Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - Modern Life Numbs You. Here’s The Neuroscience Of Waking Up | Tali Sharot

Episode Date: September 16, 2024

It’s so easy, especially these days, to numb out. To get bored. To move through life on autopilot. There is even a scientific term for this: habituation.Today we’re talking to a researcher who co-authored a new book about the neuroscience of habit and how to wake up again. To make things exciting. Or as she says, to “re-sparkle”. Tali Sharot is a professor of cognitive neuroscience at University College London and MIT. She’s written several books including The Optimism Bias and The Influential Mind. Her latest, co-written with Cass Sunstein, is called Look Again: The Power of Noticing What Was Always There. In this episode we talk about:What habituation is and what’s going on in the brain when it happensHow it negatively impacts the joy we feel in life – and inversely – how it can make us stop noticing the bad stuffKey strategies for disrupting habituation and introducing change and variety into your lifeThe interesting relationship between creativity and people who habituate slowlyHow habituation impacts our relationshipsWhy it’s important to break up the good experiences, but swallow the bad whole.How to wake up from a “technologically induced coma”How people emotionally habituate to dishonesty and lyingAnd lastly, we talk about the dangers of habituating to a slow, incremental rise in tyranny – and how dis-habituation entrepreneurs can helpRelated Episodes:#345 How to Change Your Habits | Katy MilkmanHow Turning Habits Into Rituals Can Help You At Home, At Work, And When You’re Anxious | Michael NortonMaking and Breaking Habits, Sanely | Kelly McGonigalSign up for Dan’s weekly newsletter hereFollow Dan on social: Instagram, TikTokTen Percent Happier online bookstoreSubscribe to our YouTube ChannelOur favorite playlists on: Anxiety, Sleep, Relationships, Most Popular EpisodesFull Shownotes:  https://happierapp.com/podcast/tph/tali-sharot-828See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondery Plus subscribers can listen to 10% happier early and ad free right now. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple podcasts. This is the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hello everybody, how we doing? It is so easy, especially these days, to numb out, to get bored, to move through life on autopilot. There's even apparently a scientific term for this, habituation. Today we're going to talk to a researcher who has co-authored a new book about the neuroscience of habituation and

How to wake up again to make things exciting to make things fresh or she says to? re-sparkle Tali Sherritt is a professor of cognitive neuroscience at University College London and MIT She's written several books including the The Optimism Bias and The Influential Mind. Her latest co-authored with Cass Sunstein is called Look Again, The Power of Noticing What Was Already There. In this conversation, we talk about what habituation is and what's going on in the brain when it's happening,

how it negatively impacts the joy you can feel in daily life, and inversely, how it can make us stop noticing the bad stuff. Key strategies for disrupting habituation and introducing change and variety into your life including vacations, taking breaks, even taking a different route to work. The fascinating relationship between creativity and people who habituate slowly. How habituation impacts our relationships, as Tali says, habit and routine are anti-afrodisiacs,

why it's important to break up good experiences but swallow the bad whole, and how people habituate to dishonesty and lying. We'll get started with Tali Sharrett right after this. But first some BSP or blatant self-promotion. Last week I launched a new venture over on Substack. If you want to check it out, you can go to danharris.com or just go to Substack and search under my name. If this is new news to you, this new project, let me just briefly tell you what I'll be doing over on Substack.

I will be chatting directly with listeners. I'll be hosting live video AMAs or ask me anything sessions. I'll be leading live video AMAs, or Ask Me Anything sessions. I'll be leading live guided meditations and more on the regular. If you want full details, head on over to danharris.com or just check out last Tuesday's episode where I explained why I am moving away from the meditation app I co-founded

and striking out on my own. This week over on danharris.com, I'm looking forward to our first live AMA. I'll be online and on camera and you can ask me anything. It's gonna be at 11 a.m. Eastern, 8 a.m. Pacific. I hope you'll show up and ask me whatever's on your mind. I'm both nervous and excited to connect more with all of you, the listeners of this show.

I'm a little afraid nobody's gonna show up, so do me a solid, sign up and come over and hang out. Also, while I'm doing my own thing these days, I am gonna keep telling you about what's happening over on the meditation app that used to be called 10% Happier and is now called Just Happier. Even though I don't work there anymore, I'm gonna keep updating you on their doings.

The Happier team has re-imagined the app reflecting the belief that no two journeys are the same and your meditation app should meet you where you are to help you achieve more than you thought possible. Happier introduces new ways to meditate and updated features that bring mindfulness to you on and off the cushion. The app checks in with you monthly

and adapts to your needs and goals, whether you've been practicing for three minutes or 30 years. Download the new Happier app today to discover meditation that evolves with you. Listening to Audible helps your imagination soar. Whether you listen to stories, motivation, expert advice, any genre you love, you can be inspired to imagine new worlds, new possibilities, new ways of thinking.

Listening can lead to positive change in your mood, your habits, and ultimately your overall well-being. Audible has the best selection of audiobooks without exception, along with popular podcasts and exclusive Audible originals, all in one easy app. Enjoy Audible anytime while doing other things, household chores, exercising on the road, commuting, you name it. My wife Bianca and I have been listening to many audiobooks as we drive around for summer vacations. We listen to Life by Keith Richards.

