that term hacking back? The idea here
Speaker 1: is that you know your your attention is being hacked
Speaker 1: by these devices. I mean, you know, my first book
Speaker 1: was called Hooked, How to Build Habit Forming Products. I
Speaker 1: understand how these products are built, and they are clearly
Speaker 1: designed to hack your attention. That's what they are meant
Speaker 1: to do. They want to be engaging. But as good
Speaker 1: as they are at hacking your attention, many people don't
Speaker 1: realize that it is much easier for us to hack back.
Speaker 1: That it's really not that difficult to do that. We
Speaker 1: have way more power than these tech companies do at
Speaker 1: hacking our attention. So they might want to might want
Speaker 1: us to use their products, and they want to build
Speaker 1: products that are engaging, and frankly, we want that right Well,
Speaker 1: you know it's ridiculous to think, Hey, Facebook, can you
Speaker 1: please make your product less user friendly? iPhone? You know
Speaker 1: your product is so easy to use, I want to
Speaker 1: use it all the time. Netflix, you make such good shows.
Speaker 1: Can you please stop making such good shows because I
Speaker 1: want to watch them all the time. That's ridiculous. That's
Speaker 1: not going to happen. We want these products to be engaging,
Speaker 1: but there's nothing that says we can't hack back. So
Speaker 1: how do you hack back? We can morph these technologies
Speaker 1: to serve us. And this is the critical question. The
Speaker 1: critical question is the external trigger serving you or are
Speaker 1: you serving it? So as much as people complain about
Speaker 1: notifications on their phone, they act like it's something they
Speaker 1: can't do anything about. And that's ridiculous. You know, two
Speaker 1: thirds of people with a smartphone, two thirds of people
Speaker 1: with a smartphone never change their notification settings. Can we
Speaker 1: really say the technology is so addictive that it's hijacking
Speaker 1: our brains when we haven't taken ten minutes to change
Speaker 1: our notification settings. So I devote like a page and
Speaker 1: a half to that idea of how we can remove
Speaker 1: these external triggers on our phones and our laptops. That's kindergarten,
Speaker 1: that's baby stuff. Of course we have to do that,
Speaker 1: But there are all these other pernicious external triggers we
Speaker 1: don't think about. Email, for example, right, email is the
Speaker 1: mother of habit forming technology. Turns out that if you
Speaker 1: combine just those two places where people spend their time
Speaker 1: in the modern American workplace, between meetings and email, the
Speaker 1: average knowledge worker in America has only about an hour
Speaker 1: and a half to do everything else they have to
Speaker 1: do in their day. Oh my gosh. So that means
Speaker 1: that real work doesn't get done at work. Real work
Speaker 1: gets done. You know where it gets done. It gets
Speaker 1: done after work. And who pays the price. Your health
Speaker 1: pays the price, your kids pay the price, your for
Speaker 1: relationships pay the price, because that's where the real work
Speaker 1: gets done. So what I'm advocating for is for prioritizing
Speaker 1: that time in your day by hacking back the external triggers.
Speaker 1: Not only like the ones that come on our devices,
Speaker 1: but also the ones that come from the workplace, group, chat, meetings, email.
Speaker 1: I walk through how every single one of these external
Speaker 1: triggers can be hacked back. I love that, and I
Speaker 1: don't know if you talked about that story, but how
Speaker 1: can you prevent distraction with packs pacts? Yeah? Yeah, so
Speaker 1: we've we've gone kind of in a funny order, but
Speaker 1: we've covered the four steps, which is great, there's no problem,
Speaker 1: but we've done it in a sneaky way. Yeah, that's fine,
Speaker 1: that's fine. Let me go over. This is a good
Speaker 1: time because that's the fourth step. So let me just
Speaker 1: reiterate the first three before we get to the fourth.
