Life Kit offers tips on appreciating life's small joys

Transcript

ANDREW LIMBONG, HOST:

Sometimes you have a blah day. It happens, right? Sometimes it's a blah week, and sometimes that blah feeling can stretch out for longer than you'd like. That's partly because of something called habituation, which is our natural tendency to respond less and less to things that happen repeatedly.

TALI SHAROT: Even great things in your life, if they're always there, they don't excite you as much. They don't bring you as much joy.

LIMBONG: Cognitive neuroscientist Tali Sharot co-wrote a book about fighting habituation. It's titled "Look Again: The Power Of Noticing What Was Always There," and I spoke to her for NPR's Life Kit podcast. And we were talking about how the tricky thing about fighting habituation is that habituation is actually pretty helpful, evolutionarily speaking. This tendency to not respond to things that happen repeatedly can be seen in every species studied.

SHAROT: Apes or dogs or bees - every single animal on Earth habituates. And, you know, when you see something that is so general that you see it in all species, there's usually a good reason for it.

LIMBONG: And that reason is that if we can adapt to our surroundings and filter out some of the noise, our brain has the space to be on high alert for any new threats and act fast. But the thing is, says Tali Sharot, we don't just habituate to our physical environment.

SHAROT: Just as you get used and habituate to smell or to temperature, you also get used to more complex things in your life and in society.

LIMBONG: Our jobs, our relationships, our overall happiness.

SHAROT: It's a phenomena that really affects all aspects of our life.

LIMBONG: So how do we break out of this? How do we disappear? Sharot's advice falls into two buckets. The first is to take a break.

SHAROT: When you habituate to something, if you remove yourself from that environment, from that situation for a certain amount of time, and then you come back, then you'll be better able to notice those things that are great, but you didn't notice them after a while because they were always there.

LIMBONG: This could mean anything from a short trip away. Or, if you don't have the PTO, something as simple as taking a mental break can do.

SHAROT: So if you close your eyes and really imagine not having your house, not having your family, whatever good thing you have, not having your job, and really try to imagine it with vividness and detail, when you open your eyes again, right? Again, there's at least some sort of dishabituation and this kind of feeling again of gratefulness.

LIMBONG: The second bucket is variety. Introduce some change into your life. Again, this can mean something big, like switching jobs or moving somewhere new. But it can also be something smaller, like meeting new people or taking on a new skill.

SHAROT: In any one of those situations, what you're doing is you're putting yourself in a state of learning. You need to learn about something new. And it turns out that learning is one of the things that really induces the most joy in people.

LIMBONG: The important thing to know is that it's more effective if this variety that you're adding takes the form of experiences rather than stuff that you buy.

SHAROT: The thing with material things is that we do habituate to them faster.

LIMBONG: Sharot says dishabituating can foster creativity and engage the problem-solving part of your brain, and it can also increase happiness because in a weird way, the thing about change is that it can help you notice the parts of your life that are constant. For more tips from Life Kit, go to npr.org/lifekit. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.