What the heck is a Hook Model?
Ever see a notification light up your phone and get a little rush of excitement? Or find yourself scrolling through Instagram and by the time you look up somehow 20 minutes have flown by? How about reaching for your phone the moment you wake up in the morning, before you’ve even had a moment to wipe the sleep from your eyes? We’ve all been there.
Today, we’re going to get to the heart of why the “free” products we use every day—from Twitter to Facebook to Instagram to Youtube—are actually costing us huge when it comes to our happiness, sanity, and general mental health. But there’s good news, a light at the end of the tunnel: we have choice. So we’ll also get into what we can do to reverse the tides and bring more joy and intention back into our daily lives.
What is the Hook Model?
You may not know it yet, but the Hook Model rules your life. What the heck is the Hook Model, you ask? It’s a concept created and named by entrepreneur and investor Nir Eyal to describe the way businesses take advantage of our basic human instincts to encourage us to use their products daily. It boils down to four simple components that work together in a cyclical loop:
A trigger: these can be either internal (feeding on our memories, our emotions, our routines) or external (something grabbing our attention like notifications, billboards, emails, calls-to-action)
An action: you respond to this trigger, in anticipation of a perceived reward
A reward: the product rewards you with anything from a sense of mastery to a sense of connection to your community to an acquisition of knowledge or materials
An investment: the product gives you validation and helps you understand how your action today will lead to long-term rewards that keeps you coming back for more
Why is the Hook Model so effective?
Simply put, the best product designers in the world are great at their jobs. That means they’re always looking for ways to keep us hooked and using their products every day, multiple times a day. And listen—they knew exactly what they were doing when they created the features that keep us coming back for more. In fact, here are quotes from two people in charge of creating addictive features in products:
"It's as if they're taking behavioural cocaine and just sprinkling it all over your interface and that's the thing that keeps you like coming back and back and back… Behind every screen on your phone, there are generally like literally a thousand engineers that have worked on this thing to try to make it maximally addicting." – Aza Raskin, former Mozilla employee and the inventor of infinite scrolling
"The vast majority of push notifications are just distractions that pull us out of the moment. They get us hooked on pulling our phones out and getting lost in a quick hit of information that could wait for later, or doesn't matter at all." – Justin Rosenstein, former Facebook engineering lead and co-creator of the ‘Like’ button
I like to refer to this feeling as the Infinite Overwhelm. It’s the opposite of joy, packaged up in a shiny, irresistible package we can’t wait to rip open again and again. Our lives have become a buzz of noise, of notifications, of distractions.
How can we escape the Hook Model?
The simple fact is that the Hook Model is here to stay. Instead of resisting it, instead of pretending it doesn’t exist, we need to learn to work with it and consume in moderation. Consider these strategies to build healthier screen time habits—and in turn, usher more joy into your life.
1. Awareness
The great news? You’re already practicing awareness right now. By reading this article, you’re arming yourself with the knowledge of what’s happening behind the scenes to create that never-ending cycle of chasing that dopamine high. Another wonderful awareness strategy is to use your phone’s screen time feature (here’s some information on how to activate this feature for iPhone and Android users) to track where you spend your time in a day, and how many hours you spend glued to your phone. Try and approach this with a sense of curiosity and avoid self-judgment—you’re just learning your habits.
2. Replace absent scrolling with intentional connection
The best way to reset a habit is to replace it with a new one. Consider what brings you joy and happiness. What rituals and activities help you feel more connected to yourself, more connected to your loved ones and community? Try setting aside some time every day to reach out to a loved one, or to curl up on the couch with your pup and a book.
3. Consider paid alternatives
If you don't pay for a product, you are the product. The Hook Model is most prevalent in free apps and products, since companies make money off the advertisements you see every single day. Consider paying for the products that truly serve you. If a company gets money from you upfront, they feel less pressure to get money from bombarding you with advertisements, notifications, and urgently phrased calls-to-action.
Don’t get me wrong—like breaking any habit, this is by no means going to be an easy path. It’s important to stay out of judgment, remembering that this is a constant learning process. But I promise you that once you free up time in your schedule, regaining time you can instead spend on the activities that fill up your cup—it will be well worth it.
