Nir Eyal
Appearances
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Nir Eyal on How to Win Back Your Time and Attention | EP 586
If and only if you can focus long enough to pull yourself away from TikTok and Instagram and WhatsApp and Slack and email and all the stuff that's happening in the news and to pay attention long enough to learn that new skill online. So if you have that skill, it truly is a superpower. And if you don't have the skill to focus and concentrate long enough to learn, you're toast.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Nir Eyal on How to Win Back Your Time and Attention | EP 586
I think it's a terrific question. And I think it prompts us to ask ourselves, I think this word curiosity, I think it is really neglected when it comes to our educational system, because what we forget is that we only think about technology as we are experiencing it today. And of course, we see all the negative repercussions because they're very top of mind, because we can see the difference.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Nir Eyal on How to Win Back Your Time and Attention | EP 586
We can see the change from the way we grew up, right? So we think about all the bad stuff that a new technology brings. And when it comes to the old technology, we don't see it because it's the way it's always been. But remember, institutionalized education is brand new, right? Humans have existed for 200,000 years, at least, right? Homo sapiens.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Nir Eyal on How to Win Back Your Time and Attention | EP 586
For the vast majority of that time, all education was passed down through tribes, right? Like children participated. There wasn't this bifurcation of adults go here and kids go there. We were all together as tribes. So that's how information was passed along. Kids saw what needed to get done, and then eventually they learned those skills.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Nir Eyal on How to Win Back Your Time and Attention | EP 586
And then we moved into a time when the wealthy could educate their children through tutors, through one on one education, where you would have an individual tutor who could match the child's skill, ability and curiosity to go as deep as they wanted to go into a topic.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Nir Eyal on How to Win Back Your Time and Attention | EP 586
So when you think about the way that Newton and Mozart and even Einstein were educated, they didn't sit in a classroom with 30 other students when they were children and told, sit down and shut up and listen to me. No, they had private tutors. And so what we are moving towards is not a place where only the aristocracy had that type of education.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Nir Eyal on How to Win Back Your Time and Attention | EP 586
I believe we're moving towards potentially a future where everybody has an AI coach that is infinitely patient, that can cater to that curiosity of whatever the child wants to study. And so we're in a way returning back to the technology that predated This Horace Mann style of learning where it's a bunch of kids in a room listening to some sage on the stage, blah, blah, which is incredibly boring.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Nir Eyal on How to Win Back Your Time and Attention | EP 586
I can't even stand it. And so we're moving back to, I think, what used to be a much more productive form of learning where you can tell what the child wants to lean into with certain constraints, right? There's a sandbox that the child can play in, and that sandbox expands as they get older and prove that they can handle the added responsibility.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Nir Eyal on How to Win Back Your Time and Attention | EP 586
But I think that I think could usher a glorious age of personalized education and learning because it allows kids to fully express that curiosity and teach them in a more project-based course as opposed to here's the information you need to learn. I don't care if you think this is interesting. I don't care if you'll ever use it again. You just need to regurgitate it for this test.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Nir Eyal on How to Win Back Your Time and Attention | EP 586
That's such a stupid way to do things. And of course, that's what we all buy into. We're all blind. We all have these. We don't refuse to accept that this is a stupid way of learning because that's what tortured us. So we have to do the same to our children.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Nir Eyal on How to Win Back Your Time and Attention | EP 586
Yeah, absolutely. So the indistractable model can be used with children and adults. So the first and best thing you can do if you want to raise indistractable kids is to be an indistractable parent. That we know that children, even though you can't see it, your child is born with these invisible antennae.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Nir Eyal on How to Win Back Your Time and Attention | EP 586
Did you know that every child is born with these invisible antennae that is called the hypocrisy detection device? that children are constantly scanning to see where you as the parents screw up. So just like you can't tell your child don't smoke while you're smoking a cigarette, you can't tell your child get off Fortnite while you're checking email. It doesn't work that way.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Nir Eyal on How to Win Back Your Time and Attention | EP 586
You have to walk the walk yourself. And so the best thing you can do if you want to raise an indistractable kid is to be an indistractable parent yourself. And then we work through these four strategies that I described in the book. Number one, master internal triggers. We have to understand why kids overuse technology.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Nir Eyal on How to Win Back Your Time and Attention | EP 586
And this is what we blindly refuse to acknowledge is that we enter into these moral panics as we have always done throughout history. The kids are crazy. The kids are out of control. This is why they killed Socrates, right? Because he was corrupting the minds of youth. So this is nothing new, right?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Nir Eyal on How to Win Back Your Time and Attention | EP 586
Whenever there's a new idea, a new technology, a new way of doing things, well, it must be corrupting the minds of the youth. This is what we always say. As opposed to, wait a minute, what exactly is going on with the kids? What are they looking to escape? And so what I talk about in Indistractable is called the needs displacement hypothesis.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Nir Eyal on How to Win Back Your Time and Attention | EP 586
And this has been around for a long time, almost around the time I was born, this hypothesis that came out of the work of Desi and Ryan. I'm not sure you might've had them on your show, the founders of self-determination theory. who basically said that when you are not getting what you need in one area of your life, you look for it in other areas.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Nir Eyal on How to Win Back Your Time and Attention | EP 586
So the modern day application is that when you ask yourself, what are the psychological nutrients that we know every human being on the face of the earth needs, according to self-determination theory, the most widely accepted theory of human flourishing and motivation, we need competency, we need autonomy, and we need relatedness. Every human being needs these three things, especially children.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Nir Eyal on How to Win Back Your Time and Attention | EP 586
But we are starving our children of these three psychological nutrients. They don't feel competent in school because we test them all day, every day to just barf out the same information that they were taught the day before, whether they care or not. Many kids fall through the cracks because of this No Child Left Behind Act that mandates testing, testing constantly, so they don't feel competent.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Nir Eyal on How to Win Back Your Time and Attention | EP 586
Then we have autonomy. This is the most regulated generation in history. There's only two places in the world where you can tell human beings where to go, what to think, what to do, how to dress, and who to be friends with, and that's school and prison. So it's no surprise that if you put kids in cages all day, they act like animals because they don't have autonomy.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Nir Eyal on How to Win Back Your Time and Attention | EP 586
I dare any parent listening to me to try and survive a day in high school. You will hate it. You will absolutely hate it. It's miserable. And so why do we subject our kids to this torture? Because we don't know what else to do. So that's what we do. That was done to us. That's what we'll do to our kids. So they're desperate for autonomy. They're desperate for freedom.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Nir Eyal on How to Win Back Your Time and Attention | EP 586
And so what do they do when they're looking for freedom? They come home, they go online, and finally, they can be free. They can play these games with their friends. And then finally, relatedness. What came at the cost of the extracurriculars and the swimming and the test prep and the Chinese lessons and the ballet is that kids have less time than ever to play.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Nir Eyal on How to Win Back Your Time and Attention | EP 586
And if you look at the work of Peter Gray, genius work that he's done around how little time children have for free play today. And this is making our children sick. It is making them psychologically vulnerable because play is where we learn our place in the world. It's one thing if a parent or a coach tells you what to do.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Nir Eyal on How to Win Back Your Time and Attention | EP 586
And now we have ChatGPT and we have all these great products on our devices that allow us to have all the facts and figures we could possibly want at our fingertips. So
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Nir Eyal on How to Win Back Your Time and Attention | EP 586
It's a whole nother thing when a friend says, hey, if you act like that, I don't want to play because you're acting like a jerk. That's how we learn our place in the world. And we need that to develop psychological resilience. So we need that time for free play. Well, kids don't have any time for free play anymore because they're so hyper-scheduled. Or if you don't have money, what do you do?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Nir Eyal on How to Win Back Your Time and Attention | EP 586
You put your kid behind locked door every day and they're supposed to just sit there and read Shakespeare in their spare time? No, of course not. They want to hang out with their friends. But when we don't let kids do that because the media has scared us to death about stranger danger, which is totally ridiculous. It's the safest time in American history to be a child.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Nir Eyal on How to Win Back Your Time and Attention | EP 586
