15 Tactics to Break Free from Distraction with Nate Klemp
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Do you ever feel like your life has become a constant stream of distraction, pulling you away from what truly matters? I want to explore how we found ourselves stuck in this state of constant mental noise, and more importantly, how we break free. And as my guest Nate Klemp says...

I think what's on the other side of that discomfort is freedom. So we are going to share actionable strategies to quiet the chaos, open up mental clarity, and live more intentionally every day. And if you're like me and you've been searching for ways to break free from all this distraction, you will love this one. I'm Chris Hutchins. If you enjoy this episode, please share it with a friend or leave a comment or review. And if you want to keep upgrading your life, money, and travel, click follow or subscribe. Now let's get into it right after this.

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How did all this happen and what can we do about it? Yes, I think we all know that to be true. We all have that lived experience. Even as I was preparing for this interview, Chris, I had texts coming in from my wife about kids logistics. And I think if we can manage it more skillfully, that is a huge hack and a huge way in which we can improve our lives. And how do you think we got here?

Well, I think that we all know something interesting happened around 2007, where we get the advent of the smartphone. And then shortly after that, all of a sudden, we're all on Facebook and we're all on Twitter and social media. And I can tell you from my own personal phenomenological experience, when I was in college, for example, in the late 1990s,

I had a lot of time where I would just sit around and think, you know, and come up with ideas. And I might have an idle moment at the doctor's office. And that was an opportunity to reflect, you know, or maybe I'd even bring a book with me.

And it was right around that tipping point in the late 2010s where I think all of a sudden those idle moments were transformed into these regular opportunities for entering what I would call screen land.

which is basically just the land that's on the other side of our lock screen, the land of email, the land of text messages, the land of Instagram, the land of the ESPN app. We all have our own flavor of what that screen land looks like. That was like the key shift. And I think if you look at the mental health data, it's also pretty clear that something radical is shifting in our kids' mental health right around then, something radical is shifting in adult mental health right

skyrocketing rates of depression, suicide, anxiety. So something's happening right around then. And now we're so deep into it that it's become pretty much normalized. Yeah. What are some of the most surprising things you've found about all these distractions we have?

Well, there's all sorts of statistics about how we're glued to our screens and we're increasingly addicted to devices. But I thought it was really interesting. There was this set of surveys where they were trying to figure out how we prioritize screens over other things that probably should matter more to us. So they would ask people, would you rather spend an entire month without your pet or your screen, your smartphone?

40% of people said they'd rather spend an entire month without their pet. They asked people, "Would you rather spend an entire month without your significant other or your phone?" 44% of people chose their phone over their significant other. "Would you rather spend an entire month without having sex

Or would you rather give up your phone? 56% of people chose their phone over sex. And then the one that's really crazy to me is they ask people, would you rather amputate a finger of your choosing or give up your smartphone? 11% of people said they would rather cut off a finger of their choosing than give up their phone. So to me, those are actually the most interesting statistics because what they say is,

is something that I think we're all experiencing, that there's a way in which our devices have subtly taken over our ability to choose freely and distorted our ability to stay with the things that matter most to us, to live our highest priorities and our highest values.

Yeah, in your book, you said that there are 11 hours a day is how often the average American spends on their screens. I guess my question to you is what kind of impact does this have on us? And what's the cost of living with all these constant distractions? Well, I can tell you for me, part of the reason I got interested in writing about this is that it felt like there was this subtle shift happening in my life. The image I like to use is imagine you're living in a house.

and the ceiling of your house is descending at a rate of three inches per year. So one day to the next, you don't really notice anything different happening.

But over the course of years or decades of this, it just feels like there's less space. And that was the experience I was having, feeling more closed down in my own emotional experience, feeling like when I experienced something uncomfortable, a challenging emotion, a dark thought, something that was stressful, my first impulse all of a sudden became to reach out for my phone. And so the more I investigated...

