How To Beat Distraction, Live Intentionally & Have No Regrets with Nir Eyal #685

Why do we grab our phones the moment we feel bored, lonely or overwhelmed, even when we know it’s unlikely to help? Returning guest, Nir Eyal, breaks down the psychology behind distraction and reveals a surprisingly simple truth: the pull isn't coming from your phone. It's coming from inside you. Nir is a behavioural design expert who writes, consults, and teaches about the intersection of psychology, technology, and human potential. He’s a former Stanford lecturer and is the author of the international bestsellers Hooked and Indistractable, alongside his latest book, Beyond Belief. This is his third appearance on Feel Better, Live More. In this conversation, Nir explains the remarkable truth that only around 10 per cent of phone checks are triggered by an external notification. The other 90 per cent come from within, from stress, fatigue or discomfort we're trying to escape. We discuss why treating technology as inherently addictive lets us off the hook, and what to do instead: his easy, repeatable four-step framework for noticing your internal triggers before they take hold. Nir believes that the real opposite of distraction isn’t focus, it’s traction – a sense of being pulled towards the life you actually want, rather than away from it. And crucially, the same activity, whether reading a book, gaming or checking email, can be traction or distraction depending on whether it was planned. The answer to our scattered attention isn't to eliminate leisure and rest, he says, but to plan each day in advance around our values. We talk about children and screentime. Nir introduces the idea of psychological nutrients, the basic needs for competency, autonomy and connection that every child requires to thrive. When these needs aren't met in daily life, children look for them elsewhere, often in the digital world. Understanding this changes the conversation around kids and technology, moving it away from blame and towards something far more useful: giving children what they truly need. We also explore why to-do lists can make us feel like failures – and why scheduling your time (including your rest and leisure) is the antidote to distraction. Plus, Nir reveals why a small, low-effort commitment made in advance can be more powerful than willpower alone, when it comes to living intentionally. This is a powerful and reassuring conversation for anyone who’s ever questioned their ability to focus, worried about phone addiction, or who simply wants a more meaningful, values-led life. The Thrive Tour: Transform Your Health and Happiness, a live show: Book Your Tickets https://drchatterjee.com/live Thanks to our sponsors: https://boncharge.com/livemore https://drinkag1.com/livemore Show notes https://drchatterjee.com/685 DISCLAIMER: The content in the podcast and on this webpage is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your doctor or qualified healthcare provider. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of something you have heard on the podcast or on my website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  Distraction is about escape from discomfort. So 90% of the time that you check your phone, it's not because of a ping, ding or ring. It's because of boredom, loneliness, fatigue, uncertainty, anxiety. We have to learn the source of the problem. Master internal triggers or they become your master.

• 0:19Rangan Chatterjee?

  Hey guys, how are you doing? I hope you're having a good week so far. My name is Dr. Rangan Chatterjee and this is my podcast, Feel Better Live More.

• 0:31Rangan Chatterjee?

  Do you sometimes feel yourself getting pulled away from the life you ideally want to lead? Well, if so, today's returning guest, I'm pretty sure, will help you get back on track. Nir Eyal is a behaviour design expert who writes, consults and teaches about the intersection of psychology, technology and human potential. He's a former Stanford lecturer and is the author of the international bestsellers, Hooked and Indistractable, alongside his latest book, Beyond Belief. Now, the last time Nir appeared on my podcast earlier this year, we talked about how our beliefs can hold us back

• 1:16Rangan Chatterjee?

  without us realising. And one such belief might be the idea that modern life is keeping us distracted, stealing our attention away from valuable pursuits with its phones and notifications and algorithms. But as Nir sets out beautifully in this episode, we do have more control over our time and our minds than we might think. You see, Nir believes that the real opposite of distraction isn't focus, it's traction, a sense of being pulled towards the life you actually want, rather than away from it. Nir has a wonderful way of presenting ideas about psychology and human behaviour

• 2:01Rangan Chatterjee?

  in a way that you can use immediately. In our conversation, he explains why it's not addictive technology that's distracting you, but your own internal triggers. You'll learn his four-step framework for becoming indistractable, his 10-minute rule to quash impulsivity and why to-do lists can often sabotage your productivity and what to do instead. We also talk about the difficulties many of us face raising children in a hyper-connected world, why kids turn to screens when they're missing psychological nutrients offline and what that means for parents.

• 2:44Rangan Chatterjee?

  Nir's central idea is that distraction is not a moral failing, but actually an impulse control problem instead. And by the time you finish listening, you're going to have a clearer sense of your own patterns around distraction and some simple, practical tools for interrupting them.

• 3:10Rangan Chatterjee?

  You have previously said that avoiding distraction is the key to not living with regrets. Now, many people, Nir, as they get older, start to feel a lot of regrets about the things they have done or the things they haven't done. If avoiding distraction is the key to a regret-free life, how do we avoid distraction?

• 3:32Speaker 00

  And why should we avoid regret? What's so terrible about regret? That's kind of been my goal with my writing, is the deeper I go into thinking through these topics, that's what I'm working towards, is how can I look at the future with systems in place so that when I look back at my past, I don't say, ugh, should've, could've, would've. That's what I'm really trying to avoid. I don't want on my deathbed to say, I should've spent more time with friends, I should've invested more in my kids, I should've started that business, I should've done this or that. I want to look back and say, I lived my life the way I wanted to on my terms. That's really my goal. And so if that's your goal, it doesn't have to be everybody's goal, but that's my goal, is to live a great life, then the way we make sure that we do that, what makes us more likely to live without regret,

• 4:17Speaker 00

  is that we plan each day the way we want to spend it. And I think that so few people have experienced the bliss, the joy of even one single day spent the way they wanted to live their life. It's the best.

• 4:34Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, it's really interesting. First of all, who would not want to live intentionally, which I guess is what you're proposing for us? And if I think about your three books, Hooked, sort of teaching us about how do we get addicted to things? How do companies get us hooked on things? Indistractable, which I want to talk about today, how do we control and focus our attention on what really matters? And I guess even your third book, Beyond Belief, which we spoke about a few months ago, this idea that it's limiting beliefs that hold us back from living the life that we want. There is kind of this unifying theory that I think sits above all of them, which is, how do you live an intentional life?

• 5:19Speaker 00

  Yeah, and it's not necessarily the most freedom. I don't know about you, but the days where I have the most freedom, where I don't have any plans and you think, oh, that's luxury, that's what I will made it. When I retire, I'll be able to do what I want all day. I don't find those days to be very satisfying. You know, those are the days when I waste scrolling too much or, you know, I'll get to that later or I putz around. I do all kinds of things that I didn't really want to do. So it's not just saying, I want freedom. That's not exactly right. It's living according to your values. So what are values? Values are attributes of the person you want to become. Values are attributes of the person you want to become. And so the secret here is to turn your values into time.

• 6:02Speaker 00

  And if you want to know what someone's values really are, if you ask them, they'll lie to you. Not because they're malicious, but because they don't know themselves. They'll say things like, oh, you know, it's very important to me to be a good father or to be a good friend or to take care of my health. Oh, nothing comes, nothing was more important than health or to be learned, you know, to read books, to have more wisdom. But there's really two places to look if you want to know someone's values. You look at how they spend their money and how they spend their time. The problem is that I think we have our relationship with those two things a little bit backwards. You know, we spend so much mindshare on saving money. Right? We clip coupons, we split checks, we look for sales and deals.

• 6:45Speaker 00

  We spend so much effort to save a buck. But when it comes to our time, we just give it away, right? Whatever stupid cat video, whatever silly thing in the news that's got nothing to do with us, whatever gossip around the water cooler. Yeah, take it, take it, take it, take my time. But it should be exactly backwards. We should be stingy with our time and generous with our money. Why? Because you can't make more time. You can always make more money. You can always make more money, right? You cannot make more time. I don't care if you're Elon Musk or Bill Gates, you can't make more time. It is a finite resource. Once it's gone, it's gone, that's it. And so we need to be stingy with our time because we cannot make more of it. And so by thinking very carefully about how we are going to spend our time, now that requires a bit of thinking, but I think it's really important

• 7:30Speaker 00

  to understand what distraction is. Back to that quote around how that's the secret to not living with regret is to avoid distraction. Well, what is distraction? The best way to understand what distraction is is to understand what distraction is not. What's the opposite of distraction? Most people will tell you that the opposite of distraction is focus. And they want to be focused. Not true. That if you look at the origin of the word, the opposite of distraction is not focus. The opposite of distraction is traction. Makes perfect sense when you look at both words side by side. Traction, distraction, they're opposites. They both come from the same Latin root, trahere, which means to pull, and they both end in action, reminding us that distraction is not something that happens to us. We like to blame our phones, our kids,

• 8:14Speaker 00

  you know, the beeps, the boops, the buzzes, all the things outside of us. But these are actions that we take, not things that happen to us, actions we take. So by definition, traction is any action that pulls you towards what you said you were going to do. Things that move you closer to your values, help you become the kind of person you want to become, those are acts of traction. The opposite, distraction, is any action that pulls you away from what you plan to do, further away from your goals, further away from becoming the kind of person you want to become. Now, the important thing here is that the dividing line between traction and distraction is not the behaviour itself. It's not, oh, social media, bad, and reading books, good. It's, that's silly, right? Anything you want to do with your time and attention

• 8:57Speaker 00

  is fine, as long as you do it on your schedule and according to your values, not someone else's. I love this Dorothy Parker quote. She said, "The time you plan to waste is not wasted time." So give us a break here. You want to go on YouTube? You want to listen to a podcast? You want to play video games? Awesome, do it. There's nothing wrong with any of that. Stop vilifying that stuff. Rather, as long as you have planned for it in advance, it's traction. Conversely, and this is what used to get me, is that I would go into the office and I'd say, okay, I'm gonna, I'm not gonna get distracted. I've got that big project I need to work on. Nothing's gonna get in my way. I'm gonna focus. Let me just, you know, do that thing on my to-do list. Let's get to work. I'm just gonna do that. But first, let me check some email.

• 9:43Speaker 00

  Let me scroll that Slack channel. Let me just see what's happening in the news. I have to do that stuff. That's part of my job. I have to check email. That's why I get paid. That's part of my job responsibility, right? But if it's not what you plan to do in advance, it's just as much of a distraction. In fact, I would argue it's even worse than what we think of as distraction. Because if you're playing video games at work, if you're playing Candy Crush or something on the job, you know you're not supposed to be doing that. But when you check email, because that's a productive thing to do. Meanwhile, you've got this big project you said you were going to work on. That's even a worse distraction.

• 10:17Rangan Chatterjee?

  It's the same thing. But one of them we think is okay and one, oh, we know that that's, you know, in a verse commas, bad.

• 10:23Speaker 00

  Right.

• 10:23Rangan Chatterjee?

  It's kind of interesting, that quote, "The time you plan to waste is not wasted time." It's beautiful. It makes me think of something I've just been sitting with for a couple of years now, this idea that there's no such thing as wasted time. Wrong in you spend time. And if you reflect and you realize that that wasn't the best use of your time, you can change that. But I guess where people would say that they've wasted time probably comes down to the fact that they weren't intentional. So that perception is that that was a waste, because it wasn't what I planned to do. And I guess, Nir, the other thought that comes to mind is so many people these days struggle to switch off at weekends, right?

• 11:07Rangan Chatterjee?

  People often these days feel guilty for doing nothing. And I wonder, if I look at it through your framework, I wonder if that's because they have this belief that they should always be doing something. And therefore, if they're just sitting in the sun, you know, we've had a beautiful few weeks of weather in the UK, right? If you're just sitting in the garden, like I did last weekend, literally doing nothing but baking in the sun, having a cup of tea, playing with my kids, or just sitting there going, how wonderful is this, right? It's only a waste, it only feels as though you haven't done what you should be doing if you have this kind of background belief that that doesn't count.

• 11:48Speaker 00

  Right. I think that proves this point around why the differentiating word between traction and distraction is intent. That's the difference. Because if you spent the time the way you wanted to, and we need to stop vilifying the technology. You know, the knee jerk reaction is whatever distracted me, whatever caused the distraction, that must be to blame, right? It's my phone, it's what's on the news, it's my kids, it's my boss, it's all this stuff outside of me. That's what caused the distraction. That's not true. That if you want to do those things, you know, if you want to spend time on social media, on your schedule and according to your values, there's nothing wrong with that, right?

• 12:30Speaker 00

  But we jumped to that conclusion because it's very satisfying in many ways. If you think about it, the word addiction, when people say, "I am addicted to technology. You know, I would love to spend time with my kids. I would love to work on that book. I would love to start the business." But you know, these algorithms, these algorithms, they've got my brain, I'm addicted. The word addiction comes from Latin addictio, which means slave. And so the part that you, the logical step that you took of, "I chose to do this, and if it didn't serve me, if I regret it, I can do something about it next time." That is the key. Most people, they say, "Well, what can I do?" There's nothing to be done.

• 13:07Rangan Chatterjee?

  You're a slave to that external thing.

• 13:10Speaker 00

  And you want to know the secret? The tech companies love it when you do that. They love it when you call technology addictive, that, you know, we're all puppets on a string and they've got us by the brains and there's nothing we can do about it.

• 13:23Rangan Chatterjee?

  Well, can I make, I don't know what you're going to say, Nir, but I wonder if I could make a guess based upon the kind of framework in Beyond Belief. Is part of why they love it because then we are reinforcing a belief within ourselves that we are powerless?

• 13:43Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 13:44Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 13:45Speaker 00

  You're giving, so there's titles out there, you know, things like "Stolen Focus," this book is stolen. They didn't steal your focus. You gave it away. Now, it doesn't mean these products aren't built to be habit forming. That's, "I wrote the book Hooked." I know exactly how they get you hooked. I know all their tricks. They're good, they're good. They're not that good.

• 14:04Rangan Chatterjee?

  There's a sociality there, isn't there, right? They're not inherently addictive if not everyone is getting addicted to them. There's some, there has to be another factor, right?