What other choice do children have? They want to play with their friends online. So I encourage parents, go play Fortnite. Go see what these games are like. They're not just video games. They're places for kids to hang out with their friends. That's what they're doing there. So if we don't give children competency, autonomy, and relatedness in the real world, they're going to go online.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Nir Eyal on How to Win Back Your Time and Attention | EP 586
And these tech companies are happy to give them the opportunity to do it. But that's not the cause of the problem. The cause of the problem is not the technology. The cause of the problem is why kids are so starved for these psychological nutrients in the first place. And so you asked, how do I help my daughter form a healthy relationship with technology?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Nir Eyal on How to Win Back Your Time and Attention | EP 586
The first thing I do is I help her form healthy relationships without the technology. So she has plenty of opportunity throughout her day to be with other children without me watching and without coaches and teachers watching either. Time to just hang out. And you know what?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Nir Eyal on How to Win Back Your Time and Attention | EP 586
As much as she loves her phone at 16 years old, whenever she has the opportunity to play with a real human being in the real world, she forgets about her phone in a second. Right. It's only when we starve kids of these opportunities to play. That's when they get so enamored with their phones. So that's the big deal. So number one, understand their internal triggers. The rest is kind of details.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Nir Eyal on How to Win Back Your Time and Attention | EP 586
For example, make time for traction. So planning out their day. One of the best things you can do if you want your kid to use their device less is plan time for them to use their device. Right? Because if you put time in your day to say, hey, now's the time when we're all gonna go on social media. Great, right? How much time is good for you? 30 minutes, an hour, 45 minutes.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Nir Eyal on How to Win Back Your Time and Attention | EP 586
How much time is good for you to go on social media? When it's in your calendar, just like it is for mine as an adult, I don't have to feel guilty about it. If it's age appropriate, right? Assuming your kid is of the age, the minimum age is 13. Do not let your kid on a product that the manufacturer tells you not to let your kid on below a certain age.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Nir Eyal on How to Win Back Your Time and Attention | EP 586
So at least 13, I think it should be closer to 16. But assuming they're of age, There's nothing wrong as long as you have a conversation about how to use it properly, et cetera, et cetera. Scheduling that time. Now they don't have to constantly think about, oh, when can I play? When can I play? When can I play? Oh, you can play.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Nir Eyal on How to Win Back Your Time and Attention | EP 586
It's right there on the calendar and for how much time you said you were going to use it. The third step, hack back the external triggers. I think we need to remove anything that interrupts sleep in the bedroom. Huge mistake. I think part of the reason kids are struggling psychologically these days, it's not the devices. It's what the devices are displacing, namely sleep.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Nir Eyal on How to Win Back Your Time and Attention | EP 586
So any technology that could interrupt sleep, whether it's your iPhone, whether it's the computer, whether it's a fish tank, whether it's a television, I don't think has any place in a child's bedroom. If it can interrupt sleep, it needs to be taken away because it's an external trigger that can interrupt very critical part of their mental development, which is time for adequate rest.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Nir Eyal on How to Win Back Your Time and Attention | EP 586
And then finally, preventing distraction with PACT, which is where we can use technology, ironically, to block out other technology.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Nir Eyal on How to Win Back Your Time and Attention | EP 586
So whether it's an app like Forest, where you use this app, I use it all the time, you dial in how much time you want to do focused work for, you hit a little button, and if you pick up your phone and do anything with it, your phone tells you, no, that's not what you said you were going to do. You said you were going to stay focused. So my daughter can use it when she does her homework. I use it.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Nir Eyal on How to Win Back Your Time and Attention | EP 586
It's a great product. I think it costs like $5 for this app. There's...
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Nir Eyal on How to Win Back Your Time and Attention | EP 586
countless tools many of them come pre-installed in your phone for free that help us make these packs to prevent us from getting distracted so to answer your question the way we raise indistractable kids is the same way we would become indistractable ourselves master internal triggers make time for traction hack back external triggers and prevent distraction with packs these four steps can make anyone indistractable
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Nir Eyal on How to Win Back Your Time and Attention | EP 586
They are, in that work, it explains so much. I don't understand why it's not, I feel like everybody should learn about self-determination theory. And whenever you study it intensely, it explains so much about how we behave.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Nir Eyal on How to Win Back Your Time and Attention | EP 586
I think it would start with not requiring getting comfortable with it in the first place. I think the pendulum has swung, I think, when it comes to this type of stuff, a little bit too far into the direction of habits. So the idea, there's so many books on habits these days. I wrote a book on habit. My first book was about habits.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Nir Eyal on How to Win Back Your Time and Attention | EP 586
and habits are great habits are useful and the philosophy behind habits is that you can take a hard behavior and suddenly make it easy put on autopilot right i hate exercising but if i build an exercise habit it'll be easy i hate writing but i've always wanted to write a book and so if i create a writing habit it'll be easy i can't stand meditation but if i create a meditation habit it'll be easy i know boredom is good for me but i hate being bored how do i make it easy and i think that's actually the wrong philosophy because
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Nir Eyal on How to Win Back Your Time and Attention | EP 586
Not every behavior can become a habit. Only very few behaviors can become habits. What is the definition of a habit? The very definition of a habit, an impulse to do a behavior with little or no conscious thought. An impulse to do a behavior with little or no conscious thought. So if a behavior requires a lot of conscious thought, It ain't going to be a habit.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Nir Eyal on How to Win Back Your Time and Attention | EP 586
When I go to the gym and I'm trying to beat my personal record, oh my God, I'm struggling. That requires a lot of effort. If I'm writing my book, believe me, it's a lot of conscious thought. How do you write without conscious thought? If I'm meditating and I'm not thinking, if I don't have conscious thought, I'm asleep. I'm doing it wrong, right?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Nir Eyal on How to Win Back Your Time and Attention | EP 586
Meditation is all about thinking about your thoughts and learning how to let them go, not to make it easy, but to be consciously aware of your thoughts. And so I think we've gone way overboard trying to make things easy. I think we need to do something different, which is to not expect that everything can become a habit.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Nir Eyal on How to Win Back Your Time and Attention | EP 586
Some behaviors can become habits for sure, but these difficult behaviors will never, ever become habits. Rather, we should make them into routines. What is a routine? A routine is a series of behaviors frequently repeated. So every habit starts as a routine, but many routines will never become habits. And so we shouldn't expect them to. So as opposed to expecting they become easy.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Nir Eyal on How to Win Back Your Time and Attention | EP 586
So why am I ranting about this? What's the big deal? Tomato, tomato. I'll tell you why I'm ranting about it. Because when we try and convince people that you can turn everything into a habit and then they hear some guru's advice that says, oh, you need 66 days to form a habit or 40 days or 30 days. There's no magic number, people. It doesn't exist. But then they try, and then it doesn't work.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Nir Eyal on How to Win Back Your Time and Attention | EP 586
It's still hard. They still hate exercise. Meditation is still difficult. Writing is still a chore. What do they do? Do they blame the guru? No, they blame themselves. They think, oh, I'm broken. You're not broken. It's this methodology is broken. Rather, when you have the expectation that when something is hard, good. It's not supposed to be easy. It's supposed to be difficult.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Nir Eyal on How to Win Back Your Time and Attention | EP 586
When I applied to college, the most important thing when you looked at a university was how many books were in their library. Who cares? It's completely pointless. Nobody cares how many books you have in the library because everybody has Google on their phone.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Nir Eyal on How to Win Back Your Time and Attention | EP 586
Because if it was easy, everyone would do it. And so it's a different mindset. You have to do what I call re-imagining the trigger in order to see that discomfort as something that's serving you rather than hurting you. So I'll give you an example when I'm bored. Okay. I'm bored every day because what do I do for a living? I write books and I have no idea how to make writing into a habit.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Nir Eyal on How to Win Back Your Time and Attention | EP 586