Speaker 1: The first step is to master our internal triggers by
Speaker 1: truly understanding why we are prompted to distraction, what we
Speaker 1: are trying to escape psychologically, what's that uncomfortable emotion that
Speaker 1: we have habitually attatched some kind of products used to
Speaker 1: how do we break that bad habit? That's the first
Speaker 1: step mastering the internal triggers. The second step, which we
Speaker 1: didn't talk about as much but I'm happy to go
Speaker 1: more into it, is about making time for traction. So
Speaker 1: we talked about traction and distraction. So the fact is,
Speaker 1: we can't do those things we want to do if
Speaker 1: we don't make time for it. So the thing is,
Speaker 1: you know a lot of people complain about how distracted
Speaker 1: they are, but when you look at their calendars, their
Speaker 1: calendars are blank. They haven't planned what they want to
Speaker 1: do with their time. So here's the thing. You have
Speaker 1: no right to call something a distraction unless you know
Speaker 1: what it distracted you from. Everything is a distraction if
Speaker 1: you don't plan your time. So that's the second step,
Speaker 1: is to turn your values into time by keeping some
Speaker 1: kind of a calendar. And I tell you exactly how
Speaker 1: to do that, how to synchronize that with your stakeholders,
Speaker 1: et cetera. The third step, which we covered a bit of,
Speaker 1: which is about hacking back those external triggers. And finally,
Speaker 1: the fourth step, and it's the fourth because it must
Speaker 1: be done last, because this is the only one of
Speaker 1: the fourth steps that can can backfire, can be dangerous
Speaker 1: in fact, and this comes down to pre commitments. And
Speaker 1: pre commitments have been studied extensively. It's a technique that's
Speaker 1: been used. It's at least as old as the Odyssey
Speaker 1: written by Homer, So twenty five hundred years ago. And
Speaker 1: the idea of a pre commitment is to make some
Speaker 1: kind of promise, some kind of packed with yourself, with
Speaker 1: someone else, perhaps where you become more likely to do
Speaker 1: something when you commit to what you are going to do.
Speaker 1: If there is one mantra I want people to remember
Speaker 1: from this interview and from this book is that the
Speaker 1: antidote to impulsiveness is forethought. The antidote to impulsiveness is forethought.
Speaker 1: That as much as we complain of how distracting the
Speaker 1: world is today and how manipulative all these businesses are,
Speaker 1: the fact is we have way more power because we
Speaker 1: can plan ahead. So if the chocolate cake is on
Speaker 1: the fork on its way to your mouth too late, right,
Speaker 1: there's debate whether free will even exists at that moment.
Speaker 1: It's too late, and you are going to lose. If
Speaker 1: the cigarette is lit and it's in your hand and
Speaker 1: you're about to take a puff too late, you've lost.
Speaker 1: You're going to smoke. If you sleep next to your
Speaker 1: cell phone equally distant from your lover, then you're going
Speaker 1: to pick up that phone first thing in the morning,
Speaker 1: you've already lost. But the thing that we can do
Speaker 1: that no other animal on the face of the earth
Speaker 1: can do. One of the things that we can do,
Speaker 1: I should say, is that we can see the future
Speaker 1: with higher fidelity than any other animal. We can predict
Speaker 1: what we think is going to happen better than any
Speaker 1: other creature. So the antidote to that impulsiveness in the moment,
Speaker 1: and the reason why this book doesn't advocate for self control,
Speaker 1: self discipline, and willpower. What I advocate for is a system,
Speaker 1: is a plan, is planning ahead, and that's what these
Speaker 1: pre commitments are all about. So there are three types
Speaker 1: of pre commitments. An effort packed, a price packed, an
Speaker 1: identity packed. And these are three things that we can
Speaker 1: do to make sure that when the time comes when
Speaker 1: we might get distracted, we don't do something that we
Speaker 1: don't want to do. We don't give in to that distraction.
Speaker 1: So hacking back the external triggers are about keeping the
Speaker 1: triggers out. Pre commitments and packs are about keeping ourselves
Speaker 1: in nice. Well, that's good, that's good, and that that
Speaker 1: can apply to all sorts of things that we are
Speaker 1: quote addicted to, and sometimes it's confusing to know whether
Speaker 1: or not you're actually addicted to something. Is everyone addicted
Speaker 1: to checking their email. No, okay, uh, And this is
Speaker 1: this is a big reason why I wrote the book
Speaker 1: because I am up to my eyeballs in frustration over
Speaker 1: the overuse of this term. Yeah, it's it's it's it's
Speaker 1: so overused, and it's and here's the thing. It's hurting
Speaker 1: people because we know that, you know, from studies on alcoholics,
Speaker 1: we know that the number one determined of whether someone
Speaker 1: will will stay sober after rehab is not what's going
Speaker 1: on in their body. It's what's happening in their brain.
Speaker 1: The number one determined is not physical dependency, it's their
Speaker 1: belief in their own power to change. And so what
Speaker 1: we're doing when we tell people that technology is addictive,
Speaker 1: that it's hijacking your brain, what we're telling people is
Speaker 1: that they're powerless. Right, This leads to learned helplessness because oh,
Speaker 1: my kid is just addicted to Fortnite. What can I do?
Speaker 1: I'm addicted to Instagram. There's nothing I can do about it.
Speaker 1: And that is bullshit. Now, I will say some people
Speaker 1: are addicted. Some people do have the pathology of addiction,
Speaker 1: just like some people get addicted to all kinds of substances. Right, So,
Speaker 1: you know, a lot of people have a glass of dinner,
Speaker 1: a glass of wine with dinner, but they're not. You know,
Speaker 1: not all of us are alcoholics. Not everyone who has
Speaker 1: sex as a sex addict. Not everyone who plays poker
Speaker 1: with their buddies once in a while is a problem gambler.