• 14:14Speaker 00

  So addiction has a very special definition. An addiction is a persistent compulsive dependency on a behavioral substance that harms the user. Okay, there has to be harm. There has to be a consistent dependency, okay? There's lots of things that we use that some people would meet that definition of overuse and abuse that most of us don't, right?

• 14:34Rangan Chatterjee?

  So for some people, it's addictive.

• 14:36Speaker 00

  That's right. We have a glass of wine, we're not all alcoholics. We have sex, we're not all sex addicts. So clearly, it's not as simple as just saying, "It's the product." The product is the proximal cause. It's not the root cause. Where we do have people who suffer from addiction is because addiction is a confluence of three things. You need the person, the problem, and the product. It's these three things at the same time. So if you have just the product, okay, let's take alcohol. Some people can have a glass of wine, they don't get addicted. They have a glass or two, and that's that. But if you combine the product, let's say alcohol, with the person who has a predilection towards addiction, maybe they're, that's how they deal with their problems. And now they're faced in an environment where that becomes the outlet to deal with these uncomfortable sensations.

• 15:21Speaker 00

  Now it can become an addiction. And so I think even if you're not addicted, this reveals something super important to all of us. You know, we talked about traction and distraction. What prompts us towards distraction? We've got two kinds of triggers. We have external triggers. These are the usual suspects, the pings, the dings, the rings, all these things in our outside environment. Those are external triggers. That's what we tend to blame, right? We tend to blame the things outside of us. Studies have found, however, when we do these time tracking studies and we see how many times people use their phone and why they use their phone, only 10% of the time that you check your phone, 10%, is it because of a ping, ding, or ring? 10%, an external trigger. Okay, so it's part of the problem. It's only 10% of the problem. What's the 90%?

• 16:05Speaker 00

  Did you know that 90% of the time that you check your phone, and if you actually monitor your behavior, you'll see this is true, 90% of the time, it's not because of a ping, ding, or ring, it's not because of an external trigger, it's because of an internal trigger. It's because of boredom, loneliness, fatigue, uncertainty, anxiety. It's about this uncomfortable emotional state. So distraction is about an escape from discomfort, always. It's an emotion deregulation, dysregulation problem. So when it comes to addiction, that's when it's really the extreme version. So most of us are not addicted. Turns out about 3% to 5% of the population is addicted to one thing or another. But the vast majority of us are not addicted. We are just distracted.

• 16:49Speaker 00

  So there's a big, big difference between the two. So, but when we kind of use this language to say, "Well, there's nothing we can do. We're all addicted. These products are built to be addictive." And this reinforces the narrative that the tech companies want. Because when you believe there's nothing to be done, guess what? You do nothing.

• 17:11Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 17:12Speaker 00

  You give up.

• 17:13Rangan Chatterjee?

  It's disempowering.

• 17:13Speaker 00

  Right. Whereas, you know, there's some very simple steps. There's four steps now. So we talked about traction, distraction, internal triggers, external triggers. Now we just work around those four points. So these are the four steps that anyone can use, even neurodivergent people. I've been diagnosed with ADHD. It's very, it's pretty simple. It's not easy, but it's simple, right? Everything worth having in life is on the other side of hearts. So I'm not going to say it's super easy, you know, snap your fingers and it happens. It's going to take a little work, just like having a good relationship take work, takes work. Having a great podcast takes work. Raising a great family, starting a business, it's going to take a little work. But anyone can do it. Step number one, master internal triggers. If 90% of our distractions, whether it's too much news, too much booze, too much football, too much Facebook,

• 17:57Speaker 00

  if 90% of the time that we get distracted and do something that we later regret is because we're trying to escape discomfort, we have to learn the source of the problem. So step number one, master internal triggers, or they become your master. Step number two, make time for traction. We talked earlier about how you have to turn your values into time. I can't tell you how many people have told me before, you know, "The world's so distracting these days, and social media, this, and I can't concentrate that, and you see what's happening in the news." And I say, "Wow, that's really sounds terrible." You know, show me what you got distracted from. What did you plan to do that you got distracted from? Show me your calendar. They say, "Oh, my calendar? Oh, yeah, here it is." And I look at their calendar, and they've got like maybe a dentist appointment, right? A couple of meetings.

• 18:42Speaker 00

  The rest of their calendar's blank. Here's the thing. You can't say you got distracted if you don't know what you got distracted from. If your calendar is big, open white space, everything is a distraction. So you have to start doing what's called time boxing, which we can talk about. The third step is to hack back the external triggers, even though they only account for about 10% of our distractions. Very, very simple things that we can do. Make your phone indistractable. I only devoted one page in my book to how to make your phone indistractable. It's pretty darn simple. It takes a few minutes. That's the simple stuff. The more complicated stuff are the stupid meetings that are nothing but distractions. The emails that pile up. You know, HBR study found that 50% of the emails that the average knowledge worker gets and 50% of the emails

• 19:26Speaker 00

  the average knowledge worker sends, they did not have to get or send. So huge amount of distraction with day to day email. And then fourth and final step is preventing distraction with pacts. And we can talk about that. A pact is when we have a firewall against distraction. So with those four steps, anyone can become indistractable.

• 19:44Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, I love that. I really like this framework and I definitely want to go through it with practical tools for people. So let's just repeat it to make sure I got it. So step one, master internal triggers. Step number two, making time for traction.

• 20:04Speaker 00

  Perfect.

• 20:05Rangan Chatterjee?

  Three is to do with the external environment. So, oh, taking back, hacking back the external triggers. And four is preventing distraction with pacts.

• 20:16Speaker 00

  Beautiful. You're a quick study.

• 20:17Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, well, I've done my research as well. Okay, so it's not just in the moment.

• 20:22Speaker 00

  Impressive.

• 20:23Rangan Chatterjee?

  I want you to go through tools, but I wonder if I could put something to you. Okay, so I love this idea that 90% of our triggers are internal. I agree with that. And I guess this would very much fit alongside a lot of kind of religious or philosophical or spiritual teachings about, you know, sitting with yourself, experiencing uncomfortable emotions, not jumping to distract yourself from, sit with them, allow them to be. You know, meditation for some people can be a wonderful way of learning about themselves and learning what are they feeling and experiencing?

• 21:04Rangan Chatterjee?

  Because of course, if people are constantly outside of themselves on devices, maybe unintentionally, they're not paying attention, right? To what's going on. Let's look at it through the lens of sugar, for example, right? Something that I have helped many patients with over the last couple of decades. For me, there are sort of two ways to look at it. One is what would be the desired and ultimate long-term goal? And what's going to be practical, right? In the short term. So in the short term, there are certain things that we can do. Like, don't bring things into your house that you don't want to eat. Okay, so that's almost like step three, isn't it? That is basically hacking back the external triggers.

• 21:49Speaker 00

  Right.

• 21:50Rangan Chatterjee?

  Right, so you're saying, you know, I would often say, don't use up your willpower in the house, okay? But that's only one part of a four-part model, right?

• 21:58Speaker 00

  And it's step three.

• 21:59Rangan Chatterjee?

  And it's step three.

• 22:00Speaker 00

  Step one is more important.

• 22:01Rangan Chatterjee?

  Agreed. And so I also had this little exercise called the three F's that I would teach people, it goes beyond sugar. But I'd love to sort of explain it to you and then look at it through the lens of your model. Because I think some of it will map.

• 22:16Speaker 00

  For sure.

• 22:17Rangan Chatterjee?

  And the three F's are feel, feed, find, right? Okay, so I would say to patients, okay, right? So you've eaten well all day and it's 9:00 PM at night and you're sat in front of Netflix and you feel like having ice cream. Okay, right, let's apply the three F's. Now, before you go to the kitchen and get the ice cream out and before you know it, the spoon's in your gob. As you saw the first F, what am I really feeling? Okay, so you take a pause. Is this physical hunger or is this emotional hunger? Oh, okay, actually, you know what? I only ate half an hour ago. I'm not physically hungry. I'm just a bit, I'm a bit irritated. I'm a little bit stressed, whatever it might be, okay? And then if you want to go and have it, have it, sure.

• 23:03Rangan Chatterjee?

  But at least you've started the process of identifying what's really going on, which I kind of feel is your number one. You know, I wouldn't say that's necessarily mastering internal triggers, but it's certainly becoming aware of your internal triggers. Step two is, which you can do at the same time, or the next time you are trying to avoid eating ice cream in front of Netflix, could be, you go to that first F again, what am I really feeling? The second F is feed. How does food or how does ice cream feed that feeling? Ah, so I'm feeling stressed. When I have the ice cream, at least temporarily, I feel less stressed. Okay, so now you're going, ah, you know what? That's why I can't stop it, because it's my way of managing stress.

• 23:48Rangan Chatterjee?

  And then the third F is find. Now that you know the feeling, let's say it's stress. Now that you know how food or ice cream feeds that feeling, which is it helps you feel less stressed in the moment. Then the third F is can you find an alternative behavior to feed that feeling? So let's say you're feeling stressed. Instead of going to ice cream, what else could you do? Well, maybe you could do some yoga if that's what you like. You know, five minutes of yoga can also help you alleviate stress. Maybe if you were feeling lonely and ice cream is your little treat to yourself, well, maybe you could pick up your phone and phone your friends, right? If you have not had any time to yourself all day

• 24:30Rangan Chatterjee?

  and that's your little treat for you, maybe you can treat yourself by running a bath, right? So I found over the years, this three F framework really, really helpful for people to help them understand the true cause of what was going on. And I kind of feel that, well, I put it to you. Well, what is your take on that? Because I think there are elements of your four-part model within that three F framework.

• 24:54Speaker 00

  So under this first step of mastering internal triggers, there are lots of different tools. And so I advise folks.

• 25:07Rangan Chatterjee?

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• 26:36Rangan Chatterjee?

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• 28:12Speaker 00

  So, under this first step of mastering internal triggers, there are lots of different tools.

• 28:18Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 28:19Speaker 00

  So, I advise folks, whatever works for you, keep doing. And what's gonna work for some people is not gonna work for others. So, you know, as a former fat person, you know, I used to be clinically obese, not just overweight, but clinically obese. I remember going to the doctor and the doctor saying, okay, here's the green zone. Here's yellow, this is overweight. Here's you, you're in the red, you're obese. And I think what changed my life was understanding why I ate. I wanted to believe, I would tell people that I overate and I was overweight because the food industry, you know, the food industrial complex, and McDonald's is making me fat, and that's why. Or, you know, it's really hard for a person who's overweight to get proper exercise and move like other people. And, you know, I don't know about the factfulness of all that.

• 29:04Speaker 00

  I don't know what's true, what's not there. That's not really the point. The point is, when I got to the real root of the problem, and this is the part that your brain hates doing, right? The brain hates changing its mind. And when I was able to actually look at my behaviors clearly of why was I overeating? I didn't overeat because food is delicious. I overate because I was bored. I overate when I was lonely. I would overeat the worst when I was ashamed about how much I had just overeaten. That was the cycle. When the solution became the problem.

• 29:39Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 29:39Speaker 00

  The solution to that discomfort was eating. And then eating caused more of the problem. It's this classic cycle. So, it wasn't until I acknowledged that truth, which is really hard to do. I know people right now who are listening and struggling with their weight, and just like I used to, like, he just doesn't get it. You know, who's this skinny guy telling us what to do? Like, he doesn't understand. And I do, because I used to be there. And it's not easy. And nobody's saying it's easy. But I think that's part of the problem, is that, you know, for the longest time, you know, today, we didn't have this terminology, but today with GLP-1s, we call it food chatter or food noise, right? I want it, I want it, I want it, I want it, I want it. And that's very real, right? If you struggle with your weight, you constantly hear, I still hear it today.

• 30:21Speaker 00

  What changed is my beliefs around what that means. Like, when I started hearing that food chatter, I would instantly think, well, that's bad, right? I'm not supposed to be hungry. What if this feeling never goes away? And, you know, what if I'm hungry all night? And, you know, I'm getting frustrated? And it would create this anxiety spiral that the only solution was to escape with this relief valve.

• 30:45Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 30:46Speaker 00

  And what's interesting is, it elicits what we call psychological reactance. This incredible phenomenon where, when you are told what to do, okay, by someone, your natural instinct is to rebel. So, if your mom ever told you to put on a coat, you said, don't tell them what to do. Or a boss micromanaged you, that's reactance. That's that feeling of reactance. Now, the crazy thing is, that your brain will elicit psychological reactance even when you tell yourself what to do. So, this is why abstinence doesn't work, typically. There's some kinds of abstinence that does work. So, if you can completely remove the triggers, so this is why people say, you know, if you're struggling with a substance abuse disorder, one of the things you can do is to, you know, remove the paraphernalia.

• 31:31Speaker 00

  You know, if you can remove yourself from that neighborhood, from the places you used to get high, that can be very helpful because you're completely removing all those external triggers. How do you do that with technology? How do you do that with food? You can't. We have to eat. We have to use technology. So, just telling yourself, don't do it anymore, and putting shame and blame on us for doing that kind of stuff, doesn't work. So, when we become contemptuous, rather than curious, we're losing the battle. So, it shouldn't be, stop doing that, that's bad for you. It's part of the reason I hate people talking about how terrible technology is, and it's melting your brain. You know, there was an amazing study where they found that there's no correlation between adverse mental health issues and screen time. Do you know that? That for adults, there's a beautiful study done,

• 32:13Speaker 00

  no adverse correlation between how much time you spend on the device. And, you know, you're a doctor, right? It should be dose dependent. If you spend more time on your device, and the device is what's causing you to have poor mental health, more screen time, worse mental health. No. You know what was the correlation? How people felt about their screen time. If you believed that your use of a device was bad for you, you had more adverse psychological symptoms. Not the screen time itself, but your beliefs about the screen time. So, it turns out, the better way to do it is not, I shouldn't do that, if I did it, I'm bad, you know, no, no, no, don't do it. There's a much better way. And a much better way is called the 10-minute rule. The 10-minute rule acknowledges that you can give in to any distraction,

• 32:57Speaker 00

  whether it's eating something you don't, you know, you don't want to eat, whether it's, you know, scrolling TikTok when you wanna do something else, whatever it is, whatever distraction you're struggling with, per that definition earlier, of something that pulls you away from what you plan to do, you can give in. You're a big boy, you can do whatever you want, right? However, you choose to do it in 10 minutes. Not right now. You're just gonna delay by 10 minutes. Why is that so powerful? You know, it's the same reason why we now believe that cigarettes are actually addictive. It's actually not the nicotine itself on its own. You know, of course, nicotine is a stimulator. It causes certain physiological symptoms. But that's not actually what makes nicotine so addictive. I don't know if you've read Alan Carr's book on smoking. It's incredible.