It's always hard every day. I got to write. And all I want to do when I start writing is check the news or look at sports scores or check stock prices or check my email inbox. Anything but the doing the writing because it's hard freaking work. But what I do instead is I repeat to myself a personal mantra. And you can use this mantra. You can make up your own. Feel free to steal it.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Nir Eyal on How to Win Back Your Time and Attention | EP 586
My mantra is this. I take a deep breath and I tell myself this is what it feels like to get better. This is what it feels like to get better. And so I'm re-imagining that discomfort and I say, you know what? Good. I'm supposed, this is supposed to be difficult. This is supposed to be hard. You know why? Because this is what it feels like to get better.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Nir Eyal on How to Win Back Your Time and Attention | EP 586
So that's a very important step is to reimagine that trigger as a positive rather than something we have to escape.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Nir Eyal on How to Win Back Your Time and Attention | EP 586
Totally. And for some people, the first time they hear that, it sounds cheesy. I can't do that. And by the way, this is one of dozens of techniques. So not every technique will be the first go-to solution. So I encourage people to check out the book. There's a lot more in Indistractable, all many different crayons you can color with.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Nir Eyal on How to Win Back Your Time and Attention | EP 586
But this technique, this particular technique has really served me in various areas of my life. For example, when I first started doing public speaking, I would have terrible stage fright. I still have terrible stage fright. But I used to tell myself this story.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Nir Eyal on How to Win Back Your Time and Attention | EP 586
I chose to tell myself this story that when I felt my heart beating and my armpits were sweaty and my throat was getting dry, oh, this must mean I'm not really a very good public speaker. I didn't prepare enough. I'm going to choke on stage. If I was a real professional, this wouldn't happen to me. I had this dialogue in my head.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Nir Eyal on How to Win Back Your Time and Attention | EP 586
telling me all these negative things that were going to happen and making me doubt myself all these limiting beliefs and then i read this research about reimagining the trigger and till this day i get the exact same cues right i get the same exact emotions happen to me i still get the palpitations i still get the dry throat i still get the sweaty armpits i'm feeling them right now as we speak and yet now i reinterpret them
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Nir Eyal on How to Win Back Your Time and Attention | EP 586
So now before I get on stage and I feel my heart racing, I tell myself a different story. The story I tell myself until this very day, I tell myself, ah, my heart is racing right now so that it can send more oxygen to my brain so I can deliver my best possible talk.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Nir Eyal on How to Win Back Your Time and Attention | EP 586
And once I changed that narrative, I stopped ruminating, stopped being so anxious about that dilemma of this fear of what might happen. And I can be fully present in the moment just by flipping the narrative. But that required me to see it completely different. So what I'm trying to encourage people to do, because it sounds crazy, if you're like, no, I could never see boredom as a good thing.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Nir Eyal on How to Win Back Your Time and Attention | EP 586
And no, I can never see winter or getting on stage as a good thing. Flip the script. Try and tell yourself the exact opposite, and you'd be amazed how you can actually abide by that new belief if you just try it on for size.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Nir Eyal on How to Win Back Your Time and Attention | EP 586
Sure. So if we know, go back to what we were talking about earlier, that all distraction is a desire to escape discomfort, and this discomfort comes from these internal triggers, we need to ask ourselves, what is the preceding emotion? What is that sensation that comes right before the distraction? And that actually is preceding. Probably the most difficult step because we become so habituated.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Nir Eyal on How to Win Back Your Time and Attention | EP 586
The brain is a cognitive miser. It wants to seek the path of least resistance. So when it feels discomfort, what's the quickest thing that can solve that problem? If I'm hungry, where is there a snack? If I'm thirsty, where can I get a drink, right? So it really immediately wants to find the easiest path to get what we want.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Nir Eyal on How to Win Back Your Time and Attention | EP 586
And the way we know we want something is that we feel this internal trigger. We feel this discomfort. So when we train our brains that at every drop of a hat, of boredom, uncertainty, discomfort, stress, anxiety. Where's my phone? Where's the TV? Where's the cigarette? Where's the drink? When we train ourselves to do that, it becomes easier and easier.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Nir Eyal on How to Win Back Your Time and Attention | EP 586
That actually does become a habit, something we do with little or no conscious thought. And so what we have to do is to reintroduce that space between the stimulus and the response, right? As Viktor Frankl said, that's where our humanity lies is between that stimulus and response. So just recognizing what is going on there. What am I doing here? What feeling precedes that sensation?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Nir Eyal on How to Win Back Your Time and Attention | EP 586
And oftentimes it is that negativity bias that the reason we are so addicted to the news, and I don't blame social media, all forms of media. I don't care if it's the New York Times. If it's CNN, if it's Fox News, if it's the BBC, if it's Facebook, it doesn't matter. All of them thrive on negativity bias. They don't tell you all the wonderful things that happen in the world today.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Nir Eyal on How to Win Back Your Time and Attention | EP 586
No, they only tell you about the plane crashes and the murders and the wars and all the bad stuff because guess what? The first rule of journalism is if it bleeds, it leads. And so that's what they tell you because we love the negativity bias. Why? Because it was evolutionarily beneficial. Good things are nice, bad things can kill you.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Nir Eyal on How to Win Back Your Time and Attention | EP 586
So our brains are uniquely tuned to scan our environment and look for threats. That's not a bug, that's a feature. We're supposed to be like that. It makes us vigilant against dangerous threats. But that negativity bias, when it's used against us to sell our attention to advertisers, it goes too far.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Nir Eyal on How to Win Back Your Time and Attention | EP 586
information is no longer scarce we're drowning in information what's scarce today is the ability to focus your attention long enough on that information to turn it into wisdom welcome to passion struck hi i'm your host john r miles and on the show we decipher the secrets tips and guidance of the world's most inspiring people and turn their wisdom into practical advice for you and those around you
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Nir Eyal on How to Win Back Your Time and Attention | EP 586
And so that's where we need to be very careful of media and ask ourselves, why do we compulsively check so much? Why is there such a thing as a news junkie, right? Somebody who's constantly checking. Is staying informed a good thing? Sure. But what tends to happen is we convince ourselves, oh, it's important for me to be a concerned voter. It's important for me to take civic action.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Nir Eyal on How to Win Back Your Time and Attention | EP 586
Let me just go read the news or watch television. Well, you're not doing anything constructive. You're just feeding this monster that lives inside you that wants nothing but negativity all day. And so we really need to take a step back and ask ourselves, is this media serving us or is it hurting us? Is it consistent with our values or is it nothing more than a distraction?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Nir Eyal on How to Win Back Your Time and Attention | EP 586
Exactly. We can talk about that if you want. Although what's interesting, that movie is interesting because it has not aged well. The movie was all about how Facebook is melting our brains and Facebook is so terrible. And these kids in the movie do, they smash this container so that they can get to their cell phones because they want to check. No, kids don't use Facebook anymore.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Nir Eyal on How to Win Back Your Time and Attention | EP 586
Find me anyone under 30 who uses Facebook proper, right? They used Instagram, they use TikTok, they use other tools, which don't look anything like what Facebook used to look like. right? It's like scrolling a feed and watching video after video. Not that it's any better or worse, but it's different. And guess what?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Nir Eyal on How to Win Back Your Time and Attention | EP 586
Wait another few years, TikTok and Instagram, they'll look like child's play compared to whatever's coming next, which proves the point that this is a constant cycle. We freak out about the latest technology. We think it's melting everybody's brain and it's not necessarily a good thing for everybody. I'm not a tech apologist. It's just that we never get to the root cause of the problem.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Nir Eyal on How to Win Back Your Time and Attention | EP 586
And most importantly, what we can do about the problem. So that's just so to fill everybody in, that's what really made me mad about the movie is that they interviewed me for three hours and I told them everything I knew. I did five years of research. I handed them on a silver platter. Hey, here's how to fix this problem. they didn't include any of it in the movie.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Nir Eyal on How to Win Back Your Time and Attention | EP 586
It's as if you go to the doctor and the doctor says, hey, you have a terrible disease. Say, oh my goodness, that's awful. Is there a cure? Yes, there's a cure. Amazing, can I get the treatment? No, sorry, we're not gonna give you the treatment. That's malpractice. And so ironically, this movie, as all media does,
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Nir Eyal on How to Win Back Your Time and Attention | EP 586