Speaker 1: Lots of things that are addicted to someone but don't
Speaker 1: addict everyone. Why should it be any different with technology?
Speaker 1: So some people are pathocologically addicted, of course, and I
Speaker 1: think companies have a special responsibility to help them. I've
Speaker 1: been writing about this and advocating for what I call
Speaker 1: a use and abuse policy, and I've met with all
Speaker 1: the big tech companies to try and move this forward.
Speaker 1: But for the rest of us, if you are not
Speaker 1: a protected class, so children are a protected class, they
Speaker 1: do lots of things kids can't do in our society
Speaker 1: that they need to be protected from. And I think
Speaker 1: and yeah, exactly, thank good. And I think that people
Speaker 1: who are pathologically addicted also should be a protected class.
Speaker 1: But we are not all addicted, and so we need
Speaker 1: to stop talking about this pathology as if everyone is
Speaker 1: to coming to it, because it's not helping anybody. Can
Speaker 1: you become addicted to being uh indiestractable. Can you like,
Speaker 1: can this can this be such a compulsion and such
Speaker 1: an interest that it's like it's I don't know, that's
Speaker 1: just I'm cheeky. I mean there are there are certainly
Speaker 1: you know, here's the thing. Any you could be perfectionistic, right,
Speaker 1: and that's not good. So the fact is so this
Speaker 1: is this is the rule. Any analgesic is potentially addictive.
Speaker 1: And you can find cases of people becoming addicted to
Speaker 1: literally anything that solves pain. I did an article for
Speaker 1: The Atlantic a few years ago, and I'm not making
Speaker 1: this up. I mean, just look on the internet for this.
Speaker 1: There are people out there who are addicted to Q tips. Wow,
Speaker 1: that is not I'm not I'm not joking. This is
Speaker 1: a real tips but but I'm not going to say
Speaker 1: that I'm addicted to it. Yeah, I mean people get addicted.
Speaker 1: Anything that solves pain is potentially addicted to somebody. Now,
Speaker 1: what you find is that addiction is never about the product.
Speaker 1: It's never just about the product. I should say, of
Speaker 1: course the product plays a role, But when we look
Speaker 1: at the science of addiction, you know, nobody steps on
Speaker 1: a heroin needle and becomes addicted that's not how it works.
Speaker 1: Millions of women every year in the United States of
Speaker 1: America are given fentanyl when they deliver a baby by
Speaker 1: sea section. Fentanyl. This is the most addictive substance we
Speaker 1: know of, right, this is what everyone's scared of when
Speaker 1: it comes to the opio epidemic. This is the substance
Speaker 1: that police officers won't even touch because they're so scared
Speaker 1: of it getting into their bodies. And yet, how is
Speaker 1: it that millions of women get fentanyl when they go
Speaker 1: to the hospital to deliver a baby VC section? Because
Speaker 1: it's never just about the substance, right, A tiny fraction
Speaker 1: those women ever become addicted to fentanyl because addiction is
Speaker 1: never just about the product. It's also about the person
Speaker 1: and their predilection towards addiction and the pain they are
Speaker 1: going through in their life that they would otherwise not
Speaker 1: be able to cope with. And it's only in the
Speaker 1: confluence of those three things, the person, the product, and
Speaker 1: the pain that you get addiction. So addiction does happen
Speaker 1: to I'm sure there's lots of people out there who
Speaker 1: are addicted to the Internet, addicted to pornography, addicted to
Speaker 1: social media even but that's not the majority of people,
Speaker 1: and those people who do suffer from an addiction, there's
Speaker 1: always something else going on. There's some kind of abuse,
Speaker 1: there's some kind of extreme trauma, there's many times cool
Speaker 1: morbidity with obsessive compulsive disorder, there's something else going on.
Speaker 1: It's never only about the product being abused. That's a really,
Speaker 1: really good point. We've had a guest Maya Solovitz on
Speaker 1: our podcast about a couple of years ago, and she
Speaker 1: talked about addiction. So I actually want to direct my
Speaker 1: listeners to after they listen to this episode to listen
Speaker 1: to that one as well if they want to follow
Speaker 1: up on that topic. Showed a whole book on addiction,
Speaker 1: Rethinking Addiction. No, it's a really good point. And there's
Speaker 1: even debates in the field about whether or not sex
Speaker 1: addiction is a thing, you know, or porn addiction, like
Speaker 1: if that's you know, really ever, it counts as an addiction. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean in the research for the book, I talked
Speaker 1: to a lot of therapists, particularly those who work with children,
Speaker 1: because now there is a designation for problem problem online,
Speaker 1: you know, a problem gaming use. And what they told
Speaker 1: me was that they in their experience. They had never
Speaker 1: seen a child who came in without something else going on.