Keith, if you're listening, I'd love to have you on the show. We also listen to Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari. And Yuval, if you're listening to this, we would also love to have you on the show. So audiobooks, yes, audible, yes, love it. There's more to imagine when you listen. Sign up for a free 30 day Audible trial

and your first audio book is free. Visit audible.ca, audible.ca. Alice and Matt here from British Scandal. Matt, if we had a bingo card, what would be on there? Oh, compelling storytelling, egotistical white men and dubious humor. If that sounds like your cup of tea, you will love our podcast, British Scandal, the show where every week we bring you stories from this green and not always so pleasant land. We've looked at spies, politicians,

media magnates, a king, no one is safe. And knowing our country, we won't be out of a job anytime soon. Follow British Scandal wherever you listen to your podcasts. time soon. Follow British scandal wherever you listen to your podcasts. Tali Sherritt, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me. What is habituation? So habituation is our tendency to respond less and less to things that are frequent or constant. So an easy example is you walk into your room. It's full of cigarette smoke. At first, the smell is really overwhelming, but studies show that within 20

minutes, you cannot detect the smell any longer or you, there's an AC in the background, but it's been there all day. So you don't even notice it. Right. So in the first case with the smoke, it's your olfactory neurons. They stop responding to a smell that's been there for a while. In the case of the AC, perhaps neurons in your auditory cortex stop responding. And just as we stop responding to smells or noise or even temperature that's been there

for a while, we also stop responding emotionally and physiologically to more complex phenomena in our life. A new relationship perhaps will excite less over time. There are a lot of great things in our life, but if they've been there for a while in your home and your perhaps job, they will not elicit as much joy on a daily basis. But also we stop responding to the not so great things in our life and society if they've been there for a while. So there could be some terrible things, sexism, racism,

cracks in our personal relationship, inefficiencies in the workplace. If they have been there constantly, we tend to notice them less. And if we tend to notice them less, we might not be driven to change. So on the upside, there's what is sometimes referred to as hedonic adaptation,

where we get a new car and instead of it being delightful for two years, it's delightful for two weeks. And the downside, there's what Al Gore talked about as the frog in a boiling pot of water. As the water slowly comes to a boil, you don't notice it until it's too late. And either of these can have noxious impacts. Right. So we don't feel as much joy in response to the good stuff in our life, right? Because we have bituated and that's a problem.

And we also may not feel as bad to the aversive stuff and you can say, well, that's great. And it is to some aspect, right? If you had a break of a romantic relationship, you don't want to be in that negative state for the rest of your life. You want to overcome it. You want to bounce back.

However, for things that are negative in your life and you can change them or in your professional life, if you are not reacting to them, you won't be driven to change. And with respect to the frog in the boiling water, scientifically it's been shown that a frog will eventually jump out of boiling water. However, it's a good metaphor. The old kind of tale is you put a frog in a pot of water and you turn on the heat slowly,

gradually, gradually, gradually. Because it's so gradual, the frog would not feel the heat until it finally just dies. So it turns out scientifically that's not quite right. It does jump out to save its life. But I think the metaphor is very relevant, that in life we are a little bit like frogs in boiling water. I'm glad the frogs are smarter than we are. We're going to talk about all the downsides of habituation, but you did reference it quickly

there and I want to make sure it didn't go by too quickly. There are some adaptive aspects of habituation. It's probably worth at least dwelling for a little bit on what they might be. Yeah, absolutely. We see habituation in every single living thing, every single species. It's in humans, it's in monkeys, and it's in rats, and it's in flies, and it's every neuron in your brain. When you see a phenomena in every species, there's usually a good reason for it, meaning

it's probably adaptive. The question is, what's adaptive about habituation? Well, first of all, it is important for your survival, right? Because if you stop responding to the old things around you that haven't changed, that means your brain has more capacity and it's ready and has resources to respond to the new things that are coming your way and those new things can kill you. So that's a good resource saving strategy. So it's important for survival. Now, if we kind of think about more complex things in our life, if you go back and think about your first entry-level job, you were probably really excited and happy about this

entry-level job. But if you continue being excited and happy about your first entry-level job 10 years later, then you're not motivated to move forward, right? To try to get that promotion, to try to progress. So habituation, in this case, emotional habituation, is important for enhancing motivation. And then, interestingly, we see that almost every mental health disorder has some sort of impairment related to habituation. Different disorders have different types of habituation

related impairments. Let's think about depression, for example. So within depression, it's been found that people with depression tend to habituate to negative events in their life slower. One great study was conducted at the University of Miami by Professor Aaron Heller. What he did is he asked students who just got a result of a really important exam how they were feeling and then he came back to them every 45 minutes for the rest of the day to ask how they were feeling. And what he found was that when people got a bad grade they felt bad. It didn't matter if you had a history of depression or you didn't, everyone felt

bad about a bad grade. The difference between people with depression or you didn't, everyone felt bad about a bad grade. The difference between people with depression or history of depression and people without is that people with a history of depression, they kept ruminating on this negative event. It kept impacting them negatively for a very long time. They didn't bounce back. While those that were healthy individuals without depression episodes in their past, they did feel bad for a while but you can see them going back to kind of baseline levels of happiness much faster. So it seems like habituation can be also protective for our mental health. So that's the other adaptive reason that we probably see it in humans. But as I understand it, your book really

dwells on the aspects of habituation that we should endeavor to avoid. And you have a lot of very interesting strategies, so I think it makes sense to dive in. One of the ways you talk about avoiding habituation to the pleasant, to the positive, is to take breaks. Can you expand on that? Yeah, sure. Okay. So you want to regain sensitivity to the positive things. And the question is, how do you regain sensitivity?