I found that this is becoming a universal experience. And I think what makes it tricky is it's so subtle. It's not like phones are destroying our lives in an instantaneous and catastrophic way. It's this kind of energetic drag that's happening. And ultimately, I think the biggest risk here is, as I said before, to...

our freedom, to our ability to choose what matters, to choose where we want to direct our time and attention. And before we get too far where someone's like, okay, here's another person saying we should get rid of our phones and kind of- Totally. Let's preview what the kind of end result is without getting there and talk a little bit about what kind of benefit that has and what that looks like. I think the big benefit here is-

if you want to live in the modern world and still have a screen, which is the choice that I'm making, then the key benefit is to start to develop strategies and really a system of habits that can allow you to use the technologies that really do improve our lives in a lot of significant ways in such a way that they're actually enhancing your ability to do the productive tasks that are important to you, enhancing your ability to connect with your kids,

to be with your significant other and not taking away from your ability to be in the present moment, your ability to sort of enjoy the fullest possible experience of life. So that would be the promise for me. How can we keep these technologies

extract all of their incredible benefits, but use them in a more skillful way where we're not just sort of enslaved to the devices in our pocket. Obviously there's benefit of us having access to information, all of that side of it, but is there anything that we benefit from or does anyone benefit from having a more distracted mind? That's a great question. Interestingly, I think about distraction on two levels. There's external distraction, which is all the notifications coming into your smartphone, all the news alerts, all the texts. But then

But then there's also this more internal form of distraction psychologists call this mind wandering. And that's the form of distraction that's generated in our own mind where we're

As we all know, when we have idle time, one of the things that happens in the mind is the default mode network kicks in and we start thinking about random scenarios of the past or what we're going to have to do in the future. So it's this sort of getting lost in past future thinking. And there's been a lot of research actually, that kind of internal form of distraction, while problematic in some ways, can actually be really helpful for creativity.

that there's a way in which mind-wandering sometimes will generate that next big insight. So that form of distraction I think is good.

I think that external distraction can be helpful in certain circumstances, but the degree to which we're distracted now is usually a bad thing and usually something that we would be better off taming and sort of using more skillful tools to adjust to. You talked about skillful tools, tactics, strategies. It seemed like at the highest level, you kind of say we need to open our minds, zoom out a bit.

Let's talk about what these tactics look like and then let's get into them. There are a number of different tactics here. So the key distinction for me is closed versus open. When we're closed down, we're more prone to distraction. When we're more open, there's more space in the mind. There's more curiosity. There's more openness to alternative possibilities. And then in terms of the tools, a lot of those tools are about how we can manage our addiction to screens more skillfully.

The way I like to think about this is there's three classes of tools. One are what I would call restraint-based tools.

So these are tools that allow us to resist our devices. The second class is what I would call self-binding tools. So this is a term from addiction research. Self-binding is basically just a way of saying that we're going to create constraints that make it so difficult to touch our devices, it's all but impossible to do. And then the final class of tools, which I think is actually my favorite class, if I'm being honest, is what I would call indulgence-based tools.

rather than trying to resist our screens, we can actually use conscious indulgence. What I mean by that is consciously binging on these distractions as a way of essentially uprooting the desires and cultivating a little bit more wisdom around how we use our devices. So maybe we can go through each three and talk about some examples. Yeah, I'd love to go through each of these because it'd be great just to give people...

a list of different hacks and tools from which they can choose because some of them are going to work for some people, some obviously won't work for them. Perfect. Maybe we start with the third class, indulgence-based approaches. One of the things I did in my book, Open, is I decided that after a decade or so of trying to resist the urge to check my phone, trying to resist the urge to be on email and text all the time,

I wanted to try an experiment where I spent a few days just absolutely binging on my screens. And so the idea was to just lose myself in the world of Screenland, to satiate every desire I might possibly have for Instagram, social media, you name it, news, email, etc. And what was really interesting about this experience

is that I started to find over time that there was a way in which going so deep into Screenland and indulging in this way led to the opposite of desire, led to something more like revulsion. And we're all aware of the folk wisdom that says if you catch your kids smoking, have them smoke two packs and they'll never touch it again.

