“I don’t want to do what I need to do”: why people are distracted every 5 minutes

Alpina Publisher published the book Four Thousand Weeks. Time management for mortals. Its author, journalist Oliver Berkman, in the headline reminds readers of the important thing: our life expectancy is approximately 4,000 weeks, and the allotted time must be managed wisely. This is what this publication is about. We publish an excerpt from the sixth chapter on why many people feel discomfort from important things.

If you were in the Kii Mountains in southern Japan in the winter of 1969, your eyes would spectacle: a pale and skinny American, completely naked, pours ice-cold water on his head from a large wooden bucket. His name was Steve Young, he was preparing to become a monk of the Shingon-shu Buddhist school, but so far he had met nothing but humiliation along the way. At first, the abbot of the monastery on Mount Koya refused to let him inside. Why on earth, where did this lanky graduate student from the Department of Asian Studies come from and why did he think he was made for life Japanese monk?

In the end, after much begging, Young was allowed to stay, but only on the condition that he take on the dirty work in the monastery, such as sweeping the floors in the corridors and washing the dishes. Finally, he was allowed to begin a hundred-day hermitage - this was the first real step on the path to monasticism. But it turned out that he was supposed to live in a tiny hut without heating and perform a purification ritual three times a day. This meant that Steve Young, who grew up in warm California on the ocean coast, had to pour on yourself 10 liters of bone-chilling melted snow. “It was a terrible ordeal,” he recalls years later. - It was so cold that the water froze the moment it touched the floor, and the towel froze right in my arms, and I slid barefoot across the icy floor, trying to wipe my body with the hardened kitchen towel."

Faced with physical discomfort, even if not so drastic, we tend to instinctively try to ignore it, to switch to something else. For example, if you are like me afraid of injections, you've probably caught yourself staring at the mediocre picture hanging in the doctor's office, trying your best not to think about the upcoming injection. Initially, Yang's reaction was the same: to internally withdraw from the feeling of ice water on the skin, thinking about something else, or just make an effort of will to try not to feel the cold.

This reaction is not unreasonable: when the current experience is so unpleasant, common sense seems to say that if you step back from the situation, this will reduce the discomfort.

But with each subsequent dousing of ice water, Young began to realize that this was completely the wrong approach. In fact, if he maintained a state of heightened concentration on feeling extreme cold, it seemed to him not so painful. On the contrary, when his attention wandered somewhere far away, the suffering became unbearable. A few days later, he began to prepare for each douche: he began by concentrating all his attention on what was happening, so that, having felt the icy water, he would not let discomfort develop into torment. Gradually, he realized that this was the meaning of the whole ceremony. As he put it—although real Buddhist monks would never say that—it was a “biofeedback device” designed to to teach him to concentrate, rewarding (by lessening suffering) as long as he is not distracted, and punishing (by increasing suffering) when his concentration violated.

After a period of seclusion, Steve Young (he became meditation teacher Shinzen Young; he received a new name from the abbot of the monastery on Mount Koya) realized that his ability to concentrate had changed. Thanks to his focus on the present, the painful procedure of dousing became bearable, and less unpleasant activities - daily activities that were previously a source, if not of suffering, but of irritation And boredom, — began to seem interesting and enriching. The better his ability to sustain attention in any activity became, the more he realized that the problem was not with the activity itself, but with his internal resistance to the experience. When he stopped trying to block these sensations and surrendered to them, there was no trace of discomfort left.

Young's test perfectly illustrates what happens when we are distracted: in these moments, we are driven by the desire to escape from painful experiences.

This is quite obvious when it comes to physical discomforts, such as the feeling of ice water on bare skin and the flu shot in doctor's office - cases where unpleasant sensations are so difficult to close one's eyes that it takes effort to direct one's attention to something other. But the same goes for daily distractions. Imagine a typical case where social media distracts you from work: do you sit in selfless concentration while someone forcibly diverts your attention? No, you willingly grab the slightest excuse to digress from the case in order to forget that it is unpleasant for you to do it. You are distracted by a Twitter scandal or a celebrity gossip site not out of force, but out of relief. We are told about the war for our attention, where the aggressor is Silicon Valley. But if this is true, then we often play the role of accomplices on the battlefield.

Mary Oliver calls this internal impulse to be distracted, by an internal interrupter, "an entity within the personality, whistling and banging on the door", promises that life will become easier as soon as you redirect attention from the important but difficult current task to what is happening in the next browser tab. “One of the amazing lessons I have learned is notes Greg Krach, reflecting on his own experience of this impulse, is that very often I don't want to do what needs to be done. It's not just about cleaning the toilet or filling tax reporting. I mean things that I sincerely want to achieve."

Discomfort from important things

This should be considered separately. After all, this is very strange. Why do we feel so uncomfortable when we focus on things that are important to us, on what, it would seem, we would like to devote our lives to? Why, instead, do we only do what is distracted, that is, we are engaged in what we clearly do not intend to devote our lives to? Of course, there are tasks that are unpleasant or frightening, and our desire to distract ourselves from them does not seem so surprising. But a more common problem is the problem of boredom, which often occurs for no apparent reason. All of a sudden, the thing that you firmly decided to do because it is important to you seems so boring that you can no longer concentrate not a minute on it.