• 33:41Speaker 00

  Basically, he basically tells you, stop believing cigarettes are addictive. Stop believing you can't stop. And it's incredible. It's an amazing, amazing book. And so many people have benefited from it because what he's doing is kind of calling this bluff that happens when people say, I know, I really want a cigarette, but I shouldn't smoke, it's bad for me, I shouldn't smoke, I shouldn't, I shouldn't do it, I shouldn't do it, I shouldn't do it, I wanna do it. Okay, fine. And what they're doing, by creating this anxiety, that now suddenly with a deep breath, ah, finally, I'm so relaxed. Think about it. Why do people, you know why people say they smoke? Because it relaxes me. That makes no sense. Nicotine is a stimulant. Yes or no?

• 34:16Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 34:17Speaker 00

  Right? Why would a stimulant be relaxing? It's because I get to free myself of telling myself not, to not do it anymore. So, this is why abstinence oftentimes backfires. It elicits psychological reactance. When I tell myself not to do something, oh, I wanna do it more, until I can't give in, I can't stop anymore, I have to have it. So, you're not gonna tell yourself, no. You're gonna tell yourself, not yet. Okay? Not no, not yet. I can check my phone in 10 minutes. And if 10 minutes is too long, 5 minutes, 2 minutes, doesn't really matter. And what you're gonna do is to make that increment of time so small that, of course, I can wait 2 minutes. Okay, I'll have the ice cream in 2 minutes. I'll smoke the cigarette in 2 minutes. I'll check my phone in 10 minutes, 2 minutes, whatever.

• 35:01Speaker 00

  And what you're gonna do is now prove to yourself that you have agency.

• 35:05Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 35:06Speaker 00

  That's the breakthrough. Because if you can do 2 minutes, that's gonna turn into 5 minutes, it's gonna turn into 10 minutes, it's gonna turn into 20 minutes. Wait, what did I not wanna do anymore? That's the miracle.

• 35:15Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, you take on the belief that you can do something about it.

• 35:18Speaker 00

  How addictive is it, actually? If I waited 10, 20, 30, 40, an hour, who cares?

• 35:22Rangan Chatterjee?

  Well, because ultimately, if you take this model to its end point, what you're really offering people is the opportunity for self-mastery. Right? And I really mean that, because...

• 35:39Speaker 00

  It's a big part of it, yeah.

• 35:41Rangan Chatterjee?

  Well, I kind of feel, you know, step one, mastering internal triggers, I feel it's reasonable to say, if you are able to master your internal triggers, you're gonna do pretty well in life. Right? Because so much of what we struggle with in our life is because we're not aware of these internal triggers. We don't know when they're happening. We don't know what to do about them. Right? So, I think about the three-part model, the three F's that I shared with you. And I think, I have my own theory on why this has proven so powerful for people. I think one of the reasons is because it brings the hidden out into the light. They don't know why they're eating sugar and ice cream.

• 36:22Rangan Chatterjee?

  It's like, suddenly, it's like, oh, there is a cause beyond hunger, right?

• 36:27Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 36:27Rangan Chatterjee?

  Secondly, it's what you said about psychological reactance. It's not me telling the patient, this is why you're eating. I, very early on in my career, learnt that no patient does what you tell them to do in the long term. No human does, frankly. Being a parent taught me that, right? That it will only be long-term when at some point, it becomes the patient's plan.

• 36:51Speaker 00

  Right.

• 36:51Rangan Chatterjee?

  Not my plan.

• 36:52Speaker 00

  Right.

• 36:52Rangan Chatterjee?

  I learned that very early on. So, everything I do is about empowering that patient. So, the three F's, it's an empowerment tool. Because it's like, oh, once you start to be aware, that's what's driving your ice cream intake. Okay, you've learnt some of that. I didn't need to tell you. You've learnt it for yourself. And then, I guess, what I was saying before is about hacking back the external triggers. If the ice cream ain't in your house, you're putting a bit of friction between you and actually putting it in your mouth, right?

• 37:20Speaker 00

  For sure, yeah.

• 37:21Rangan Chatterjee?

  So, I feel that, right?

• 37:22Speaker 00

  Yeah. But if you're like me, I would find whatever I have and stuff my face with it. Like, I would take, you know, potato chips and honey and like, whatever left mayonnaise. I don't know, whatever. Because until, here's the thing. If you don't start with step one, that's why mastering internal triggers is the most important step. Because if you don't figure out why you are looking to escape discomfort with this outside stimulus, you're always going to get distracted. Now, but it is very helpful, by the way. The hacking back the external triggers is very helpful after step one and two.

• 37:55Rangan Chatterjee?

  Let's just interrogate that for a minute, because as we're talking about food, right? Well, we're talking about many things. We're broadly talking about how do you live an intentional life, which leaves you with no regrets. That's broadly the umbrella we're trying to cover today. But this whole external environment piece, the external trigger piece, is really interesting to me because we know, for example, that there are hunter-gatherer tribes or traditional societies who have no obesity. But as soon as their environment becomes urbanized, and there is a proliferation of ultra-tasty, ultra-processed foods, calorie-dense foods around them, they also very quickly become overweight and obese.

• 38:37Speaker 00

  It's usually, by the way, also part and parcel when people leave these agrarian societies, they also leave something else. They leave the people who provide emotional support to them.

• 38:46Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 38:47Speaker 00

  They separate families. They go off, you know, one person goes off to work to send money back to the rest of the family. So, it's never in isolation. It's never just about the food. I have no doubt that, you know, metabolic syndrome is real and that our hyper-processed food is not good for you. But the thing is, with every substance that is potentially addictive... The vast majority of people, save some people who probably have something biologically going on, which is probably, you know, a small percentage of people, let's say 3% to 5%, the rest of us have this little circuit breaker.

• 39:13Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 39:13Speaker 00

  That says, ah, too much, too much, right? You've drank in too much, you've watched too much, you've scrolled too much, you've done something too much, ugh, cut back. 95% of us have that very well-working little circuit breaker that goes off. Now, there's some people who do get biologically addicted. Have you ever heard of the rat park experiment?

• 39:33Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, I have heard of, I wonder if this is the one that Johann Hari told me about.

• 39:38Speaker 00

  Could be, yeah, I think it was in his book as well, but that, I think that's a great demonstration.

• 39:41Rangan Chatterjee?

  When you have community around you.

• 39:44Speaker 00

  Right, they took the rats.

• 39:45Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 39:45Speaker 00

  They, when they get, you know, back in the 80s, they used to tell us, you know, when a rat takes cocaine, it wants nothing but cocaine until it dies, you know, don't do drugs. And it turns out that that's not at all what happened in this study, that in this study, one option was a rat in a tiny cage where it couldn't move around and all it could do was take cocaine. That's all it could do, cocaine, food, water, that's it. And so, of course, all it wanted was cocaine. Well, when they took rats and they put them in what they called rat park, where they could play, you know, rats are social species, when they had their, their, their group, they had, you know, their little families and they could have a little wheel to, to exercise on and they could have their little social communities, they didn't want cocaine anymore.

• 40:22Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 40:23Speaker 00

  They didn't need it, right? So, when we overdo something, when we have a consistent compulsive dependency on a behavioral substance that harms us, it's because there's something else going on, it's because present reality is so painful that we need some kind of escape.

• 40:39Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, and that, and it sort of totally maps with this growing loneliness epidemic, right? Because if you have your tribe around you, your family around you, your community around you, actually, they can help you manage a lot of the stress in life, right? So, you're then having less of the boredom, the anxiety, the fatigue, the frustration that then leads to these behaviors that we're trying to avoid, right? It's like what you're saying with the rat experiments. A lot, a lot of people who talk about trauma will say that one of the biggest determinants as to whether an experience ends up being traumatic or not depends on the level of support you had at that time.

• 41:21Rangan Chatterjee?

  If you had support around you and a family, friends, people to talk to and process it, it's less likely to become long-term trauma.

• 41:31Speaker 00

  And the story that you tell. You can have, you can have post-traumatic stress or post-traumatic growth that also happens.

• 41:38Rangan Chatterjee?

  Exactly.

• 41:38Speaker 00

  You can have two people, you know, one says, my father was an alcoholic and used to beat me and that's why I'm in such a miserable place in life. Another person says, my father was an alcoholic and used to beat me and that's why I'm such a success, I wanted to prove him wrong.

• 41:48Rangan Chatterjee?

  Beyond belief.

• 41:49Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 41:49Rangan Chatterjee?

  That's what you write about, right?

• 41:51Speaker 00

  Based on these belief systems. There's, there was actually a real-world example of rat park in the, during the Vietnam War. You know, during the Vietnam War, American soldiers in Southeast Asia, something like a third of them were using heroin. And Nixon, yeah, actually, the reason that the DEA was formed was because of this fear that when these soldiers would come back from war, that they would create this drug epidemic in America, because, you know, such a high proportion of them were, were using heroin. Well, when they came back, they stopped. You know, we think of heroin being so addictive, why would they stop? And this is exactly what happened, because in the hellscape that was the Vietnam War, it was a way to self-medicate from this terrible situation to, you know, blow your mind, to

• 42:34Speaker 00

  get high, so you didn't have to suffer through that. Whereas when they came back to America and they had their family, they had a support system, they had meaning, they had jobs, they had a life, they didn't need the addiction anymore.

• 42:44Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, it reminds me of something Jonathan Haidt said to me about his book, The Actors' Generation. You know, he makes the case that, that technology is harming kids and we can maybe get to that at some point, but it's not necessarily that you just take the technology off the kids or reduce their access to some of the more harmful technologies. It's a two-part solution. You also need to get them playing more and being with their friends more and, you know, being allowed to explore their neighborhoods and, do you know what I mean?

• 43:17Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 43:18Rangan Chatterjee?

  And so, the more I think about your model and your work, the more I think about the way we live now, so many of us are living these isolated lives. We're living lives where we are disembodied, we're on screens all the time, we're not interacting with other human beings. So, how many of our internal triggers, which drive a lot of our problematic behaviors, are actually a consequence of the way modern life is set up?

• 43:43Speaker 00

  Or the stories we tell about modern life. You know, take, for example, loneliness.

• 43:47Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 43:48Speaker 00

  There's one way to talk about loneliness that will make you miserable, that every time, you know, if you're eating alone, are you a loser because nobody's around you, you have no friends, like, you know, you can also get into this anxiety spiral of, am I, am I, is this bad, am I supposed to be around people all the time?

• 44:02Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 44:03Speaker 00

  But if you call loneliness solitude, it's amazing, right? There's something so beautiful about going to a movie by yourself, having dinner alone. It can be a very, reading a book on your own. Solitude can be amazing. I think part of the problem is that there's so much money to be made off of freaking people out, right? Fear sells. I was a journalism co-major in school, if it bleeds, it leads. And so, a great way to make a career is to freak everybody out about one thing or another, whether it's, you know, the latest social, the panic, the moral panic around social media, which I think we're, is in full effect, which I called over a decade ago, was going to evolve now, everybody's having a moral panic about AI.

• 44:46Speaker 00

  Loneliness, I mean, there's always something else for us to be miserable about. I want to be very clear, I'm not saying this stuff doesn't have negative consequences. See, the thing is, the, the, the most scarce word right now that we need to bring back into our language is nuance.

• 45:02Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, for sure.

• 45:04Speaker 00

  We have totally forgotten nuance. It's complicated, folks. So, yeah, so when we say, you know, Paul Verilli had a wonderful quote, he said that when you invent the ship, you invent the shipwreck. And so, are, what happened with ships? Did we stop sailing ships? No, we made ships safer, we made them better, we sailed more ships than ever before. So, are ships good? Yes. Are ships bad? Yeah, sometimes there is a shipwreck. Is social media good? Yeah, it can connect people together, it's amazing, you know, you can learn so much information. Is social media bad? Yeah, it can be, every new technology, every new tool has goods and bads.

• 45:39Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah. It's interesting, just going back to that sugar example for a minute, I guess, one thing I hinted at before was, long-term, I think, through the lens of self-mastery, it would be wonderful to get to a point where we're so aware of what's going on inside of us and in tune with our bodies, that we're able to not consume things we don't want to consume, even if they surround us, right? I, I do think some people are able to do that, where they can have a house full of sweets and sugar and they're so self-aware and they've done the work of figuring out themselves and what their triggers are and all that kind of stuff, where they still will

• 46:22Rangan Chatterjee?

  not go to that stuff, even if it's there. I guess that's quite an interesting thought, isn't it, where can you get to that level of self-mastery where you're not tempted by this stuff? And if you choose to have it one day, you're like, yeah, you know what, I really want a really nice sweet now, or a borrowed chocolate now. So, it's not that you're doing it to soothe loneliness or boredom or fatigue, or because you've had a crap day, you're having it because, you know what, I really want to enjoy this piece of chocolate now. Two very different things, right?

• 46:51Speaker 00

  Right, that can also, I think, lead to regret. If, if you're not able to enjoy a piece of chocolate cake at your kid's birthday party once in a while, that, that would be personally something I would regret, right? So, sometimes there is a place for sugar, sometimes there's a place for alcohol, sometimes there's a place for binging on social media, if that's what you want to do. That's why I think we have to stop vilifying the thing, right?