And there's actually a whole tradition of tantric Buddhism that teaches one of the ways in which we can change our relationship to things like drinking or sex or indulgent eating is to cultivate this practice of almost like intentional indulgence, conscious indulgence. And so after I did this three-day experience, what was really interesting is I woke up the next day

And I remember I had the thought, this is when I usually grab my phone and go to the bathroom, my morning ritual for the last decade. And for the first time in my entire life, that desire just completely fell flat. Like it wasn't even there. It had been extinguished, essentially. So you might be saying, wow, three days of binging on my screens, that sounds like a crazy practice. Why would I ever do that? Well, I don't think you need to do it for three days, first of all. But I think there is something really interesting about...

reversing this momentum. So instead of trying to resist these things, to indulge in them to the point where you're almost like over consuming and getting to that terrain of revulsion rather than desire, that can be really powerful. So even just doing this for a day or doing it for a few hours is it helps you see the desire and see the habit differently

which is really the starting point to begin to change your habits around these things. You said it extinguished that desire for how long? Because I imagine, you know, sometimes you overindulge in something, whether it's a type of food and you're like, I don't want this thing forever. And then like days, weeks go by and you're like, all right, wake up in the morning, grab my phone. Did it come back? Yeah, the extinction worked on two levels.

that extreme experience of just having no craving, that maybe lasted for a couple of weeks. So you're right. You get back to a situation where those desires reemerge and now you're kind of back in the predicament again. But I would say there was another level of change that happened that was really interesting, which is that even though those desires came back, there was something about having gone all the way with my phone

having seen everything there was to see. Something about that did, over the long term, change the underlying experience of craving my device and craving my phone.

The analogy I use is if you think back to high school and like somebody you had a crush on, if you could follow them around at that moment and watch them as they pulled out their night guard and, you know, start crying at the end of the day because they felt like some sort of spiral of low self-esteem, it would fundamentally change the experience of that crush because you will have seen everything there was to see. And so I think there's something similar we can do with our devices where we're

actually going deeper can take away a little bit of the mystery, you know, can dispel their ability to sort of mesmerize us and capture our attention. This episode is brought to you by Notion. Lately, I've been reflecting on how much smoother life and work have become with the right tools. And for me, one of those tools is Notion. Whether I'm brainstorming ideas, organizing tasks, or even mapping out long-term goals, Notion is where it all happens.

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Yeah, for me, this was my experience with TikTok, which was very casual. I was never an aggressive TikTok user. It was like a random thing. Every now and then I thought about it. And then one time I was like, why don't I just spend 30 minutes just like going at it? And at the end, I was like, I want the time back. And I felt so good about just deleting TikTok off my phone. But like, it took me seeing how much it could work.

waste beyond checking it for 10 minutes to get to the point that I was like, I don't need this. This also happens with me all the time with random mobile games. I'll find some crossword puzzle thing and then I'll just go crazy on it. And I'll be like, now that I've seen how crazy I can get, now I feel good deleting it. So it's worked for me in a slightly different way.

That to me is the essential approach. And what I love about that is your example shows that you can do this in 30 minutes. It doesn't have to be three days. And another thing you can do, which maybe doesn't even take 30 minutes, is when you're having that moment, like earlier this morning, I had that moment where I was about to start working on a new book that I'm writing.

And for some reason, I ended up on the ESPN app. Like I had to do something with a ticket to a football game that I'm going to, and then somehow, you know, just followed this choose your own adventure path to ESPN. And I had this moment of like, okay, am I going to do this right now? Because I'm supposed to be writing right now. And you can choose to distract yourself, but do it consciously and really start watching what's happening as you're doing that. And that also will change the experience.

and can make it less likely that you get hooked the next time. So what I mean by that is if I choose consciously in that moment, okay, we're doing ESPN now. And I pull up ESPN and I'm reading a story about Tyreek Hill and the Dolphins and then this and that. I'm also watching like, how do I feel as this is happening? I had an intention to write and here I am on ESPN. And if I watch that closely, what I'm feeling is like,

There's a kind of guilt. There's a kind of sadness. There's a kind of yuck factor. And so it helps me the next time to be a little bit more disciplined in that decision. Yeah, I remember when I had Nir Eyal on the podcast almost two years ago talking about distraction. He was like, even if you're going to give in, pausing for just a second to feel what the urge feels like.

