Zoë Chance, a professor at the Yale School of Management with a doctorate from Harvard, made a shocking revelation to a crowded TEDx audience: “I’m coming clean today, telling this story for the very first time in its raw, ugly detail. In March of 2012 . . . I purchased a device that would slowly begin to ruin my life.”
At Yale, Chance taught future executives the secrets of changing consumer behavior. Despite the class’s title, “Mastering Influence and Persuasion,” Chance’s confession revealed that she herself was not immune to manipulation. What began as a research project turned into mindless compulsion.
Chance stumbled upon a product that typified many of the persuasion techniques she taught in her class. She tells me, “We kept saying, ‘Oh, this is brilliant. These guys are geniuses. They’ve actually used every motivational tool we could possibly think of.’”
Naturally, Chance had to try it out for herself and signed up to be the first guinea pig in her research experiment. Little did she know how the product would manipulate her mind and body. “I really, really, truly could not stop, and it took me a long time to realize it was a problem,” she says now.
It’s easy to understand why Chance stayed in denial for so long. The product she became dependent on was not a prescription pill or street drug—it was a pedometer. More specifically, it was the Striiv Smart Pedometer, made by a Silicon Valley start-up founded one year earlier. Chance is quick to mention that the Striiv is no ordinary pedometer. “They market it as a ‘personal trainer in your pocket,’” she says. “No! It is Satan in your pocket!”
As a company founded by former video game designers, Striiv utilizes behavioral design tactics to compel customers to be more physically active. Users of the pedometer are tasked with challenges as they accrue points for walking. They can compete with other players and view their relative rankings on tournament-style leaderboards. The company also couples the step counter with a smartphone app called MyLand, where players can exchange points to build virtual worlds online.
Clearly, these tricks had cast their spell on Chance. In fact, she found herself incessantly pacing to keep accumulating steps and points. “I would come home, and while I was eating, or while I was reading, or while I was eating and reading at the same time, or while my husband was trying to talk to me, I would be going in this circuit between the living room and the kitchen and the dining room and the living room and the kitchen and the dining room.”
Unfortunately, all that walking, much of it in circles, started taking its toll. She had less time for her family and friends. “The only people that I was getting closer to,” she admits, “were my colleague Ernest, who also had a Striiv, so we could set challenges and compete with each other.”
Chance was obsessed. “I was creating spreadsheets to optimize and track—not my exercising, but my virtual transactions in a virtual world that existed on a Striiv device.” Her obsession was not only sucking time away from her work and other priorities but also began to cause her physical harm. “When I was using the Striiv, I was going twenty-four thousand steps a day. You do the math.”
Chance recalls how, at the end of one particularly active day, she received a tempting offer from her Striiv. “It was midnight, and I was brushing my teeth and getting ready for bed, when this pop-up challenge showed up. It said, ‘We’ll give you triple the points if you just climb twenty stairs!’” Chance quickly realized she could complete the challenge in about a minute by walking down and up her basement staircase twice. After completing the challenge, she received another message, encouraging her to climb another forty steps for triple points. She thought, “Yes, of course! It’s a good deal!” and quickly walked an additional four flights.
The incessant walking did not stop there. For the next two hours—from midnight until two in the morning—the professor treaded up and down her basement staircase as if possessed by some strange mind-controlling power. When she finally did come to a standstill, she realized she had climbed over two thousand stairs. That’s more than the 1,872 required to climb the Empire State Building. As she walked up and down her stairs in the middle of the night, she felt unable to stop. Under the influence of the Striiv Smart Pedometer, Chance had turned into a fitness zombie.
On the surface, Chance’s story is a textbook case study of how something as seemingly healthful as a pedometer can mutate into a harmful distraction. Once I’d learned about Chance’s strange obsession with her fitness tracker, I wanted to know more. But first, I needed to better understand what really drove her behavior.
For hundreds of years, we’ve believed that motivation is driven by reward and punishment. As Jeremy Bentham, the English philosopher and founder of utilitarianism, put it, “Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure.” The reality, however, is that motivation has much less to do with pleasure than was once thought.
Even when we think we’re seeking pleasure, we’re actually driven by the desire to free ourselves from the pain of wanting.
Epicurus, the ancient Greek philosopher, said it best: “By pleasure, we mean the absence of pain in the body and of trouble in the soul.”
Simply put, the drive to relieve discomfort is the root cause of all our behavior, while everything else is a proximate cause.