• 47:10Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 47:11Speaker 00

  It's not the thing that's, and frankly, here's the thing, more than, more than any consideration, the train has left the station, okay? We, we should be so, can you imagine if our grandparents listened to us complaining about this stuff? You live in a world where you have too much food, too much entertainment, this is what you're complaining about? Like, our, our grandparents were starving, okay? They were fighting wars. And, and, and this is the first generation in human history where there isn't large-scale famine somewhere on the earth. You know, for 200,000 years, there was famine always somewhere. This is the first generation where more people die of diseases of excess than of shortage. Never happened before in 200,000 years of human history. We should be celebrating this, but you know what?

• 47:55Speaker 00

  The price of progress, the price for the fact that your kids aren't starving and, and looking for, you know, to, to feed, to feed themselves and that we can have this much abundance, the price of all that progress is that we have to learn some new skills.

• 48:08Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 48:08Speaker 00

  Right?

• 48:09Rangan Chatterjee?

  It's like, one of the other prices, I think, is that rates of anxiety and depression are much higher now, from what we can tell, right?

• 48:20Speaker 00

  The way we measure them, that's also a whole nother conversation.

• 48:22Rangan Chatterjee?

  Sure, that, exactly, but that, that, you know, there is a school of thoughts that says, when you don't have real problems to deal with, so, you know.

• 48:33Speaker 00

  Right.

• 48:33Rangan Chatterjee?

  We're looking at the past, you know, you had to get out, you had stuff to do, you, you couldn't just sit at home and Deliveroo this and Uber eats that and, and literally stay in your pajamas all day and still work and money, have food, have drink, you couldn't do that, right?

• 48:47Speaker 00

  Right, you were too busy.

• 48:48Rangan Chatterjee?

  You, you, yeah, you, you would have to go out and get food. You know, even when we were kids, you would have to go to, at least, at the very least, you'd have to go to the supermarket, buy your food and get it home. You don't have to do that anymore, right? But there is a school of thought which says that when you don't have real things or real problems to occupy your time with, the brain will start to create problems that in some ways don't exist, right?

• 49:14Speaker 00

  That's right, yeah.

• 49:14Rangan Chatterjee?

  So, it's kind of, there has been, there has been incredible human progress, but of course, some of that has come at a cost. But I love the way you're framing it, which is very much about empowerment, which is, we need to learn new skills for the world that exists today.

• 49:29Speaker 00

  Because, and why? Because who's going to do it for us?

• 49:34Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 49:34Speaker 00

  Like, are we going to say, hey Netflix, can you please stop making good shows? Uh, Apple, you know, your devices are so user-friendly, please stop that. Stupid. Who, who wants to go back to an age where we don't have those devices? We, we love them, that's what they're supposed to do. I, I, yes, I agree, it's difficult to stay on a diet, believe me, I know, I understand. But I don't want to go back to a day before, you know, those things were invented. When I go to Paris, I want some great croissants. I'm not going to tell the baker, stop making your croissants so delicious, I like them too much. It's up to me. So, it's not my fault, I didn't invent social media, I didn't invent the iPhone, I didn't invent croissants, but it's my responsibility, because who else's responsibility is going to be?

• 50:11Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 50:12Speaker 00

  Right?

• 50:12Rangan Chatterjee?

  Let's just go back to social media for kids for, for just a moment.

• 50:15Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 50:15Rangan Chatterjee?

  Because that is an interesting thing to discuss here, which is...

• 50:21Rangan Chatterjee?

  As a society, we have made a decision that certain things like alcohol or gambling, right? Depending which country you live in the world, should wait until people are 18, for example. So it's simply saying, we as a society feel maybe we need to protect them whilst they're young until they are adults where they can make these decisions for themselves. So one argument, first of all,

• 50:55Rangan Chatterjee?

  understanding your model and understanding that the important thing is to mask your internal triggers and know why are you on social media? What are you avoiding? What emotion are you trying to suppress or get away from? Yes, of course, you can teach children that. And maybe that would be a really good thing to teach children. And maybe that's what you did with your daughter. But as we record this conversation, there is a movement in the UK to limit social media in under 16s. I personally support that. What's your take on that?

• 51:33Rangan Chatterjee?

  I am really excited to share that I am bringing my Thrive Tour, Transform Your Health and Happiness, to Canada and Europe this September and November. It's a live, interactive, uplifting show that over 20,000 people came to last year across the UK and Australia. I'll be sharing powerful stories, life-changing insights and simple tools that will inspire you to feel better, think clearer and live with more intention and joy. To get your tickets right now and see all of the dates and venues, go to drchatterjee.com/live. I really hope that you can join me.

• 52:17Rangan Chatterjee?

  Today's episode is sponsored by Lingo by Abbott. When glucose is relatively stable, you feel better day to day with steadier energy, mood and focus. But over time, unstable and elevated glucose can impair your metabolic health and increase the risk of type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease. Globally, more than 760 million adults are estimated to have prediabetes, many without symptoms or a diagnosis. Now, the problem is that our healthcare system often waits until you get sick before taking action, when we should take a proactive approach. Now, most of us don't have access to our own glucose data and therefore don't have

• 53:00Rangan Chatterjee?

  clear feedback on how our everyday choices impact our glucose. That's where Lingo by Abbott comes in. Lingo is a biosensor and app that helps you see how food, movement and lifestyle choices affect your glucose in real time, so you can notice patterns and build healthier habits in the moment. With Lingo, you can get to know your glucose to build healthier habits for today and tomorrow. For listeners in the US and UK, Lingo by Abbott is offering an exclusive 10% off a four-week plan. Just visit hellolingo.com/livemore for more information. Terms and conditions apply.

• 53:41Rangan Chatterjee?

  Again, that's hellolingo.com/livemore.

• 53:53Speaker 00

  I totally agree that there should be some kind of number. In fact, there already is. The number is 13. The social media companies will tell you.

• 54:03Rangan Chatterjee?

  Well, that's the key thing. They will tell you, whereas the data I've seen, if you look at how many nine-year-olds are on TikTok. That, yeah, I guess officially it may be 13. Or how people at nine and 10 do all their communication on WhatsApp groups. WhatsApp will tell you it's 13. So clearly, people are getting through this.

• 54:21Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 54:22Rangan Chatterjee?

  And a lot of people.

• 54:23Speaker 00

  So first things first, look, I'm not going to let my daughter walk into a bar and order a gin and tonic. I'm not going to let her go into a casino and play blackjack. She's not ready for that. And why exactly would I let her use a product whether the manufacturer is telling me she should not use if she's under a certain age? I think parents, look, I know it's not popular to say. I know people don't like to hear it, but we do have power as parents. Who pays for the cellphone bill? We do. Who oftentimes is the one that buys the phone? We do. And it's gotten so much easier today than it used to be. There are parental controls. The settings are there. There are settings that will tell you, hey, you've had enough. Tell me what other device, can you think of any other product that tells you, built into the product, how to use it less?

• 55:08Speaker 00

  Doesn't exist. Only technology built into it has tools that will help you use it less. Google Wellbeing, Apple Screen Time, they have these tools built in. So one, we should have an age. I've always advocated for some kind of age. Now, whether it's 13 or whether it's 16, this is nuanced. Even if it's 16, we have to have parent involvement. We have to have responsibility for our children to some extent of saying, hey, if you're not going to let them drink below 21, this is yet another thing that we have to do to make sure that a child is protected in some way. So no arguments there. I think there should be some age. Now, I would actually go further. I think we need regulation, and this is something I've proposed for the past decade now.

• 55:51Speaker 00

  And I met with all the tech companies about this and they've done nothing. We should have regulation that says that companies need what I call a use and abuse policy. Because not only should we have a protected class around children, they should be a protected class, I agree with you. Now, again, I don't know what age is the right age, but that's debatable. We should also have a protected class of people who are addicted. Now, that's never been done before. And I think we should take this very seriously because why do we protect children? Why do we say children shouldn't have alcohol under a certain age? Well, because we believe that children are people who cannot make a decision with sound body and mind. And so they need our protection. And I believe people who are pathologically addicted also deserve protection because if

• 56:36Speaker 00

  you are pathologically addicted, you also cannot make rational decisions with sound body and mind. So I've been proposing this for decades, that we need some kind of policy that says, look, how many hours a week would trigger some kind of notification that says, hey, you've been using this product in a way that may indicate you're struggling with an addiction? Can we help? Maybe you'd like to be put on a blacklist. Maybe you'd like us to restrict how many hours do you use it? Maybe you'd like resources for addiction counselling? How can we help? Because unlike the alcohol companies, who, they don't know how much you're drinking. They have no idea, right? Even though we know that they would not be in business without the people who abuse their products, right? It's a fat head industry.

• 57:18Speaker 00

  The people who consume way too much are the ones who keep that industry profitable. But they could say, hey, look, plausible deniability, we don't know how much everybody is drinking. The tech companies know. They have personally identifiable information about how much time you spend on their site. Now, it doesn't mean they should cut you off, but I think if you know someone is actually pathologically addicted, they're using your product to a way that may hurt them, it's our responsibility to tell them. Now, here's the thing, the reason this won't happen is because the people who complain about this problem, new media, right? New media, The New York Times, the BBC, CNN, who's their competition? Their competition is social media. But nobody's saying, hey, what about the news junkies?

• 58:02Speaker 00

  What about the people who are spending way too much time watching Fox News? Isn't that just as potentially addictive? You say, well, but they don't have algorithms. Bullshit, they don't have algorithms. They know exactly what pushes your buttons. The job of the media isn't to report the truth anymore, it's to keep you hooked, just as hooked as you are to social media. Social media is their competition, but they want to compete on a different plane. So I think all media, where you know how much someone is using your product, has an ethical responsibility to say, hey, look, you may be struggling with an addiction. How can we help? So not only do I support regulation for a protected class of children, we need this new protected class. And also, the best thing you can do for your child, if you want to raise an indistractable kid, is to follow these four steps with them. Because there's a whole section in the book on how to raise indistractable kids.

• 58:47Speaker 00

  And it starts with this psychological concept that's been around for over 50 years, that most people have never heard of, which completely explains why kids overuse technology today. And guess what? It's not the phones. It's something else completely.

• 59:03Rangan Chatterjee?

  Right. We're going to come to that. Let's just finish off a few things that just came up there. First of all, really interesting take. I really appreciate the clarity and the passion with which you spoke there. I think irrespective of anyone's views or opinions on this, I think this stuff is not going away, right? So we need to figure out ways that we can be more intentional with our usage of whatever it is, whether there's regulation or not. Because in terms of like what's in our control and out of our control, that frankly is out of our control. We may want governments to act and do stuff, or tech companies to act and do stuff, but

• 59:48Rangan Chatterjee?

  there's only so much that we can do to influence that. We can try.

• 59:51Speaker 00

  It's going to take a long time. And by the time they do something about it, the next thing will happen.

• 59:55Rangan Chatterjee?

  So irrespective, it's important that we understand our own internal triggers. Now, a couple of things to be open about.

• 1:00:06Rangan Chatterjee?

  My children are currently sixteen and thirteen, and they have never had social media. Okay. And the way my wife and I have handled that is by having open dialogue with them, explaining why we don't believe it's helpful for them. Okay, now, it's not been as challenging as people would think, actually, because we've just had this open dialogue with them and explained now, you know, was this the right thing to do? Well, time will tell. In a few years, maybe, you know, who knows, right? But a lot of parents will say it's just too difficult. All of their friends are on it, right? And I really feel sympathy for that because I think that the pressure can be quite profound

• 1:00:49Rangan Chatterjee?

  as saying, Mom, that everyone else in the class has got it, right? You know, everyone's got TikTok at ten. You know, I need to have TikTok. So, you know, because I just want to make sure we've acknowledged that because I think,

• 1:01:05Speaker 00

  I acknowledge it. Yes, parenting is difficult.

• 1:01:08Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:09Speaker 00

  Good morning.

• 1:01:12Speaker 00

  I mean, come on, like, isn't this what our parents told us about? Well, if all your friends do it, then are you just gonna do it? Are you just gonna run off a cliff if all your friends are gonna run off a cliff? I mean, this is the same conversation we have with kids and drugs and drinking and all kinds of stuff.

• 1:01:24Rangan Chatterjee?

  I mean, you know that there'll be some parents at the moment who are not liking what you're saying.

• 1:01:28Speaker 00

  Of course, of course, because, look.

• 1:01:30Rangan Chatterjee?

  Doesn't mean you shouldn't state your opinion.

• 1:01:31Speaker 00

  No, and, and look, parenting is, I just wrote a book about beliefs. Parenting is like a religion. It's not, it's not a belief, it's faith, right? We don't know how what we do today will impact our kid in the future.

• 1:01:42Rangan Chatterjee?

  Totally.

• 1:01:42Speaker 00

  We just need faith. We just have to believe that this is gonna work out the way it's gonna work out because that's how we were raised and that's what we think is the best. And parenting is hard work. Parenting is definitely hard work and we have to make the best decisions we can with the tools we have. And our kids will probably still have, have complaints about us in twenty years when they grow up. So what we have to do, I think, is,

• 1:02:04Speaker 00

  is think rationally here for a second. The most important thing you said was that you could have the discussion with your kids. The fact that that's where you started changes everything. When you talk to the families who say, there's just nothing you can do. All their friends have it. They're begging me for it. What am I supposed to do? I bet you, at least in my experience, what I've seen, those are the families who can't sit down and have a calm, rational conversation. Or it's the families I've seen again and again, I've been telling my kids, they need to get off that TikTok, right? TikTok's terrible, all their friends are using it. Meanwhile, the mom's telling me this as she's checking email or Facebook or whatever. If you wanna raise indistractable kids, you have to be an indistractable parent.

• 1:02:47Rangan Chatterjee?

  A hundred percent.

• 1:02:48Speaker 00

  You see, children come born with these invisible antennae.