Step one is just that. So you're like, oh, I need to go do this other thing. Pause, feel it. Even if you let yourself go, learning to recognize that moment will help you correct in the future, even if you're not correcting now. Well, and that pause is actually a really big deal because I've tested this a bunch and I would invite everybody who's listening to this to do the same. When you feel that desire,

And it could be for your phone or it could be for ice cream at the end of the night, whatever it is, right? You feel the desire to pause and then really study what happens to the desire as you stay in the pause. What I have learned from watching myself pretty closely is that there's about one to two minutes where that desire stays at a really high intense level and I can feel its pull.

But if I can get beyond the one or two minute mark, all of a sudden it's like it drops off a cliff. Like the desire really does start to go away. And usually we skip over those moments. We're so busy. We're doing a lot of things. You know, we just don't even notice them. But if you can notice them and almost start to examine or study what's happening in your mind in those moments, to your point,

All of a sudden, you'll notice that the desire actually leaves pretty quickly. I like that. Okay, we kind of got off track a little bit from binging. Should we go in reverse from three to two? Yeah, let's go from three to two. So number two was self-binding tactics. This is maybe the most extreme set of approaches. As I said, this comes from the field of addiction where...

Alcoholics, for example, will remove all of the alcohol from their house. And it turns out there are all sorts of clever ways we can do this with our phones. So one of the things we do in our family, which has been quite effective, is we have this thing called the K-safe. It's basically just this box that has a locking top

and you can put all of your devices in there. So your iPads, your phones, and then it has a timer on the top and you can set the timer for whatever you want, right? So I might set the timer for two hours. You push the button, it has a five second countdown. And at the end of those five seconds, you cannot get to your devices for the next two hours.

What I think is really interesting about this technique is that when I do it for the first minute or so, again, I feel this almost like panic. There's like this freak out. Oh my God, I don't have my phone. What if I need my phone? What if somebody's hurt? What if there's an emergency? And then after that,

There's this bubbling up of a kind of feeling of freedom. Like, wow, I literally don't have access to my phone right now. I could read a book. I could go sit outside in the yard. I could go walk around the block. So that I think can be a really cool thing, especially with kids. I have a daughter who's about to be 13. So we're playing with these things a lot because we can start to see these unconscious patterns in our kids in a much more dramatic way because they don't even know that there's an alternative world here.

So that's one thing. The other thing that I've been playing around with, there's this thing called the brick that you basically tap your phone to the brick and it becomes a dumb phone. So you can decide which apps you want to eliminate. And so you can take your smartphone, turn it into a dumb phone, go around town, do your thing. You don't have any access to distractions.

I have found that that's a nice compromise because the third way you can play this is to go to the dumb phone. So a lot of people now are getting flip phones. There's a thing called the light phone, which is super cool. It's just black and white, basic phone texting, music, things like that. But these are all ways that we can basically constrain ourselves. It's kind of like the story of Odysseus.

where he was going by the island where the sirens were singing and anybody who heard the siren singing would be attracted to the island and end up like crashing their ship. So he told his crew, strap me to the mast, you know, just tie me up. They all had like, you know, earplugs, couldn't hear anything. Odysseus got to experience that in just this fully constrained manner. That's kind of what I think we can play with when it comes to our devices. Okay.

So we could bind ourselves and kind of do that. I mentioned this in an episode earlier that if someone wants to experiment without even making a purchase right now, there are settings that I've found in iOS, probably similar on Android, where you can kind of create these modes. One of the things I didn't realize until playing with it recently is you can go into a mode where your home screen is empty.

You can basically say, don't show any home screen in this mode. And now by default, when I wake up, like I basically, my phone is in sleep mode or no distraction mode, 24 hours a day. And I have to take it out of one of those. And just the fact that I have to take it out means that any time of day, when I look at my phone, there are no notification icons. Doesn't mean I can't go into email and see all the emails. It just means that like by default, I'm not seeing a bunch of apps and a bunch of red dots or,

but it's not nearly as restrictive as locking something. So I'm going to look into this brick device. Nice. All right, now let's move back up to number one. Okay, restraint-based tools and tactics. The big idea here is in habit formation research, there's this idea of environmental design, which basically says, can you design temptation-free environments? Or put differently, can you put friction between you and temptation?

and remove friction between you and what you most want to focus your time and energy on. So that's the big macro level concept here. And then we can apply that concept to all of the various environments and spaces where we find ourselves. So the first space that I think is kind of interesting, which is a little bit ethereal, is the space of time, the temporal space.