Consider the game of pool. What makes the colored balls go into the pockets? Is it the white cue ball, the stick, or the player’s actions? We understand that while the white cue ball and stick are necessary, the root cause is the player. The white cue ball and stick aren’t the root causes; they are the proximate causes of the resulting event.
In the game of life, it’s often hard to see the root cause of things. When we’re passed over for a promotion, we might blame that cunning coworker for taking our job instead of reflecting on our lack of qualifications and initiative. When we get into a fight with our spouse, we might blame the conflict on one tiny incident, like a toilet seat left up, instead of acknowledging years of unresolved issues. And when we scapegoat our political and ideological opponents for the world’s troubles, we choose not to seek to understand the deeper systemic reasons behind the problems.
These proximate causes have something in common—they help us deflect responsibility onto something or someone else. It’s not that the cue ball and stick don’t factor into the equation, just like the coworker or toilet seat, but they certainly aren’t entirely responsible for the outcome. Without understanding and tackling root causes, we’re stuck being helpless victims in a tragedy of our own creation.
The distractions in our lives are the result of the same forces—they are proximate causes that we think are to blame, while the root causes stay hidden. We tend to blame things like television, junk food, social media, cigarettes, and video games—but these are all proximate causes of our distraction.
Solely blaming a smartphone for causing distraction is just as flawed as blaming a pedometer for making someone climb too many stairs.
Unless we deal with the root causes of our distraction, we’ll continue to find ways to distract ourselves. Distraction, it turns out, isn’t about the distraction itself; rather, it’s about how we respond to it.
Over several email exchanges, Zoë Chance let me in on the dark truths that drove her extreme behaviors, which she hadn’t revealed in her TEDx talk. “My addiction to Striiv coincided with one of the most stressful periods in my life,” she tells me. “I was just going on the market to look for a job as a rookie marketing professor: a grueling, months-long process involving tremendous uncertainty.” She continues, “It’s not uncommon for academics on the job market to experience physical symptoms of stress. I was losing hair, losing sleep, and getting heart palpitations. I felt like I was going crazy, and that I had to hide it from everyone.”
Chance was also hiding a secret about her marriage: her husband was a marketing professor, too, which meant that the couple needed to find a joint appointment, either for her at his school or for both of them at another school. “Marketing departments are small,” she explains, “and joint appointments rare as hens’ teeth.”
Further complicating matters, her marriage was falling apart. “I didn’t know whether my husband and I would be together or not, but because the best-case scenario would be that we worked things out, stayed married, and I got a job at his university, we didn’t want anyone at his university to know we might get divorced, since then they’d be less likely to offer me a job.”
Chance felt stuck. “I knew that even my best efforts couldn’t guarantee a good outcome for either my marriage or the job market, and in hindsight, I can see that Striiv gave me something I could control and succeed at.” During this particularly difficult time in her life, she says she used her Striiv as a coping device. “It was an escape from reality,” she now admits.
Most people don’t want to acknowledge the uncomfortable truth that distraction is always an unhealthy escape from reality. How we deal with uncomfortable internal triggers determines whether we pursue healthful acts of traction or self-defeating distractions.
For Chance, racking up Striiv points provided the escape she was looking for. For other people, the escape comes from checking social media, spending more time in the office, watching television, or, in some cases, drinking or taking hard drugs.
If you’re trying to escape the pain of something as serious as impending divorce, the real problem is not your pedometer; without dealing with the discomfort driving the desire for escape, we’ll continue to resort to one distraction or another.
Only by understanding our pain can we begin to control it and find better ways to deal with negative urges.
Fortunately, Chance was able to come to this realization herself. First, she focused on the real source of discomfort in her life, narrowing in on the internal triggers she was trying to escape. Though she did end up separating from her husband, she says she’s in a much better place in her life now. Professionally, she got a full-time post at Yale, where she still teaches today. She has also found better ways to stay healthy and in control of her time, scheduling regular fitness activities instead of letting her pedometer rule over her.
Though overcoming her obsession was a positive step for Chance, the Striiv pedometer won’t be the last distraction in her life. But by pinpointing the root cause, rather than blaming the proximate, she’ll be better able to address the real issue next time. When used together, the strategies and techniques you’re about to learn in this section work both immediately and for the long term.
REMEMBER THIS
• Understand the root cause of distraction. Distraction is about more than your devices. Separate proximate causes from the root cause.
• All motivation is a desire to escape discomfort. If a behavior was previously effective at providing relief, we’re likely to continue using it as a tool to escape discomfort.
• Anything that stops discomfort is potentially addictive, but that doesn’t make it irresistible. If you know the drivers of your behavior, you can take steps to manage them.