Freaked people out, made them scared, took advantage of their psychological weaknesses that they deride, right? They talk about how these tech companies are using psychological tricks. The movie used every psychological trick in the book to scare people, right? To make more money for this company that made the movie without giving them any solutions, which turns out anyone can do.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Nir Eyal on How to Win Back Your Time and Attention | EP 586
Anyone can use to fix the problem.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Nir Eyal on How to Win Back Your Time and Attention | EP 586
The problem is, unfortunately, I can't remember the name of this rule. It's an Italian guy who said this, so I apologize that I don't remember his name, Mr. Italian guy. But it's something that goes, the amount of effort to refute bullshit is 10 times the effort to create it. So there are some ideas that are just really hard to stomp out. It requires so much effort to tell people, guess what?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Nir Eyal on How to Win Back Your Time and Attention | EP 586
It's not social media, right? It's not, that's not why your kids are crazy. There's a lot of other stuff going on because it's such a popular narrative that we all want to believe that the amount of effort to refute that theory is orders of magnitude more. Definitely.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Nir Eyal on How to Win Back Your Time and Attention | EP 586
Sure. So if you want to know what someone's values really are, you don't listen to what they say. You look at two things. You look at how they spend their time and how they spend their money. That really will show you what their values are. And it's interesting in society, we place so much currency, if you will, on money is so important. We have to save every dollar.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Nir Eyal on How to Win Back Your Time and Attention | EP 586
We put our money in banks protected by guards. We split checks. We use coupons. We have to save money, but when it comes to time, we just give it away. All right. Whoever wants it. Sure. Just take it. And I think it should be exactly the opposite, that you can always make more money, right? You can always make more money. You can do something to find how to make a buck. You cannot make more time.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Nir Eyal on How to Win Back Your Time and Attention | EP 586
So I don't care if you're Bill Gates or Warren Buffett or Elon Musk, you cannot make more time. We all get a finite amount of time on earth. And so I think we should flip the script. We should be generous with our money and stingy with our time because we can't make more of it. And so what do we do with that? How do we put this into practice? You turn your values into time. So what are values?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Nir Eyal on How to Win Back Your Time and Attention | EP 586
How do you define values? My definition of values are attributes of the person I want to become. Values are attributes of the person you want to become. So what I offer folks is this three-part framework of how you can start building
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Nir Eyal on How to Win Back Your Time and Attention | EP 586
turning your values into time starting with you you're at the center of these three life domains if you can't take care of yourself you can't take care of other people you can't make the world a better place so what i advise people to do is to look at their calendar for the week ahead and ask themselves how would the person i want to become spend their time taking care of themselves in whatever way is important to you so if prayer is important if meditation is important if physical fitness right you ask people what do you value oh my health is number one well
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Nir Eyal on How to Win Back Your Time and Attention | EP 586
Do you have time in your calendar to exercise, eat right, and get proper rest? If not, is that really one of your values? And I'm not telling you it has to be. If you don't like to exercise and it's not part of your value system, don't do it. I'm not going to tell you to do it. But if it is one of your values, if being healthy is important to you, it's got to have that time on your calendar.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Nir Eyal on How to Win Back Your Time and Attention | EP 586
as does time for the things you enjoy if you like watching youtube videos or netflix or golf or i don't care what it is if you enjoy that stuff put it on your calendar as long as it's consistent with your values and your schedule not someone else's so don't medicalize and moralize do it enjoy it but do it because you said you were going to do it not because you're looking for an escape from reality so put it on your schedule that's the you domain
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Nir Eyal on How to Win Back Your Time and Attention | EP 586
then time for your relationships. So part of the reason we have a loneliness epidemic in the industrialized world is that as society became more secular, these institutions that used to give us a time and a place on our calendars to meet with other people started to disappear.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Nir Eyal on How to Win Back Your Time and Attention | EP 586
So the church group, the Kiwanis Club, the local thing, the bowling league, the things that we used to do together became less and less part of our lives. And this is a long-term phenomenon. This is not because of social media, This was happening in the 1990s. Robert Putnam wrote about this in his book Bowling Alone in the 90s. So this has been a long-term trend. We need to bring that back.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Nir Eyal on How to Win Back Your Time and Attention | EP 586
We need to have time for the people in our community, the time for our best friends, the time for our significant others, for our kids, for our family members. It needs to be in our calendar because if we don't put that time in our calendar, it's not going to happen. We become ships in the night. So put that time for the important relationships in your life on your schedule.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Nir Eyal on How to Win Back Your Time and Attention | EP 586
And then finally, the last domain is the work domain. And work comes in two flavors. There's two kinds of work. We have what's called reactive work, which is how most people spend most of their day, reacting to emails, reacting to notifications, reacting to taps on the shoulder from their boss. That's reactive work. Then there's what's called reflective work.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Nir Eyal on How to Win Back Your Time and Attention | EP 586
Reflective work is the kind of work that can only be done without distraction. planning, strategizing, thinking for God's sakes requires you to work without distraction. The problem is that reflective work is hard and reactive work is easy. Why? Because reactive work always tells you what to do. I don't want to have to think about, am I doing the right thing?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Nir Eyal on How to Win Back Your Time and Attention | EP 586
Reactive work will tell me, let me check my inbox. Let me go to this meeting. Let me do this stuff that other people want me to do. Therefore, I don't have to ask myself, is this actually worth doing? It's very cognitively easy to do reactive work all day long. Now, some people's job is reactive work all day long. If you work in a call center, the phone rings, you pick it up.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Nir Eyal on How to Win Back Your Time and Attention | EP 586
It's all reactive work. But most people have some kind of blend of reactive and reflective work. So what's important is you have to carve aside that time for reflective work and keep it sacred, whether it's 20 minutes, 30 minutes, maybe an hour of your day. You have to plan that time and think of it as a meeting with the most important person in the world.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Nir Eyal on How to Win Back Your Time and Attention | EP 586
You are the most important person in your world. So keep that commitment to yourself. Have that time for reflective work, because if you don't, I promise you, you're going to run real fast in the wrong direction.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Nir Eyal on How to Win Back Your Time and Attention | EP 586
Absolutely. So first of all, you do have time. I hear this all the time. We do have time. We all have the same 24 hours in the day and you can do it all. You really can do it all. You just can't do it all at the same time. So one of the problems with the self-help community is that we use a lot of research that doesn't have very good backing. So it turns out that this technique that
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Nir Eyal on How to Win Back Your Time and Attention | EP 586
How far back do you want to go? I think if I really try and figure out the genesis of my fascination with human behavior and specifically distraction and technology, it probably would go back to my childhoods. For as long as I could remember as a kid, I was obese and not just overweight. I was actually clinically obese.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Nir Eyal on How to Win Back Your Time and Attention | EP 586
Everybody uses, I used to use it, is the to-do list. And to-do lists are one of the worst things you can do for your personal productivity because to-do lists have no constraints. You can always add more to a to-do list. So here's what invariably happens. You add more and more things to a to-do list. You come home from work every day. You're exhausted.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Nir Eyal on How to Win Back Your Time and Attention | EP 586
You look at the to-do list and here's all these things you still didn't get done. So what does that do to your psyche if day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year, you're looking at this list of things that you said you were going to do and you didn't? Loser.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Nir Eyal on How to Win Back Your Time and Attention | EP 586
And so that's why people get this terrible dialogue, these limiting beliefs in their heads that says, oh, I'm no good. I don't know how to manage my time. Maybe I have undiagnosed something or another, and they think that there's something wrong with them. There's nothing wrong with them. Again, it's this stupid technique that has very little scientific backing.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Nir Eyal on How to Win Back Your Time and Attention | EP 586
that to-do lists are not the best personal productivity technique. The best personal productivity technique used, and this has been studied thousands of times. I didn't invent it. It was around before I was born. It's called setting an implementation intention. It is the best technique that few people use. And that is simply saying what you're going to do and when you're going to do it.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Nir Eyal on How to Win Back Your Time and Attention | EP 586
