Mastering Your Internal Triggers With Nir Eyal

[0:00] Intro

I’m Igor Kheifets, and this is The List Building Lifestyle, the podcast for anyone who wants to build a wildly profitable email list working from home. If you’d like to make six figures, travel the world, and help people improve their lives in the process, this podcast is for you. I also invite you to claim a free copy of my best-selling book, The List Building Lifestyle: Confessions of an Email Millionaire, at igorsbook.com. Get the free book plus $3,000 bonus package that includes my best capture page templates, email swipe files, and traffic blueprints. Visit www.igorsbook.com for details. And now, it’s time to claim your List Building Lifestyle.

[0:53] Igor Kheifets

Welcome back to The List Building Lifestyle. I’m your host, Igor Kheifets, and today I’m picking the brain of the one guy who hates to-do lists more than me. His name is Nir Eyal, and he’s the bestselling author of Hooked, Indistractable, and Beyond Belief.

His work was published in Harvard Business Review, The Atlantic, TechCrunch, and Psychology Today. Nir is one of the few researchers who understands that the true reason we try to distract ourselves with various forms of food and entertainment are things like boredom, anxiety, loneliness, and uncertainty rather than technology itself, which explains how he’s able to both help companies develop habit-building products and teach people to regain control over their habits and their environment.

Nir’s newest book, Beyond Belief, argues that our beliefs shouldn’t be treated as absolute truths, but rather as flexible tools we can redesign and swap out when they aren’t working for us anymore. As an entrepreneur, I’m always dancing on the fine line between influencing customers to develop better habits and keeping myself from slipping into bad ones. I hope to learn a few things today that will help me do both. Nir, welcome to The List Building Lifestyle.

[2:09] Nir Eyal

Thanks, Igor. Good to be here.

[2:11] Igor Kheifets

So your work about internal triggers as uncomfortable emotional states really resonated with me because I always find myself overeating or turning to video games or some other form of entertainment when I’m in a funky state. Things like ambiguity, uncertainty, overwhelm, those are the things that usually throw me off my routine in search for cheap dopamine. What have you found to be an effective way to break that cycle?

[2:45] Nir Eyal

Well, where do we start? First, we need to understand what distraction actually is. You notice the opposite of distraction is not focus. The opposite of distraction is traction. Traction is any action that moves you toward what you say you’re going to do, things that help you become the kind of person you want to become. Distraction is any action that moves you away from what you plan to do, away from your goals, away from the kind of person you want to become.

So the best thing you can do is to start planning your time. Plan time for the video games, plan time for social media, plan time for watching sports on TV, whatever you currently call a distraction. As Dorothy Parker said, the time you plan to waste is not wasted time. If you plan to do that thing, it’s not a distraction. There’s nothing wrong with it.

Now, what leads us toward distraction? Only 10% of the time is it what’s called an external trigger. An external trigger is a ping, a ding, a ring, anything in your outside environment that tells you what to do. But that accounts for only 10% of our distractions. The other 90% of the time we get distracted is because of an internal trigger. Internal triggers are uncomfortable emotional states: boredom, loneliness, fatigue, uncertainty, anxiety. That is the source of 90% of our distractions.

Just blaming the technology is not going to solve the problem. People have always been distracted. Even before the iPhone and the internet, Plato talked about this 2,500 years ago. He called it akrasia, the tendency to do things against our better interest. It’s not the device causing the distraction, at least 90% of the time. It’s how we feel on the inside.

The most important thing you can do is learn how to master those internal triggers. Master internal triggers or they will become your master.

[4:58] Igor Kheifets

I agree wholeheartedly. I’ve noticed that something as basic as not getting a good night’s sleep throws me off completely. In that state, I’m way more prone to browse meme sites or go for something sweet even in the morning when I’m usually on my best behavior. And in those states, it takes a lot of discipline to push through.

[5:43] Nir Eyal

There are four strategies for this.