Speaker 1: It was never, you know, a perfectly healthy child who
Speaker 1: had a perfect home life started playing video games and
Speaker 1: now was addicted. There was always something else going on.
Speaker 1: There was OCD. Typically, there was some kind of trauma.
Speaker 1: And by the way, this is exactly what we the
Speaker 1: exactly what we went through sixty five years ago during
Speaker 1: the Senate hearings about comic books. Experts went to the
Speaker 1: Senate just like experts are going to the Senate now
Speaker 1: to give these testimonies we've seen recently about how terrible,
Speaker 1: you know, screen time is, and they said, verbatim the
Speaker 1: same thing that we hear people saying today, that it's
Speaker 1: causing suicide, that it's causing mental health issues, that it's
Speaker 1: causing this, and it's causing that, and it's not causing
Speaker 1: it's correlative because we don't know whether people who are
Speaker 1: looking for escape from this discomfort. As I said before,
Speaker 1: you know, any analgesic is potentially addictive to someone. And
Speaker 1: so that's the same exact story. It's exactly what was
Speaker 1: said in front of those Senate hearings about comic books
Speaker 1: is being said today about screen time. Not that I
Speaker 1: think upset that excessive screen time is not harmful. I
Speaker 1: think it is likely harmful. But of course what we
Speaker 1: need to ask ourselves is, you know, where we see
Speaker 1: harm is not two hours or less. No study of
Speaker 1: children using screens extracurricular age appropriate screen time for two
Speaker 1: hours or less has been shown to have any delatarious effects.
Speaker 1: Where we start seeing negative effects is five, six, seven
Speaker 1: hours a day of extracurricular screen time. But of course
Speaker 1: the question is you know that much screen time, or
Speaker 1: that much time with any media is probably indicative of
Speaker 1: something else going on. And I think that's what we
Speaker 1: need to be asking around. Yeah, that's kind of like
Speaker 1: a one of the rules of psychotherapy. You expect that
Speaker 1: whatever the patient presents, whatever the problem you know they
Speaker 1: present with, is not the root problem. It always comes
Speaker 1: out to be or most likely always comes out to
Speaker 1: be larger or Gottlieb talked about that in her in
Speaker 1: her new book. So yeah, so you're really you're really
Speaker 1: shattering this conventional narrative that the problem with the distractibility
Speaker 1: is the gadgets. Almost gadgets have become like the scapegoat it.
Speaker 1: You know, you are pinpointing this inner desire for escape,
Speaker 1: and yeah, I just keep keep leaking that to boredom
Speaker 1: in my own head. There is a lot too bored.
Speaker 1: I mean, look, you know there's that wonderful work by
Speaker 1: Timothy Wilson where he puts subjects in a room and
Speaker 1: you know, they could do nothing but electrocute themselves. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and it was something like twenty something percent of women
Speaker 1: and sixty something percent of men would rather have delivered
Speaker 1: an electrical shock that they were told would be painful.
Speaker 1: They would rather do that than feel nothing. Yeah, then
Speaker 1: just sit in silence. So clearly I think there is
Speaker 1: an evolutionary adaptation to boredom getting off our butts, right,
Speaker 1: That's what kept us striving and searching and looking to
Speaker 1: improve our lot. Was that sitting around and doing nothing.
Speaker 1: If the species didn't have this trait of wanting more,
Speaker 1: of feeling boredom, that would be not as evolutionarily beneficial
Speaker 1: as a species that was perpetually perturbed. And so that's
Speaker 1: why I talk about in the book how I bristle
Speaker 1: at the self help industry's idea that somehow, if you're
Speaker 1: not happy, if you're not satisfied with life all the time,
Speaker 1: that somehow something's wrong with you. I think nothing could
Speaker 1: be further from the truth that our species is designed
Speaker 1: to want more. It's about how we channeled these internal
Speaker 1: triggers towards traction versus distraction. That really matters. Thanks Snir.
Speaker 1: I appreciate that you make this like a very fundamentally
Speaker 1: human problem. I appreciate that for you know, people who
Speaker 1: struggle with add or ADHD, they can be stigmatized very easily,
Speaker 1: kind of othered, and they just you know, that tendency
Speaker 1: that a lot of them have is really just a
Speaker 1: more extreme version of something that we all struggle with, right,
Speaker 1: I think that that's that's likely, right, I mean, I
Speaker 1: think you know, you know, I'm sure you know better
Speaker 1: than I do that you know, some folks do have
Speaker 1: extreme forms of the pathology and they do need special assistance.