And people don't do it. Those who don't do it, either they don't know about it or they don't do it because they're scared that if they did it, they would do the work. And so they had this little saboteur that says, ooh, if I actually schedule the workout, I might have to actually go work out. And I don't want to. So again, this is step two. Back to step one, the most important step.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Nir Eyal on How to Win Back Your Time and Attention | EP 586
If you don't deal with those mind goblins in your head that are telling you, this hurts, I don't want to do it, this sucks, let me escape. If you don't deal with those internal triggers, none of the other techniques will work. You have to tackle step one first, to have arrows in your quiver ready to go that will kill those mind goblins telling you how terrible the behavior is.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Nir Eyal on How to Win Back Your Time and Attention | EP 586
So that's step number one. Step number two is then planning when you're going to do the behavior. Because unlike with a to-do list, a time box calendar where you say, here's what I'm going to do and when I'm going to do it, now you have a constraint. And that constraint is 24 hours in a day. Unlike a to-do list that can go on and on, a time box calendar only gives you 24 hours in a day.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Nir Eyal on How to Win Back Your Time and Attention | EP 586
So it forces you to make those trade-offs. So if it's taking care of your kids or your ailing parents or exercise or working or anything Playing video games, you have to make that trade-off. And any trade-off you want to make is fine. It's not up to me or anyone else to tell you how to live your life. You have to decide based on your values, but you're doing it in advance.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Nir Eyal on How to Win Back Your Time and Attention | EP 586
Because remember, if there's one thing I want everyone to remember, it's that you can't call something a distraction unless you know what it distracted you from. I'm going to say it again. You cannot call something a distraction unless you know what it distracted you from. So if there's nothing on your calendar... What didn't you have time for exactly? What did you get distracted from?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Nir Eyal on How to Win Back Your Time and Attention | EP 586
Everything is a distraction unless you know what you got distracted from. So that's why we have to plan out our day. And I mean, down to the minute, it doesn't mean you can't have fun. You can plan time to watch TV or play video games or take a walk or do whatever you want, but plan it in advance. Okay. Very important technique. That's the only way we can turn our values into time.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Nir Eyal on How to Win Back Your Time and Attention | EP 586
I remember my mom taking me to the doctor and the doctor saying, okay, see this chart over here? The green zone is normal weight. This is overweight. The yellow zone, here's you're in this red zone here. So I was clinically obese from an early age. And I remember at that time that food seemed to control me. I don't know if I had an addiction. I try not to use that word.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Nir Eyal on How to Win Back Your Time and Attention | EP 586
Thank you for sharing that.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Nir Eyal on How to Win Back Your Time and Attention | EP 586
First of all, thank you for your service. You're a hero in my book for serving our country. And then when it comes to this question of liminal moments, it's not that we need to, it's impossible to not have them in our life. We always have these transition points, as you say. If you're waiting for a light to turn green while you're waiting at a red light,
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Nir Eyal on How to Win Back Your Time and Attention | EP 586
You have that temptation to check your phone for a quick second until the light turns green. So it's not necessarily the checking of the phone that's the problem. It's when the light turns green and the guy behind you honks at you, or you might get an accident if you start going and checking your phone at the same time. That's when it becomes dangerous.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Nir Eyal on How to Win Back Your Time and Attention | EP 586
So what you want to do is to have hard stops between these liminal moments. And so this goes back to the solution to answer your question, is time boxing. Because when you have the next thing you're supposed to do, And you're measuring yourself not by did you finish? This is a very important point. People get this wrong about timeboxing all the time.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Nir Eyal on How to Win Back Your Time and Attention | EP 586
They think timeboxing is about getting things done. It's about, I hear this all the time, well, what if I plan to do a task and I don't finish it? Can I just expand the timebox? And the answer is absolutely not. Because the goal of timeboxing is not to finish anything. What? How can that be? How am I going to be productive if I don't finish things?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Nir Eyal on How to Win Back Your Time and Attention | EP 586
The idea here, unlike a to-do list, you measure your productivity, you measure your self-worth by how many cute little boxes you check off. So what do you do? You check off the easy stuff. You check off the fun stuff. I used to do a task and then forget, oh, it wasn't on my to-do list, so I would go back and write it down just so I can feel the joy of crossing it off, right? It's stupid.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Nir Eyal on How to Win Back Your Time and Attention | EP 586
It makes no sense because I was trained in this methodology of, oh, it feels so good to check boxes. But I wasn't doing the important stuff that I really had to do to move my life and career forward. Whereas with a time box calendar, rather what you're doing, you're not measuring yourself by did you finish?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Nir Eyal on How to Win Back Your Time and Attention | EP 586
You're measuring yourself by did I do what I said I was going to do for as long as I said I would without distraction? That's the only metric that matters. Not that I finish. Did I do what I said I was going to do? And that could be being with my kids. It could be having dinner with my family. It could be watching television.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Nir Eyal on How to Win Back Your Time and Attention | EP 586
Did I do what I said I was going to do for as long as I said I would without distraction? And it turns out studies find that people who use that productivity technique and just measure themselves by did they work without distraction?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Nir Eyal on How to Win Back Your Time and Attention | EP 586
actually finish more they get more done the to-do list people because the to-do list people they work on a test for five minutes uh let me just check email let me go get a cup of coffee oh janet's at the water cooler they do this they oh what was i working on again i totally forgot whereas the people who time box and they say i'm just going to focus on this one task now they know how long things take and they can plan accordingly so the solution to these liminal moments is to have a hard stop to say okay i've got this meeting on the way back from that meeting i'm going to look at my phone because i'm just walking back to my desk
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Nir Eyal on How to Win Back Your Time and Attention | EP 586
I think it's overplayed, this addiction. But I certainly felt like there was an element, a loss of control when it came to food in my life. And I would use it for what I now recognize as an emotional escape, right? When I was feeling... Lonely, I ate. When I was feeling bored, I ate. When I was ashamed about how much I had just eaten, I would eat.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Nir Eyal on How to Win Back Your Time and Attention | EP 586
This is another ancillary benefit of time boxing is that when you allow yourself the time and measure yourself simply by that metric of, did I do nothing but focus on the task at hand? Sometimes you can get into those flow states and that's terrific. You're very lucky.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Nir Eyal on How to Win Back Your Time and Attention | EP 586
What I would caution against, and my beef with flow states, is that flow states only happen for fun things, for things people enjoy doing. When you read Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in his book, he talks about basketball players. He talks about artists. He talks about poets. He talks about people who are doing things they enjoy doing.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Nir Eyal on How to Win Back Your Time and Attention | EP 586
I've never heard of anyone getting into flow state doing their taxes, maybe accountants, hopefully, if they love their job.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Nir Eyal on How to Win Back Your Time and Attention | EP 586
it's very difficult to get into flow state for a a task you don't want to do which is the stuff that we get distracted while we're doing right it's when a chapter is not going well not when i'm in flow state when i'm in flow state i don't want to get out of it when a chapter is not going well that's when i get distracted so i just want to caution people don't expect that flow state don't think that you're somehow doing something wrong if you don't feel a flow state because you know what hard tasks are hard don't expect them to feel easy
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Nir Eyal on How to Win Back Your Time and Attention | EP 586
Sure, so I'll give you, I think if you want a summary of my decade of research, it would be this, that the antidote for impulsiveness is forethought. The antidote for impulsiveness is forethought, meaning that everything we're talking about, distraction, is simply an impulse control issue. That's all it is. It's not a character flaw. It's not a moral failing. There's nothing broken about you.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Nir Eyal on How to Win Back Your Time and Attention | EP 586
It's simply a skill issue that you haven't learned how to deal with this impulse control issue. But the antidote is forethought. What do I mean by that? That if you wait to the last minute, you're gonna lose. If you're on a diet and you have a piece of chocolate cake on the fork on the way to your mouth, you're gonna eat it.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Nir Eyal on How to Win Back Your Time and Attention | EP 586
If you are trying to quit smoking, but you have a cigarette in your hand lit, you're gonna smoke it. If you sleep next to your cell phone every night, it's gonna be the first thing you reach for in the morning before you even say hello to your loved one. So if you leave it to the last minute, too late, you will lose, they will get you.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Nir Eyal on How to Win Back Your Time and Attention | EP 586