Number one is to have a practice in place for what you will do with that internal trigger. When you feel fatigued, uncertain, or anxious, what are you going to do with that sensation? And what do you believe about it? My third book, Beyond Belief, goes into this. We know there is not only a placebo effect but also a nocebo effect. If you tell yourself you had a crappy night’s sleep, whether or not that’s true, you will be more likely to get distracted, feel groggy, and not perform as well. Because you believe it to be true.

They did studies in sleep labs where people got great sleep, but when they woke up researchers told them they had really bad sleep. They reported feeling tired and mentally foggy. They performed worse. And the exact opposite is also true. When people have a poor night’s sleep but are told they had a great one, they don’t feel groggy. They perform great. So these underlying beliefs have a huge impact. Oftentimes, what we experience is not our physiological limits. It’s the limits of our beliefs.

Step two is to make time for traction. If you have an open calendar or you’re using a to-do list to run your day, you’re sunk. You need to plan your day down to the minute. Which includes time for relaxing, napping, video games, whatever you want. But without knowing what you plan to do, you can’t say you got distracted. You can’t say you got distracted unless you know what it distracted you from.

Step three is to hack back external triggers. Even though they only account for 10% of distractions, those pings and dings can take us off track. Hack back every single one. Don’t check emails you didn’t need to check or attend meetings you didn’t need to attend.

Step four is to make a pact. A pact is when you decide in advance what you will do when you are likely to get distracted. Use all four in concert: master internal triggers, make time for traction, hack back external triggers, and prevent distraction with pacts. If you use those four techniques together, anyone can become indistractable.

[8:55] Igor Kheifets

You know, a lot of what you talk about, Dan Kennedy talks about too, obviously not from a scientific point of view, but things like time boxing, scheduling everything in the calendar. He has been talking about that for years. And I guess what I’m saying is that the secrets to success are not necessarily brand new. Sometimes we just need someone to introduce them from a new point of view.

[9:54] Nir Eyal

It’s not what’s new. It’s what you’re willing to do. Time boxing is the most well-studied, well-validated time management technique out there. Way, way better than to-do lists. To-do lists are one of the worst things you can do for your personal productivity. Running your day on a to-do list means you’re already going to lose.

And I think one of the things we need to do is stop using the word dopamine as if we know what it does, because we don’t. There’s no such thing as cheap dopamine. Dopamine doesn’t work that way. But here’s what happens when we constantly repeat this stuff: we reinforce the belief that there’s nothing we can do. We give away our agency. We give away our power because we believe we’re addicted. The word addiction comes from the Latin addictio, which means slave. We’re not enslaved by this stuff.

Whether you believe you can or you can’t, as Henry Ford said, you’re right. And one of the most convenient things you can do, which will absolutely tank your productivity and life satisfaction, is to believe you’re addicted. It’s just not true.

[12:12] Igor Kheifets

As an email marketer, I have a love-hate relationship with email. On one hand, I check it 30 to 40 times a day. On the other hand, it’s the primary tool I use to move my business forward and generate revenue. Have you done any interesting research about email that our listeners might like to hear?

[13:13] Nir Eyal

Email is the mother of habit-forming technology. It’s the technology that none of us really like but can’t stop using. It never seems to die. It’s the cockroach of the tech world. It uses the hook model. My first book, Hooked, was all about how products become habit-forming, and email is a perfect little hook that keeps us coming back again and again.

Technology is a tool. As Paul Virilio said, when you invent the ship, you invent the shipwreck. Every tool can be used in a number of ways. A hammer can help someone build a house, but it can also bash someone’s head in. Email can be wonderful. We can’t imagine life without it. But we also need to use it correctly.

One of the worst things we do with email is use it as an emotional pacifier. When I don’t want to think about what I really need to do, let me just check email. I don’t want to work on that big project. I’ll feel productive. I’ll just check email for a few minutes. That feels productive. That’s okay. I have to check email sometime today, isn’t that part of my job?