And the key is really described well by this quote by the economist, Tiber Skitovsky, he says, "'Pleasure results from incomplete and intermittent satisfaction of desires.'" What that means is that if we experience something that is great for a long time, pleasure would probably go down over time. But if we have an incomplete experience, if it's like intermittent,

then probably we will encounter more pleasure. Let me give you an example and then kind of talk about, well, how can we implement that in our life? One piece of data that we have comes from work that I did with a large tourism company, and they wanted to know when are people happiest on vacation and what makes them happy. So we went on the resorts and we serviced people,

and we found that the happiest day of vacation or the happiest point was 43 hours into vacation So 43 hours allow people time to unpack and focus on fun, but from 43 hours in The joy started dwindling slowly slowly slowly and to be clear They're still happy on day four five six seven eight, but not as much as they were happy on day two And when we asked them, hey, what was seven, eight, but not as much as they were happy on day two. And when we asked them, hey, what was the best part of the vacation? The word that they used more than any other word was first, the first view of the ocean, the first cocktail I had, the first sandcastle I built. The

second view of the ocean was also great. The second, third, fourth, fifth cocktail was quite good, but not as good as the first. And again, why is that? Because things that are new are more exciting. We can notice them more, we pay attention, it brings more joy, but then over time we have a joy. And so if we think about just this example of vacations, perhaps it makes sense to have more shorter vacations, right? Make them more frequent, but have them shorter.

Have more of those firsts, more of those 43 hours in, rather than the long ones. Of course, you can't always do that if you're kind of traveling halfway across the world. That's not practical, but it's something to think about. Okay, so we want to have these kind of shorter experiences. And perhaps one of the most interesting study was one that was conducted where people were asked, hey, what would you prefer to listen to a song that you really like beginning to end, no breaks, or would you rather listen to a song with breaks intermittent in between?

What would you choose, Dan? Wait, so is this a break in the middle of the song or between song? No, in the middle. So you listen to a song beginning to end, no interruptions, or you have breaks. About every 30 seconds, I have a 10 second break. 30 seconds, 10 second break. Definitely hearing the whole song. Yeah, so that's very intuitive, right? 99% of people said, I don't want any breaks.

However, when they did the experiment, they found that those that did have breaks in the song actually enjoyed it more, right? They didn't predict it, but that's what happened. They were willing to pay double to listen to the song and concert. And they did it in other domains. They had questions about a massage. So they said, Hey, do you want massage beginning to end, no interruptions?

Or do you want interruptions in your massage? Of course, everyone says, I don't want interruptions in my massage. They did the experiment and they found that those that had little breaks in their massage actually enjoyed it more. Why is that? Well, if you listen to a song or you have a massage at the beginning, you're really enjoying it. And then because of habituation, joy starts dwindling going down, right? You're still enjoying it even at the end, but not as much as a beginning. Now if I break your experience for a short amount of time, you dishabituate, right?

And then when the song comes back in or the masseuse comes back in, joy pops up again. So overall, you're experiencing more joy in that time. So the idea is break up the good experiences, right? Don't kind of binge watch that Netflix show in one night, break those experiences, even in situations where it's not intuitive.

And you can also take breaks from your own life, just from daily life. And I mean, some of us just do that as part of our routine. We may go for a business trip or we go away for a weekend. And what happens when people come back from these breaks that they have from life, there is this phenomenon that we use the word, actually we bore this word from Julia Roberts. It's called re-sparkling. So you come back and now you haven't been home for a few days or more and now everything seems a little bit sparklier. You notice your perhaps your view, you notice a comfortable house, perhaps your loved

ones and you feel more of that joy. There's a wonderful quote by Jodie Foster that we actually found after we submitted the final version of the book. And she describes what happened when she went on a location to film for six months. And then after six months, she came back to her home. And she says, I came back from somewhere that is amazing and beautiful,

but you know, you long for really dumb things that you're just used to. That six months ago, I'm sure I was bored by, but right now I'm like, my God, avocados are amazing. Or I'm so glad I get to go to the gym again. Things that six months ago were sort of what I was trying to escape from, now everything is amazing. And of course, Jodie Foster has not a normal life, right? Quite a privileged life, but I think she's describing something that is very ordinary. When we leave our normal life and then we come back, we see things in

you. We see them afresh. So that's the idea of breaking up, break up the good experiences into little bits. So just to put a fine point on it, in terms of operationalizing this in our own lives, what's the best way to do it? To try to travel as much as possible so that we're getting out of our habits and routines and then when we return, it's re-sparkled? Right. So you can think about the little things, right? We talked about, oh, maybe if you go on vacation on a very long one, have little short ones, don't binge, but rather kind of divide your experiences.