However, if you plan ahead, if you use forethought, there is no distraction you can't overcome tomorrow by planning for it today. Don't leave it to the last moment. Plan today to make sure that you don't get distracted tomorrow. The antidote to impulsiveness is forethought.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Nir Eyal on How to Win Back Your Time and Attention | EP 586
Sure. Thank you. So my website is nearandfar.com. That's where I publish a blog post every other week about personal productivity, about all kinds of topics around behavior change and behavioral design. And my latest book is called Indistractable, How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life. And you can find that wherever books are sold.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Nir Eyal on How to Win Back Your Time and Attention | EP 586
After a long time trying to figure out why I had these behavioral patterns, my first inclination was to blame the food companies, that they're making us fat, that it's the terrible food in our ecosystem. I think that is true to some extent. And it definitely helped me psychologically to vilify the food makers and blame McDonald's and blame processed food companies.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Nir Eyal on How to Win Back Your Time and Attention | EP 586
My pleasure. Thank you so much for having me.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Nir Eyal on How to Win Back Your Time and Attention | EP 586
But to be honest, I played a pretty big role in that as well. And it wasn't until I figured out why I was emotionally eating and that leading to obesity that I could get my health and my weight and my life under control. And that was a turning point in my life. And so that kind of was the genesis. And then I remember also, I used to be really fascinated by Consumer Reports.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Nir Eyal on How to Win Back Your Time and Attention | EP 586
It used to be a magazine. Now it's just a website. But when I was growing up, we had this magazine called Consumer Reports, and they would tell you the inside outs of how products manipulated you and what was a good product and what was a shady product. And there was something in that fascination of like, wow, you can design products to get people to do things. And that was really interesting.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Nir Eyal on How to Win Back Your Time and Attention | EP 586
And yeah, it was just an early fascination. And I carry that forward until what I do today, which is I'm a behavioral designer. So I help companies on the business side. I help companies produce products and services that create healthy habits. That's my requirement. There's lots of companies I won't work with alcohol, tobacco, firearms, pornography, lots of companies I won't work with.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Nir Eyal on How to Win Back Your Time and Attention | EP 586
but there's lots of companies that use my services for good so i help companies like fitbond uses the hook model that i developed to build an exercise habit through their app duolingo a company that that uses my methodology to help people learn new languages even products like sunnyside actually help people
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Nir Eyal on How to Win Back Your Time and Attention | EP 586
drink less so they use my methodology it's a company i invested in it uses my methodology to help people break bad habits as well and so i've looked at both sides of the coin as a behavioral designer working for companies to help them build healthy habits but then also with my second book indistractable is about how we can break bad habits ourselves from a consumer perspective and those bad habits can include any kind of distraction whether it's too much news too much booze too much football too much facebook any of these distractions that pull us away from what we really want to do with our time and attention
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Nir Eyal on How to Win Back Your Time and Attention | EP 586
Exactly. And it's the same thing, by the way, with our technology. Something I talk about is the first and most important step to becoming indistractable is doing what I call mastering internal triggers that we know we do when we do time studies of why people check their devices. They will tell you they think that they're checking the device because of some external trigger, right?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Nir Eyal on How to Win Back Your Time and Attention | EP 586
A ping, ding, a ring. They think that's the cause. But it turns out that's only 10%. When we look at how many times people check times a day that people check their phones, only 10% of the time that they look at their screen is Is it because of an external trigger? The other 90% of the time that we check our devices, it's because of what's called an internal trigger.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Nir Eyal on How to Win Back Your Time and Attention | EP 586
Internal triggers are these uncomfortable emotional states, boredom, insecurity, loneliness, fatigue, uncertainty, anxiety, these uncomfortable sensations that we seek to escape. And so what I discovered is that all distractions, no matter the format, are not a moral failing. It's not a character flaw. The vast majority of people don't have anything wrong with their brains.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Nir Eyal on How to Win Back Your Time and Attention | EP 586
It's simply that we haven't learned this skill of dealing with emotional discomfort in a healthy way that leads us towards traction rather than trying to escape it with distraction.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Nir Eyal on How to Win Back Your Time and Attention | EP 586
Yeah, that's a great question. And I think it's a point that I think was lost on me for a long time because I bought into this paradigm that I think most people believe in of that human motivation is all about carrots and sticks. And Jeremy Bentham said something like this. Sigmund Freud said something like this. So we've had this idea of carrots and sticks in our vernacular for a long time.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Nir Eyal on How to Win Back Your Time and Attention | EP 586
And it turns out that neurologically, this is not how the brain works. The brain is not motivated by carrots and sticks. It's not about pleasure and pain. It's all about one thing. And that one thing is the desire to escape discomfort. That even wanting to feel good, seeking that reward is itself psychologically destabilizing.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Nir Eyal on How to Win Back Your Time and Attention | EP 586
So if all human behavior, all human behavior is motivated by the desire to escape discomfort, that means quite simply that time management is pain management. That money management is pain management. That weight management at the end of the day is pain management.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Nir Eyal on How to Win Back Your Time and Attention | EP 586
Once I realized that, I think that was incredibly empowering because now I wasn't confusing myself with blaming the things that weren't the real culprits, right? Of course, the phone in your hand plays a role. The food in your other hand plays a role. The cigarette between your fingertips, that plays a role. It all plays a role, but that's not the root cause of the problem.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Nir Eyal on How to Win Back Your Time and Attention | EP 586
The root cause of the problem is the root cause of all human behavior, which is just
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Nir Eyal on How to Win Back Your Time and Attention | EP 586
a feeling a powerful feeling but yet a feeling nonetheless and i think it's so important to answer your question because it's like looking at a lineup and trying to pick out who done it from a line of potential suspects and you point to the wrong guy and you put that guy in jail and yet the murderer is on the loose and i think that's exactly what we're doing with a lot of our of the things that we blame
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Nir Eyal on How to Win Back Your Time and Attention | EP 586
and we blame these things outside of us and they certainly do play a role but there's a whole heck of a lot that's going on inside of us that we can actually have a lot of control and agency over because look the world is not going to become a less distracting place quite the opposite with the virtual reality and augmented reality and everything that's happening in reality the world is only going to become more distracting so it behooves us
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Nir Eyal on How to Win Back Your Time and Attention | EP 586
to acquire what I call the skill of the century, because I think the world is really bifurcating into people who will allow their time and attention to be manipulated and controlled by others and people who stand up and say, no, I am indistractable. This is who I am. This is part of my value system. I control my time and attention because I am indistractable.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Nir Eyal on How to Win Back Your Time and Attention | EP 586
a terrific question i think it's a great question for young adults who are smart enough to ask that question and i think it's a question that every parent should be asking right now because the future is it has never been more unpredictable it's really hard to tell our kids what they should study to answer this question and the answer can't be oh go study computer science or go study a particular field who knows what that field is going to be like in just a few years i think what we can do
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Nir Eyal on How to Win Back Your Time and Attention | EP 586
is to look at which skills will never go out of style, which skills will always be essential.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Nir Eyal on How to Win Back Your Time and Attention | EP 586
And I think that the most important thing we can teach our children, which is actually antithetical to how our school system works, funny enough, because our school system was designed to feed workers into factories during the Industrial Revolution, that what we really should be teaching kids today is how to become, what is one of my favorite words, how to become an autodidact is someone who teaches themselves.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Nir Eyal on How to Win Back Your Time and Attention | EP 586
Why is that so important? I see it every day. that our teachers, the people who are teaching our children in high school, middle school, elementary school, even in college, can't keep up. They just can't. The world is moving too fast. How is a teacher supposed to update their syllabus in real time as the world is changing so quickly with all these developments in AI?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Nir Eyal on How to Win Back Your Time and Attention | EP 586