Speaker 1: And while I didn't write indistractable specifically for people with ADHD,
Speaker 1: I have heard from several folks that there is a
Speaker 1: lot of overlap with techniques that they've learned to manage ADHD,
Speaker 1: and those techniques can be useful as well. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and in mindfulness has been shown to be useful. Sure, yeah, absolutely,
Speaker 1: people with a do do Okay, so let's return to
Speaker 1: kids for a second. I know that I know that
Speaker 1: this conversation itself feels a bit add but something I
Speaker 1: like is how it all like, it all does tie
Speaker 1: together at the end, you know, and I love to
Speaker 1: like call back things that we talked about earlier. So
Speaker 1: let's talk about kids again and the overuse of technology.
Speaker 1: What are some tips to help them focus in an
Speaker 1: increasingly distracting world? Yeah? Yeah, So this was my favorite
Speaker 1: section of the book because it really overturned what I learned.
Speaker 1: You know, I write books not because of what I know,
Speaker 1: but because of what I want to know. And so
Speaker 1: when I was struggling with figuring out how to raise
Speaker 1: our daughter, you know, of some of her first words
Speaker 1: were iPad time, iPad time. I remember her saying that incessantly,
Speaker 1: and it would drive us crazy and we didn't know
Speaker 1: what to do about it. And you know, so that's
Speaker 1: when I really tried to figure out, Okay, how you know,
Speaker 1: if you think the world is distracting today, just wait
Speaker 1: a few years, right, It's not going to become less distracting.
Speaker 1: If anything, it's going to become more potentially distracting as
Speaker 1: technology improves and it becomes more pervasive and persuasive. That's
Speaker 1: not going to change, and so it was really imperative
Speaker 1: that we figure out how to raise is an indistractable child.
Speaker 1: And you know, let me just say some obvious stuff
Speaker 1: first and foremost obvious stuff are things like the fact
Speaker 1: that if a technology company tells you not to let
Speaker 1: your kid use the product before a certain age, please
Speaker 1: believe them. Okay. I can't tell you how many people
Speaker 1: would I've talked to since writing this book, and even
Speaker 1: before I finished writing the book, just interviewing folks and
Speaker 1: trying to figure out what works and what doesn't out there,
Speaker 1: how many people are tell you know, told me how
Speaker 1: distracted their kids were and how terrible social media is.
Speaker 1: And then I asked them, well, how old is your child?
Speaker 1: Eight nine? Right? No, the tech companies tell you don't
Speaker 1: let your kid use a social network until thirteen, listen
Speaker 1: to them. Okay, they say that for a reason. So
Speaker 1: that's common sense stuff. And then I think the metaphor
Speaker 1: here is to treat a kid's use of technology and
Speaker 1: the same way we would think about a swimming pool,
Speaker 1: that swimming pools can be a lot of fun, and
Speaker 1: you know, it's great when kids have the opportunity to
Speaker 1: learn how to swim. But swim pools kill kids, right,
Speaker 1: Kids die because they drown in swimming pools. Now, does
Speaker 1: that mean we should as parents never let kids swim
Speaker 1: in a pool. No, it means we should teach kids
Speaker 1: how to swim safely. So just like we wouldn't, you know,
Speaker 1: give a kid a phone on their birthday and say here,
Speaker 1: have at it, you know, do anything you want. We
Speaker 1: have to monitor. We have to make sure that they
Speaker 1: know how to use the device properly, and so part
Speaker 1: of that is teaching them how to become indistractable. These
Speaker 1: four steps of mastering your internal triggers, making time for traction,
Speaker 1: hacking back the external triggers, and preventing distraction. With packs,
Speaker 1: we can teach them this stuff. The most important thing
Speaker 1: you can do is to set a good example yourself
Speaker 1: that children are hypocrisy detection devices. And so we as
Speaker 1: parents cannot tell our kids get off that you know,
Speaker 1: get off that phone, stop playing Fortnite, get off social
Speaker 1: media as we're checking our email. That's ridiculous. So we've
Speaker 1: got to make sure that we become indistracted by ourselves. Now,
Speaker 1: those that's the easy stuff. That's the that's the you know,
Speaker 1: one on one level. When it comes to really digging deep,
Speaker 1: what I wanted to really understand here was the root
Speaker 1: cause of distraction. Mean, that's the real theme throughout the
Speaker 1: book in the workplace when it comes to raising in
Speaker 1: distractable kids, when it comes to our own struggle with distraction,
Speaker 1: I always wanted to get to the root cause of
Speaker 1: the problem. And I you know, we know that parents
Speaker 1: have always looked for the proximate causes. And one of
Speaker 1: the most pervasive myths that I think demonstrates what I
Speaker 1: think we're doing today with technology is this idea of
Speaker 1: a sugar high. You know, we've all heard it, right
Speaker 1: that if you give a kid sugar, they're going to
Speaker 1: act crazy and they're going to run around and you know,
Speaker 1: be disobedient or whatever. And it's not true. There is
Speaker 1: no there's been meta studies here that show that the
Speaker 1: sugar high is not true, doesn't exist except when it
Speaker 1: exists in parents. That when parents were told their child
Speaker 1: was given sugar, even despite the fact that they were
Speaker 1: given in inert substance that was not sugar, they acted differently.
