Nir Eyal: belief

Transcript context

…Okay. Before we move on to a different topic, I'd love to spend a little more time in that first bucket because it feels like your point is so important that most of our distraction is this emotional regulation and we just don't like discomfort. And so, I'm curious what else you could teach me and teach people about getting better at managing that emotion. Are there any other tactics in that bucket that might be useful? Absolutely. So, there's three big buckets in terms of mastering these internal triggers. We can reimagine the task, reimagine the trigger, and reimagine our temperament. And so, maybe I can give you one big tip I think that I discovered when it came to reimagining our temperament. If we think about our temperament as these immutable qualities, as the attributes of our personality, we have to be very careful about what kind of identity and what kind of limitations we let in to our psyche. And I'll give you a good example of this. So, a few years ago, there was this line of research around what's called ego depletion. Ego depletion is this idea that willpower is a depletable resource. And you saw some researchers doing studies that seem to suggest that willpower was something that you run out of, that for me, I would come home after a long day of work and I'd say, "Oh, I'm out of willpower. I'm 'spent', there's nothing else I can do. Give me that pint of Ben and Jerry's. I'm going to sit in front of the TV because I'm spent. There's no more willpower left." And some of these studies seem to suggest there was this phenomenon except the problem became that in the social sciences when something sounds a little fishy, when it sounds too good to be true, the scientific process dictates that we should rerun those studies. And it turns out that these studies around ego depletion could not replicate. We couldn't find the effect. And so, there was one exception to this and that exception was in a study done by Carol Dweck, she's one of my research heroes. She wrote the book Mindset, you're probably familiar with, and she did a fascinating study where she found that ego depletion does actually exist, but only for one group of people. Who was that group of people? It turns out that the only people who really did run out of willpower the way you would run out of charge in a battery were people who believed that willpower was a limited resource. And so, this is super, super important to not let ourselves be influenced by these ridiculous notions, these beliefs that somehow we are impaired, that we are limited, that we're addicted. That's a really popular one, that we're all addicted, we're all unable to control these behaviors. That is not true. And in fact, it's only true if you believe it is true. So, it should be part of our practice to tell ourselves we are indistractable. Indistractable is meant to sound like indestructible. It's meant to sound like a superpower. So, repeating to yourself that you're not limited, it's just about your actions. It's not a moral failing. It's not something wrong with you. It's not that technologies are doing it to you. It's simply a series of behaviors that we have to practice. I really like that. That's a theme that comes up a lot on this podcast is people that feel like they're responsible for their situation, they didn't cause it, but they're still responsible. It is their responsibility to deal with it, end up being more successful. And there's this idea of just being high agency.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.