How to Fight Distraction (in a Crazy News Cycle)
Win the game of whack-a-mole you're playing against online addiction machines
Problem statement
Modern society under capitalism has evolved to manipulate our attention and dopamine system to create addiction. News outlets and social media exemplify this: success for them results in behavioral addiction for their users. Global crises that trigger hot news cycles only exacerbate that trend. That is, powerful organizations will do everything they can to monopolize your attention for as long as they can via optimized content and algorithms, and you will have a hard time resisting them, especially when something in the news triggers you.
If you fail to resist it, you'll end up wasting a ton of time on content that seems interesting or useful but actually makes you feel bad and empty, and you won't focus on the tasks that will help you pursue your real goals, or make time for the people you really care about. The whole machine is an expansion of Pinocchio’s Pleasure Island: we go off with Lampwick for the good time, but the attentional theme park eventually turns us into beasts of burden.
If you're curious about these socio-economic dynamics, you should read Tim Wu's The Attention Merchants, David Courtwright's book about limbic capitalism, and Anna Lembke's Dopamine Nation. Personally, I listen to everything Andrew Huberman has to say about dopamine on his podcast, because it's central to how people focus and motivate themselves.
Intuition: Addictive content is like a vapor, the smell of baked goods or pizza, which makes you want to break your diet. Mere exposure to the smell makes you want it, and makes you feel complicit in wanting it. To resist the urges that arise, you need to seal your house. The vapors will find any small hole to creep through, and once they do, they will trigger your desire to breath them in and chase them down. Only in this case, the house is your mind, and the leaks happen through your digital devices: phone, laptop, tablet. That's where you have to plug them.
The basic idea is that you should make it easy, obvious and desirable to do whatever you decide is valuable, and you should make it difficult, obscure and undesirable to reflexively perform the habits of addiction. If you're curious about behavior design, BJ Fogg's Tiny Habits and James Clear's Atomic Habits are great primers.
Solutions
Here’s how I fight my behavioral addiction to the junk dopamine available online.
News feed eradicator
This Chrome plugin wipes out every algorithmically driven feed on social. So I can access, say, a specific profile to see what someone has said, but I can’t tap the aggregated feed of all people I follow or who the platforms think I should be reading.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/news-feed-eradicator/fjcldmjmjhkklehbacihaiopjklihlgg
Why not totally block all social media, you ask, rather than merely erase the news feed? Professionally, I need to access social media each day (but not all day ;), and can do it from a laptop.
My working theory to explain why so few people know about News Feed Eradicator is because those who like it most are the least online. It is the product version of the Shaker sect that did not believe in procreation (and therefore died out). It has an innate negative feedback loop for growth, because it’s against the kind of virality that social media has replatformed our attention to. But it works to get yourself off the platforms!
Parental controls
I blocked the main sites (all social media, most news) using Parental controls on my cell phone. Best if you have someone you trust choose the code to change the controls.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201304
Black & white screen
Makes your phone less attractive, so you don’t reach for it as much.
On iPhones, go to the Settings app > General > Accessibility > Display and Text Size > Differentiate Without Color.
You may say “But now I don’t like looking at my cell phone.” And that of course is the point! ;)
Focus time/do not disturb
On iPhone, Settings > Focus, then tap the Focus time you want to schedule
Robokiller/Telco controls
One is a paid app to block spam calls, the other a service provided by your cell carrier. The idea here is to limit the excuses that your phone has to interrupt your attention (in this, your one wild and precious life, as Mary Oliver would say).
https://www.verizon.com/solutions-and-services/call-filter/
Blocking websites
Every browser needs something different: Cold Turkey works for Firefox. Other apps include Freedom and Stayfocusd.
Remove from Dock
This gets certain laptop apps out of view, just CTRL click on the app icon in your Dock, and go into the drop-down menu to remove it from view.
Hacker News (HN)
A distraction specific to people who work in tech… Under your HN profile, set the noprocrast to yes, maxvisit to 10, minaway to 120, or whatever ratio gets you back to focus.
Browsers and Messaging Apps
Put all notifications on mute except the ones that remind you to do necessary things you might forget, like jump on a call or drive to an appointment.
Next step: Intermittent Phone Fast
By chance, I locked my phone in a room to which the phone itself held the key, and couldn’t access it for 14 hours. The feeling of liberation was extraordinary, because I didn’t have anything to reach for anymore, no weight in my pocket that said “What about now? What about now?” Why not lock your phone in a box for 10 hours at least once per week?
The Right Foundation
Fighting distraction is just half the battle. The other half, maybe more important, is to build habits that improve executive function (ie increase baseline energy and dopamine levels; motivation to do things; discipline and self-awareness to prioritize and not reach for the junk dopamine).
For that, you need to:
Get enough sleep
Blocking distractions from your devices helps with this
Eat right
Simple version: less processed food
Expose yourself to sunlight in the morning (h/t Huberman)
Exercise
Abilities and needs vary, but just getting 30 minutes of aerobic exercise on a treadmill does a lot to improve executive function.
Each of these bullet points probably requires a post in itself, and this one is already to long, but you get the idea!
Outcomes
The TechCo addiction machine will find any holes you leave in your defenses, so you need to watch how and where a behavior gets triggered (which browser, which device) and then find a way to block access. You’re playing an evolving game of whack-a-mole. Constant vigilance is the price of digital freedom. ;)
Results: By doing all these things, and I get about 2 hours of my life back per day (that's how bad it gets for me...). That's time I can spend on things I really care about. I'm a more productive person, and a better partner/dad/son/friend as a result.
While I still reach for the junk dopamine, it comes in slightly less junky forms, like long reads and books on subjects I care about, which allow me to reflect rather than react to news. The whole game here is to level the playing field in the battle between your mind and the addiction machine, by decreasing the relative power of whatever might hook you, so that its lure exerts less force than your defenses.