It's just moving too fast for these teachers to adapt to the skills that our kids are going to need, let alone all the regulatory changes and curriculum changes. It's just moving way too slowly.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Nir Eyal on How to Win Back Your Time and Attention | EP 586
So what we have to do is to teach our kids how to teach themselves because what they will find in the job market, no matter what industry they go into, is that pace of change is going to favor people who can very quickly assess the situation and assess what's going on with their industry.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Nir Eyal on How to Win Back Your Time and Attention | EP 586
And as opposed to just sitting there and waiting for a bailout or waiting for someone to sweep in and save them when we know nobody's going to save them, we have to save ourselves. These are the kind of people who will be able to read the landscape and say, you know what? That's not the right path.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Nir Eyal on How to Win Back Your Time and Attention | EP 586
I'm going to go switch to a different path or upgrade my skill set or take a course of action to chart my own path by teaching myself a new skill. And the good news is that that is now possible for the first time in human history, right? Like our grandparents could complain and say, you know what? My grandfather was a tailor and he was always a tailor.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Nir Eyal on How to Win Back Your Time and Attention | EP 586
He couldn't upgrade his skill set because he didn't have access to go learn a new skill, right? Only the very wealthy could go to universities so that they could have access to these big, luxurious libraries. Like when I applied to college, the most important thing when you looked at a university was how many books were in their library. Who cares? It's completely pointless.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Nir Eyal on How to Win Back Your Time and Attention | EP 586
Nobody cares how many books you have in the library because everybody has Google on their phone. And now we have chat GPT. We have all these great products on our devices that allow us to have all the facts and figures we could possibly want at our fingertips. So information is no longer scarce. We're drowning in information.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Nir Eyal on How to Win Back Your Time and Attention | EP 586
What's scarce today is the ability to focus your attention long enough on that information to turn it into wisdom. My daughter taught herself how to play guitar.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Nir Eyal on How to Win Back Your Time and Attention | EP 586
from youtube we never paid for even one guitar lesson because she learned the ability to focus long enough to learn this skill through the free information that's online and you can pretty much learn almost anything these days most of it for free right online
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Bryant Wood on How to Unlock Healing with Spiritual Biohacking | EP 584
Who cares? It's completely pointless. Nobody cares how many books you have in the library because everybody has Google on their phone. And now we have ChatGPT and we have all these great products on our devices that allow us to have all the facts and figures we could possibly want at our fingertips. So information is no longer scarce. We're drowning in information.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Bryant Wood on How to Unlock Healing with Spiritual Biohacking | EP 584
What's scarce today is the ability to focus your attention long enough on that information to turn it into wisdom.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Life Lesson: The 10-Minute Rule That Beats ANY Bad Habit & This Weird Trick Forms Good Habits Instantly! Professor Steve Peters & Nir Eyal
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.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Life Lesson: The 10-Minute Rule That Beats ANY Bad Habit & This Weird Trick Forms Good Habits Instantly! Professor Steve Peters & Nir Eyal
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.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Life Lesson: The 10-Minute Rule That Beats ANY Bad Habit & This Weird Trick Forms Good Habits Instantly! Professor Steve Peters & Nir Eyal
Yeah. So step one is- Understand it. Yeah. Is master those internal triggers. Yeah. Or they become your master. Yeah. That's step number one. There's a bunch of techniques. We're just covering the surface. There's over a dozen different techniques that you can use. Mm-hmm. to help you master those internal triggers. Now, the second step is to make time for traction.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Life Lesson: The 10-Minute Rule That Beats ANY Bad Habit & This Weird Trick Forms Good Habits Instantly! Professor Steve Peters & Nir Eyal
So when you have those doubts, one of these techniques that is really life-changing is scheduling time for worry. Scheduling time for worry. That what happens is in the moment, we feel these feelings, we think these thoughts, and a distractible person will say, well, I got to deal with that sensation right now. I have to work through whatever it is that I'm feeling right now.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Life Lesson: The 10-Minute Rule That Beats ANY Bad Habit & This Weird Trick Forms Good Habits Instantly! Professor Steve Peters & Nir Eyal
And they stop everything to do that. And that's not the right method. The right method is to write down that sensation and get back to the task at hand as quickly as possible using these four strategies. Then later on, right now that you've written down what that sensation is, you're going to make time in your calendar to think about that sensation.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Life Lesson: The 10-Minute Rule That Beats ANY Bad Habit & This Weird Trick Forms Good Habits Instantly! Professor Steve Peters & Nir Eyal
So step number one, you have these tools. Maybe I can digress for a second. I'll tell you my favorite tool for mastering internal triggers. It's called the 10-minute rule. This comes from acceptance and commitment therapy. And the 10-minute rule says that you can give in to any distraction Any distraction. Maybe it's smoking that cigarette if you're trying to quit.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Life Lesson: The 10-Minute Rule That Beats ANY Bad Habit & This Weird Trick Forms Good Habits Instantly! Professor Steve Peters & Nir Eyal
Maybe it's eating that piece of chocolate cake if you're on a diet. Maybe it's checking social media. Whatever it is. Whatever distraction. You can give in to that distraction, but not right now. You can give in in 10 minutes. Don't misunderstand. Not for 10 minutes. Sometimes people get it wrong. It's in 10 minutes. Okay? So what does that do?
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Life Lesson: The 10-Minute Rule That Beats ANY Bad Habit & This Weird Trick Forms Good Habits Instantly! Professor Steve Peters & Nir Eyal
What that does is we talked about psychological reactance earlier, and you asked what do you do about psychological reactance. You're allowing yourself to acknowledge that you are in control, that you decide. What many people do is they have strict abstinence, right? Strict abstinence says, no, I will not do it, right? I won't eat sugar. I won't get distracted. I will do this. I will do that.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Life Lesson: The 10-Minute Rule That Beats ANY Bad Habit & This Weird Trick Forms Good Habits Instantly! Professor Steve Peters & Nir Eyal
As opposed to saying, hey, I'm an adult. I can do whatever I want. I choose not to go off track for the next 10 minutes. That's it. In 10 minutes, I can give into whatever I want. So now I'm in control. You know, the whole just say no technique turns out makes you ruminate and think about and have more discomfort around the thing you want, increasing these internal triggers.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Life Lesson: The 10-Minute Rule That Beats ANY Bad Habit & This Weird Trick Forms Good Habits Instantly! Professor Steve Peters & Nir Eyal
And that actually is what makes you give into that distraction. We know that with smoking, actually, it's very interesting. We're finding that nicotine is less and less part of the reason people get addicted to cigarettes. It's more about the rumination around... I want to smoke, but I can't. I want to smoke, but I shouldn't. I want to smoke. I want to smoke. I want to smoke. Fine.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Life Lesson: The 10-Minute Rule That Beats ANY Bad Habit & This Weird Trick Forms Good Habits Instantly! Professor Steve Peters & Nir Eyal
I'll finally smoke. Now I get relief. How do we know this? If you ask smokers, why do they smoke? The number one reason, it's relaxing. That makes no sense. Nicotine is a stimulant. Makes no sense, right? Why would it be relaxing? It's relaxing because finally I can stop telling myself I don't have to do it anymore. I don't have to fight with myself anymore.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Life Lesson: The 10-Minute Rule That Beats ANY Bad Habit & This Weird Trick Forms Good Habits Instantly! Professor Steve Peters & Nir Eyal
And that eases that psychological reactance. Ha, I can finally give in. So when you use this 10-minute rule and say, okay, I can give into that distraction in 10 minutes from now, what you're doing is you're establishing agency. Right now you're in control and we can do anything for 10 minutes. And if 10 minutes feels like too long, try the five minute rule.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Life Lesson: The 10-Minute Rule That Beats ANY Bad Habit & This Weird Trick Forms Good Habits Instantly! Professor Steve Peters & Nir Eyal
The idea is that you're building that ability over time. So the 10 minute rule becomes a 12 minute rule, becomes a 15 minute rule. And you're learning, wait a minute, I can't actually delay gratification. Remember all these problems of distraction are an impulse control issue. So when you teach yourself, wait a minute, okay, I could delay for five, 10 minutes. That's no big deal.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Life Lesson: The 10-Minute Rule That Beats ANY Bad Habit & This Weird Trick Forms Good Habits Instantly! Professor Steve Peters & Nir Eyal
You're proving to yourself, hey, I'm not addicted to these things. I'm not powerless. My brain isn't being hijacked. I do have control as long as I use these practices, right? So the 10 minute rule is a very, very effective technique.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Life Lesson: The 10-Minute Rule That Beats ANY Bad Habit & This Weird Trick Forms Good Habits Instantly! Professor Steve Peters & Nir Eyal
So step three is hacking back the external triggers. So this is when we do talk about the usual suspects, the pings, the dings, the rings. That's where we...
