Need to know
‘Just a second. I just need to respond to this one thing,’ I said to my daughter, as I attended to my iPhone.
Only much later could I count the mistakes in that statement. No, it wouldn’t take ‘just a second’; no, I didn’t ‘need’ to respond to the email – I’m an author and researcher, and thus rarely receive messages that have a drop-everything-and-answer urgency to them. And no, it wouldn’t be ‘one thing’. My brain would be too tempted, I’d feast on it all.
After I finished, I looked up and my daughter was gone. The worst part: before I became distracted, we had been playing a lovely game, telling each other what superpower we most wished for. It could have brought us closer together, but I’d just blown the spirit and substance of it big-time.
If you’re a parent in the 21st century, I bet you’ve experienced your own version of this. But it’s not just parents, it’s all of us in our interactions with each other. Distraction has become the norm. We’re blessed with pocket-sized supercomputers that connect us to anyone and everyone, and a buffet of information. But there’s a dark side: those same gadgets distract us, often at the moments that matter most.
Of course, smartphones didn’t invent distraction – they’re just the latest culprit. Before that, we blamed television. And before that, it was the telephone, or comic books, or the radio. Go back more than 2,000 years, and Socrates was even criticising the written word, for causing ‘forgetfulness in the learners’ souls’.
Still, our present feels different, with the sources of distraction seeming greater in number and more ubiquitous. One study in 2014 showed that when two people are talking, the mere presence of a smartphone resting on a table is enough to change the character of their conversation. That’s a tame example. To see the seriousness of the problem, look at the sobering statistics on ‘distracted driving’ in the United States.
After I abandoned my daughter and our game for an utterly inconsequential email, I realised I needed to deal with my distraction problem. First, I tried a popular approach: I blamed technology and made a serious attempt at a ‘digital detox’. I bought a flip phone, subscribed to a print newspaper, and even purchased a 1990s-era word processor without an internet connection. I convinced myself that, once I banished all the technology from my life, I’d become the disciplined writer and focused father I’d always strived to be.
Talk about a rude awakening. Sitting at my ancient word processor, my eyes began to peer over to my now-tantalising bookshelf. ‘Hmmm,’ I said to myself, ‘I really should take a glance at this book’. I’d justify the distraction as necessary for ‘research’. And if it wasn’t reading, then I’d find something else – the laundry that needed to be folded right now, my desk that needed to be tidied-up this minute. The technology wasn’t distracting me. I was distracting me.
That’s when I started a five-year journey to understand distraction, its causes and its cures. I discovered a great deal that I found surprising and counterintuitive, and I developed methods to deal with my distraction that actually worked – and didn’t involve me trying to turn back time and operate a flip phone. I realised that distraction often begins from within, not without, and found that the fix came from identifying and managing the psychological discomfort that leads us off track.
As often as not, distraction is your brain ducking challenging feelings such as boredom, loneliness, insecurity, fatigue and uncertainty. These are the internal triggers – the root causes – that prompt you to find the comfort of distraction and open a browser tab, Twitter or email, instead of focusing on the matter at hand. Once you identify these internal triggers, you can decide to respond in a more advantageous manner. You won’t always be able to control how you feel – but you can learn to control how you react to the way you feel. A trigger that once sent you to Twitter can perhaps lead instead to 10 deep breaths.
Distraction, in other words, is a symptom of a problem – not the problem itself. Those deeper and systemic reasons – such as an inability to cope with fear, anxiety or stress – deserve our concern, because it’s only when we start to address them that we can make real progress. When we begin to understand what we’re trying to avoid by clicking over to Twitter or checking the news for the 10th time today, we can begin to address the issue itself, and not medicate it through more distraction. We also begin to appreciate how habitual the act of avoiding discomfort via distraction can be, and how much it’s become a part of how we work and live.
The good news is that there’s something paradoxical about discomfort: it’s actually the best tool we have for evolving and developing as a species. Feeling bad isn’t actually bad; it’s what helped us survive. Writing in 2001, the American psychologist Roy Baumeister and his colleagues observed: ‘If satisfaction and pleasure were permanent, there might be little incentive to continue seeking further benefits or advances.’ If we didn’t feel bad, in other words, we’d never achieve good.
Once you understand the depth of distraction, you can start to manage it and improve. After years of experiments, I found myself less distracted – a quality that improved nearly every aspect of my life. It turns out that being able to focus on the subjects and people in my life who matter improved everything from my health to my happiness to my productivity. That can seem obvious, but I couldn’t have fully appreciated the joys of living an indistractable life if I hadn’t gotten there on my own after a five-year journey. Being indistractable can lead you to not just change your life for the better, but also experience life fully.
