We’re blessed with pocket-sized supercomputers that connect us to anyone and everyone, and a buffet of information. But there’s a dark side: those same gadgets distract us, often at the moments that matter most. Of course, smartphones didn’t invent distraction – they’re just the latest culprit. Before that, we blamed television. And before that, it was the telephone, or comic books, or the radio. Go back more than 2,000 years, Socrates was even criticizing the written word, for causing ‘forgetfulness in the learners’ souls. Still, our present feels different, with the sources of distraction seeming greater in number and more ubiquitous. One study showed that when two people are talking, the mere presence of a smartphone resting on a table is enough to change the character of their conversation.

Distraction, in other words, is a symptom of a problem – not the problem itself. Those deeper and systemic reasons – such as an inability to cope with fear, anxiety or stress – deserve our concern, because it’s only when we start to address them that we can make real progress. When we begin to understand what we’re trying to avoid by clicking over to Twitter or checking the news for the 10th time today, we can begin to address the issue itself, and not medicate it through more distraction. We also begin to appreciate how habitual the act of avoiding discomfort via distraction can be, and how much it’s become a part of how we work and live.

The good news is that there’s something paradoxical about discomfort: it’s actually the best tool we have for evolving and developing as a species. Feeling bad isn’t actually bad; it’s what helped us survive. The American psychologist Roy Baumeister and his colleagues observed: ‘If satisfaction and pleasure were permanent, there might be little incentive to continue seeking further benefits or advances.’ If we didn’t feel bad, in other words, we’d never achieve good.

As often as not, distraction is your brain ducking challenging feelings such as boredom, loneliness, insecurity, fatigue and uncertainty. These are the internal triggers – the root causes – that prompt you to find the comfort of distraction and open a browser tab, Twitter or email, instead of focusing on the matter at hand. Once you identify these internal triggers, you can decide to respond in a more advantageous manner. You won’t always be able to control how you feel – but you can learn to control how you react to the way you feel.

Once you understand the depth of distraction, you can start to manage it and improve. It turns out that being able to focus on the subjects and people in your life who matter improved everything from your health to your happiness to your productivity. Being indistractable can lead you to not just change your life for the better, but also experience life fully. Unfortunately, it’s not as easy as flipping a switch and bam presto! However, it’s eminently doable. It can be done a million different ways, but here are some points I’ve found important :

Master your internal triggers. A lot of writing about distraction focuses on the surface issues: how to turn off notifications on your phone, how to reduce the apps you use. That is all well and good, but the process of becoming indistractable runs much deeper. You will discover that if you started with the tactics – such as eliminating technology – then you’d just find other ways to distract yourself. So, focus on what I call ‘mastering internal triggers’ – what discomfort were you avoiding by turning to social media or your phone? Then work on those distractions and build your work habits around them.

Make time for traction. You have to make a schedule that’s not driven by ticking off your daily to-do list, but instead helps you achieve the things you value most. That could be spending time with family, friends, work, hobbies – anything. But the point is to organize your time around these domains – specifically, around the things you say you want to focus on. When you’ve found it helpful to be explicit about those values then to turn those values into a time.

Hack back external triggers. Ironically, it’s in our work environments that we’re often distracted from doing our work. This is doubly true today, with more of us working at home where we’re mixing the personal with the professional. Take a good look at the notifications that you have activated, both on your phone and on your computer. Think about how many different interruptions you have during the day. Are all of these necessary? You won’t miss these external triggers, and the paradox of eliminating a phone screen update when you get a new Tweet or turning off news alerts is that, in most cases, you won’t notice what you’re missing. Your brain, however, will thank you for giving it one less distraction from whatever you’re focused on.

Prevent distractions with pacts. Make an agreement with yourself or others about how you plan to spend your time. This is a useful strategy for getting over that final hurdle, and it often involves accountability to systems outside of yourself. Make a bet with a friend to spend your time the way you say you will. Use third-party apps to block websites that you know pull you away. In the same way that making automatic contributions to your retirement accounts sets you up for success, you can tackle behaviour change by using pacts to take momentary willpower out of the equation.

Do it consciously. We can change our focus without doing it intentionally but it works much better if you do it intentionally. Doing it accidentally is like blindly stumbling upon something amazing — I wouldn’t count on it, but if you wander around long enough, it’ll probably happen. Instead, make it an intention to consciously shift your focus in this area.

Think about what you want to do. Do you want to be a person who writes every morning? A person who only eats plant-based foods? Someone who buys very little? Write it down: “I am a morning meditator.”

Intentionally start doing the actions. Set up visual reminders, phone reminders, whatever you need to do but start doing the things that you now consider to be important and would do with this new version of yourself. If you’re a runner, go run.

Be the new version of you. Doing the actions is one thing, but you might be doing it while thinking that this is so not you. Instead, do the actions as if you were already that person. See yourself as the runner, the early riser, the writer. Feel it in your being. Stand as this person.

Reinforce it by appreciating yourself. Each day, have a minute where you look back and see what you did. And appreciate this about yourself. See that you’re already shifting. “Yeah, this is happening, good job me!” We tend to focus on the bumps in the road rather than the progress we’re making.

When you falter, think about what this new version of you would do. Even a Zen teacher misses a day of meditation sometimes. That’s a part of life. We don’t always do things “perfectly” and as planned but a Zen teacher wouldn’t miss a day of meditation and then just give up. She’d just sit the next day. A runner will get back into it even after a week of disruption or distraction (maybe due to visitors, illness, travel, injury, etc.). Don’t think of the disruption as proof that you’re not a runner, but instead approach the disruption as if you are a runner.

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