• 1:02:52Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:52Speaker 00

  It's called the hypocrisy detection device. And our kids are constantly scanning for where we screw up. And they are looking for where we are being hypocrites. So you cannot tell your kid, you're not ready for social media, get off social media. Meanwhile, you're checking it all day. You can't tell yourself, you shouldn't drink. And meanwhile, you're downing gin and tonics every night. We have to set that example, obviously we do. It's not about their friends. We are who they look to. And if we say, you know, it's just like a family who has particular religious convictions, right? Is it so hard? I'm gonna wear a hijab because that's my faith and I'm gonna go to school where nobody else does. Yeah, that happens, right? Or I'm gonna wear a cross and nobody else. If it's part of what's important to you, if it's part of your values, if it's part of your conviction, you'll find a way.

• 1:03:34Rangan Chatterjee?

  Well, it comes about to intentionality.

• 1:03:35Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:03:36Rangan Chatterjee?

  Right, which we mentioned right at the start. I certainly would say my wife and I have always been very intentional with how we raise our kids. I would probably say how we bring up our kids is the most important thing to us. You know, I don't think. Yeah, I don't think there's anything more important to us. So I do feel that we, right or wrong, we've always made intentional decisions that we hope are in their best interest. And as you say, some of this is faith because they're not adults yet. So I don't know what the implications of this are going to be. But, you know, we've certainly done our best.

• 1:04:14Speaker 00

  Right. Now, some people are gonna say, I promise you, they will say, well, that's really nice for him. He's affluent, he has resources, he has time, he has a loving relationship. What about everybody else? And even then, I would say, first of all, you know, nothing that's in this book, you know, it'll take you, what, like, an hour and a half to read Indistractable? Anybody can use it and, you know, the, I just gave you the basics. It's, it's not that hard, right? Anybody can do this, it's not a socioeconomic thing. But even then, if you can say, yeah, but, you know, I think it's very demeaning to say that somehow poor people can't go to their library and check out this book and, and read it. But some people will tell me nonsense like that. To which I respond, look, you know, this stuff does not exist in a vacuum. That when you think about the causes of teen mortality, right?

• 1:04:57Speaker 00

  What killed kids a generation ago, two generations ago? When you look at all the factors, except one, there's one exception. Everything that killed kids is at record lows. Do you know that? Teen murder rates, record lows. Drunk driving, record lows. Even things like truancy, record lows. Pregnancy, absolute record lows. All the things that used to hurt kids, except for suicide, which has gone up from, it used to be at a historic low, it's gone up, now it's going back down. More recently, it looks like it's going back down, so it could just be reversion to the mean. All the things that used to hurt kids are at record lows. Whoever talks about that, we never hear that. Why? If we're gonna say, hey, technology caused all these problems since about 2008,

• 1:05:41Speaker 00

  since the iPhone came out, what about all these crazy trends of things happening the right way? Why? So let me ask you. If you wanted to create a device to keep kids safe at home, off the streets, maybe one of these devices isn't such a bad idea. I think if you would have brought the technology we have today back to my generation when I was in high school, parents would have said, oh, my goodness, we can keep kids from drunk driving? We can, they can stay home and play games together? That's amazing. They can be safe indoors during this very risky period of their life? So I'm not, I'm not saying tech doesn't have negative consequences.

• 1:06:17Rangan Chatterjee?

  I see your point, Anna, and I think it's also important to acknowledge it.

• 1:06:23Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yes, and that has also come at a consequence, right?

• 1:06:26Speaker 00

  Of course.

• 1:06:27Rangan Chatterjee?

  Where kids are socializing less and having less free play and less independence.

• 1:06:32Speaker 00

  So this is that fifty year study that I wanted to bring up earlier. So, okay, let's, let's work through these four steps of how do we raise indistractable kids with these four steps? Starting with mastering internal triggers. Now, internal triggers are a little bit more interesting and sophisticated in children than in adults. Because as an adult, you can do this for yourself. You can figure out, wait, why am I overdoing this or that? You can, you can be introspective about it. For kids, we have to understand what this generation is going through. And it's amazing, a lot of people read The Anxious Generation and they just take away from, you know, they read the cover and they don't read through the book. And Heit has actually two really big arguments. One, he talks about how it's, it's something that's happening in terms of how kids spend their time in the real world. And then the other half is about how do the kids spend their time in the online world?

• 1:07:16Speaker 00

  But most people only take the online world lesson and they say, that's enough. Okay, we have to ban social media. That's not the whole argument. What's happening with kids is that they are deficient in what I call psychological nutrients. So you know how we have macronutrients for the body? We have fat, protein, carbohydrates? There are three nutrients, psychological nutrients, that every human being on the face of the earth needs to flourish. And those three nutrients, and we've known this for over fifty years, it's called self-determination theory, tells us that every single human being, children, adults, everyone, needs competency, autonomy, and relatedness. But when you think about the dosage that kids get of those three things, they are psychologically deficient. So what happens is, it's called the needs displacement hypothesis,

• 1:08:00Speaker 00

  that if you don't get what you need in the real world, you are looking for it in the online world. And here's how it works. The first one is competency. We know that per self-determination theory, every psychologist on the face of the earth knows self-determination theory. It's the most well-validated, most well-studied theory of human flourishing and well-being. And what the, the research tells us is that when you don't have enough of these three things, psychologically, a lot of bad things happen. You have more anxiety, depression, all kinds of disorders. So let's take competency. You know, one of the things that, that was on the rise around the same time of around 2008, when we got the Apple App Store, was this rise in obsessive testing. At least in the United States, and now it's gone worldwide. Children are tested to a ridiculous degree.

• 1:08:44Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:45Speaker 00

  All year long, testing, testing, testing. So there's a subset of the population that is constantly told, you are not competent. All the time. You know, they, I think it was in Philadelphia where they test first graders, something like eight or nine times a year with these standardized tests. Because that's how they now pay teachers. So with all that testing, if you're constantly reinforced, you're not good enough. You're not competent, you're not mastering the subject. And you're hearing that in the real world, you're gonna look for it somewhere else. Well, where do you find it? Online. When you play Roblox or Minecraft, you feel like a god, you feel competent. You master the game. So your psychological nutrient number one is fulfilled. The second one, autonomy.

• 1:09:28Speaker 00

  You know, we talked earlier about psychological reactance and the importance of having that sense of autonomy. We hate being told what to do. And the work of Peter Gray has shown how this is the most over-regulated generation in history.

• 1:09:40Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:41Speaker 00

  You know, there's only two places in society where you can tell people where to go, what to think, how to dress, who to be friends with, what to eat, and that's school and prison. And if you put people in cages, they behave like animals. And that is exactly what we are doing with our children. We are telling them what to do all day long. You know, the average American child today has twice as many restrictions as an enrolled service member. Someone who's in the Marines or the Army, twice as many rules. Because we are constantly telling them what to do. And so if you are constantly told what to do, you have no autonomy, one of your three psychological nutrients. And if you don't have in the real world, you look for the in the online world. And when you play one of these games online, you can do whatever you want.

• 1:10:25Speaker 00

  You feel like a god, you feel autonomous. That's what they're looking for because they're not getting it offline. Finally, relatedness. Relatedness is this psychological need that we all have to be understood by others and to understand others as well. We know that this generation is starved of free play. Free play is when children are allowed to play without the watchful eye of coaches and teachers and parents. Just allowing them to be kids. Because today, at least in the United States, I'm not as familiar outside the United States. You know, when I was a kid, our neighborhood sang with the song of children playing.

• 1:11:03Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:03Speaker 00

  And today, you don't see it anymore.

• 1:11:04Rangan Chatterjee?

  You don't hear it.

• 1:11:05Speaker 00

  Why? Because if you have the means, well, now your kid is going to test prep and Chinese lessons and swimming and ballet. They're so over scheduled, they have no time for free play. And if you don't have the means, well, you tell your kid, go home and sit in front of your computer or your phone or the TV. Why are kids kept indoors? Because of this myth of stranger danger. We had the media freaked us all out, thinking that our kids are going to get abducted. Turns out, this is the safest time to be a child ever. And yet, parents, at least in the United States, some parents have gotten arrested for letting their kids walk a mile to the local park. They were thought of as negligent parents because they let their kid on their own go play at the park. So we have so over scheduled children that they have no time for free play.

• 1:11:45Speaker 00

  If you want to raise psychologically healthy children, the best thing you can do for them is to schedule time for them to free play without coaches and teachers and parents. Just let them play. Now, why is that so important? Because when you play with your peers, this is where you learn your place in the world. You know, if you are a jerk to your friends, they won't want to play with you, right? They'll tell you, hey, when you act like that, it's not fun. I don't want to do that anymore. And so this is where we learn social interaction skills. And guess what? If we don't get it offline, we're going to get it online. That's where the kids go. And so one of the things I encourage parents to do is when they complain to me about, oh, my kid's always playing Minecraft

• 1:12:29Speaker 00

  or Roblox or whatever, you know, the latest fear mongering, moral panic game is. Have you ever played it? You know, it's amazing how few parents complain about what their kids are doing and they have no idea what their kids are doing. You know, when kids are playing these games, it's not the game, it's who they're doing it with. It's just like when we were kids, we used to be on the phone for hours on end because we were separated from our friends. And so we wanted to communicate with them. That's what these kids are doing on these online games. They're they're socializing. So without mastery, autonomy and relatedness, in the offline world, the kids are desperate for these psychological nutrients. And where are they getting them? Of course, those tech companies are very happy to give them what they want.

• 1:13:09Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, I love the way you you put that across. And I guess it really fits with this idea that we're both passionate about, which is what is the root cause? Let's not necessarily deal with downstream symptoms in my language and my worlds. But let's get to the roots, right? So I guess one of the things you're saying is if we give, frankly, adults as well, but let's say children, if we give them competency, autonomy and relatedness, if they have those three core psychological needs met, even if they were being exposed to lots of technology, less of them would have the harmful effects from them

• 1:13:52Rangan Chatterjee?

  because they wouldn't be seeking those things from the technologies.

• 1:13:56Speaker 00

  That's exactly right.

• 1:13:56Rangan Chatterjee?

  Right. And as you were talking about, it reminded me of a case of a patient I had a few years ago, which I think I wrote about him in my fifth book, Happy Mind, Happy Life. I'm pretty sure I wrote about him, which is this sort of young adult, I think he was around 18 from recollection. And I always remember it really well because he came to see me and he wouldn't look at me. He wouldn't make eye contact. He was so, so ashamed. But near essentially what he had to tell me was that he was addicted to online pornography, right? He just couldn't stop looking. And he didn't know what to do, right? And as, you know, I'll shorten the story, but effectively, as I got to know him and understand what was going on with him, it was very clear that he had nothing else in his life.

• 1:14:41Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:14:41Rangan Chatterjee?

  Right? Nothing. He didn't have friends, he didn't have a hobby for a variety of different reasons. And so I was trying to figure out, well, how can I help him? Because for me, the online pornography wasn't actually the problem. It was a downstream symptom, right? And the way I helped him was we went through various options of stuff that he could do in his neighborhood, right? And a lot of the options he wouldn't go for, but there was something about boxing that appealed to him. I helped this guy join a local boxing club. And that changed his life. And what's really interesting is that I very much felt that

• 1:15:25Rangan Chatterjee?

  once he had that connection, once he learned a new skill, he found other people around him who, I remember he said to me, you know, in a boxing gym, five press ups means five press ups, right? It's not optional, right? If they say drop it for 10, you drop it for 10. He didn't have that, right? Outside. And but I can look at what happened with him through the lens of those three needs that you just brought up, right? Competency and mastery.

• 1:15:51Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:15:52Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, he was learning that new skill and developing that. There was autonomy there, there was relatedness, he had a tribe around him, but other people like him. Once he got those, within months, he didn't use online pornography anymore, right? And that was quite a few years ago now, right? I didn't know that theory, but I felt it just quite intuitively that this is not the problem, right? Now, it doesn't mean that, as we've we've said, that it doesn't mean that these technologies are not built to be addictive, right? I think we've acknowledged that. And also the nuance, the context.

• 1:16:27Speaker 00

  They don't have to addict you.

• 1:16:28Rangan Chatterjee?

  Right? You can also give yourself these.

• 1:16:32Speaker 00

  Psychological nutrients.

• 1:16:33Rangan Chatterjee?

  Psychological nutrients to make it less likely. It's super interesting.

• 1:16:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think it's a great framework to look through. And I think part of the problem, you know, but we're back to how we believe, what we believe about these deficiencies. You know, Kierkegaard has a beautiful quote. He said, anxiety is the dizziness of freedom. Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom. That part of the reason we live in such an anxious age is because we have more freedom. And the fact that this guy had time to watch pornography all day. And then instead, he filled it with something else, filled it with boxing. That's a luxurious age, back to like what our grandparents were struggling with. It's a whole nother world. I mean, thank God, this is the biggest problem we deal with, that we have so much excess time that we're complaining about using TikTok and pornography too much. That's that's amazing, right? Many, most people on earth don't have that luxury. They're still living hand and mouth.

• 1:17:22Speaker 00

  So recognizing that this is an opportunity, it's just about how we shape it for ourselves.

• 1:17:27Rangan Chatterjee?

  Okay, so hypothetical question for you. If I was, not that I'm planning to anytime soon, but I will have the conversation with my children. But let's say one of them was to start using social media, okay? What would you advise me as a parent to do to ensure that they use the tool rather than have the tool use them?

• 1:17:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, so first step is setting that example. Be an indistractable parent. Learn this methodology. It's not that hard. Take you maybe a couple of hours to learn it and start applying it to your life. And be vulnerable with your kids about the challenge, right? So when I was writing Indistractable, actually, my daughter was the inspiration to start writing the book in the first place because I was ignoring her checking my phone and I hated that example I was setting for her. So, you know, many parents feel like if they're vulnerable to something that they're struggling with with their kids, then their kid is going to not look up to them anymore. And it's actually exactly the opposite. That when we wanted to do this together, that I told her, you know, I'm struggling with this. These devices are designed to get us hooked. I know better than anyone about why that's true. And so how can we use them responsibly? How can we get the best out of them without letting them get the best of us?