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Life Lesson: The 10-Minute Rule That Beats ANY Bad Habit & This Weird Trick Forms Good Habits Instantly! Professor Steve Peters & Nir Eyal
you know very systematically go through what a lot of people complain about but it's really only 10 the problem because 90 of our distractions begin from within but people you know do have these issues you know we talk about the the phone the computer what turns out to be a much bigger problem is not the technology, it's what the technology is attached to, right? So what if it's your boss?
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Life Lesson: The 10-Minute Rule That Beats ANY Bad Habit & This Weird Trick Forms Good Habits Instantly! Professor Steve Peters & Nir Eyal
That's the distraction. What if it's your kids that are a distraction? We love them to death, right? Our kids are great, but they can be a huge source of distraction. Meetings, oh my God, how many stupid meetings do we have to attend that are nothing but a distraction, especially now that Zoom makes it accessible so that wherever you are, you know, people can call meetings.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Life Lesson: The 10-Minute Rule That Beats ANY Bad Habit & This Weird Trick Forms Good Habits Instantly! Professor Steve Peters & Nir Eyal
those are huge distractions of course uh slack channels and that's what we get into more in the book in terms of okay systematically what do you do about these various external triggers so we're on step three of the four steps what's step number four so step four is is preventing distraction with packs so packs are these what's called a pre-commitment device so this is what you do after the first three steps so you master the internal triggers you make time for traction you hack back the external triggers
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Life Lesson: The 10-Minute Rule That Beats ANY Bad Habit & This Weird Trick Forms Good Habits Instantly! Professor Steve Peters & Nir Eyal
As the last line of defense, as the firewall against distraction, you're going to prevent distraction with a pact. Now, what are pacts? It's when you decide in advance what you will do to keep yourself in that task. And there's three types of pacts. We have what we call effort pacts, price pacts, and identity pacts.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Life Lesson: The 10-Minute Rule That Beats ANY Bad Habit & This Weird Trick Forms Good Habits Instantly! Professor Steve Peters & Nir Eyal
Uh, an effort pact is when there's some bit of friction in between you and the thing you don't want to do. So I'll, I'll, it's just us and your millions of viewers here. So I'll get a little personal. Okay.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Life Lesson: The 10-Minute Rule That Beats ANY Bad Habit & This Weird Trick Forms Good Habits Instantly! Professor Steve Peters & Nir Eyal
Um, a few years ago, my wife and I, and again, we've been married for 22 years now, a few years ago before I was writing this book, uh, we noticed that our sex life was suffering that every night we were going to bed. And I was fondling my iPhone and she was caressing her iPad.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Life Lesson: The 10-Minute Rule That Beats ANY Bad Habit & This Weird Trick Forms Good Habits Instantly! Professor Steve Peters & Nir Eyal
Right? And we were going to bed later and later. And not only were we not getting proper sleep, we all know how important rest is. our sex life was suffering. So when I started this research, I came across this research around the importance of these effort packs. And I went to the hardware store and I bought us this $10 outlet timer.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Life Lesson: The 10-Minute Rule That Beats ANY Bad Habit & This Weird Trick Forms Good Habits Instantly! Professor Steve Peters & Nir Eyal
Now this outlet timer, you plug into the wall and whatever you plug into that outlet timer will turn on or off at any time of day and night. So what did we do with that? We plugged in our internet router into this timer. So every night in our household at 10 p.m., the internet shuts off. Now, could I turn it back on?
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Life Lesson: The 10-Minute Rule That Beats ANY Bad Habit & This Weird Trick Forms Good Habits Instantly! Professor Steve Peters & Nir Eyal
Of course I could, but I'd have to go under my desk, unplug this timer, reset it, and plug it back in. That would take effort. So I put some friction in between myself and the distraction. OK, and lo and behold, every night we all knew, OK, the Internet's going to shut down at 10 p.m., finish up whatever you need to do.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Life Lesson: The 10-Minute Rule That Beats ANY Bad Habit & This Weird Trick Forms Good Habits Instantly! Professor Steve Peters & Nir Eyal
And it gave me that bit of mindfulness to say, OK, do I really need to still, you know, check email or social media or whatever silly thing I was doing? Or is it time to do what I said I was going to do, which is get some rest, go to bed and maybe be intimate with my wife?
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Life Lesson: The 10-Minute Rule That Beats ANY Bad Habit & This Weird Trick Forms Good Habits Instantly! Professor Steve Peters & Nir Eyal
Again, but now it's effort, right? If I really wanted to lie to myself, of course I could. That's not the point, right? That there's always a way. The point is it adds a bit of friction, right? It's that bit of effort that now I have to take.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Life Lesson: The 10-Minute Rule That Beats ANY Bad Habit & This Weird Trick Forms Good Habits Instantly! Professor Steve Peters & Nir Eyal
Exactly. And now, by the way, it actually wouldn't even matter because we all know the Internet's going to shut off at 10. We all need to start getting ready to stop doing whatever we're doing because it's going to now we don't even need it anymore. It's become part of our nightly ritual. Right. And by the way, what I want to illustrate is the concept, not the practice, right?
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Life Lesson: The 10-Minute Rule That Beats ANY Bad Habit & This Weird Trick Forms Good Habits Instantly! Professor Steve Peters & Nir Eyal
Tactics are what you do. Strategy is why you do it. That's more important. You know, I think a lot of these books around similar topics around, you know, dealing with focus and productivity, it's a lot of life hacks. Right. But what I wanted was more the strategy, the psychological principles around why we get distracted. And then I'll let people come up with their own tactics.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Life Lesson: The 10-Minute Rule That Beats ANY Bad Habit & This Weird Trick Forms Good Habits Instantly! Professor Steve Peters & Nir Eyal
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?
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Life Lesson: The 10-Minute Rule That Beats ANY Bad Habit & This Weird Trick Forms Good Habits Instantly! Professor Steve Peters & Nir Eyal
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.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Life Lesson: The 10-Minute Rule That Beats ANY Bad Habit & This Weird Trick Forms Good Habits Instantly! Professor Steve Peters & Nir Eyal
It wasn't just about the hunger, right? 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.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Life Lesson: The 10-Minute Rule That Beats ANY Bad Habit & This Weird Trick Forms Good Habits Instantly! Professor Steve Peters & Nir Eyal
It is and it isn't. I mean, I'm not... You don't have to go to therapy. No, there's nothing wrong with it. If it's helpful, please do it. But that's not a requirement. Something as simple as, you know, so whenever I work, I have on my desk, I have a little post-it note and a pen handy. And...
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Life Lesson: The 10-Minute Rule That Beats ANY Bad Habit & This Weird Trick Forms Good Habits Instantly! Professor Steve Peters & Nir Eyal
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?
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Life Lesson: The 10-Minute Rule That Beats ANY Bad Habit & This Weird Trick Forms Good Habits Instantly! Professor Steve Peters & Nir Eyal
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.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Life Lesson: The 10-Minute Rule That Beats ANY Bad Habit & This Weird Trick Forms Good Habits Instantly! Professor Steve Peters & Nir Eyal
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.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Life Lesson: The 10-Minute Rule That Beats ANY Bad Habit & This Weird Trick Forms Good Habits Instantly! Professor Steve Peters & Nir Eyal
And so what I'll do many times is just pause to reflect on, wait a minute, what's going on there, right? 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 the sensation because I'm stressed. Why am I stressed?
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Life Lesson: The 10-Minute Rule That Beats ANY Bad Habit & This Weird Trick Forms Good Habits Instantly! Professor Steve Peters & Nir Eyal
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.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Life Lesson: The 10-Minute Rule That Beats ANY Bad Habit & This Weird Trick Forms Good Habits Instantly! Professor Steve Peters & Nir Eyal
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.