And the tactic here, Chris, you're going to find this kind of funny. I think that you might have inspired this idea because I was on all the hacks, I don't know, three years ago, we were talking about the 80-80 marriage and relationships, and we're talking about devices and how corrosive these devices are to couples. And you said something about how when I abstain from checking my device for a long period of time,

When I then go to check my device, the pleasure is way more intense. It's like kind of amazing actually. And I had been experimenting with something similar where I would actually block off time each day for distraction. So it was like 12 to 1230, that's my distraction time. And I realized thanks to what you were describing that there's something interesting happening here. I ended up calling it dopamine dessert.

So the basic hack here is when you schedule this time for just binging on distraction, but then you're also skillful at not checking those distractions earlier in the day when you're actually trying to do work or trying to be with your family or whatever it is, you get to that time

And it really is kind of like food where if you don't eat chocolate cake all day and you eat pretty good nutritious foods, but then after dinner, you give yourself the indulgence of having a slice of chocolate cake and maybe some ice cream. It is so much better than if you just eat chocolate cake all day. And so that's one tool that has been really transformative for me, dopamine dessert, just basically deciding what,

If I were to block off time for distraction, what's the best time to make that happen for me? And then as you're going through the day and you get those urges to just remind yourself, oh, no, it's cool. I don't have to check my phone right now. I don't have to check the news right now. I've got dopamine dessert coming up.

So that's been a real game changer for me. And I got to thank you on that one because I feel like you were part of the inspiration. Yeah, I've said this a lot of times and I'm in the middle of a window right now where we're talking, I'm not checking my email. And I think we've all had that experience of like, well, let's just go see, is there anything there? If you're doing that all day, it seems to be like,

it's either zero or one new things. And then you leave for an hour or two hours and you're like, oh my gosh, there's 20 new things. Like, this is really exciting. And so I experience that all the time. The only thing I'll say is,

I don't even know if it has to be as structured as like 1215 to 1230 is this as much for me. It's more, you know what? I'm going to go do something and I'm just not going to check email or social media or anything for the next few hours. And I know I'll get this reward at the end. It's not as scheduled as it is. I just know that this, I don't know, phenomenon or whatever, you know, exists so I can feel good about,

depriving myself of this urge because I know there's going to be a reward without a schedule. So if anyone hears this and says, well, I'm not the kind of person that wants to schedule my email and all that, as much as that's probably a really good habit, I haven't been great at adhering to that habit, but you can do it without. Yeah. And I don't really schedule it formally either. So it's not actually in my calendar, but my informal cue is lunch. Usually I'm

At my house, by myself, and that's the time where I allow myself to check the news and check email and go to Instagram and all these different things. It is, in a weird way, something I look forward to.

And it also helps me actually get some writing done in the morning. So it has a lot of different benefits. So we talked a lot about distraction, but you talked about everything open and closed at the beginning. We haven't really talked about other people and their role in this and what being open brings you with relationships and human interaction. Yeah. As I think about this tendency to close that many of us are familiar with,

It's happening on two levels, primarily. The first level is what we've been talking about, that there's a kind of internal form of closure to our own mind, to our own discomfort, to challenging emotions, things like that. So that's one level at which this is happening. And when we close in that way, screen addiction becomes the manifestation of that form of closure. The other form of closure is

that has been really interesting to me, especially as someone who my training before writing about things like meditation and relationships was political philosophy. I was a professor of political philosophy. And so the second layer of closure that I think we can all relate to is a kind of closing down to people who might disagree with us, people who have a different worldview, particularly in the realm of politics.

That's the other dimension to me of closed versus open. And the statistics really bear out that there's a similar macro level change happening here to the kind of change that's going on with our devices. So in 1980, around 47% of people had a warm and favorable view of the opposite political party.