The solution to this puzzle is that by distracting ourselves, we are trying to avoid the painful encounter with our problem of limited time, and especially limited control over time. Because of this, it is impossible to be sure what the outcome will be (except perhaps the very unpleasant certainty that one day death put an end to it all).

When you try to focus on what you think is important, you are forced to acknowledge your limitations, experiencing an experience that seems especially unpleasant precisely because you value the task set so much task.

Unlike the architect from Shiraz who refused to transfer his ideal mosque to an imperfect world, you give up your godlike fantasies and realize your lack of power over the things that have for you meaning. Perhaps the creative project you cherish will be beyond your ability; maybe a difficult conversation with a spouse that you were preparing for will turn quarrel. And even if everything goes great, you can't know that in advance, so you'd still have to give up feeling like you're the master of your time. Again quoting psychotherapist Bruce Tift, you would have to take the risk of feeling "captive, powerless, and limited by reality."

This is why boredom can be so distinctly, aggressively unpleasant. We usually think that it occurs when we are simply not interested in what we are doing; in fact, it is a strong reaction to a deeply negative experience: the awareness of limited control over time. Boredom can strike in a variety of situations: when you are working on major projectwhen you can't think of anything to do on a Sunday night, when your duty is to sit with a two-year-old child for five hours in a row. They have one thing in common: they require you to acknowledge your limited time.

You have to live according to how events are developing at the moment, come to terms with the fact that this is reality.

It's no wonder we're looking for distractions on the internet, where it seems like there are no limits, where you can immediately learn about the events taking place on another continent, portray yourself the way you want, and until you are blue in the face leaf through endless news feeds as they wander aimlessly through "a realm in which space is immaterial and time stretches into the infinite present" as put it sociologist James Duesterberg. Indeed, often killing time on the Internet is not so funny. But this activity is not intended to entertain. Its purpose is to dull our pain from the realization of the finiteness of time, to make us feel free from limitations.

It also helps to understand why the usual strategies for dealing with distraction - digital detoxes, personal mail check modes, etc. - work rarely or for a short time. They mean that you yourself will limit your access to things that distract you. In relation to the most addictive types of technology, this is, of course, reasonable. But such methods do not affect the inner need itself. Even if you quit Facebook*, ban yourself from social media during the work day or go into seclusion in a hut in the mountains, concentrating on what is important to you will most likely still seem unpleasant limiting. Therefore, you will find some other way to alleviate your suffering by distracting yourself by daydreaming, unnecessary take a nap or - the best option for a productivity geek - re-arrange the to-do list and reorganize the work place.

The bottom line is that distractions themselves are not the main reason we get distracted.

They are simply places where we relieve the discomfort caused by the recognition of our limitations. The reason you find it hard to focus on conversation with spousenot that you are secretly checking your phone under the table. On the contrary, you secretly check the phone under the table precisely That's whythat it's so hard to focus on the conversation. After all, in order to listen, you need effort, patience and humility, and what you hear may upset you. Of course, checking the phone is more pleasant. And even if you put your phone away, don't be surprised if you suddenly start looking for another way to ignore the interlocutor. For example, internally rehearse what you will say as soon as he closes his mouth.

It is a pity that I cannot immediately reveal the secret of how to eradicate the desire for distraction. I can’t tell you how to get rid of the unpleasant feeling that arises when we strive keep attention on what is valuable to us. The problem is that they hardly exist. The most effective way to deal with distraction is to simply stop expecting it to ever be different, accept that it is. an unpleasant feeling is inherent in a person who devotes himself to difficult and important tasks, forcing him to realize that our control over our own lives limited.

But in a sense, agreeing that there is no solution is a solution. In the end, Young realized on the mountainside that he only suffered less when he came to terms with his true position, ceased to struggle with the facts and allowed himself to fully feel the icy water on his skin. The less attention he took to denying what was happening to him, the more attention he could turn to reality. My ability to concentrate may not be close to that of Young, but I realized that this logic applies to everything. You can safely dive into a complex project when you recognize the inevitability discomfort. One should not rebel against the state of things, but direct more attention to reality.

Some Zen Buddhists considerthat all human suffering is rooted in an attempt to ignore the real situation because it did not work out the way we dreamed or because we would like to have better control process. Realizing the truth that we are finite and will never be free from finiteness carries with it a very practical form of freedom. You are not given control over the course of events. And the paradoxical reward for accepting the limitations of reality is that they no longer seem so limiting.

The Four Thousand Weeks book. Time management for mortals" will help you look at your workload from a new angle. The author will tell you why you should not take on the maximum number of tasks, and will advise how to properly manage your time.

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*Activities of Meta Platforms Inc. and its social networks Facebook and Instagram are prohibited in the territory of the Russian Federation.