Look Again

1. Habituation Dims the Spark: The Brain's Natural Gray Scale

I suppose everything in existence takes its colour from the average hue of our surroundings.

The brain filters the constant. Habituation, a fundamental characteristic of life, causes us to respond less to stimuli that repeat. This means that even the best things in life—relationships, jobs, art—lose their sparkle over time. Our brains prioritize what is new and different, filtering out the old and expected to conserve resources and focus on potential threats or opportunities.

Troxler's fading. This principle is demonstrated by Troxler's fading, where fixed images disappear from our vision because the brain stops responding to unchanging stimuli. Similarly, we stop noticing the smell of tobacco or the buzz of an air conditioner. This process extends to more complex circumstances like wealth, poverty, and even discrimination.

Internal models. Our brains create internal models of predictable situations, inhibiting our responses when experiences match these models. This is why we get used to a neighbor's barking dog or background noise. Understanding this process is key to restoring our sense of amazement and addressing the bad things we no longer notice.

2. Breaks Resparks Joy: Intermittent Pleasure, Not Constant Comfort

If I was here for the last eighteen years doing that all day, every day, it probably wouldn’t still have pixie dust on it. But I go away, and I miss it so much. Then I come back, and it kind of resparkles.

Breaks trigger dishabituation. Frequent breaks from daily life allow us to focus on the joy of the details. Being away allows us to miss things and then experience them with fresh eyes. This is why Julia Roberts, despite her privileged life, marvels at her good fortune because she travels often and comes back home.

Macaroni and cheese. Pleasure results from incomplete and intermittent satisfaction of desires. A study showed that people who ate macaroni and cheese every day found it less pleasing over time, while those who ate it once a week continued to enjoy it. This illustrates that constant exposure diminishes pleasure, while breaks allow for rediscovery.

Small breaks. Even small breaks can trigger dishabituation and elicit joy. Studies show that listening to music with small breaks in between increases enjoyment compared to listening continuously. These breaks, regardless of what you do during them, reduce the tendency to adapt to the good stuff, making the bursts of joy last longer.

3. Midlife Sameness: The Unhappiness of Halting Change

Oh! I hope I am not that. It would leave no room for developments, and I intend to develop in many directions.

Midlife crisis. The dreaded "midlife crisis" is often rooted in a halt in change and learning. People in their forties and fifties experience a dip in happiness across various countries and circumstances. This is because they sense they are stuck, with less change, learning, and unpredictability in their lives.

Stability is not bad. Stability is not a bad thing, and life may be "good" in the conventional sense. But there is less change, less learning, less that is unknown or unpredictable. People may have some great things in their life, but many of those are constants to which they have habituated.

Happiness takes a turn. Happiness takes a turn for the better later in life. That image of the grouchy old man? The data does not support it. It may seem surprising, but happiness has been shown to rise post-midlife and continues to do so until the last couple of years of life. Maybe this is because during post-midlife (late fifties, early sixties) change kicks in once again—children leave home, adventures loom, people retire and seek new horizons.

4. Experiences Over Possessions: Lasting Memories vs. Fleeting Thrills

Nothing is more hopeless than a scheme of merriment.

Experiences induce more joy. Experiences (vacations, meals, concerts, courses) tend to induce more joy than new possessions (cars, houses, tablets). This is because satisfaction with material goods falls sharply over time, while satisfaction with experiences does not decline and often increases. The joy from a new refrigerator fades quickly, while the memory of a great concert lasts a lifetime.

Possessions are ephemeral. At the time of purchase, there is no difference in how happy these made people feel. While satisfaction with material goods falls sharply over time, satisfaction with experiences does not decline. Research shows that it often increases! The joy you get from refrigerators and concerts may be roughly the same at first, but while you habituate to a KitchenAid with French doors relatively fast, the happiness that is triggered by the memory of watching Prince perform at the O2 Arena in London before his untimely death lasts a lifetime.

Regret not purchasing an experience. The lingering impact of experiences on happiness relative to the fleeting impact of possessions may be one reason that people are more likely to regret not purchasing an experience (a trip to Paris, a pony ride) than not purchasing a thing. We often think possessions last longer, but in the human mind, the possession might be ephemeral, and the experience might last forever.

5. Social Media's Misconfiguration: The Illusion of Normal

We humans can adapt to a lot; it’s easy to sleepwalk into a state of chronic stress and distraction without ever reflecting that things could be different.

Social media alters perception. Social media misconfigures our perception of "normal," altering what we expect to experience and what we find surprising. Constant exposure to the curated lives of others shifts our adaptation level, leading to feelings of inadequacy and disappointment. This is because your explicit assessment of what is good does not habituate as fast as your feelings.

Facebook detox. Studies show that people are happier without Facebook. Deactivating accounts leads to increased happiness, life satisfaction, and reduced depression and anxiety. This is because social media acts like a constant irritant, and its removal allows us to focus on our own lives.

Addiction. Social media can be addictive, generating a continuous urge to engage despite negative effects. This is because not engaging causes pain and suffering. The more we log on, the more we need to log on to get the same emotional boost, creating a vicious cycle.

6. Change for Good: Chop Up the Good, Swallow the Bad Whole

A change would do you good.

Change introduces variety. Change introduces variety, but it also comes at a cost; it can produce hassle and also risk, as you never know what change will bring. So people may be reluctant to make a change, even when their current circumstances are not so good or are even bad.

Change is good. People whose virtual coin turned up heads were 25 percent more likely to make a change. More important, it turned out that change, on average, was good. Those who made a change were substantially happier than those who did not.