In 2020, that number went down to 25%. It'll be interesting. I'm sure they'll run that survey again in 2024. We'll see what those numbers look like. But there's been this shift toward a more polarized politics. And so if we're going to explore this idea of how do we open our mind, I think one way to do it is through changing our relationship to our devices. But the other way to do it

is to think about ways that we can change our relationships to other people, particularly those people who disagree with us, and see if we can cultivate a little bit more openness in those spaces as well.

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I just want to thank you quick for listening to and supporting the show. Your support is what keeps this show going. To get all of the URLs, codes, deals, and discounts from our partners, you can go to allthehacks.com slash deals. So please consider supporting those who support us. And how do we do that? Obviously, we talked about tactics to become less distracted on your devices, but what's the first step to being more open to other perspectives?

Well, I'll tell you what I did, which is very extreme. And then I can give some easier habits and hacks after that. I live in Boulder, Colorado, which is a left of center town. I'm similar in politics to most of my neighbors. And so as I was thinking about this concept, I was trying to think about, well, if I were to really go all the way with this and explore opening to the other side, what's the group that would be most challenging for me?

And the answer that came up for me was the National Rifle Association. So I ended up enrolling in a National Rifle Association concealed carry training.

where I went to rural Colorado and learned all about guns and shotguns, which I hadn't done ever in my life, really. And it was this totally mind-blowing experience. And the key to it was going into that experience not with the vantage point of our ordinary habits, where I was thinking like, oh, I'm going to convince all these people to support gun control and convince them that they're wrong. It was more going into this with an attitude of trying to understand

And so that's what I did. I spent quite a bit of time just really asking questions. And in the end, it didn't so much change my political view, but it did give me this mind-blowing experience, which is really seeing the humanity of these people who I considered the enemy before. And seeing that they, just like me, have kids and marriages and neighbors that they care about, and they're fundamentally good people.

That, to me, was a really kind of mind-shattering realization because I had spent so long in this highly polarized media environment where somehow in my own mind, I had developed these mental caricatures of who these people were. And so to just blow that up for me was really powerful experience.

So that's an extreme thing that one could do, but you could do a more deflationary version of that. It might look like talking to your neighbor who you disagree with from a place of genuine curiosity, or maybe it's as simple as just diversifying your information environment. One of the tendencies many of us have is to get all of our news and information from a single perspective. So

One of the things I try really hard to do is to make sure that my information is coming from a lot of different sources and a lot of different perspectives. And that in itself creates this more contestatory environment, even in your own mind, where things aren't so clear all the time. And so how did you find those sources? Like to get really tactical, how do you find them without going off into...

necessarily like the tabloid-esque world, but to find good but different perspectives. It's really challenging right now because as you say, if you start going into the world of pure opinion journalism, you can end up in conspiracy land, which I did for this project. It was interesting in its own right, but I don't think that's necessarily helpful.

So what I do, which is pretty simple, is I try to just take the mainstream outlets and use those as point counterpoints to one another. So for me, reading the news, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, they definitely represent two very different perspectives and are a nice point counterpoint. So if you wanted to keep it simple, something like that, where you just have

a couple mainstream news sources that are giving you a slightly different take that's more aligned with one side or the other.

Yeah, I could see going down quite the rabbit hole in this process. There are websites where if you say like, show me media outlets based on their political lean, you know, you could probably get a pretty large database of outlets at every point along the way. Maybe someone has a two by two matrix of how much is fact based versus kind of opinion based, which might help.

Absolutely. And I think these two things that we're talking about, political polarization and screen addiction, are absolutely connected. It's no coincidence that you get this rise of levels of addiction and...

desire for our screens that corresponds with the rise of polarization, because we all know how these algorithms work, right? They're rewarding information that's more inflammatory. You're setting them up such that you're following people you already agree with. You're unfollowing people you don't agree with. So there's a way in which these two problems are interconnected. And if we're really trying to use these technologies more skillfully, not throw them away, but just

become a little bit better at using them, where we're maintaining that freedom of mind, that openness, I think we want to look at both dimensions of the problem. And just to be clear, being open doesn't mean you have to blindly accept everyone else's perspective, right? Absolutely. Yeah. I firmly believe that you can be open and have really strong political beliefs,

