Dr. Tali Sharot: Are you bored, stuck, or just... not excited by life anymore?

Ladies and gentlemen, joining us today is Dr. Tally Sheret, a distinguished professor of cognitive neuroscience at University College London and MIT and the founder of the effective brain lab. Dr. Sheret has contributed to esteemed publications such as the New York Times, Time, the Washington Post, and her engaging TED talks have garnered over 15 million views. She is also the uh acclaimed author of the optimism bias and the influential mind. We're here to discuss her latest work, Look Again. The power of noticing what Was Always There. This groundbreaking book explores how we can reignite joy and innovation by overcoming habituation, the process by which we become desensitized to both the positive and negative aspects of our lives by introducing change and consciously altering our routines.

Look again offers practical strategies to help us rediscover the extraordinary in everyday life. Dr. Sheret, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me. Absolutely. I wanted to start with a little story and this ties to some of your your earlier work. Uh, but my son was watching a TV show about a year ago and it was it's called Brain Games and great show that makes neuroscience research accessible to kids. And I was making him something to eat and he pauses the TV and he comes over and he says, "Dad, how old are you again?" And I said, "I'm 45." And he starts laughing hysterically. And I said, "What what is so funny?" He said, "You're at the worst point in your life right now." And then he showed me the U curve that they had on the TV screen of happiness in life, which dips at midlife.

Now, I feel like I'm at the the best point in my life. Um, I don't know if that should should concern me or not, but I I wanted to share that story and get your thoughts on that. Yeah. So, the research shows that happiness follows um a U-shaped function. So relatively high in kids and teenagers goes down down down hitting rock bottom in your midlife and then going up again which people actually are not aware of. So then it goes up again and actually climbs up and it stays up until the last couple of of uh years of life uh in general. But I think before kind of trying to dive into why this happens, it's really important to remember that this is just the average, right?

Um so you take thousands and thousands and thousands of people you average all their happiness ratings um and you find this curve. It doesn't mean that every person follows this curve at all. You can go up, you can go down, you can zigzag, you can do all sorts of things. You can stay stable. Um this is just average. So um it's like almost every scientific uh finding you know it's not the case that whatever the finding is on average will relate to each individual. Um I feel that a lot of people do see themselves in that U shape but you know not not everyone should or will. Um and and that's great.

Maybe yours is an inverse you. Maybe you're down. Maybe it's coming down. Right. Right. This this is the high point and it's all downhill from here. Um yeah. Well, it see I would guess it's tied to a lot of life events that happen around between 40 and 50 where your parents are getting older, possibly sicker, possibly passing away. Divorces tend to happen at this age, the kids are getting older, moving out of the house. I mean, is that what drives a lot of that that for most people the the bottoming out of the U between 40 and 50 years old? Yeah. So, we don't know for sure what's driving it. And it could be life events, as you say.

It could be some neurological changes um that happen in that kind of way. Or maybe there's one change going down over time, the other one going kind of up over time, and they uh together create a U-shape. don't really know but we can speculate given um some of the data that we have um and I don't think it's one thing so it's a few different things but one thing that we do see is that stress goes the opposite way right so stress is relatively low in kids and teenagers and it goes up up reaches peak around uh your midlife and then it starts going down again and then you can ask okay so why is stress high um same thing as asking why is happiness dips in midlife and I think You're right.

I think some of it is life circumstances. You know, that is a time that you are a lot of people still taking care of children. Um and at the same time taking care of elderly parents. Um in terms of um professional um elements, you might be, you know, under high stress. There's a lot of responsibilities. So, it could be that there's a lot going on and a lot of things that that you need to care for. Um, another thing that that may relate is that midlife is a little bit kind of sameness. It's a time in life where we're kind of in the same place. Um, it could be a great place. You could be at the top of your field, but many times you've been there for a while.

So, you mostly for most people, and again, there's a lot of individual differences, but on average, you probably lived in the same place for quite a while. uh been in the same relationship for quite a while, been in the same job for quite a while and all these things can be great but they haven't changed. Um and if you look at what happens early in life and then also later in life which is less intuitive but early in life things are changing all the time right so for kids you are changing they literally change every year how they look how their brain works right um their experience is constantly changing and then the same thing with teenagers and then you go into your 20s and maybe it's you're going to university you're taking on a new job you're in different relationships So things are really changing and people are learning.

Um and while at midlife less though then then counterintuitively this could also happen later in life. So later in life when you're closer to retirement and maybe the kids are left left home and and you need to change your life again and it could be quite um maybe like anxiety um inducing to think about that. Um, but you know that means that you're again there's changes and you have to kind of learn how to live again. And so one of the things that we talk about in our in our book look again which is co-authored with Kasanstein is that um there's it's really important to a uh see yourself as changing and progressing.