Speaker 1: The parents follow the kids around, the parents berated their children.
Speaker 1: The parents to their children's is misbehaving even when they
Speaker 1: hadn't been given any sugar. And so this is what
Speaker 1: we are doing, I think, with all sorts of technologies,
Speaker 1: with all sorts of and this is throughout you know,
Speaker 1: the history of parenting today at social media and video games.
Speaker 1: Before that, it was television before that, it was the radio.
Speaker 1: Before that, it was comic books. I mean, every generation
Speaker 1: we parents want something to blame that's not us. Now
Speaker 1: what I think we need to do. It's about time
Speaker 1: we think about why kids are over using technology. And
Speaker 1: this is where we get into self determination theory. So
Speaker 1: you know, I talked to I did extensive interviews with
Speaker 1: Richard M. Ryan and you know about his work with
Speaker 1: self determination theory. This is kind of the most widely
Speaker 1: accepted theory of human motivation and flourishing. It's you know,
Speaker 1: fifty year old research now. And when you look at
Speaker 1: these three factors of competency, autonomy, and relatedness, these three
Speaker 1: things that Dessie and Ryan tell us are necessary for
Speaker 1: human flourishing, we see that children today are deficient in
Speaker 1: these three things. And Dessie and Ryan called their need
Speaker 1: to find those things these psychological nutrients online when they
Speaker 1: can't find them offline. They call this the needs displacement hypothesis.
Speaker 1: And what we see is, if you think about children's
Speaker 1: life today, let's take these one at a time. Competency.
Speaker 1: One thing that correlates with the rise of tech, of
Speaker 1: cell phone use and social media, you know around two
Speaker 1: thousand and seven two thousand and eight, is also the
Speaker 1: rise in standardized testing. This is around the same time
Speaker 1: when No Child Left Behind made standardized testing and teaching
Speaker 1: towards the test the law of the land. So today
Speaker 1: children starting in kindergarten receive these standardized tests, and teachers
Speaker 1: started teaching for the tests in a way that's never
Speaker 1: been done before. And so kids are told multiple times
Speaker 1: per year they are not competent. Not all kids, the
Speaker 1: ones who do well, don't get that message, but many
Speaker 1: kids who don't do well are constantly told this message.
Speaker 1: You are not competent, you are not good enough. And
Speaker 1: so what a kids do when they feel that, when
Speaker 1: they don't get enough sense of competency in their life, Well,
Speaker 1: the tech companies are more than happy to give them
Speaker 1: a sie of competency. Right, if you go play Minecraft,
Speaker 1: you feel like God you're the master of this universe,
Speaker 1: you feel supremely competent, then take take autonomy. So this
Speaker 1: need that we all have to feel in control of
Speaker 1: our environment, turns out that the work of Peter Gray
Speaker 1: has shown that children today have twice as many, sorry
Speaker 1: ten times as many regulations and rules placed upon them
Speaker 1: as an average American adult, twice as many rules as
Speaker 1: a convicted incarcerated felon. There are two places in society
Speaker 1: where we are allowed to tell people what to do,
Speaker 1: where to go, what to think, what to eat, who
Speaker 1: to be friends with, and that is school in prison.
Speaker 1: And so is it any surprise that when kids come
Speaker 1: home after being told what to do all day long,
Speaker 1: they want freedom, they want agency, they want autonomy. Now,
Speaker 1: in our generation, where did we get that? We went outside,
Speaker 1: we played, We vandalized things, we did you know, we
Speaker 1: were rascals, right, That's what we did in our generation,
Speaker 1: generations before. Well, one thing that you don't hear in
Speaker 1: the current debate around technology use is people seem to
Speaker 1: think that technology use lives in a vacuum, that if
Speaker 1: we just got rid of Facebook and Fortnite and Instagram
Speaker 1: and Snapchat and TikTok, kids would start reading Shakespeare in
Speaker 1: their spare time. Give me a break. Right, What we
Speaker 1: have not talked about is that all the other things
Speaker 1: that kids do to hurt themselves and hurt others have
Speaker 1: all gone down. With the one exception of suicide. Everything
Speaker 1: else has gone down. And by the way, suicide actually
Speaker 1: was just as high in the nineteen eighties. It's just
Speaker 1: that when you hear those statistics about suicide going up,
Speaker 1: they're always referencing twenty fourteen, which was a record low year.
