Deal with Distraction from Within
Jonathan Bricker, a psychologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, has spent his career helping people manage the kind of discomfort that not only leads to distraction but also to disease. His work has been proven to effectively reduce the risk of cancer by changing patient behavior. Bricker writes, “Most people don’t think of cancer as a behavioral problem, but whether it’s quitting smoking or losing weight or exercising more, there are some definitive things you can do to reduce your risk and thereby live a longer and higher-quality life.”
Bricker’s approach involves harnessing the power of imagination to help his patients see things differently. His work shows how learning certain techniques as part of acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) can disarm the discomfort that so often leads to harmful distractions.
Bricker decided to focus his efforts on smoking cessation and developed an app to deliver ACT over the internet. Though he uses ACT specifically to help people quit smoking, the principles of the program have been shown to effectively reduce many types of urges. At the heart of the therapy is learning to notice and accept one’s cravings and to handle them healthfully. Instead of suppressing urges, ACT prescribes a method for stepping back, noticing, observing, and finally letting the desire disappear naturally. But why not simply fight our urges? Why not “just say no”?
It turns out mental abstinence can backfire.
Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote in 1863, “Try to pose for yourself this task: not to think of a polar bear, and you will see that the cursed thing will come to mind every minute.” One hundred twenty-four years later, the social psychologist Daniel Wegner put Dostoevsky’s claim to the test.
In a study, participants who were told to avoid thinking of a white bear for five minutes did so on average once per minute, just as Dostoevsky predicted. But there was more to Wegner’s study. When the same group was told to try and conjure the white bear, they did so much more often than a group who hadn’t been asked to suppress the thought. “The results suggested that suppressing the thought for the first five minutes caused it to ‘rebound’ even more prominently into the participants’ minds later,” according to an article in Monitor on Psychology. Wegner later dubbed this tendency “ironic process theory” to explain why it’s so difficult to tame intruding thoughts. The irony being, of course, that relieving the tension of desire makes something all the more rewarding.
An endless cycle of resisting, ruminating, and finally giving in to the desire perpetuates the cycle and quite possibly drives many of our unwanted behaviors.
For example, many smokers believe it’s the chemical nicotine that causes their cravings. They’re certainly not wrong, but they’re not completely right either. Nicotine produces distinct physical sensations. However, a fascinating study involving flight attendants demonstrated how even smoking cravings might have much less to do with nicotine than we once thought.
Two groups of flight attendants who smoked were sent on two separate flights from Israel. One group was sent on a three-hour flight to Europe, while the other group traveled to New York, a ten-hour flight. All the smokers were asked by the researchers to rate their level of cravings at set time intervals before, during, and after the flight. If cravings were driven solely by the effect of nicotine on the brain, one would expect that both groups would report strong urges after the same number of minutes had elapsed since their last cigarette; the more time passed, the more their brains would chemically crave nicotine. But that’s not what happened.
When the flight attendants flying to New York were above the Atlantic Ocean, they reported weak cravings. Meanwhile, at the exact same moment, the cravings of their colleagues who had just landed in Europe were at their strongest. What was going on?
The New York–bound flight attendants knew they could not smoke in the middle of a flight without being fired. Only later, when they approached their destination, did they report the greatest desire to smoke. It appeared the duration of the trip and the time since their last cigarette didn’t affect the level of the flight attendants’ cravings.
What affected their desire was not how much time had passed after a smoke, but how much time was left before they could smoke again. If, as this study suggests, a craving for something as addictive as nicotine can be manipulated in this way, why can’t we trick our brains into mastering other unhealthy desires? Thankfully, we can!
You’ll notice that throughout the book I cite smoking cessation and drug addiction research. I do this for two reasons: first, though studies show very few people are pathologically “addicted” to distractions like the internet, tech overuse can look to many like an addiction; second, I wanted to make the point that if these well-established techniques are effective at stopping physical dependencies to nicotine and other substances, then they can certainly help us control cravings for distraction. After all, we’re not injecting Instagram or freebasing Facebook.
Certain desires can be modulated, if not completely mitigated, by how we think about our urges. In the following chapters, we’ll learn how to think differently about three things: the internal trigger, the task, and our temperament.
REMEMBER THIS
• Without techniques for disarming temptation, mental abstinence can backfire. Resisting an urge can trigger rumination and make the desire grow stronger.
• We can manage distractions that originate from within by changing how we think about them. We can reimagine the trigger, the task, and our temperament.