If it's about your daily life, sure, I think you could try to have breaks where you actually leave for a few days and come back, but not everyone is able to do that. And so there's a few other options. One actually is something that Laurie Santos talked about. We saw her talking about this where she says, well, what you could do is you could close your eyes and imagine your life without these things in your life, without your job, without your house, without your loved ones, really try to like imagine it with vividness and details. And what happens is when you open up your eyes again, then things seem to,

again, re-sparkle to put our term on it. You see them in you, you feel them more. You don't necessarily have to actually remove yourself from the situation. If that's not possible, you can do it in your mind. Another way is something that I experienced when I had COVID. So I had COVID for one of the many times that I had it. And I went down to the basement to such that my family members won't be infected. And first of all, I found that living in the basement was actually quite an adventure.

Felt like a little bit of a camping situation. But even more important than that, after a few days when I emerged back to the ground level, things re-sparkled again. So I took myself out of the situation, I came back and now you kind of appreciate things more. So there are, I think, creative ways in which we can create more breaks. The reason breaks are important is because it induces dishabituation. There's another way by which it induces dishabituation. There's another way by which you can induce dishabituation. It's related, but it's not quite the same.

And it is to induce variety and diversify your life. So if you think about what makes a good life, so most people will say, oh, I want to be happy, right? That's the topic of your podcast. I want to be happy, right? That's the topic of your podcast. I want to be happy. I don't want to be sad. Sure. And then happiness is not everything.

People also want meaning and purpose in their life. That's important too. But because of habituation, a lot of time, those things that do induce happiness and purpose can do so less over time. Even if you are doing cancer research for many years, perhaps a sense of purpose will diminish over time and perhaps the kind of feeling of awe maybe be feeling more of like routine. But there's this third ingredient of a good life which people often overlook and it counters the habituation that causes less happiness and less feeling of meaning which is variety So if you induce variety into your life

And actually it's been shown that people who have more diverse life in terms of maybe they lived in different places They work in different projects. Perhaps they interact with different types of people They tend to have a psychologically rich life because what variety does it kind of shakes up your days and it dishabituates You such that you're more able to see things and you When you do diversify your life and it could be with really small things you could choose different routes to work You could learn a new skill or take a course in something outside of your Expertise when people tend to do that what happens is they put themselves in a outside of your expertise, when people tend to do that, what happens

is they put themselves in a state of learning and they need to learn, you know, the new environment, they need to learn the hierarchy. There's many studies showing that learning really increases joy and happiness. People like to feel that they're learning, that they're progressing, that they're moving forward. So variety is another way to induce disabituation. Right, so it seems like if you want to re-sparkle your life, there are lots of moves you can make from traveling, but if traveling is not an option to using your imagination.

Lori Santos, the great podcast host, the host of the Happiness Lab, and Yale professor talks about doing an imagination exercise that can help you re-sparkle. Next time you get sick, you can try to pay attention to what it's like when you feel better, and life can be

a little bit more interesting in that way. And then introducing variety of any sort, learning a new skill, meeting new people, moving cities, taking a new skill, meeting new people, moving cities, taking a different way to work. There are lots of ways, whether you have the luxury of travel or not, to start to see the things in your life

through a fresh pair of eyes. Yeah, absolutely. And it turns out that if you do those things, yes, it can enhance well-being, but there's other advantages. So one interesting advantage is that it can enhance your creativity as well. So there's an interesting study by the psychologist Kayleigh Main where she found that if you change your environment and simply change the room that you're working in, so for example,

you're working in the office and you move to the kitchen, then you take a walk outside, then you come back. What she found is that if you do that, there's a boost in people's ability to solve things creatively every time they make that change. Now granted, the boost only lasts for about six minutes, but during those six minutes, you might have that eureka moment. One of the reasons that she suggests for this is that you are dishabituating yourself. The moment you're moving to another room or another environment, now you have different inputs coming into your brain, right? You're seeing different things, you're hearing different things,

your brain is more open to taking things in. And that can actually enhance the ability to come up with creative solutions. Yeah. So I read that I felt validated because I, when I'm writing, sometimes I work at the computer, but often I'm printing out some pages and pacing around the house or going outside or taking it with me when I travel. And I find that actually the best work is almost never when I'm standing at the computer,

it's when I've taken it with me into a different environment. Yeah, and I have the same exact experience. So when I think about the most important kind of ideas or solutions that I came up with in my work, in my scientific work, it's always when I was not in my office, not in front of my computer, the moment that I was doing something else. So one kind of example that comes to mind, I was trying to solve this problem and I

was on my computer, I couldn't figure it out. There's some kind of data and I couldn't figure out why it's looking the way it is. So I decided to just leave and go to the gym. And so I walked outside and before I got to the gym, so within those six minutes, that's when I came up with the solution. It was a solution that actually led to years of research. So a line of research that was very important for me and my lab. It wasn't that I was trying to solve the problem while I was walking to the gym. To the contrary, I don't think I was. I think what happens is that you're encoding all this information.