Right? So even if you're at the top of your game, if you haven't progressed for a while, that can induce negative feelings and if you don't see yourself learning, that also has a negative effect. In fact, learning is one of the things that really bring people huge amount of joy and that may be something that we're doing less in midlife. Um so it happens naturally to be less so, but we can induce it. Yeah. So that brings us to habituation and it might be a good starting point. Let's let's define that. I mean you have touched on it already but just to give everybody a definition of that and then uh and tie that back into why that happens during this period of life.

Mhm. Okay. So let me give you a simple example before we go into the definition. Imagine that you go into a room full of uh smoke like cigarette smoke. At first, it's quite overwhelming and you can really like smell it, but studies show that within 20 minutes, you don't actually you can't you don't notice it anymore. You can't detect the smell of smoke. You've habituated to it. So, your neurons stop responding uh to the to the smoke. Um, same thing with a perfume. You got a new perfume, you spritz it on, you really smell it, and then you put it the next day and the next day, and you know, a month goes by, you cannot detect the the smell of your own perfume.

That is habituation. And so basically what it means is a diminished response physological and emotional response which we'll talk about in a minute to stimuli that is repeating or that's constant. And so it's easy to understand when we talk about smells. It's easy also to maybe understand if a noise there's like an AC in the background but it's been there all day. So I don't notice it anymore. My neurons stop responding to it. Um you jump into a pool. really cold at the beginning, but in a few, you know, 10 minutes goes by and you're kind of adapted. You don't really notice it. And so, just as we habituate to these things which are more like senses, um, we also habituate to more complex things in our life emotionally.

So, think about a relationship. When you start a relationship, right, it's maybe really exciting and joyful and over time it kind of takes less less attention from you and maybe induces less joy. Same thing with a new uh job also with negative things. It could be a negative event that happens in your life and you have a strong negative emotional response, but we habituate or adapt, if you will, to anything really. So, we have less physiological and emotional response to things that have been there for a while that haven't changed. Yeah. So it's almost like it when we're in more of a routine and we're habituating to multiple aspects of our lives, we're no longer in a place I mean where if you're in your 20s, you might meet someone you're going to spend the next the rest of your life with on any given day and that is exciting.

But as we move into a position of a long-term relationship, living somewhere for a while, being in a career for a while, there is a sameness to all of that and it kind of takes the sparkle off of life. Is that accurate? Yeah. Because what our brain does, it's attuned to the to the things that are novel, right? Um and less so to the things that are familiar. And it makes sense. There's a good reason for it. It's actually really important for our survival because what it what that means is that we have more resources. We have more brain resources ready to react to the new thing that's coming your way.

And that's important because if you just react to everything that's around you despite the fact that it's been there all the time, you might not have enough resources to come to react to that lion that's coming your way, right? To know whatever it is. It could be something that is dangerous that you know or it could be something great that you want to react to because it's like that's something I want right so it's actually a really um helpful kind of mechanism that um is something that we have not only in humans it's in every species and if every almost every system in your brain as well. So it's really really really really basic and important.

Um but what's kind of surprising about it is that it impacts every single aspect of our life. Um everything from relationships to social media to how much risk you take to whether and how much people lie and are dishonest. So it it's really impacting every part of the behavior. um but also um how we respond to other people's behavior or how do we respond to just the environment around us. Now how does it impact risk takingaking and lying or truthtelling? Yeah. So really this book started um with a study that we published in 2016. So the first study was in fact about dishonesty and lying. So what we found is that when people are put in in a situation where they can lie for their own benefits um at the expense of another person, they start by lying just a little bit.

You know, most people say that lying is a bad thing and so they feel bad when they lie, most individuals. And so they just lie by a little bit, you know, but then they have another opportunity to again be in the same situation to lie for their benefit at the expense of another person. And then what we see they lie a little bit more and then they lie the next time a little bit more. And so with repetitive encounters they lie more and more and more and more. And what we did in this um experiment that we conducted we recorded people's brain activity while they were in in this kind of like task their game.

And what we found at the beginning when they lied there was strong activity in the amygdala which is part of the brain which is important for emotion. So you actually have two. You have one on each side of your brain about the size of a cherry tomato. And so at the beginning when you lied, even if it was small light, there was strong activity in in the amydala. But the second time you lied, there was less activity in the amydala. And the third time even less and even less. And so over time, the amygdala activity, which is related to emotion, went down. And as it went down, your lying went up. And actually we could predict how much you would lie more in the second in the next time you had an opportunity by looking how much your response in the amydala went down.

So without the because and it's just because emotion habituates, right? It's just what our brain does is what we do. And so now because you have less of an emotional response, nothing is curbing your dishonesty. So dishonesty goes up. Um and something similar happens with with risk as well. So, with the first time you do something risky, it could be, you know, jumping off a cliff. Um, you might see it in your kids if you take your kids to I take my kids to the great to the playground now. They're a little bit older. Um, but, you know, my son will go up and he would like wait there before he jumps.