Speaker 1: So it's just as high as it was in the
Speaker 1: nineteen eighties. We don't know why, but we can talk
Speaker 1: more about with those suicide rates. But if you think
Speaker 1: about everything else, so truancy record lows, drug use record lows,
Speaker 1: pregnancy record lows. This was the generation of the super predator. Right.
Speaker 1: There are prisons, juveniles, attention centers that are empty. Well
Speaker 1: why is that? Part of it is because kids are
Speaker 1: staying indoors. Right, If you wanted to invent a device
Speaker 1: to keep it's safe at home, off the streets from
Speaker 1: not getting in trouble outside, you would probably have been
Speaker 1: something like a video game, which you know, I'm not
Speaker 1: saying doesn't have dilitary effects. When it's used in excess,
Speaker 1: but you know, if it's instead of what the things
Speaker 1: that kids used to do in their spare time to
Speaker 1: feel agency, feel freedom, this is a lot less dangerous
Speaker 1: than other things kids could do. And then finally the
Speaker 1: third of Dessie and Ryan self determination. These three psychological nutrients.
Speaker 1: The third is relatedness. And one thing we've seen over
Speaker 1: the past fifty years is the utter collapse in play
Speaker 1: time and in what's called free play. So kids today,
Speaker 1: this is the generation of children who when they come
Speaker 1: home from school are either you know, locked indoors because
Speaker 1: their parents are so scared of stranger danger and their
Speaker 1: kids getting in you know, being abducted, which is ridiculous,
Speaker 1: is the safest generation in American history. Or kids are
Speaker 1: so scheduled these days between Kuman and piano lessons and
Speaker 1: Mandarin and test prep that they have no time for
Speaker 1: free play. So when you don't get your psychological nutrients
Speaker 1: of relatedness fulfilled, where do you find relatedness? Well, you
Speaker 1: find it on Snapchat, you find it on TikTok, you
Speaker 1: find on Instagram. Right just like we did in our
Speaker 1: generation when we would talk to our friends on the
Speaker 1: phone for hours on end. That's where they go to socialize.
Speaker 1: And so that's the big lesson I want to impart
Speaker 1: to parents that if you really want to get to
Speaker 1: the root cause of why kids overuse technology, we have
Speaker 1: to understand these three factors that you know, this is
Speaker 1: very old, very established research that kids need competency, autonomy,
Speaker 1: and relatedness and when they don't get that offline, they
Speaker 1: look forward online. Hi, everyone, just wanted to take a
Speaker 1: quick break and talk about my new book that's coming
Speaker 1: out April seventh. It's called Transcend The New Science of
Speaker 1: Self Actualization. Really excited to present this book to you all.
Speaker 1: It represents the culmination of many, many years of hard
Speaker 1: work and synthesis. What I've what I've done in this
Speaker 1: book is I've taken Maslow's classic hierarchy of Needs and
Speaker 1: I've revised it for the twenty first century, trying to
Speaker 1: bring back humanistic psychology. I think that the field of
Speaker 1: humanistic psychology in the fifties and sixties really got a
Speaker 1: lot right about humanity and the creative possibilities of humans,
Speaker 1: as well as the humanitarian and spiritual possibilities. I really
Speaker 1: hope in this book can present a vision of humanity
Speaker 1: that transcends us all and helps us connect deeper with
Speaker 1: each other, but also help us reach our greatest potential
Speaker 1: individually and collectively. So if you want to check out
Speaker 1: this book, you can actually pre order it right now
Speaker 1: in Amazon as well as other there's independent bookstores I
Speaker 1: think you can pre order it from and then on
Speaker 1: April seventh. Starting April seventh, that should be in bookstores.
Speaker 1: A lot of people in wondering throughout the years how
Speaker 1: they can support me and the Psychology podcast, and here's
Speaker 1: the time. You know, you're always welcome to contribute money
Speaker 1: to the podcast, help support it. If you're a longtime
Speaker 1: listener or even short time listener, you want to not
Speaker 1: only support the podcast but dive deeper into a lot
Speaker 1: of the concepts and ideas we talk about constantly on
Speaker 1: this show. This is a great way to do that
Speaker 1: by buying this book. So please check the book out
Speaker 1: and let me know what you think. Thank you for that.
Speaker 1: That was a great review of self determination theory as well.
Speaker 1: And you know, the big core of self determination theory
Speaker 1: is the idea of intrinsic motivation being the best kind
Speaker 1: of motivation. But it doesn't seem like that is true.