And then once you're changing your environment, you're changing, you know, your physical state and just what's around you. Yes. Information is kind of like consolidating in your head and perhaps interacting with other things around you in different ways that can enhance the likelihood of finding a solution or coming up with some kind of creative idea. Coming up, Tali talks about the interesting relationship between habituation and creativity, and she explains why it is important to break up

the good experiences but swallow the bad whole. Being a part of a royal family might seem enticing, but more often than not, it comes at the expense of everything, like your freedom, your privacy, and sometimes even your head. Even the Royals is a podcast from Wondery that pulls back the curtain on royal families, past and present, from all over the world to show you the darker side of what it means to be royalty. Like the true stories behind the six wives of Henry VIII, whose lives were so much more than just

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It's where I interview some of the most celebrated actors and musicians of our time about their life, their craft, and where they find their ideas. You'll hear giants like Tom Hanks. Very rarely do I have a conversation, quite frankly, like this one guy. Jason Sudeikis talked about how he became Ted Lasso. People will say to us, you know, the show saved me. I will say back, me too. Plus musicians like Ellie Goulding, Bjork, the show saved me. I will say back, me too. Plus, musicians like Ellie Golding, Bjork, and Lainey Wilson.

I remember having that crazy feeling of, I am going to do this. I'm going to be on that stage. You can check out our newest season and browse our whole catalog, 80 Plus episodes, by following The Great Creators on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to The Great Creators early and ad free right now on Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to the great creators early and ad free right now on Wondery Plus. A quick reminder to come check out what I'm doing over at danharris.com. This is a huge new venture for me. I'd love to get your support and your feedback. And a reminder that the 10% Happier app is now called Just Happier,

and they've got personalized meditation plans and fresh ways to meditate on and off the cushion. Download the new Happier Meditation app today to discover meditation that evolves with you. You know, speaking of creativity, there's something else I want you to talk about if you're up for it. You kind of referenced it earlier,

but I think it's worth coming back to. You talked about how some people have trouble habituating to negative changes in their life or difficult changes in their life. That's often correlated with depression or maybe the other way around. If you have depression, you have trouble habituating. However, what you haven't yet mentioned, and it's related to creativity. And you do talk about this in your book, is that often in those periods of struggle with habituation,

there is simultaneously unhappiness and creativity. So can you talk a little bit about that phenomenon and why you believe it's come about? Yeah, it's interesting because as you said, on one hand, people with problems in habituation that is related to mental health problems, however, at the same time, people who habituate slower are also more creative. So you can measure people's habituation rate in many ways.

For example, you can play them the same sound over and over again and then test to see their conscious response to the sound, but also arousal responses, like you can measure their skin congestance response, right? So that's one way to measure the rate of habituation. Are you continuing to respond to the same sound or not? And there was a study that was conducted, and I think this was at Harvard, and they found that people who habituate slower using this measure, they tend to be more creative in the sense that those were the individuals who perhaps had a book under their name, a patent under their name, they had an exhibition. So there's this interesting relationship

between slow habituation and creativity. The question is why? And I think the reason is that if you habituate slower, you're less likely to filter information, sounds, images, smells, knowledge, stays in your mind longer. It certainly can be distracting, but this mismatch of information in your mind can sometimes result in unexpected combinations, right? Because you have this information in your mind for longer.

And what can happen is that one piece of information that seems very mundane from one field can then kind of collide, interact with another piece of information that's quite mundane in another field. And when they come together, they create this kind of novel, something new. I mean, you see this often in technology, often solutions come from biology. These combinations, they can foster creativity. And I think that is why this idea of moving your moving environments can actually also enhance creativity. In fact, there's another interesting study that we mentioned in the book, which is it's been found that when people move from one country to another, they are for a short amount of time,

better at solving problems and puzzles. So as if having to be in this new situation where they're in a state of learning, maybe a different language, everything is new, can actually cause them to be more creative as well. One of the other things you talk about in the book is how we can re-sparkle our relationships. There's a quote in the book and it's about monogamy and the quote is, habit and routine are anti-aprodisiacs. So how can we avoid a kind of negative habituation in our committed relationship. Yeah, so we actually rely on Esther Perel here, the well-known expert in relationships. She did surveys to see when are people most attracted to their partners. She came up with two instances that people are most attracted to their partners.

One was when people were away for a certain amount of time and then came back, breaks. The second one was when people saw their partner in a new situation, perhaps they were talking to some strangers, perhaps they were on a stage where normally they wouldn't be on a stage. So that's variety and novelty. So basically she in her surveys and she doesn't necessarily use these words, but what she's saying is to enhance your attraction, you want breaks. This doesn't mean a break in a relationship. It could just be like an evening away. You want variety in the sense that instead of doing the same thing over and over and

over again, going to the same restaurants, doing the same thing, you might want to include some diversity. At the same time, it is important to have these experiences that you can rely on, right? The experiences that don't change, those are important too. They probably create the kind of connection and history, but at the same time, variety can be helpful because that causes you to see your partner in a new way. I think what often is the case is that people believe they really know those that are close to them, whether it's parents, kids, partners, close friends. Perhaps you have a sense that you know them well, but you never really know someone as closely that you think you do.

