Your Distractions are Bad Habits. Here's how to Break Them.
It’s hard enough getting research done without also battling distraction.
Research work is intricate, creative, and deep—it requires a lot of focus. But it’s hard to protect that focus from the mundane tasks that pop into our brain to distract us. We might be curing diseases, exploring the universe, or solving climate change, but when our brain snaps away from that noble work to remind us that we haven’t checked Twitter in over an hour, it’s a difficult temptation to fight.
So annoying!
Well, today I want to help you overcome those annoying distractions. I’d like to share a strategy I use to fight distraction. And it relies on a single idea:
Your distractions are bad habits.
And they must be broken.
Simple enough. But if you want to use that idea to beat your distractions, we’ll need to elaborate. So let’s talk about habits, and why they should be the centerpiece in your distraction-fighting arsenal.
1. Distractions are bad habits. So what?
Here are two reasons why you should view your distraction as habits.
It reveals your distraction’s severity. This isn’t just a struggle with some annoying activity. It’s a battle with your subconscious. There’s chemistry and dopamine involved. Your brain wants to indulge in that distraction, and it will fight you to get it.
It gives you a robust toolkit. Habit-breaking has a long history of study. So, science knows a lot about the psychology, mechanism, and chemistry of habits. And that knowledge provides a rich source of ideas for breaking your distraction.
2. How habits work.
Let’s dive a bit deeper into that habit knowledge, then, so you can understand your distraction and build a strategy to break it.
A habit is a subconscious activity. It’s like a snippet of code in your brain that automatically responds to a trigger. Here are the four stages of its automation protocol:
Cue: an event triggers a craving.
Craving: you brain suggests an irresistible response.
Response: you respond with an action.
Reward: your action creates an outcome.
That’s called a “habit chain.” And when that chain ends in a desirable reward, your brain releases dopamine, which strengthens that chain. So, the more you complete a chain with a desirable reward, the more that chain is reinforced until it becomes ingrained as a fully-fledged, subconscious habit.
3. How to break habits.
To break a distraction habit, you must first reveal its cue-craving-response-reward chain. Then you can attack that chain from multiple fronts. In general, that means:
Hide the Cue: Make your distraction’s cue harder to notice. Once you identify that triggering event, you can modify your environment to hide—or at least reduce—it.
Weaken the Craving: The anticipation of reward drives your craving. To weaken your craving, then, you must end your distraction with a disappointing outcome. Then expose that disappointment early on in the habit chain to deflate your anticipation.
Block the Response: Make it difficult to respond to your craving. Put barriers, annoyances, extra steps between you and the response. A little friction goes a long way.
Sour the Reward: When the habit’s response leads to an undesirable reward, your brain will question the habit’s value and lose some habit-building momentum. End your habit with mediocre reward. Then accentuate that disappointment by drawing attention to it.
If you battle your distraction on all of those fronts, you’ll cue your habit less often, crave the response less, have a harder time responding, and feel disappointed by your reward. This won’t break your distraction immediately. But over time, your subconscious will lose interest in that habit chain, and your temptation for that distraction will diminish.
4. How I broke my entertainment habit.
Well, that’s interesting enough. But it’s a bit vague, right?
So let’s apply that theory to a concrete example. Here’s a story of how I used that habit-breaking framework to beat a stubborn distraction.
For years, I struggled with losing concentration to entertainment—playing video games, checking social media, making sure those falsified sentences I put into Wikipedia still exist. And after some unproductive amusement, I’d shame myself back into work, only to slip back minutes later into more diversions.
It felt like a hopeless and discouraging loop.
To break that habit, I first had to understand its cue-craving-response-reward chain. I took an hour-long walk to figure out what was going on. I thought about each piece of the habit chain. Here’s what I came up with:
Cue: I repeatedly failed a task—unsuccessfully debugging code, for example. This repeated failure left me feeling like I’d been wasting time.
Craving: I wanted a small victory. I wanted to feel like my time had produced at least some accomplishment, however small.
Response: I consumed entertainment. I made some headway in a video game or finished some social media task.
Reward: I felt a small sense of getting something done. Games, social media, and other distractions may be meaningless tasks, but they felt slightly more productive than hours of repeatedly accomplishing nothing toward my research.
After dissecting the habit, I strategized how I might attack each part of its chain. Here’s what I came up with:
Hide the Cue:
The cue for this habit is a hard one to hide. I work on challenging problems. And that work produces many failed attempts. So, I can’t completely avoid those failures—they’re inevitable.
What I can do, though, is reduce the frustration those failures cause. Now, I work for shorter durations, take more breaks, and ask for help more often. These strategies reduce my frustration, which limits the cue that triggers my entertainment habit.
Weaken the Craving:
Making progress in some entertainment is a mediocre response to my craving for a small victory. I decided to highlight that mediocrity by installing a web-browser application.
Now, when I navigate to an entertainment website, I first meet an intermediate page that says, “Entertainment does not give the small victory you are looking for. Why not do something more rewarding instead?” That page really squashes my craving.
Block the Response:
That browser application adds an extra step to my response—I have to click past that intermediate page. This provides just enough friction to slow down my response, but not so much that I try to disable the blocker.
I also found it helpful to replace my bad response with a good one: to read something relevant to my research project. I enjoy reading, and I always have some book, article, or study wanting attention. I encourage that response by keeping reading material on my desk.
Now, when I crave a small victory, it’s harder to respond with entertainment and easier to respond with reading.
Sour the Reward:
That website-blocker has one more useful feature: every ten minutes it pops up again. So, if my distraction beats my defenses and I end up browsing YouTube, ten minutes later that intermediate page will pop up again, along with its deflating message. This really sours my entertainment experience.
When I respond to my craving with reading, however, I enjoy myself. The more times I choose reading over entertainment, the more I reinforce that alternate version of the cue-craving-response-reward chain.
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Habit breaking is not a quick fix: it requires strategic design and takes time to implement. But when we use the habit framework to break our distractions, it can lead to real, lasting victory.
Another thing that helps us find victory over distraction: encouragement from others’ stories of success. If you have a frustrating distraction, a habit breaking strategy, or a success story, share it in the comments below. You’ll help others find the solidarity, advice, and encouragement they need to break their distractions, too.
So, share your story in the comments below!