• 1:18:40Speaker 00

  So, setting a good example, being vulnerable with your kid, that's setting the stage. Now, we walk through these four steps. Step number one, mastering your internal triggers. Making sure that they have time for free play, right? We tackle competency, autonomy, and relatedness. Again, you get all three when you get that opportunity to let kids schedule time for free play. So, finding a few other families in your neighborhood, and just like you would schedule the swimming lessons or the test prep, schedule time for free play. You don't need that many families in your neighborhood to do this. Make it a priority. It's an investment in your child's psychological future. And here's what you find. I have never found that when a child has the opportunity, and I don't care how good the video game is or how good the social media is,

• 1:19:24Speaker 00

  if they've got friends doing something that they're interested in as well, you would, you'd be amazed how quickly they toss the phone and they want to play. We just don't give them the opportunity to do it. So, that's the first thing. Understand your kid's psychological nutrients, competency, autonomy, relatedness. Are they getting enough? Okay? The next step is making time for traction. This is gonna sound crazy, but one of the best things you can do to help your kid use technology responsibly is to schedule time for it. Schedule time for it. Why? Because in their brain, if there's something they enjoy doing, they're gonna think about it, as all of us do, right? If you like watching football, if you like reading the news, if you like watching YouTube videos, you're gonna think about, hey, when do I have time to do that? So, what happens with kids, they're scheduled all day long.

• 1:20:10Speaker 00

  They get home from, from school, and they're gonna start thinking about it. Immediately, they might jump onto it. But if you sit down with them, this is what we did with my daughter when she was just six years old, and she's 17 now. But when she was just six years old, we sat down with her, and we noticed that she was using her iPad a bit too much. And so, we asked her, we said, hey, Jasmine, how much time do you want to spend on your device? Because the cost of using your device is much. We didn't wanna freak her out and tell her it's melting her brain. That's silly. Like, it's melting my brain, but not your brain? That doesn't make any sense. We have to be rational about it. And, you know, the jobs of the future require our kids to be conversant with technology. So, we don't wanna freak them out. Rather, what we wanna say is, the cost of using this technology too much is what else you could do with your time? So, when you're on your iPad, you're not playing with your friends.

• 1:20:55Speaker 00

  You're, we're not going to the pool together. We're not hanging out. We're not cooking a meal. We're not doing things together. So, how much time would you like to spend on your device? And I thought she was gonna say, all day, right? But that's not what she said. You know what she said? She said, two episodes. Right? In her mind, that's what she, you know, she, what she was doing on, on the iPad was watching Netflix shows, you know, for, that were age appropriate. And when I looked into the research, did you know that three hours or less of age-appropriate screen time, of course, it has to be age-appropriate, three hours or less, no deleterious consequences? There has not been even one study that shows that three hours or less of age-appropriate content has any negative effects. The negative effects start at four, five, six hours. That's when you start having some problems.

• 1:21:39Rangan Chatterjee?

  There will be some people who would disagree with you on that, though.

• 1:21:42Speaker 00

  That's not what the studies show. That three hours, as long as it's age-appropriate. Lots of inappropriate stuff that will cause harm. But let's say you've got the proper internet filters on your devices. Three hours or less? No, there's no studies that show there's any deleterious consequences. Okay? So, I was fine with three hours or less. She only said two episodes. Two episodes is 45 minutes. So, I said, fine. Okay, you can watch your two episodes. But here's the thing, I don't wanna tell you when to stop. Okay? I don't wanna tell you. I'm not gonna be the police officer. Because remember, our job as parents, we're not raising kids. Our job as parents is to raise future adults. So, if I'm the police officer, and I have to tell her, get off the device! Give me that device! Not only is she gonna resent me and hate me, what happens when she goes off to college? Right?

• 1:22:27Speaker 00

  She has, I'm stealing from her this skill of self-regulation. What am I doing?

• 1:22:33Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:33Speaker 00

  She has to learn that skill. So, I said, you can watch your two episodes, no problem. But let me ask you, Jasmine, how will you know it's time to stop? She thought for a minute, and she said, well, you know that microwave that you and mommy will time things on? Because we used to have this microwave that was below the countertop. And sometimes, when we needed a timer in the kitchen, we would, you know, use it as a timer. And she saw us doing that, six years old. And she says, well, why don't I put in the time I have? And when it beeps, I'll stop. And that's what she did. We let her have that responsibility. She scheduled it in her calendar, so she didn't have to constantly obsess of, when can I watch? When can I watch? She knew when she could watch. It was on her schedule. And she knew how much time she said was good for her. So, back to autonomy. I gave her the keys to the kingdom, and she didn't disappoint.

• 1:23:17Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, I mean, I just gotta acknowledge that teaching your daughter this kinda skill from the age of six, I think is wonderful. Because of course, hopefully, and again, I don't mean to share anything about your personal life or your family that you don't want to, but I imagine that having that awareness taught to her and just brought to her awareness at the age of six is going to yield dividends for the rest of her life.

• 1:23:49Speaker 00

  Versus, give me that! Stop using your device!

• 1:23:52Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:52Speaker 00

  What is that? I mean, if you did that to an adult, you'd get punched in the face.

• 1:23:56Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:57Speaker 00

  Why do we think our kids are gonna be, oh, thank you mommy and daddy for taking my device away from me? No, let's have a conversation. What's the cost? What's the pros? Having that, and being vulnerable yourself and say, look, I struggle with this too. It's amazing.

• 1:24:08Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, I love that you've been teaching your six-year-old, well, your then-six-year-old the, the, the skill of self-reflection and understanding, right? So, we're, we're currently trying to figure out, how can someone teach their child to be, you know, indistractable? And you're saying the first thing there is to

• 1:24:28Speaker 00

  Understand their, their internal triggers.

• 1:24:30Rangan Chatterjee?

  Internal triggers, to make time for traction. So, you, so she said, I want two episodes.

• 1:24:34Speaker 00

  So, when does that happen? In the day? So, it's gonna be eight o'clock? I get to watch a couple before whatever, you know, bedtime or whatever? And for how long? And I'm going to, I'm going to tell myself when it's enough time. Okay? So, that's step number two, making time for traction. The third step is hacking back the external triggers. And this is incredibly important. Because for all the news we hear about psychological symptoms increasing since the use of the cellphone, I am pretty convinced, if you actually dig down and look at the data, it's not what they're doing on the device, per se. Although, of course, there's bad stuff out there, and it's gotten better and better in terms of the filtering, but it's not perfect. It's not what they're doing with their device. It's what they're doing instead. Meaning, there is an unbelievable correlation

• 1:25:18Speaker 00

  between the amount of sleep that children are getting today versus what they got 10, 20, 30 years ago, and these psychological symptoms. Sleep goes down, psychological symptoms go up. I think that's actually much more part of the equation, and we never talk about it. How much sleep your kid, your kid is getting is incredibly important. Not only, of course, for them, how much sleep you're getting is important. So, we have to hack back the external triggers. So, anything that beeps, buzzes, or boops should not be in the bedroom. Okay? I'm talking about a radio, whether it's a laptop, whether it's their iPhone. Nothing that could interrupt sleep should be in the bedroom. TV, definitely not. Nothing that could interrupt sleep. Also, I think setting a good example as parents, right? There's no reason to have a TV in the bedroom. Have a TV in the living room.

• 1:26:02Speaker 00

  We don't want anything that has, emits light or noise of any kind to interrupt our sleep. And, just like step two, how we talk about turning our values into time, along with scheduling time for watching videos or going on, or, you know, whatever it is they like to do with their device, playing video games, there's also a discreet bedtime. I remember my, my, I would tell my daughter, it's time for your bedtime. You have to go to bed. She said, daddy, when's your bedtime? Once again, I was being a hypocrite. I didn't have a bedtime. She was absolutely right. Now, I have a bedtime, so I can, I can walk the walk, not just talk the talk, of, yeah, you know what? Sleep is important for our psychological well-being. Remove those external triggers from anything that could possibly interrupt it.

• 1:26:40Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, it's really interesting. You know, I did a Channel 4 documentary on this called Swiped. We did a 21-day experiment with year rates. So, in this country, this is, they're about 12-year-olds. And it was, I think, the first of its kind experiments that was done with York University, where for 21 days, the kids came off all, like, computers, laptops, games, and smartphones for 21 days, just to see what happens. Now, that's just the first part, right? That's not necessarily the solution. That's just to demonstrate a point. And there was many things that we discovered. But on average, every child slept for one hour extra.

• 1:27:17Speaker 00

  Which is huge.

• 1:27:18Rangan Chatterjee?

  Huge, because, you know, we can, we can talk about sleep in terms of, we all know when we haven't slept well, you know, our mood's a bit off. We got not much energy, our concentration isn't there. But a lot of people don't realize that there are really good studies showing that your ability to resist temptation goes down.

• 1:27:36Speaker 00

  Because you feel groggy, you feel crappy all day.

• 1:27:37Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, exactly. So, when you start to put it all together.

• 1:27:40Speaker 00

  It creates the internal trigger. When you haven't got enough sleep, and you feel groggy, and you're also telling yourself I didn't get enough sleep, you have a new internal trigger to escape from.

• 1:27:47Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, I know I scroll more when I haven't slept well.

• 1:27:51Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:27:52Rangan Chatterjee?

  You just, you don't, you're just fatigued. It's just a distraction from your low-energy state, right? Because you're, you're taken away from it.

• 1:27:59Speaker 00

  But look, look at this, right? It's so much more comforting. And I'm not apologizing for the tech industry. I don't, I don't make money from Facebook. I don't, I don't care. Like, I'm telling people, use it less, okay? Use TikTok less, use Facebook less, absolutely. But also, it's irrational how much attention we give the last thing in our hands versus this long, upstream consequence that we never think of. Who is ever talking about the crash in amount of time that kids spend playing and sleeping? Those two things are enough to explain the phenomenon.

• 1:28:27Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah. I guess we also should acknowledge that, again, now, is this a societal belief? Or I'm intrigued as to what you're gonna say here. But I think it's important to acknowledge, or certainly I feel it is, that, you know, life is getting really quite hard for a lot of people, right? And, you know, some people are working multiple jobs to try and pay their bills. They're, they're chronically stressed, right? They, maybe, maybe it's a single-parent family. And therefore, a lot of these things get a lot harder.

• 1:28:59Speaker 00

  I agree with you. We should, we should tomorrow ban all Netflix, all social media. No, no, let's, let's take this very seriously. Make it all go away tomorrow. And what changes? Are people going to read Chaucer and Shakespeare in their spare time?

• 1:29:17Rangan Chatterjee?

  And is that even a good thing?

• 1:29:19Speaker 00

  Maybe. Plato talked about this problem 2,500 years ago.

• 1:29:23Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:24Speaker 00

  He called it akrasia, the tendency to do things against our better interest. Distraction has always been here, always, and it always will be here. It's nothing new. And in fact, in many ways, these tools are a gift to people who are on the lower strata of the socioeconomic pyramid. Because for the first time, they have the ability. I mean, you go on YouTube, you can learn almost anything, right? You can upscale, as opposed to in past generations, you had to go to the library to check out a book, to read through. Now you've got at your fingertips the world's information. Well, the price of that, I would call that progress. I would, in the fact that if you want to learn a new skill, you could access pretty much anything for free. That's amazing.

• 1:30:04Rangan Chatterjee?

  What would you say to people who would say, agreed, and these algorithms are so powerful, and they are designed for the weak spot of human psychology, and they will, to use the term in your first book, hooked, they will hook you. These algorithms are too powerful, okay? And only a small percentage of people are going to ever be able to develop and cultivate the skills necessary to deal with them. What would you say to that line of arguments?

• 1:30:35Speaker 00

  I couldn't agree more. That I think that there will be a gap between people who allow their time and attention to be controlled by others and manipulated by others, and people who stand up and say, no, I am indistractable. I decide how I will control my time and attention.

• 1:30:53Rangan Chatterjee?

  So it's almost like a revolutionary act to be indistractable.

• 1:30:57Speaker 00

  Okay, I'm not, just to be very clear, I want us to stand up and take back our time and attention. That's why I wrote indistractable. I wrote it for me more than anybody else. I needed this, right? I saw how powerful the algorithms are. I also saw, to be fair, that even when I did an experiment, and I bought on eBay this flip phone, like we used to use in the 90s with no apps, and I got myself a word processor with no screen, just had like this tiny LCD thing that all you could do was type on. And I was absolutely convinced that now that I have, you know, no apps, no internet, I would get so much done, I'll write so much. And you're laughing, right? Because you know what happened? I would sit down at my desk, and I would say, oh, you know what? My desk is so messy, I really should reorganize, and I should probably take out the trash, you know, that needs to be, and you know what? That book on the shelf, I've been meaning to read, and I kept getting distracted. You know why?

• 1:31:42Speaker 00

  Because it's not the algorithms, it's up here. If we haven't dealt with the internal trigger, it's going to be watching too much football, it's going to be drinking too much, it's going to be whatever, we're going to find the distraction, because people have always found distraction.

• 1:31:55Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, and as you say, there's four parts, right? So you're saying part three is hacking back the internal trigger, so you're not against that?

• 1:32:01Speaker 00

  No, definitely not.

• 1:32:02Rangan Chatterjee?

  You're saying that is a part of it, but let's not pretend, because that's what you did with that phone experiment, right?

• 1:32:08Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:32:08Rangan Chatterjee?

  You hacked back the internal triggers.

• 1:32:11Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:32:11Rangan Chatterjee?

  But you didn't do step one, mastering the internal triggers.

• 1:32:13Speaker 00

  But I found something else, just like the potato chips with honey and mayonnaise when I was obese, like I'd find something.

• 1:32:19Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, so in terms of just finishing off then with raising indistractable kids, I think we've got to the, through the first three, preventing distraction with pacts, which is the final step, is that something that's applicable to children?

• 1:32:34Speaker 00

  Yes, very much so. So this is, to explain a pact, there's three kinds of pacts. There's a price pact, an effort pact, and an identity pact. These pacts are the last line of defense. It's like a firewall against distraction. So one, so basically what you're doing is you're making a pre-commitment, so that when all else fails, if you find yourself distracted, there's a way to get yourself back on track. And again, this is the fourth step. Don't jump to this. This comes after you've done the first three. One example of this is called an effort pact, and I'll give you a couple of different examples. So for example, in my household, I bought, I went to a hardware store, and I bought us this outlet timer, and it's like $5. Anything you plug into it will turn off at whatever time you program.