Putting people in these new situations can get that feeling of, ooh, there's something here that I still don't know. So then there's something to learn. I'm smiling a bit because, and I apologize to anybody who've heard me tell this story before, but what you're saying reminds me of a time when I stepped off stage after giving a talk and my wife made a joke. She said, I like you so much better publicly. And it makes much more sense

in light of what you were describing. Mm-hmm, yeah. It's less familiar, right? Exactly, yes. Yeah, I'm doing and saying different things than I do around the house. So we've been talking mostly about Habituating to The positive things in our life in a way that kind of dulls our ability to appreciate and be grateful on the flip side of the coin

You argue that while we should chop up the good we should swallow the bad Whole can you expand on that? we should swallow the bad whole. Can you expand on that? Yeah. So if they are tasks that you need to do, which are aversive, perhaps it's household chores, perhaps it's doing your taxes admin, for me it might be like grading papers.

Habituation is actually your friend, because the negative reaction to these things will habituate over time. So they'll feel less and less negative. So the same people who did these experiments with the music or the massage, they also did an experiment with an unpleasant noise and they had either an unpleasant noise beginning to end, no interruptions, it's just really annoying noise or they had little breaks. And of course everyone said, I want a break.

I don't want to hear some pleasant noise for how long? Ten minutes. had little breaks. And of course everyone said, I want a break. I don't want to hear some pleasant noise for a long 10 minutes, I want breaks. But again, people's intuition was wrong. And when they did the experiment, they found that those that listened to the annoying noise from beginning to end, no interruptions, they suffered less because they tended to habituate.

They wouldn't notice the noise as much. So noise is one example, but I think it's also true for other things that you have to do, you don't like it, and sometimes it's just better to get it over and done with. I'm just moving through various topics in the book because it's also interesting. So this next one is not, it's a little bit of a non sequitur,

but I'm looking down at my list of notes and it's something I really do wanna hear you talk about, which is social media. And specifically you have a chapter or a section called how to wake up from a technologically induced coma. What's the advice there? Yeah, so I think a lot of us have this sense that social media may have a negative impact on us.

Maybe you have a sense it's probably causing you a little bit of anxiety and stress, not for all of us, but I think for many. But we don't really know to what extent social media has a negative effect because it's always there. It's really hard to assess the impact of different things in your life if they're always there. You don't really realize the impact. You can think about it social media a little bit again like a bit of an AC in the background, right? There's this noise in the background, but you don't really notice it. It has a negative impact on you, but you don't realize why until

someone turns it off. And then you say, oh, I feel so much better. I didn't realize what a negative impact this had on me. So it turns out it's the same with social media. When you take a break, when you close, when you shut it down for a while, it turns out it has quite a positive impact on people. So one study that I like a lot is by the economist Hans Alcott. And what he did is he had two groups of people, 1,000 individuals in each group, and he gave one group $100 each to go off Facebook. It was an old study, so specifically on Facebook, to go off Facebook for a month.

And the other group, he paid them $100 each to just continue what they're doing, no need to change. And then he came back at the end of the month. He found that on every measure that he had, people that went off Facebook felt better. They were happier, they were less depressed, less sad, they were more likely to have interactions in person, they're more likely to read books, play the piano. I think the most interesting thing was how surprised people were of the impact. He

has a lot of quotes in this study of people saying, oh, I didn't expect to have such a positive impact on me. So they didn't really realize until they tried it out. Now, another surprising part of this experiment was that despite the fact that most people at the end of the month said, I'm feeling better and so on, they went straight back to Facebook after the experiment. I think it shows us that there are some things in our life that we realize consciously are not good for our well-being, are not good for happiness, but for some other reasons we still do them. It could be a little bit like addiction. So addiction is characterized by this sense that you're doing

something that you don't even enjoy, you don't even like, but you have a drive, a drive. In the sense of social media, it could also be something as simple as I need the information, right? I wanna be in the know. I understand it's reducing my happiness, but I want to have this information for professional or personal reasons.

Another takeaway vis-a-vis social media in the book is it's more about what you consume than how much of it. Can you expand on that? Yeah, sure. So, I mean, there's been a lot of conversation about social media and its impact on well-being. There's people saying it has a negative effect. The other people are saying, well, the literature is quite mixed. Do we really know what's going on. I think part of the problem is that most of the research, not all, but most of the research is measuring what's the easiest thing to measure, which is how frequently we go online or go on social media and how much time we spend. That's the

easiest thing to do. And I don't think that is the most important thing to measure. And I will explain in a minute. And the other problem, the reason that the literature is so murky, is that researchers tend to look at everyone together. What we found, and I'll tell you about this in a second, is that whether social media or internet, web browsing and so on, has positive or negative effect on you depends on some of your characteristics. So I'll tell you about our study. It's just one example. There's probably other examples. What we found is that people who have more mental health problems, more symptoms, tend to go online and search for things with more negative connotations.

So what we did is we asked people to go online and do whatever they usually do. Browse the internet like they usually do, do that for five days, and then send us the history of their web browsing. So now we have all their history of their web browsing. We go into all the websites that they looked at. We take the text out of the website, and we use an analysis to see how many positive words and how many negative words in this text. So we have kind of a measure of the valence of the information that they consumed.