Your job is not to check email. Your job is to get things done. Email should not tell you what to do. That is a recipe for disaster.

Stop checking email 40 times a day. Put it on your calendar. Have time in your day when you will check email and nothing else. Timebox how much time you want to devote to it. Let’s say you put in four times a day for 30 minutes each. Two hours a day of email is more than enough for most people. When 30 minutes is up, you stop immediately, even if you’re in the flow.

Because the goal of timeboxing is not to finish the task. The goal of a stupid to-do list is to check, check, check the boxes. But a to-do list has no constraints. You can always add more. So it becomes not a register of things to do but of things you wish you would have done. That has severe psychological tolls. You come home at the end of a long day, you’ve worked hard, and there’s still a million things on the list you haven’t done. Day after day, week after week: loser.

Then people make up silly assumptions. Oh, I’m no good at time management. I must have ADHD. There must be something wrong with me. No, there’s nothing wrong with you. You’re just using a terrible technique.

The biggest benefit of timeboxing is that you learn how long things actually take. You never learn that with a to-do list because there’s no feedback loop. To-do lists are far, far, far inferior to a proper time box schedule.

[18:29] Igor Kheifets

Another thing I hate about to-do lists is that they don’t differentiate the gravity of each task. On a list of ten items, they all seem equally important when in reality, according to the 80-20 rule, only one or two will actually move the needle.

[18:47] Nir Eyal

Right. Not only with your work but with your life. The beauty of a time box calendar is that it forces you to be realistic with your time. When you say to yourself, tomorrow I’m in the office for eight hours, how do I want to spend that time? How much time for focused work, for reactive work, for reflective work? And then what about the rest of my life? How much time with my kids, time to exercise, to eat with a friend, to have fun?

So few people have experienced the sheer joy of living even one day the way they planned it. Making a path for yourself of here’s how much time I want for myself, here’s how much for the important people in my life, here’s how much for reactive and reflective work. It is the best. There’s nothing like it.

[20:13] Igor Kheifets

How big of a problem is it that many people don’t actually know what they want? If you ask them to describe their perfect day, their perfect life, most people can’t answer that.

[20:32] Nir Eyal

I think you’re right. And the reason it’s so sad is because what that leads to is a life you look back on with regret. I wrote Indistractable because I was the most distracted person you’ve ever met. I have ADHD. I was terrible at managing my time. And the people paying the price were my wife, my daughter, and my work.

What it took for me to get off that path was understanding what my values were. Values are attributes of the person you want to become. The way you ask yourself what you want is by asking how you spend two things: your time and your money.

When it comes to money, we’re very stingy. We clip coupons, split checks, look for deals. But we should actually be generous with our money and stingy with our time. Because you can always make more money. You cannot make more time. Time is a non-renewable resource. We all get the same 24 hours in a day and eventually we won’t get any more. But we give away our time as if it’s unlimited. We give it to gossip, to cat videos, to things that don’t matter. That’s like spraying hundred-dollar bills out of your bank account onto the street.

Be generous with your money. Be stingy with your time.

To define your values and build a time box calendar, ask yourself how the person you want to become would spend their time across three life domains.

The first domain is you. If you can’t take care of yourself, you can’t take care of other people. Is there time on your schedule to read a book? Is there time for leisure, for the fun stuff? If you like playing video games, put it on your schedule as something that matters.

The second domain is your relationships. Many times our relationships bear the brunt of our poor planning. If we don’t actually sit down and ask how much time we want to spend with our spouse, our kids, our friends, it’s not going to happen. We become ships in the night. For me, I have date night with my wife every Friday. A Sunday morning walk with my daughter. Wednesday evening is daddy-daughter date. Regular phone calls with friends. It’s all on the schedule.