I think the shift is that you're more interested in hearing other perspectives. You're curious about understanding the other side versus being so committed to your own perspective that you don't even want to hear the arguments of the other side. That's the difference. So I really don't think you have to give up on political action or give up on having really strong beliefs. Those are important. We need those.

but we can change the way we interact with the other side. And to me, this has been actually somewhat life-changing because I have close friends and family members and those relationships started to change and started to be diminished by these conditions. The more I tried to make this shift, the more I tried to engage with these folks from a spirit of openness with a little bit more curiosity,

I started to find that the quality of those relationships went back to where it was before all of this kind of craziness that happened. And any advice if you are trying to engage with someone and maybe they have strong opinions, but maybe they're not as open to having a dialogue with someone who disagrees? That feels like the ultimate practice. I would think of that as the advanced practice, especially because it's not just your conversational partner might be...

closed down and uninterested, I think what's even more difficult about those conversations is usually your conversational partner starts to get in a dysregulated emotional state, starts to get irritated, starts to get angry. And we know from the research in psychology, there's this whole phenomenon called social contagion, where basically a fancy way of saying if somebody's really angry, you instinctively get angry. That's just the way the human brain works. So in those moments,

We have a couple options. One is, you know, maybe that's a time to exit the conversation and leave and talk about it later. Or if you want to play around with what's called non-complementary behavior, you can start playing with the idea of, okay, I'm just going to recognize there's a lot of anger coming from the other side. I can feel the anger coming up inside of me. I'm going to let that move through and then see what happens when I stay in this place of curiosity.

So non-complementary behavior is basically saying you're flipping the script. You're approaching anger with kindness or irritation with love or whatever you want to say or curiosity. And that's actually a great relationship tactic, by the way, for couples that when your partner is super pissed off at you, if you can shift to that place of curiosity and play and

in the midst of their anger, it's very difficult to do, but that's a practice that can allow you to kind of stay in that more grounded place and be open to the irritation of the person you're talking to without biting the hook. Could you give an example of what that would actually look like? Yeah, well, maybe the easiest place to start with an example would be

In a relationship setting, this happens all the time where a partner will say, why can't you load the dishwasher correctly? Every time you load this thing, you put the bowls in the wrong way. The other partner hears that and there's an immediate feeling of anger and irritation. It's sort of that mirror that's happening in the conversation or the relationship.

If the second partner were to just follow the default flow of habit, the comment back would be something like, why are you micromanaging me? This is insane. What am I, your employee? So that would be the default way in which we respond in kind. That would be complimentary behavior. Non-complimentary behavior might be saying like, you know, I have been trying to achieve spousal perfection for a decade now and I just keep falling short. I'm sorry. So that would be a joke. I do that sometimes.

Or maybe it's genuine curiosity, like, hey, can you tell me more about the bowl thing? Why load the bowls that way? I'd love to know more about why this is so important to you. You know, I want to make sure we're connected and close. So that might be the relationship manifestation. But you could imagine doing a similar thing in a political conversation, like using humor, using curiosity as a way to just help everyone in the conversation relax a little bit and de-escalate the emotions that are happening.

I mean, obviously, if you apply some of this to your relationship, I can see some of the benefits. But if we move back to broad opening up

you know, yourself, your mind. What comes from this open mind? What is the end goal in terms of how it impacts our life and our well-being beyond just having a little bit more focus and understanding of other perspectives? The basic answer is that when we live with a closed down mind, when we allow screen addiction and polarization to capture our behavior and our habits,

life starts to feel really small. When we're able to cultivate a little bit more openness, all of a sudden life, the mind itself starts to feel bigger. And what I mean by that is that there are more possibilities. There's just more curiosity. In the end, I think the ultimate virtue, the ultimate benefit is

is feeling like we have a little bit more freedom. When you wake up in one of those really stressed out moods and you can't help but grab your phone and do whatever it is that's your distraction urge, maybe it's like a game or Instagram, there's just a way in which you're running on automatic habits. There's a way in which you're not actually making the choice to do that.