And we also had measures of their psychological health. And we found first, as I said, that people with more symptoms within mental health, they're more likely to go and search things that tend to end up to being negative. And that negative information then makes their symptoms worse. We were able to show that the relationship between the two things is not only correlational. It's not only the mental health is related to consuming more negative information, and negative information is related to worse mental health, but we were able also to then in another study, manipulate the type of information that people consumed by delivering either more negative or positive web pages and showing that that had an impact on people's mood. So if you consume more

negative information that we give you, that reduces your mood. I think it's important to not just look at how long you're online, but what are you doing? What information you're consuming? What is the content? And also, which population are we talking about? Right? They are populations that are more vulnerable. They're more likely to go online and consume things that are worse for them, and that, it's a bit of a feedback loop that makes the situation worse. So it seems like if we want to not be sucked into social media in such a way that it's

deadening our capacity to enjoy our actual lives, if it's leading to a kind of unhealthy habituation, the two main takeaways that I'm hearing from you are one, take a break for a while and see how it goes and two, monitor or pay attention to what you're consuming, even if you're going to continue using it. Yeah, the idea of breaks from social media in order to just measure for yourself, what is the impact? It's true for many other parts of life. In fact, our the last chapter in the book is called It's true for many other parts of life. In fact, our the last chapter in the book is called Experiments in Living. And the idea is that we can't really tell what's good for us, what's bad for us, if we don't do experiments. Just like science, you don't know what's true until you do the experiments and measure the impact. And that is something that we can do in our own life. We

need to experiment in living, try different things. Now, some of the things are not going to be good for us, and some of the things will be good for us, but we have to do the experiments in order to find what are things that are optimal, what are things that are not so great. And of course, we can't try everything in life, so sometimes we do need to rely on the experience of others as well. But part of the idea, we talked a lot about diversity and variety, part of the idea of variety is that sure, you might try things and you won't like them and they won't be great, but you never know until you try. So exploring a little bit more and experimenting a little bit more may lead to you to find, oh, you know, these things that are constantly in my life,

I really should maybe do less of, perhaps eliminate altogether. And it could be different for different people. The book dwells quite a bit on the subject of lying. Why? Okay, so first, it's an interesting effect, but second, it's really the study that triggered the whole book.

So it's a study that we conducted. It was out in 2016. Basically what it shows is that when people start lying, they lie more and more and more. So they dishabituate to their own lying. And the reason is that most people feel that lying and dishonesty and doing immoral things are bad, right? Lying is a bad thing. That's what most people feel. And because of that, they feel pretty bad when they lie. And that negative feeling curbs our dishonesty.

We did an experiment where we brought people into our lab in pairs, and they had an opportunity to lie. And we didn't tell them that they should lie, but they could figure out from the experiment that if they lied, they would gain more money at the expense of the other person. And what we find is at the beginning, they lied by just a little bit, by a few cents. And then over the hour of the experiment,

they lied by more and more and more and more. So their dishonesty kind of escalated. While they were doing that, we in fact scanned their brain activity. So they were in the brain imaging scanner, but they could interact with the other person using the computer. And what we find at the beginning, despite the fact that they lied by just a little bit, there was strong activity in the amygdala, which is part of the brain that is important for emotions. So it seemed like at the beginning they lied by a little bit, but they felt really, really bad. But then as they lied more and more, emotional habituation kicked in.

Emotional habituation is simply the phenomena by which you feel less and less. In this case, you feel less and less bad to things that are repeated. So they continued lying, but they felt less bad. And because they felt less bad, there was nothing stopping their dishonesty. So they lied more the next opportunity that they got. So this really suggests that we want to stop lying in dishonesty. One way to do that is by noticing even those small digressions because if we let those go, they can actually escalate over time.

There's a section in the book called how to Keep Your Child from Growing a Long Nose that caught my attention because I have a nine-year-old and nine-year-olds, you know, I think this is developmentally normal experiment with fibbing. What's the parenting advice there? Yeah, so I think it is to call out your child when they are lying, even if the lies are small lies, because I think if we don't, then it can sort of become a habit. What was interesting in our study was that this escalation of lying and the emotional habituation that came along with it was only the case when people lied for their own benefit

and at the expense of another person. So interestingly, when someone lied for the benefit of someone else, we didn't see this. And I think the reason is if you're lying for the benefit of someone else, you're less likely to feel bad about it. It doesn't necessarily feel as immoral, maybe. And so there's no negative feeling that kind of like goes down over time. You might think about like these white lies. Someone brings your child a present and he says,

thank you, I like it a lot. He doesn't like it. This is a sort of white lie. And those, you know, it's a little bit of a balance here. On one hand, well, should we not mention those? On the other hand, our research show that if you're lying for the benefit of someone else, that is less problematic and less likely to cause escalation.

Coming up, Tali talks about the dangers of habituating to a slow incremental rise in tyranny and how what she calls dishabituation entrepreneurs can help. Let's talk a little bit about, and you referenced this earlier, how we can habituate to negative macro trends. You know, the onset of tyranny. You write a lot about Germans in the 1930s getting used to the Nazis living with cultural or structural or societal bigotry. We tend to get used to these macro trends, these larger phenomena. How can we avoid that?

This kind of relates to this idea that there are maladies in our societies and if those maladies have been around us for a long time, we tend to perhaps not see them as clearly. Racism and sexism is one example, but also things that just escalate very, very, very, very slowly. Right? So the Nazi regime is one such example that they didn't start off with the final solution, but they started off with little, little steps. And then as you get used to those steps, the next step just doesn't seem as terrible because it's just like another step. Quite a few quotes, and this was taken from different sources of individuals who were in Germany during this time.