• 1:33:18Speaker 00

  So in my household, every night, 10:00 PM, the internet shuts off, okay? Now, I could turn it back on, of course, like I could go fiddle with it, I'd go under my desk, I'd plug it in, unplug it, right, reset it. I could find a way to turn the internet back on. Or, you know, we could use it on our phones or whatever. But knowing that the internet's going to shut off at 10:00 PM, our screens also turn off because of this, is that timer to remind me, hey, this is something that's more important, that getting to bed is more important than putzing around on the internet or answering emails past the time I say I want to start getting ready for bed. So that would be an example of an effort pact. Another effort pact, specifically for kids, there are so many apps today, most of them are absolutely free, that will help you make these pacts. One of my favorites is called Forest. Have you tried Forest? It's wonderful.

• 1:34:03Speaker 00

  My daughter uses it, I've been using it. Basically, it's super simple. You set how much time you want to do focused work for. So let's say you want to, you know, a kid wants to do homework for 45 minutes. You take out this app, you dial in how much time, let's say 45 minutes, and then as soon as you hit go, this cute little virtual tree is planted on the screen, okay? Now, if you pick up your phone and do anything with it, the virtual tree gets cut down. So it's enough of a reminder to tell you, oh, that's not what you want to do. You made a promise to yourself before that you're only going to not focus on, you're only going to work on what's not on your phone right now. So it's enough of that reminder, very gentle, right? Could you bypass it? Of course you could, but it's that bit of friction in between you and the thing you don't want to do.

• 1:34:48Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:49Speaker 00

  So that's one type of pact.

• 1:34:50Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, I love that. And the idea being that we want to see that tree grow fully.

• 1:34:56Speaker 00

  Yeah, you don't want to kill this cute little tree.

• 1:34:58Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:58Speaker 00

  And you get points and rewards and badges if the tree grows over time, so it becomes like its own incentive, but it's silly, it's made up. But it's enough of a reminder, ah, don't kill the tree, don't be a tree murderer. And so it just reminds you, you made a promise to yourself.

• 1:35:10Rangan Chatterjee?

  You're just breaking that default, and I guess...

• 1:35:13Speaker 00

  And there's 100 tools like this, by the way. They're, almost all of them are free, and it's just that bit of friction, that bit of effort between you and the thing you don't want to do.

• 1:35:20Rangan Chatterjee?

  I think one of the things I like about your Wi-Fi automatically going off is that it turns your desired behavior into the default behavior.

• 1:35:30Speaker 00

  Right, right. And now frankly, we don't even need it, because we all know, over time, hey, internet shuts off at 10, okay, we're wrapped up.

• 1:35:36Rangan Chatterjee?

  So you use it as a tool to get you to, and then after a while, you have a new norm.

• 1:35:39Speaker 00

  Which is why it's not the first thing to do. Some people jump to this, and it doesn't work, right? Because if the internal trigger is super strong, and you haven't dealt with it, you'll find a way.

• 1:35:48Rangan Chatterjee?

  You'll just go down.

• 1:35:49Speaker 00

  Exactly, you're going to find a way. But it's enough of that speed bump to say, ah, think about that twice. But that's only one of three effort, I'm sorry, pacts that you can make.

• 1:35:58Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, no, I really, really like that. Before we leave this sort of idea of being indistractable, I just wanted to ask you, because again, the framing here is that, why do we want to become indistractable? So that we can spend our life doing the things that we want to do. You know, so we are prioritizing our attention, we're not letting someone else decide our attention for us, is effectively what we're trying to do. And, you know, step two, which we have already spoken about, is making time for traction. So once you've done step one, mastering your internal trigger, step two is making time for traction, which is basically trying to decide what it is you want to spend your time doing.

• 1:36:37Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:36:38Rangan Chatterjee?

  A few years ago, you would talk about your planning that you would do on Sunday nights. Do you still do that?

• 1:36:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, I do. Every Sunday, 8:00 PM, it's in my calendar.

• 1:36:48Rangan Chatterjee?

  And is this step two, making time for traction? Is this where it fits?

• 1:36:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, so this is essential, this will change your life. How do you do this? Remember, we talked about values. Values are the attributes of the person you want to become. So this is why this technique is so much better than what most people do, which is to-do lists. To-do lists are one of the worst things you can do for your personal productivity, that there's many reasons to-do lists are terrible. One of them is that there's no constraint. So when you wake up in the morning, and I'm not against taking things out of your brain and putting them on a piece of paper or an app, that's a great idea. Running your day on a to-do list is terrible. You will lose, you'll be a basket case. And here's why. You know, because to-do lists have no constraints, it's a list of things you want to have done, okay? Here's what happens, here's what happened to me.

• 1:37:36Speaker 00

  I would come home from work, and I would look at this to-do list of all these things I still hadn't done, and all these promises I had broken to myself. And if you do that, day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year, you start believing that you're no good at time management, right? Here's all these things, all these things I said I would do, and I didn't do, loser. And so we start blaming ourselves, thinking we must be bad somehow, we must have some kind of undiagnosed condition, maybe we're, you know, not cut out for this, we don't have enough self-discipline. There's nothing wrong with you, it's this stupid to-do list technique, right? Because if you are not translating, or transferring, I should say, the things on your to-do list to your calendar... You've made a big mistake. Why is time boxing so much better than to do lists?

• 1:38:21Speaker 00

  Because time boxing has a constraint. The constraint is the same 24 hours in a day. So here's how time boxing works. You look at your calendar for the week ahead. Okay, this doesn't take that long, but it's important to do. You take a look at your calendar the week ahead. And then you look at what I call the three life domains. The three life domains, at the center is you. 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 ask yourself, how would the person I want to become, spend their time this week taking care of themselves? Okay, how would I spend my time taking care of myself according to my values? The person I want to become. Well, the person I want to become would spend some time reading. Is that one of my values, right? That I want to be well-read? Okay, put time to read every day.

• 1:39:05Speaker 00

  Would the person I want to become take care of themselves? You know, grooming, hygiene? Yep, that's part of it, too. Would they go to the gym? Yep, put time for that, too. Okay, so I'm filling out my calendar with things in the you domain. Everything I want to do for myself, including I like to play video games. Great, put it in your calendar. I want to check social media. I want to watch something on Netflix. Awesome, put it in your calendar. The next life domain, relationships. Okay, so many of our relationships in life were like ships in the night. My wife and I used to do this all the time, right? Because we didn't plan that time together. My wife is incredibly important to me. We've been married now for 25 years. She's my best friend. And a few years ago, we, we kind of became strangers in our own house. We didn't really, we weren't connected anymore. Now, that's not the case.

• 1:39:50Speaker 00

  We have put time in our schedule. We have a date night every Friday. We have a walk every Sunday morning. It's in our schedules. So no matter what, we've got that time planned for. I do this with my siblings. I do this with my best friends, right? Male relationships, we talk about the loneliness epidemic. You know why it's happening? Because we're not planning the time.

• 1:40:07Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:07Speaker 00

  Right? We used to have church, or synagogue, or mosque, these institutions where we would go to see our, our, our community members. Well, you know, with the decline, the secularization of society, many of us don't have that anymore. We don't have the bowling league or the Kiwanis Club. Put it in your schedule. So my, my best friends, they have a dedicated time when I'm going to talk to them in my schedule. Okay, those are your relationships. Finally, the last life domain is work, which is where most people, if they schedule, that's what they schedule first. It actually should come last. And work can be subdivided into two kinds of work. We have what we call reactive work and reflective work. Reactive work is how most people spend most of their day. Reacting to emails, reacting to meetings, reacting to notifications, reacting all day long. Why?

• 1:40:52Speaker 00

  Because it's easy. I don't have to think about what I do. Let me just see what my email inbox tells me to do. So that's fine. Email is part of many of our jobs. Reactive work has to get done. Totally fine. Plan time for it. How much time would the person you want to become professionally, spend on reactive work? Emails, meetings, notifications? Have that time in your schedule. No problem. But if you don't plan time for the other kind of work, it's called reflective work. Planning, strategizing, thinking for God's sakes. If you don't plan time for reflective work, I promise you, you're going to run real fast in the wrong direction. If you want to leg up on everybody else in your industry, plan time to think, because no one else is doing it.

• 1:41:36Speaker 00

  Put it in your schedule. Now, here's what's going to happen. After you do you, your relationships, and your work, you're going to have a schedule that is too full. 100% of the time. When you do this, you're going to have more than you want to get done than can be accommodated in a 24-hour day. That's the point. Because now what you're going to do is you're going to start making trade-offs.

• 1:41:56Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:57Speaker 00

  One of the reasons to do lists are terrible for personal productivity. There's no trade-off.

• 1:42:01Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:01Speaker 00

  Just more, more, more, more.

• 1:42:02Rangan Chatterjee?

  You don't have to prioritize.

• 1:42:03Speaker 00

  Right. And here's, here's the secret. You can do it all. You can do it all, just not all at once. You can do it all, just not all at once. So when you see, hey, I want to do all this stuff, but I don't have the time, now you're forced to make some trade-offs. Okay, if I want to spend some more time in the office, that might mean less time with my kids, or less time in the gym, or less time to read, or less time, whatever. I'm going to have to make those trade-offs. And whatever you choose is fine. It's not up to me or anyone else. If you want to play video games all day, do it.

• 1:42:30Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:31Speaker 00

  Right? That's your life. But when you have that time box calendar, now the goal, and this is a big one, is not to finish anything. Did you hear me? I said the goal is not to finish anything. This blows people's minds. We have been so inculcated to think that the way you manage your time is to check off cute little boxes, that that's what we expect. That's how we measure our personal self-worth, is how many cute boxes I check off. I used, I'm embarrassed to tell you this. I used to do a task, remember it wasn't on my to-do list, go back and write it down so I can have the joy of checking it off. How stupid is that? Right? Because that's how I-

• 1:43:06Rangan Chatterjee?

  I've done that.

• 1:43:06Speaker 00

  Right? That's how we measure our self-worth.

• 1:43:08Rangan Chatterjee?

  I think I did that last week, actually. I'd already done it. I actually, I'd already done it.

• 1:43:13Speaker 00

  Yes, all done.

• 1:43:13Rangan Chatterjee?

  I went back into my notes app. I put it in with the little circle and it takes it. And I was like, yeah, got that.

• 1:43:19Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:43:20Rangan Chatterjee?

  Which is ridiculous on one level, isn't it?

• 1:43:22Speaker 00

  Totally ridiculous. Okay, so now here's the better way. Instead of checking off cute, this is where people say time boxing doesn't work. This is why, because they don't understand how to work time boxing. The goal is not to finish anything. What do I mean by that? The goal with time boxing is not to finish the task. It's to have a feedback loop on how long things take you. So the biggest problem with to-do lists is someone says, okay, I've got to do this thing on my to-do list, right? I have to prepare that presentation. I have to make those sales calls. I have, you know, finish my email inbox. How long does that take? It doesn't say in the to-do list. So here's what I do. Okay, I got to work on that big presentation. Let me work on this presentation. Oh, this is getting kind of boring. Hmm, let me check email for a few minutes. Uh, probably something important there. Okay, let me, you know what? I could really use some coffee. Hey Janet, how you doing Janet? So good to see you.

• 1:44:07Speaker 00

  Wait, what was I working on again? That's what people do. We call it time confetti. That's what some people call it. That our day is, you know, these little bursts of, of activity. And that's what makes you so unproductive throughout the day and why you feel, you feel like you've been working hard and nothing got done. Rather, the goal of time boxing is to do whatever you said you were going to do for as long as you said you would without distraction. Not to finish, to work on whatever it is you said you were going to do for as long as you said you would without distraction. Why? Because now you have a feedback loop. We know that the average knowledge worker takes three times longer to finish a task than they estimate. Three times longer, because there's no feedback loop. Here's how you build a feedback loop. You say 30 minutes, okay?

• 1:44:52Speaker 00

  I have a big presentation coming up. 30 minutes, that's all I'm going to spend, no more, no less. And in those 30 minutes, I'm going to work with zero distraction. I'm not going to get up from the table, even if I have to go to the bathroom, even if somebody taps me on the shoulder. Nope, I'm going to put a sign up that says, do not disturb. I'm only going to work on this task for 30 minutes. Then at the end of 30 minutes, I can see how far I got. And I could say, okay, in 30 minutes, I finished three slides. Well, the whole presentation needs to be 30 slides. So that means I need nine more time boxes to finish the task.

• 1:45:20Rangan Chatterjee?

  So you're training yourself. You're, you're sort of constantly iterating and learning.

• 1:45:25Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 1:45:25Rangan Chatterjee?

  Actually, oh, you know-

• 1:45:27Speaker 00

  No other technique can do that for you. By the way, I didn't make up time boxing. It is the most well-studied productivity technique in history. To-do lists, very little productivity, uh, very little actual academic research on it. Implementation, I should say, uh, making a time box calendar, there is tons of great academic research about why that's a much, much better technique.

• 1:45:46Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, it's, there's so many beautiful elements of it, because you can even plan in time for, you know, going back to the start of this conversation, what some people might call wasted time, right?

• 1:45:57Speaker 00

  Yes, I want you to.

• 1:45:58Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, but you're planning, and I was telling you before we just started, that I interviewed Esther Perel yesterday at South by Southwest in London. And I've been reading her, her book, Making in C captivity, the 20th year anniversary edition. And one of the things she, she writes about there is the purposelessness associated with play is really hard to reconcile with our modern culture of high efficiency and constant accountability. Right? And so the case I think she's making is, you know, play is really important for our relationships, particularly our intimate relationships.

• 1:46:42Rangan Chatterjee?

  And, you know, it's just something that we should do for the inherent pleasure of it without a goal or an outcome from it, just because it's a good thing to do. But it kind of fits alongside time boxing, because you can actually box off the time to do that.