Speaker 1: That that's very helpful when you talk about Yeah, of course,
Speaker 1: a lot of these kids are intrinsically motivated to do
Speaker 1: lots of things that are that they probably shouldn't be
Speaker 1: intrinsically motivated true to do so that they used to
Speaker 1: do in previous generations. You mean, right, yes, yes, yes, Okay.
Speaker 1: So my last question, because I'm a creativity researcher and
Speaker 1: I'm really interested in that this tension and what we're
Speaker 1: finding in the brain in our own research that some
Speaker 1: of the greatest sources of creativity comes from the indistract
Speaker 1: This comes from the distractable mind trying to reconcile this
Speaker 1: with each other. You know, if we were indistractable twenty
Speaker 1: four to seven, is it possible we would be missing
Speaker 1: out on some really surprising connection creative connections. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: a terrific question. I think it's a semantic question because
Speaker 1: the way I define distraction, I think the entomology of
Speaker 1: the word distraction is never good. If distraction is the
Speaker 1: opposite of traction, it's doing things against your better interest,
Speaker 1: things that you did not plan to do with intent.
Speaker 1: I think distraction is not never good. What I think
Speaker 1: you're referring to, and I think is very good is
Speaker 1: diversion of attention, and that is I think that's you know,
Speaker 1: you can plan to allow your attention to be diverted.
Speaker 1: If you go watch a movie, read a book, go
Speaker 1: to a sports game, take a walk, meditate, let your
Speaker 1: brain wander and daydream. All of those things are fantastic.
Speaker 1: That's a diversion of attention that you can plan for.
Speaker 1: And so I think in this day and age, if
Speaker 1: we don't plan for it. You know, we know that
Speaker 1: there are benefits to creativity when we let our minds wander.
Speaker 1: But the fact of the matter is the cost. The
Speaker 1: price of this progress, the price of having the world's
Speaker 1: information at your fingertips, the price of having you know,
Speaker 1: so much information, so many videos, so many endless articles.
Speaker 1: You know. Krekergard I think said it best, and he
Speaker 1: said that anxiety is the dizziness of freedom. And I
Speaker 1: think that so perfectly encapsulates what we're feeling right now.
Speaker 1: You know, we are dizzy with so much choice, we
Speaker 1: have so many options. So the solution to that harkens
Speaker 1: back to what I said earlier, that the antido fer
Speaker 1: impulsiveness is forethought that if we see and the research
Speaker 1: is bearing this out that, you know, letting your mind
Speaker 1: wand or having time to just think and daydream for
Speaker 1: a sample. What we have to do these days is
Speaker 1: to schedule time for that, because if we don't, it's
Speaker 1: just not going to happen. So I don't think I
Speaker 1: don't think we contradict each other when I say that.
Speaker 1: I think some diversion, letting your attention wander is wonderful,
Speaker 1: and I think we should plan time for it. If that's,
Speaker 1: you know, if it's according to your values that you
Speaker 1: want to be more creative, that's something that's important to you.
Speaker 1: You can have your cake and eat it too, But
Speaker 1: I think that requires becoming indistractable to make sure we
Speaker 1: can make time for even things like letting our minds
Speaker 1: wander from time to time. Thank you. I appreciate that
Speaker 1: your model still is room for the planned what my advisor,
Speaker 1: one of my mentors, and a Graduchul Drome singer called
Speaker 1: positive constructive daydreaming. Yes, absolutely, I think there's definitely a
Speaker 1: place for that. Great So I like to end sometimes
Speaker 1: with one of my favorite quotes from the guest, and
Speaker 1: I'm going to read one of your quotes. In the future.
Speaker 1: There will be two kinds of people in the world,
Speaker 1: those who let their attention and lives be controlled and
Speaker 1: coursed by others, and those who proudly call themselves in distractable.
Speaker 1: Thanks so much for chatting with me today and helping
Speaker 1: me learn how I can be a bit more indistractable
Speaker 1: my own life. Thank you, Scott A pleasure. Thanks for
Speaker 1: listening to this episode of the Psychology Podcast. If you'd
Speaker 1: like to react in some way to something you heard,
Speaker 1: I encourage you to join in the discussion at the
Speaker 1: Psychology podcast dot com. That's the Psychology Podcast dot com. Also,
Speaker 1: please add a reading and review of the podcast on
Speaker 1: iTunes and subscribe to the Psychology Podcast YouTube channel, as
Speaker 1: we're really trying to increase our viewership on YouTube. In fact,
Speaker 1: many of these episodes are in video format on YouTube,
Speaker 1: so you'll definitely want to check out that channel. Thanks
Speaker 1: for being such a great supporter of the podcast, and
Speaker 1: tune in next time for more on the mind, brain, behavior,
Speaker 1: and creativity.