And there's one wonderful quote by a German citizen who says, in talking about the Nazi regime, each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained, or on occasion so regretted, that people could no more see it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees a corn growing one day it is over his head. Right? So the corn grows really, really slowly and you don't see it until it's over your head. So I don't think we have a solution to this per se, but what we have noticed is that often change can happen with what we call dishabituation entrepreneurs. So these are people that for whatever reason, and we speculate what these reasons may be, are first able to observe these situations and two, which is as important, are also able

to disabituate other people, to alert other people and make them see what perhaps is unseen. A lot of these times, the dis disabituated entrepreneurs are in fact the victims themselves, but not always. It doesn't necessarily have to be the case. I think if you are the victim, you're still disabituating, but you may be disabituating less. And let me give you an example of why this may be. The fact that you walk on a plane, nowadays it's less so, but still the case. When you walk on a plane and you it's less so, but still the case. When you walk on a plane and you look at the cockpit, mostly you see a male pilot. So anytime you see the male pilot, your brain is not even taking notice of it.

It's what the brain is expecting a male pilot, and when it's getting the information it expected, there's no surprise signal. You don't notice it. The second thing your brain does, it probably comes up with a reason for why the data in front of you, in this case, males in the pilot in the cockpit, why it is a case. And your brain will probably come to the conclusion that probably males are better at being able to navigate

and control very large machinery. And it may actually impact your actions. So for example, if you need to hire people to take care of large machinery in the future, you might be more likely to hire males. Here's what happens when you're the victim. Let's say you are the female pilot and you are impacted by the fact that you may know

that people around you suspect that you may be less likely or less competent to be able to control this big machine. But your daily experience is different. So when you're in there in the cockpit and you're controlling the big plane, you're doing a good job perhaps. And that piece of information goes against the expectations. It creates what we call a prediction error. It creates kind of a surprise signal the expectations, it creates what we call a prediction error. It creates kind of a surprise signal. And that makes it less likely for you to habituate to these expectations around you.

And I think that's one of the reasons why victims are more likely to see the things that perhaps others can't. And then the question is, who are the people who are then actually going to be able to dishabituate others? And how are they going to do it? So one example that I like is by a Princeton professor by the name of Yael Niv. She's a neuroscientist and she noticed that when she goes to conferences, she sees more male speakers and female speakers. And she wanted to do something about it. And so what she did is she created a website and the website is called Norabias or Norawatch, I think.

If you go on the website, what you see is there's a list of conferences and next to each conference is the ratio of female to male speakers in that specific conference and also the ratio of female to male in that specific subfield. So for example, it could be that the ratio of speakers is one female for every five males, but she has data and her data shows that the actual ratio of females to male in the field at large, perhaps is three to four.

It's a clear signal to others that something here isn't quite right. And what she does on top of that, she names the people who are organizing the conference. And by doing that, she is making them accountable. And no one wants their name together with some data that suggests some kind of discrimination. And so that website was very, very effective in creating more equality with speakers in this case, in the field of neuroscience, but it could be done in any field, you know, you can do it with journalism in arts

Finding ways to make those things apparent to others once you see them yourself We're basically out of time, but I'm curious if I can sneak one last question in here After having done this research and then writing the book, you know, how has your life changed? What are your techniques for re-sparkling? Yeah, so, you know, I think I'm a disabituation junkie. Even before I wrote this book, I was a disabituation junkie. I do get bored quite easily. It doesn't mean that I don't finish projects, I do,

but I very much need variety and diversity. I live in two different places, two different countries, I work on different types of projects, and you know, variety and diversity is something that I did kind of naturally. I think now I have a good excuse for it. I have a scientific reason why this may be helpful. But also I think maybe in parts of my life that I'm less likely to do it, it may drive me to try other things to create more change as well. Two final questions before I let you go. These are quick.

One is, is there somewhere you were hoping to go during this interview that we didn't get to? No, I think we managed to touch upon many different things. Okay, so then the final question is, can you just plug the book and any other books you've written and any other stuff you want us to know about? Sure, so the latest book is Look Again, and that is co-offered with Cass Sunstein,

and my other two books are The Influential Mind and The Optimism Bias, and there's a lot of materials on my lab website, which is affectivebrain.com, affective with a, so you're, you can find talks and you can find essays for popular journals, but also you can find the kind of scientific articles for those who want to read those as well. Tali Sherritt, thank you very, very much for coming on.

Appreciate it. Thanks so much for having me done. This was fun. Thanks again to Tali. And thank you finally to everybody who worked so hard to make this show a reality. Our producers are Tara Anderson, Caroline Keenan, and Eleanor Vasili. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People. Lauren Smith is our production manager. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior Pod People. Lauren Smith is our production manager. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer. DJ Kashmir is our managing producer.

And Nick Thorburn of the band Islands wrote our theme. If you like 10% happier, and I hope you do, you can listen early and ad free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple podcasts. Prime members can listen ad free on Amazon Music. Before you go, tell us about yourself by filling out a short survey at Wondery.com slash survey.