Time Management Is Pain Management
At first, I didn’t want to believe the inconvenient truth behind what really drives distraction. But after digesting the scientific literature, I had to face the fact that the motivation for diversion originates within us. As is the case with all human behavior, distraction is just another way our brains attempt to deal with pain. If we accept this fact, it makes sense that the only way to handle distraction is by learning to handle discomfort.
If distraction costs us time, then time management is pain management.
But where does our discomfort come from? Why are we perpetually restless and unsatisfied? We live in the safest, healthiest, most well-educated, most democratic time in human history, and yet some part of the human psyche causes us to constantly look for an escape from things stirring inside us. As the eighteenth-century poet Samuel Johnson said, “My life is one long escape from myself.” Mine too, brother. Mine too.
Thankfully, we can take solace in knowing we are hardwired for this sort of dissatisfaction. Sorry to say, but odds are you and I are never going to be fully happy with our lives. Sporadic bouts of joy, sure. An occasional feeling of euphoria? Yes. Singing “Happy” by Pharrell Williams in your underwear once in a while? OK, who hasn’t? But the sustained “happily ever after” sort of satisfaction you see in the movies? Forget it. It’s a myth. That sort of happiness is designed to never last for long. Eons of evolution gave you and me a brain in a near-constant state of discontentment.
We’re wired this way for a simple reason. As a study published in the Review of General Psychology notes, “If satisfaction and pleasure were permanent, there might be little incentive to continue seeking further benefits or advances.” In other words, feeling contented wasn’t good for the species. Our ancestors worked harder and strove further because they evolved to be perpetually perturbed, and so we remain today.
Unfortunately, the same evolutionary traits that helped our kin survive by driving them to constantly do more can conspire against us today.
Four psychological factors make satisfaction temporary.
Let’s begin with the first factor: boredom. The lengths people will go to avoid boredom is shocking, sometimes literally. A 2014 study published in Science asked participants to sit in a room and think for fifteen minutes. The room was empty except for a device that allowed the participants to mildly but painfully electrocute themselves. “Why would anyone want to do that?” you might ask.
When asked beforehand, every participant in the study said they would pay to avoid being shocked. However, when left alone in the room with the machine and nothing else to do, 67 percent of men and 25 percent of women shocked themselves, and many did so multiple times. The study’s authors conclude their paper by saying, “People prefer doing to thinking, even if what they are doing is so unpleasant that they would normally pay to avoid it. The untutored mind does not like to be alone with itself.” It’s no surprise, therefore, that most of the top twenty-five websites in America sell escape from our daily drudgery, whether through shopping, celebrity gossip, or bite-sized doses of social interaction.
The second psychological factor driving us to distraction is negativity bias, “a phenomenon in which negative events are more salient and demand attention more powerfully than neutral or positive events.” As the author of one study concluded, “It appears to be a basic, pervasive fact of psychology that bad is stronger than good.” Such pessimism begins very early in life. Babies begin to show signs of negativity bias starting at just seven months of age, suggesting this tendency is inborn. As further evidence, researchers believe we tend to have an easier time recalling bad memories than good ones. Studies have found people are more likely to recall unhappy moments in their childhood, even if they would describe their upbringing as generally happy.
Negativity bias almost certainly gave us an evolutionary edge. Good things are nice, but bad things can kill you, which is why we pay attention to and remember the bad stuff first. Useful, but what a bummer!
The third factor is rumination, our tendency to keep thinking about bad experiences. If you’ve ever chewed over something in your mind that you did, or that someone did to you, or over something that you don’t have but wanted, over and over again, seemingly unable to stop thinking about it, you’ve experienced what psychologists call rumination. This “passive comparison of one’s current situation with some unachieved standard” can manifest in self-critical thoughts such as, “Why can’t I handle things better?” As one study notes, “By reflecting on what went wrong and how to rectify it, people may be able to discover sources of error or alternative strategies, ultimately leading to not repeating mistakes and possibly doing better in the future.” Another potentially useful trait—but, boy, can it make us miserable.
Boredom, negativity bias, and rumination can each prompt us to distraction. But a fourth factor may be the cruelest of all. Hedonic adaptation, the tendency to quickly return to a baseline level of satisfaction, no matter what happens to us in life, is Mother Nature’s bait and switch. All sorts of life events we think would make us happier actually don’t, or at least they don’t for long. For instance, people who have experienced extremely good fortune, such as winning the lottery, have reported that things they had previously enjoyed lost their luster, effectively returning them to their previous levels of satisfaction. As David Myers writes in The Pursuit of Happiness, “Every desirable experience—passionate love, a spiritual high, the pleasure of a new possession, the exhilaration of success—is transitory.” Of course, as with the other three factors, there are evolutionary benefits to hedonic adaptation. The author of one study explains that as “new goals continually capture one’s attention, one constantly strives to be happy without realizing that in the long run such efforts are futile.”
Can we cue the sad trombone music now? Is futility our fate? Absolutely not. As we’ve learned, dissatisfaction is an innate power that can be channeled to help us make things better in the same way it served our prehistoric relatives.
Dissatisfaction and discomfort dominate our brain’s default state, but we can use them to motivate us instead of defeat us.
Without our species’ perpetual disquietude, we would be much worse off—and possibly extinct. It is our dissatisfaction that propels us to do everything we do, including to hunt, seek, create, and adapt. Even selfless acts, like helping someone, are motivated by our need to escape feelings of guilt and injustice. Our insatiable desire to reach for more is what drives us to overturn despots; it’s what pushes the invention of world-changing and life-saving technologies; and it’s the invisible fuel that drives our ambitions to travel beyond our planet and explore the cosmos.
Dissatisfaction is responsible for our species’ advancements and its faults. To harness its power, we must disavow the misguided idea that if we’re not happy, we’re not normal—exactly the opposite is true. While this shift in mind-set can be jarring, it can also be incredibly liberating.
It’s good to know that feeling bad isn’t actually bad; it’s exactly what survival of the fittest intended.
From that place of acceptance, we stand a chance of avoiding the pitfalls of our psyches. We can recognize pain and rise above it, which is the first step on the road to becoming indistractable.
REMEMBER THIS
• Time management is pain management. Distractions cost us time, and like all actions, they are spurred by the desire to escape discomfort.
• Evolution favored dissatisfaction over contentment. Our tendencies toward boredom, negativity bias, rumination, and hedonic adaptation conspire to make sure we’re never satisfied for long.
• Dissatisfaction is responsible for our species’ advancements as much as its faults. It is an innate power that can be channeled to help us make things better.
• If we want to master distraction, we must learn to deal with discomfort.