A new job, apartment or relationship can all come with a sheen of excitement. But that luster fades after a while. And everything seems a bit duller.
There's a term for that phenomenon, says Tali Sharot , a cognitive neuroscientist at University College London and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology: habituation. It's "our tendency to respond less and less to things that are repeated or constant." Its evolutionary purpose is to help us adapt to our surroundings so we can be on high alert for new threats.
But it can also impair our creativity and affect our levels of stress and happiness. So how do we add that sparkle back into our lives? In a new book, Look Again: The Power of Noticing What Was Always There , Sharot and her colleague Cass R. Sunstein , a professor at Harvard Law School and an expert on behavioral economics, discuss how to dis habituate.
That means making changes "that will allow us to feel joy again from the same things that are around us," says Sharot. Sharot talked to Life Kit about how to disrupt your routine, get out of your rut and revitalize your life. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
In your book, you reference an episode of The Twilight Zone . In it, a crook is killed during a robbery. In the afterlife, he's given infinite access to money, cars and women.
It's great at first, but eventually, he isn't happy. And surprise, you find out he's in hell. What lesson can we glean from this? The major takeaway here is that even g.