Yesterday, I took an introductory seminar on MindValley.com, given by Nir Eyal, author of the book Indistractable. The topic was learning how to be indistractable, namely, doing what we say we are going to do. The premise is that we either spend our time on traction activities, which move us towards our goals, or distraction activities, which take us away from our goals. Therefore, writing this blog post would be a traction activity, whereas playing on my iPad would be a distraction, in this moment, because I have told myself I want to write my blog post right now.
Nir also said that we are prompted to do distraction activities, that is, we are distracted from our meaningful intentional tasks, by external triggers only 10% of the time. The other 90% of the distraction comes from our internal triggers, namely boredom, loneliness, hunger, discouragement, etc. Therefore, the first step of Nir’s approach to becoming indistractable is to master these internal triggers, or in other words the emotional states that lead us to reach for the escapes of food, alcohol, TV, iPad games, social media etc.
I found this quite reassuring because I’ve long struggled with these behaviours I call escape or numbing behaviours, and I’ve known they were hindering me from living my best life, but I’ve struggled to master them. I’ve tended to take the all-or-nothing approach, treating these behaviours as completely worthless, evil, something I shouldn’t be doing at all, not necessarily because in themselves they’re so terrible, but more because, when I do them for even a little bit, I often find it almost impossible to stop. It can seem hard or completely impossible to constrain how much time we spend on them and so we try to ban them altogether. However, despite several semi-successful attempts at banning these various behaviours (see my no-TV for 30 days posts), they’ve always come back, sometimes with a vengeance, sometimes to a lesser extent, but in short banning things never seems to completely work. The only exception is when you truly believe that an action has no benefit for you whatsoever. Then, it may actually be best to completely get rid of it. But actions such as TV, eating sugar, even drinking alcohol, can have their good sides as well as bad, at least for some of us. Banning them forever isn’t always an option, or even beneficial in terms of our living our best lives.
So what is the answer then? Nir’s take is that, rather than looking at these distractions as the problem, we need to look at what is causing us to reach for them. Namely, the emotional triggers. This seems so obvious now it’s been pointed out to me that I wonder why I’ve never looked at it before, given my long battle with bad habits. So, what does this mean exactly? Taking an example, the activity I’m struggling with a lot right now is YouTube. I just love watching YouTube videos, and especially if I find a new topic that interests me, I just want to watch every video I can find on the topic. But why am I turning to it? According to Nir, it’s not actually because I’m so excited to hear about time-blocking, or running at threshold pace, or the best ways to clean your house. In fact, I’m not pulled TO YouTube so much as PUSHED away from my real life and my inner turmoil. Some underlying emotional state is making me uncomfortable, and I’m trying to run away from it, block it out, distract myself from it.
In Nir’s seminar, which was really just a taster session, he only touched on one technique you can use for dealing with this: the 10-minute rule. When you have the urge to do one of your distraction behaviours, you give yourself 10 minutes in which you must continue doing the task you’re supposed to be doing. This should be enough time for the urge to go away. Alternatively you can do something called “surf the urge”, which he unfortunately didn’t explain. I didn’t know if he meant go and do your distraction activity for 10 minutes but no more OR literally sit with your emotional turmoil for 10 minutes and your craving to go and watch a YouTube video. I’m planning to read his book and hopefully it will explain this and the many other techniques he says he uses when he’s facing this sort of temptation/trigger.
One thing I should note here is that, even though this is step 1, it actually sort of relies on you having already completely step 2, which is time-blocking. In other words, you need to know what you SHOULD be doing in order to stop yourself being distracted from it. I’m mostly fairly good at sticking to a task when I know what I’m supposed to be doing. It depends on the sort of task it is, but certainly with the really important stuff I’m usually pretty good. However, I don’t currently time block or plan my day much beyond having a little list of the most important tasks for the day. The trouble is, in between them and definitely once I’ve completed all of them, I don’t really know WHAT I should be doing and that’s when I often get sucked into the black hole of timewasting. So I’m really excited to get onto step 2 and have more certainty about what I should be doing with my time, but I’m also planning to schedule in time for both YouTube and iPad games to see if that helps at all.
Going back to the emotional triggers, I think what’s triggering me right now is fear. I don’t want to face the reality of my life. I don’t want to face the scary, difficult tasks that I should be doing to try to make my life better. Or at least I don’t mind facing them as long as I can have regular breaks to dive back into a novel or YouTube or games etc. Maybe that’s ok, but I definitely think I spend too much time taking a break from reality, and I know from past experience that taking a break doesn’t solve anything. Your problems your fears are still there when you come back, and often they’re made even worse because you’ve been ignoring them. So I’m very tempted to just buy Nir’s book and goof off and spend the rest of the day reading it. I’m sure it’s got some great techniques in it that will be helpful. But more important than that is I need to actually try to apply what I’ve already learned from his introductory seminar. I’ll try the 10 minute rule, and I’ll identify my emotional triggers, and I’ll work towards time-blocking, which I’ll maybe write a bit more about tomorrow.