The third domain is your work, which divides into reactive work and reflective work. Reactive work is reacting to emails, notifications, meetings. Everyone has some of that. But reflective work is the kind that can only be done without distraction. Planning, strategizing, thinking. If you want a leg up on everyone in your business or industry, plan time to think. Because nobody else is doing it. Everyone’s asking ChatGPT for answers or watching YouTube for answers. Nobody’s actually thinking. And here’s the secret: you already have the answers. You just haven’t given yourself the time to process what you already know needs to be done.

When you turn your values into time, you will realize there is not enough time to do everything. You can have it all, just not all at once. Make the trade-offs consciously and in advance, not by default at the end of your life.

The tattoo should read: turn your values into time. That is the biggest lesson.

[27:28] Igor Kheifets

That’s seriously great advice. People vote with their wallets, they show you what they actually want by what they spend on. We vote with our calendars too, based on how much time and resources we allocate to different things. If somebody says they want to start a business but spent $800 last month on entertainment, that tells you where their values actually are.

Let’s shift to the family domain. What advice can you share on helping parents get their children to form better habits?

I’ll give you an example. I’m trying to teach my kids about investing right now. I built an app where they can lock in their savings for a certain period and earn interest. With my daughter, the first time we did it, the investment period was seven days and she earned 7% return. I thought she’d want to reinvest. Instead she took the money and bought something right away.

[28:50] Nir Eyal

Can I have that deal? I like that deal.

[28:52] Igor Kheifets

My friend said adopt me. Seriously. So I’ve been asking myself since then, what can I do to create environments and guardrails that guide my kids toward better decisions?

[29:24] Nir Eyal

I’m a big fan of natural consequences. I’m not big on lecturing and preaching. I’m more in the camp of let’s see what happens.

What you’ve got is the opportunity of example. Human beings have what’s called mimetic desire. Monkey see, monkey do. When you see someone else wanting something, you want it too. So, probably the best practical advice I could give you is to use that. Take your money out, no problem. Let’s see how much your brother has in a week. Wait a minute, if it’s 7% in ten weeks, oh my goodness, you’d have double. What’s the natural consequence of that?

Every human being has trouble understanding exponential growth. Making it tangible and then watching someone else want the thing is how mimetic desire works. From an evolutionary basis, mimetic desire is very, very powerful.

[31:21] Igor Kheifets

You’re right about that. As soon as my daughter started investing, my son approached me and said, hey, I want to do that too. The difference is that my son starts with a specific thing he wants, a toy or a game pass, and reverse engineers how much he needs to invest and for how long. My daughter is the opposite. She now seems to enjoy watching her money grow. She finds it interesting without needing a specific goal pulling her forward. So the same system produces two completely different relationships with money.

[32:31] Nir Eyal

I would count that success with your daughter as a big win. She’s learning the time value of money. Most people in the world, if they’ve got money in their pocket, they’re spending it. The fact that she can delay gratification is a huge win.

[33:09] Igor Kheifets

Let’s talk about beliefs because that’s what you’ve been most recently immersed in. As an entrepreneur, what would you say is the most common destructive belief entrepreneurs tend to have, and what’s the most empowering one?

[33:36] Nir Eyal

We know that beliefs shape our perception of reality. We don’t see reality clearly. We see reality as we believe it to be.

One of the defining traits of successful entrepreneurs is entrepreneurial alertness. They see things other people just can’t see. And I think this is a trait that can actually be learned over time based on how you choose to see yourself and the world.

There’s a beautiful study where they took people who self-identified as lucky or unlucky. Two groups. Same newspaper, same task: count how many images you see. The people who believed they were unlucky took two and a half minutes and counted 43 images. The people who believed they were lucky took just 11 seconds. Why the difference?

On page two of the newspaper, in big bold letters, was an image that said: there are 43 images in this newspaper, collect your reward. The unlucky people saw the image. They counted it. But it didn’t enter their conscious awareness. They didn’t read what it said. The lucky people saw it, read it, got up, went to collect their reward, and were out the door in 11 seconds.