• 1:47:00Speaker 00

  That's right. And it's amazing how, you know, this is what they call the happiness paradox. The happiness paradox shows us that the more we pursue happiness, why am I not happy? I need to be happy. Everything that's not making me happy is a problem. The more we, we obsess about happiness, the less happy we become. And it's the same in relationships. When we become hyper fixated in a relationship or in any part of our life on what's not there, we become less likely to get it. So in a way, the to-do list trains us to constantly obsess over all the things that need to get done.

• 1:47:28Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah. As you, as you were sort of describing time boxing, my mind was brought to paddle, okay? Now, I brought up paddle a few times over the past few months, because it has literally had such a profound impact on me for a variety of different reasons, okay? Which I've spoken about before. I play for fun primarily, and there are beautiful physical and mental wellbeing side effects. But that's not why I play, right? I play because I love it. But one of the reasons I think that it is blowing up, and it's the fastest growing sport in the world, right? At the moment. There's, and there's a few themes within paddle

• 1:48:12Rangan Chatterjee?

  that I think relate to this conversation. We, we've spoken about loneliness before, right? And, and why if we don't get these kind of core needs, right? You were saying this through the lens of children, but I think it kind of applies to adults as well. We need competency, autonomy, relatedness, that community.

• 1:48:28Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:48:29Rangan Chatterjee?

  Paddle gives us that, for sure. Sociality is built into paddle, okay? You can technically play singles, but nobody does, right? Or very few people. It's a game of doubles. But, and this is where it relates to time boxing. It's not quite time boxing, but one of the things you do to book a game is you go on the app. There are a few apps, PlayTomic, PaddleMates, whatever app your club uses, right? And you go on it and you, and this is one of the beautiful things about it. You don't need to know anyone else who plays. You can just join a match, right? Once four are full, the match is there, right? It's done. And within 24 hours, you can't cancel.

• 1:49:14Rangan Chatterjee?

  Okay? So if you don't show up, you're letting someone else down. You've got three other people who are turning up.

• 1:49:19Speaker 00

  Pre-commitment.

• 1:49:20Rangan Chatterjee?

  Pre, yeah. But when I'm working from home, and if there's a bit of flexibility in my schedule for the day, I will sometimes take a look in the morning, are there any games around? Now, obviously, I don't get to choose what time it is if I'm looking to join a game. But sometimes I'll see a game and I'll be like, yeah, you know what? I reckon I could do that 60-minute game at lunch. I, I kind of think I can get my work done and that. You commit. You book, the game's locked, right? Yes, you made that pre-commitment, but B, it's kind of gone into your calendar.

• 1:49:56Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:49:56Rangan Chatterjee?

  So instead of at lunchtime, assuming I was breaking for lunch, think about, oh, have I got motivation to have a workout? Have I got motivation to go for a walk? Which, you know, I often do, but a lot of people struggle with that. You know you're playing paddle because you said you would.

• 1:50:11Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:50:12Rangan Chatterjee?

  And that's if you book in the morning. You might book five days before, but it goes in the schedule. So I think that's why so many people who have struggled to get fit, struggled to move their bodies. It's not like even a sport like, you know, nothing wrong with tennis, great sport. I love playing tennis. But because you don't have this app booking, right? You have to find people, you have to get people together. Are you free? This is so easy. You just join a game. Do you know what I mean?

• 1:50:38Speaker 00

  This is, I think what you've hit on here is such an important concept. And it's really why.

• 1:50:44Rangan Chatterjee?

  This is technology helping us.

• 1:50:46Speaker 00

  Yes. One, that's a great point. Yeah, that's a habit-forming technology, right? That has its own internal triggers when you've got, oh, you know, you've got, it's got its own hook model built right in, which is amazing. But also I think it demonstrates what we're all capable of, right? That what is, what is, what does it mean to be indistractable? An indistracted person doesn't mean you never get distracted. I made up the word so I can define it any way I want.

• 1:51:09Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:09Speaker 00

  So indistractable people are people who strive to do what they say they're going to do. And what's amazing is when you become indistractable, it's incredible how many ancillary benefits you get. So just being the kind of person who commits, the way you say, right? People want to play with those who do what they say they're going to do. That people want to date people who do what they say they're going to do.

• 1:51:33Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:34Speaker 00

  It is the skill of the century. And this pre-commitment, one thing it brings up for me is sometimes I'll, you know, I'll talk to people who are struggling with making those commitments to themselves. And I'll say, imagine you've got one of your heroes. Okay, maybe it's, I don't know, David Beckham or Oprah Winfrey or whoever, whoever you really admire. And they call you up and say, hey, I heard you were a big fan. I would love to have lunch with you. Are you going to make that lunch happen? Absolutely. You're going to move, you know, hell and high water. You're going to be there no matter what. Traffic, whatever, you're going to be there.

• 1:52:11Rangan Chatterjee?

  I flew back from my family holiday early to interview Jon Bon Jovi last year.

• 1:52:15Speaker 00

  Jon Bon Jovi, really?

• 1:52:16Rangan Chatterjee?

  My boyhood idol. Okay, I thought, I'm not, I'm, I'm, I'm just not going to not do this.

• 1:52:21Speaker 00

  There you go, there you go. Exactly, exactly. Like, think about all the effort you would go through if, if one of your heroes made time for you.

• 1:52:30Speaker 00

  Who is the most important person in your world? It's not Jon Bon Jovi, it's not David Beckham, it's not Oprah Winfrey, it's you. You are the most important person in your world. If you're not happy and thriving, nobody around you is either. You can't help others if you can't help yourself. And yet, when it comes to appointments with ourselves, going to the gym, making time to read, whatever it is, I'll do it tomorrow. You wouldn't skip out on Jon Bon Jovi, you wouldn't skip out on your heroes. And yet, we skip out on ourselves, the most important person in our life, all the time. So making those pre-commitments, deciding in advance, that's why every Sunday, now it only takes me 15 minutes, by the way, because 90% of my calendar is exactly the same week to week. That's the beauty of a time-box calendar. You put it in Google Calendar, that's the only technology I really use for this.

• 1:53:14Speaker 00

  And more or less, you know, things kind of stay the same. Once you've figured out your rhythm, the idea here is that every Sunday, I'm looking for ways to make my calendar easier to follow. Easier to follow. And I can change it. You can change whatever you want in the future. You can't change it in the day. Once the day starts, that's it, it's locked and loaded. Then you can't divert from it. What's beautiful about it is you always know when you're distracted. You always know, as opposed to letting your.

• 1:53:38Rangan Chatterjee?

  Because you didn't do it.

• 1:53:38Speaker 00

  Because you're not doing what's on your calendar. So if you're checking email and saying, oh, let me just check email for a minute.

• 1:53:42Rangan Chatterjee?

  What a beautiful mirror to your life.

• 1:53:44Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 1:53:45Rangan Chatterjee?

  It's literally showing you there and then.

• 1:53:47Speaker 00

  You can't get distracted unless you know what you got distracted from. So by saying, this is what I plan to do, even if it's, I plan to scroll social media, everything else is a distraction.

• 1:53:56Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, love it. Now, I want to make something clear that I didn't make clear before. I flew back with my wife and kids for this. I didn't just leave them on a family holiday and they supported it and they came with me to the interview.

• 1:54:08Speaker 00

  Okay. I would do that too.

• 1:54:09Rangan Chatterjee?

  I just wanted to make that, that point clear.

• 1:54:13Rangan Chatterjee?

  I just had a thought also in my head, which I think is worth covering, which is when you were describing timeboxing, it felt to me that that could work very well for an entrepreneur or someone who has a lot of independence, which of course it can. In my head, I went to, well, what if there's a nurse or a teacher listening who is saying, hey, listen, when I get to work, I have, there are things I have to do, right? Like, let's say a nurse gets a shift, says, for that 12 hours, I am doing my job, right? What would you say to that person?

• 1:54:45Speaker 00

  So typically, to be honest, they don't have this problem. Right? If you're a nurse, you know exactly what you need to be doing for every second of your day. You're not scrolling TikTok.

• 1:54:52Rangan Chatterjee?

  That's the point.

• 1:54:53Speaker 00

  They don't have that problem. Who has the problem? Are people who, who are knowledge workers, they're at a desk, they're, you know, working on their own, they're working remotely, nobody's over their shoulder. And they have, remember we said anxiety is the, anxiety is the dizziness of freedom? This Kierkegaard quote? That's who has the problem, right? It's this anxiety of what am I supposed to be doing today? If you're a nurse, you know what you're supposed to be doing every second of the day. You're not, you don't have this problem. Now, when you get home, you might have the problem. But when you don't have this dizziness of freedom, you also don't have the internal trigger.

• 1:55:21Rangan Chatterjee?

  Now, I've got to say, I just freaking love chatting to you.

• 1:55:24Speaker 00

  Thanks, buddy. Me too.

• 1:55:25Rangan Chatterjee?

  Honestly, I.

• 1:55:27Speaker 00

  We're just scratching the surface.

• 1:55:28Rangan Chatterjee?

  Literally, I prepped this yesterday. I, I don't think we're 20% in to the things I thought we were going to talk about. But I feel it's been such an enjoyable conversation, just trying to really explore these concepts together that you've been writing about, I've been writing about, we've both been thinking about for many years. It's just been great. I want to go more, but I think this is a really good part three conversation. Maybe there's going to be more coming in the future. I suspect there will be.

• 1:56:00Rangan Chatterjee?

  For that person who has been listening there and has recognized throughout this conversation that they are anything but indistractable and that there are forces around them that they think are taking them away from living the life that they want and living a life of no regrets.

• 1:56:22Speaker 00

  Less regrets. You're always going to have some kind of regrets, less regrets.

• 1:56:25Rangan Chatterjee?

  What would you find a word for them be?

• 1:56:27Speaker 00

  A word for them? Okay, so the most important thing I can leave you with is, is this. The antidote to impulsiveness is forethought. The antidote to impulsiveness is forethought. So all of, everything we're talking about, distraction is an impulse control problem. It's not a moral failing, it's not a character flaw, there's nothing broken about you. It's just that you haven't learned to deal with these impulse issues, that you've got these emotions that right now have been attached to satisfying them with some kind of distraction. But this is malleable, we can change this. Remind yourself, the antidote to impulsiveness is forethought, that when we think ahead, that's the key.

• 1:57:06Speaker 00

  So if you wait until the chocolate cake is on the fork to your mouth, it's too late, you're going to lose. If you wait till the cigarette's in your hand, you're going to smoke it. If you sleep next to your cellphone every night, it's going to be the first thing you reach for before you say hello to your loved one. So if you leave it to the last minute, you're going to fail, they're going to get you, every time. But if you plan ahead, the antidote to impulsiveness is forethought. If you take steps today, there is no distraction you can't overcome tomorrow.

• 1:57:35Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, absolutely love it. Guys, the book we have been talking about today, all the themes within it is Indistractable. If you heard my chat with Nir just a few months ago, which again, if you haven't, I'd highly, highly recommend you listen to. We were discussing his very latest book, Beyond Belief. And whilst on the surface, they may seem like different books, that they're actually not, are they? They are, there's, there's different content in there, but there is something that sews them together, right?

• 1:58:03Speaker 00

  For sure. Actually, the reason I wrote Beyond Belief was because there's still things unresolved that I needed to go deeper on about what was, I would actually, it's funny, I would recommend reading my books in reverse order. Start with Beyond Belief.

• 1:58:16Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:16Speaker 00

  That, I think, is the most important book to read before you do any other self-help, is understand the, that no, no good advice works without the, the latticework of the right beliefs. That's the first place.

• 1:58:28Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:28Speaker 00

  Then let's go into the tactics in Indistractable.

• 1:58:31Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, I completely agree. Like, that's where my whole thinking has gone over the last few years. It, it all comes down to beliefs. Like, so much of our life is downstream from those beliefs. And as you beautifully say in your book, and you beautifully told me a few months ago, you get to choose your beliefs.

• 1:58:48Speaker 00

  That's right. Beliefs are tools, not truths.

• 1:58:50Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, you can intentionally choose your beliefs so that they help you rather than enslave you.

• 1:58:56Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 1:58:57Rangan Chatterjee?

  Nir, thank you so much for flying in to the show again. Appreciate you coming to the studio. I'd appreciate everything you do.

• 1:59:03Speaker 00

  Of course. Thank you for having me.

• 1:59:08Rangan Chatterjee?

  Really hope you enjoyed that conversation. Do think about one thing that you can take away and apply into your own life. And also have a think about one thing from this conversation that you can teach to somebody else. Remember, when you teach someone, it not only helps them, it also helps you learn and retain the information. Now, before you go, just wanted to let you know about Friday 5. It's my free weekly email containing five simple ideas to improve your health and happiness. In that email, I share exclusive insights that I do not share anywhere else, including health advice, how to manage your time better, interesting articles or videos that I've been consuming,

• 1:59:52Rangan Chatterjee?

  and quotes that have caused me to stop and reflect. And I have to say, in a world of endless emails, it really is delightful that many of you tell me it is one of the only weekly emails that you actively look forward to receiving. So if that sounds like something you would like to receive each and every Friday, you can sign up for free at drchatge.com/friday5. Now, if you are new to my podcast, you may be interested to know that I have written five books that have been bestsellers all over the world, covering all kinds of different topics, happiness, food, stress, sleep, behavior change, movement, weight loss, and so much more. So please do take a moment to check them out.

• 2:00:34Rangan Chatterjee?

  They are all available as paperbacks, ebooks, and as audiobooks, which I am narrating. If you enjoyed today's episode, it is always appreciated if you can take a moment to share the podcast with your friends and family or leave a review on Apple Podcasts. Thank you so much for listening. Have a wonderful week. And please note that if you want to listen to this show without any adverts at all, that option is now available for a small monthly fee on Apple and on Android. All you have to do is click the link in the episode notes in your podcast app. And always remember, you are the architect of your own health.

• 2:01:15Rangan Chatterjee?

  Making lifestyle changes is always worth it, because when you feel better, you live more.