And so I think that's the ultimate benefit is to be able to actually make a choice around how we spend our time and attention. And the word I would use for that is freedom. I mean, for me, freedom describes a state in which we're okay to feel something that doesn't feel great in our body. We're okay to feel some sadness or anxiety and not immediately check out with our phone. We're okay to have a really difficult political conversation that might scare us.

or might make us question our own beliefs. All of those things are uncomfortable, but I think what's on the other side of that discomfort is freedom. So that would be my main argument for why you should maybe spend a little bit more time and energy on cultivating more openness and interrupting some of these patterns of closure that we all get stuck in. And for someone listening, what would you say is the one thing that they should take away and put into their practice?

The one thing I would recommend that people do is really take a close look about your relationship to your devices. And I know you hear this all the time and it's almost become cliche, but the reason I think that is really powerful and important is that

These devices are creating this subtle drag on our productivity, subtle drag on our connection and relationships, a subtle drag on just our life force and energy, frankly. And if you can start to mitigate the drag of those devices,

and create an alternative momentum where you have a little bit more freedom with how you direct your time and attention, that's something that can powerfully change your life. It can change your life in the realm of work, obviously, because doing really good work is hard and it requires an undistracted state for the most part. It can change your relationships. As a writer in relationships, we found devices to be perhaps the most formidable obstacle that modern couples have.

And it can just change your ability to show up every day with a little bit more creativity, a little bit more possibility in the mind. I like that. I know probably somewhere earlier in this conversation, you mentioned some of us have addictions to our screens. When I hear that, I'm like, no, that's not me. Are there ways that I could actually go and kind of like diagnose this and kind of understand how strong that pull is for me? Yeah.

Yes, I use the term screen addiction. Some people have pushed back on that, but there are a few caveats here. Caveat one, screen addiction is different from other forms of substance abuse addiction to things like drugs and alcohol. It's more akin to what psychologists would call a behavioral addiction. So other behavioral addictions include things like gambling or shopping addiction, something like that. So that's caveat number one.

Caveat number two, when I say screen addiction, it doesn't mean that we're all experiencing an extreme form of addiction. So there are people who are so addicted to their screens

that they cannot live a normal life. That is a true form of extreme screen addiction. While there may be a few people listening to this who are experiencing that, my guess is most of the listeners are experiencing something more in the range of mild to moderate screen addiction, where your life has not been destroyed by your phone or your devices, but it may be affected by it in really significant ways.

And so if you want to assess that, there are actually a number of different scientifically validated tools to assess what's usually called internet addiction in the literature. I talk about some of these in the screen addiction chapter in the book. You can find many of these online.

Adam Alter, a professor at NYU in marketing, he actually has a really great book called Irresistible, which is all about screen addiction. He has his own survey in that book that you can take that's a few questions. So you can actually assess yourself and get a better sense of like, hey, am I in the mild to moderate range? Do I not feel this at all? Or am I experiencing something a little bit more extreme? We'll link to a couple of those in the show notes.

This has been great. Where can anyone who wants to go deeper on all of this go? Yeah, well, the book is called Open. It's available wherever books are sold. My website, nateklempp.com has some various resources. I have a free guide to decluttering your mind. And then my wife, Kaylee, and I, we write a newsletter every couple of weeks called the Klempp Insights Newsletter.

And that's a fun thing to subscribe to because we're basically just offering tips both on how you might manage your mind and screen addiction and openness, things like that, but also how you can manage your relationships more skillfully and the intersection of all these things when it comes to life and relationship. And if you want to go deeper on relationship stuff, we actually did an episode, Me, You, Minds,

my wife and your wife about relationships. So I'll link to that in the show notes. It was a lot of fun. Yeah, that was a really fun episode. And I love that we had four different people in the episode, all the different perspectives going. It was really a great conversation. Yes. So awesome. Nate, thank you so much for being here. Thanks for having me, Chris.

I really hope you enjoyed this one. It was a lot of fun having Nate back on the show. And more importantly, I hope going into the new year, this really helps you be more focused and more open and distraction free and focus on what really matters. Intentionality is so important. It's something I'm focused on as well. Thank you so much for listening. Have an incredible holiday with family and friends, and I will see you next week.