This is exactly how entrepreneurial alertness works. When entrepreneurs have the right beliefs, they see opportunities that other people literally cannot see. It is right under their nose and they look straight past it.

So the most important entrepreneurial trait is that your beliefs allow you to see things the rest of us can’t see.

[36:17] Igor Kheifets

So are you saying the most destructive belief is believing you’re unlucky and the most powerful is believing you’re lucky?

[36:28] Nir Eyal

It’s believing that you can versus believing that you can’t.

The number one most important trait of who achieves their goals, whether business, personal, or fitness goals, is not intelligence. I’ve met very, very wealthy people. They’re not dummies, but they’re not the smartest people I’ve ever met. I’ve met professors with far more raw intellectual horsepower than some of the wealthiest people I know.

It’s not intelligence. It’s not skill. It’s not secret information. It’s not resources. The number one trait is persistence. Whether or not you quit. Because persistence doesn’t guarantee success, but quitting guarantees failure.

So if you believe you can succeed, you are much more likely to persist. Two identical marathon runners, identical in every single atom, identical training, identical physical condition. The only difference: one believes he can finish the marathon, one believes he cannot. Which one are you betting on?

Of course the one who believes. And yet we don’t think about this. We don’t realize how much power we have to determine the most important factor of whether we will succeed. It’s what we believe.

Now, a belief is not a fixed truth. It’s a conviction open to revision based on new evidence. So much of what we do day to day is not based on objective fact. It’s based on predictions about what will happen. Saying I can’t, you don’t know yet. It hasn’t happened. If you have a belief like I can build this business versus I can’t, that is the most important trait of whether you will likely succeed.

You can’t change objective reality through your beliefs. But you can absolutely change subjective reality.

[39:28] Igor Kheifets

So at the end of the day, it all comes down to watching the Matrix.

[39:32] Nir Eyal

It is one of my favorite movies. And I don’t think we have evidence that we’re in some kind of simulation from robot aliens. But we have very, very strong evidence that we live in a simulation of our own minds. Right now, your brain does not see reality clearly. None of us see reality clearly. There’s just too much information. So your brain has to constantly make a simulation of reality based on what it predicts will happen. We see reality filtered through our beliefs about reality so we can make predictions. In many ways we are absolutely living in a simulation, but the simulation is all up here. It’s not some kind of computer code from aliens. It’s a simulation of our own creation.

[40:36] Igor Kheifets

We’re coming on time. If anyone listening has never read any of your books, which one should they start with?

[40:51] Nir Eyal

Go in reverse order. Unless you know you need to build a habit-forming product right now, in which case read Hooked. But if you want to read Beyond Belief and Indistractable, start with Beyond Belief. Because Beyond Belief is the unlock code that makes all other self-help advice actually usable.

How many self-help books, YouTube videos, and podcasts have you consumed with great advice that you’ve done absolutely nothing about? Beyond Belief addresses that. The reason we’re not doing what we know we need to do is not that we lack information. We’re drowning in information. We’re held back by beliefs. So read Beyond Belief first. Then if you’re struggling with distraction, and these days who isn’t, move on to Indistractable.

[41:43] Igor Kheifets

This was Nir Eyal, the author of Hooked, Indistractable, and Beyond Belief. If you’ve never read any of his books, start with Beyond Belief and then move in reverse order. Nir, thank you so much for taking the time and putting us into a time box on your calendar. I really appreciate it. Until next time, we’ll chat. Have a good one.

[42:08] Outro

Thank you for listening to The List Building Lifestyle. Get access to previous episodes, transcripts, and other exclusive content at listbuildinglifestyleshow.com. Also, remember to claim your free copy of my best-selling book at www.igorsbook.com. It explains how I made millions with list building starting from scratch, plus $3,000 worth of free bonuses, including my best landing page templates, email swipe files, and traffic blueprints. Go to www.igorsbook.com now to claim your free package.