Chop up the good. When it comes to enjoyable experiences, it may be better to chop those experiences up into pieces. Take vacations, for example. A few years ago Tali went on a work trip to a sunny holiday resort in the Dominican Republic. Her mission was to find out what made vacationers the happiest and why. She interviewed people about their experiences and asked them to fill out surveys. When the data was in, she noticed one word that appeared again and again and again: first. Vacationers spoke of the joy of “seeing the ocean for the first time,” the “first swim in the pool,” the “first sip of a holiday cocktail.” Firsts seemed hugely important.

7. Resilience: Bouncing Back from Life's Challenges

Resilience is our ability to bounce back from life’s challenges and unforeseen difficulties, providing mental protection from emotional and mental disorders.

Mental health history. People with preexisting mental health problems have a particularly hard time adjusting to life changes. At the very beginning of the pandemic, its influence on people’s life satisfaction was the same, regardless of mental health history. The greatest difference appears shortly after lockdown commenced.

Adjustment disorder. Adjustment disorder is a condition in which individuals experience sadness, hopelessness, and a feeling of being overwhelmed in response to major life changes, bad or good. Ironically, positive events such as obtaining a new dream job, recovering from cancer after a long struggle, and finding love can all trigger an episode.

Exposure therapy. Exposure therapy is the most common therapy for phobias and obsessive-compulsive disorder (which often involves germophobia). The goal of the therapy is to expose you to the very thing that terrifies you in order to achieve habituation. The key is to control the exposure such that it is gradual—one bird at a time—and to do so in an environment that feels safe.

8. Creativity: Overcoming the Habituation of Thought

Without change there is no innovation, creativity, or incentive for improvement.

Change triggers dishabituation. Even minor changes have the power to trigger dishabituation by signaling that a new situation needs to be navigated. As a result, people are more likely to rethink the status quo. For example, after people move to a new country, they become better at solving creative puzzles.

Slow habituation. Slow habituation may enable a person to see what others no longer do and therefore perceive opportunities for improvement. If you make fewer assumptions of how things should be, you may be open to new possibilities.

Outsiders. New thinking, and real originality, often comes from people who are in some sense outsiders—individuals who have different knowledge or skill sets from others in the field. In law, some of the most creative work in the last fifty years has come from the field of economics.

9. Lying: The Snowball Effect of Dishonesty

It starts out with you taking a little bit, maybe a few hundred, a few thousand. You get comfortable with that, and before you know it, it snowballs into something big.

The brain habituates to dishonesty. With each additional lie, we observe a reduction in the amygdala's response—a form of habituation to lying. The greater the drop in the brain’s sensitivity to dishonesty, the more we lie the next time we have a chance.

Emotions fade. Repeated dishonesty is like a Chanel perfume you apply over and over. At first you easily detect its distinctive scent every time you spritz. But over time and with repeated applications, you can hardly sense its presence, so you apply it more liberally, oblivious to why no one will sit by you on your morning commute.

Nip it in the bud. Knowing that dishonesty escalates due to habituation has clear implications for how to decrease it at home and at work: nip it in the bud. If you ignore small transgressions, they may slowly snowball to acts with serious consequences. People might get used to dishonesty and no longer consider it wrong.

10. Misinformation: The Power of Repetition and the Truth Bias

Slogans should be persistently repeated until the very last individual has come to grasp the idea.

The illusory truth effect. Whenever a falsehood is repeated, people tend to think that it is true. As we will soon explain, this is partly because when a statement is repeated again and again, your brain processes it less and less as it is no longer surprising or new. The result is that you are more likely to accept it as a given.

Familiar, truthier. Repetition creates a feeling of familiarity. And when something sounds familiar, you assume it is true. This is because in life a feeling of familiarity is often (rightly) associated with truth, and a feeling of surprise is often (rightly) associated with implausibility.

Easier, truthier. When it is effortless for you to process information because of repetition (i.e., less neural response), you are more likely to accept it as true. Information that is easier to process—perhaps because it is printed in salient colors such as red or in easy-to-read fonts—is more likely to be believed.

11. Risk: The Perilous Path of Escalation

My comfort zone is like a little bubble around me, and I’ve pushed it in different directions and made it bigger and bigger until these objectives that seemed totally crazy eventually fall within the realm of the possible.

Risk habituation. Risk habituation is the tendency to perceive a behavior as less and less risky the more you engage in it, even though the actual threat remains the same. You find yourself taking greater and greater risks while feeling less and less scared.

Feelings. To assess risk, people often rely on their feelings. When you are about to do something risky—something that could result in a really good or a really bad outcome—you usually experience a surge of emotions, including fear, excitement, and arousal.

Högertrafikomläggningen. If you want to dishabituate people to a certain risk—your teenage son, your employees, yourself—you need to “shake it up.” Every so often change the environment, alter the context, so that people move out of their comfort zone.

12. Discrimination: Breaking the Chains of Low Expectations

We shall remain prisoners of culture unless we become aware of the process and force ourselves to confront it.

Habituation to discrimination. In a world where bias and discrimination are the norm, most people become habituated to them. We do not perceive the discrimination around us because we expect it. One more time: we notice what is surprising and different, but gloss over what is the same and anticipated.

In another's shoes. If you transform yourself from male to female, white to Black, or straight to gay, you will be more likely to perceive discrimination that you would otherwise not see. This is exactly what is reported by people who have undergone such changes.

Dishabituation entrepreneurs. Dishabituation entrepreneurs—people such as Margaret Sawyer, who are able to see the problem and react in real time—may be required to make the unseen seen. Sawyer is white, but she both observed the problematic nature of the Red Cross poster and pointed it out.

Last updated: March 18, 2025