He looks he's really, really scared. You know, it takes time. Then finally, he jumps and then the next time he does it, he goes back up a little bit quicker, less scared, right? And then the third time and so on. Um and so it could be a physical risk or it could be a financial risk. How much you put in the market? Um it could be something related to interpersonal relationships. Should I ask this person out or not? So the first time you take a a certain amount of risk um again you will have this kind of fear, right? Because risk is about I can lose something here. So there's an emotional response and that emotional response curbs your risk takingaking.

That's what stops you part of the thing that stops you from taking a risk. But as you do it more and more and more just na nature means your emotion will go down. There's nothing that's curbing your risk takingaking and so you take more and more uh risk. Now is that a positive or a negative or is that completely context dependent whether it's positive or negative? Because it sounds like we're maybe if it was lying we're habituating to lying. We're getting used to it and becoming more comfortable with it. But risk-taking that seems like that could cut either way. Maybe it's a positive risk, maybe it's a negative risk.

It could be investing more and becoming more comfortable with that. It could be gambling and running to the casino more. Mhm. So, you asked specifically about risk-taking. This is specifically about risk-taking. You know in life we should take some risk because if we you know you don't take any risk then you can't gain right. So you want to explore and you want to take some risk and of course you know there's a balance um of you know uh what how much risk you want to take and in what domain. Um so in in that sense um habituation could be something useful right because it it can help you do those things that you're scared to do because you're scared of losing but you really should do them right in order to progress and move forward on the other hand you know it can lead to a negative consequences so you know risk-taking on on the road for example is a huge problem I mean accidents is one of the key um um u ways that people actually um lose their life right so um in that sense that's not a good thing but it's the same it's the same mechanism so you can't say oh well the risk takingaking in this domain is good for me so here I want habituation but on the road I want to turn it off it just doesn't work like that um but in a more general sense um there's a question okay so is habituation and or emotional habituation is it a good thing or is it a bad thing and it is both right so let's kind of look at what the the advantage antages.

So we already said that habituation is important for survival because it gives you the resources you need to respond to the new thing that's coming your way. So that's a right that's really important and that's why you have it. If if you see something in every single species on Earth, there's probably a good adaptive reason that it's there, right? It's it's not a mistake. Um that's eight. The second thing is um it could be it's quite important for our mental health. In fact, um, almost every mental health condition is characterized by some impairment in habituation. So, let's take depression for example.

People with depression tend to habituate to negative life events much more slowly than people without depression. Um, for example, there was a study conducted in the University of Miami by Professor Aaron Heler where students who just took a really important exam where um asked how they were feeling when they got the score for the exam and then they were asked how they were feeling every 45 minutes for the rest of the day. And so what um Aaron found was that when people got a bad score, they failed, they felt bad. It didn't matter if you had a history of depression or you didn't. Everyone felt bad.

But what he found was that then people without depression they kind of over time went back to the baseline level of happiness and well-being. So within a few hours they were back to baseline. People with depression also went back to baseline but it took them more time. It was much slower, right? They were ruminating over the events. Um you know what is it consequences? What does it mean for a future? and and so they were feeling bad for much longer and um you know there so the habituation to negative event just takes them longer and that's that's one of the problems right in depression. So um so we need it in order to move forward right ne bad things will happen in our life.

We will lose loved ones. We will maybe some people lo lose their jobs or you know bad things happen but we need a mechanism that allows us to over time get over it and continue to live and move forward. So so it's really important for that as well. It's also important to drive you forward. Um, if you think about, for example, your first entry-level job, you're probably like super duper happy about that first ent uh entry- level job. But if you continue being happy about it as excited 10 years later as you were like the first day, you would not be motivated to move forward to progress, right? So for us to kind of to explore and progress and want to go uh forward, we need to habituate also to the good stuff, right?

So without it, I think, you know, I think humans, if we were just continuing to have the same joy with with the situation that we have, we might not have the desire to do other stuff. And so I think that's um another reason why it's important for us. Now, let's look at the negative sides, right? So what are the negative sides? The negative sides means that we get less joy from things in in our life, even if they're great, just because they've been there so long, right? from your relationship and your family and they've been they're there every day and so it doesn't bring you as much happiness on a daily basis um as it potentially should.

And if you look at habituation to the bad stuff, if you habituate to not so great things in in your life, maybe cracks in your personal relationships or inefficiencies in the workplace, you might not notice those things and therefore not be motivated to change them. um could be things in your personal life, could be social things as well. So um you know it's necessary, habituation is necessary. However, it can also lead to negative um impacts on us in our life. So it's really important to understand what it is where where does it work in our life how is it affecting you um and what can we do right to to kind of as you say disabituate in in those instances when we should and we can Yeah.

So, if let's say you've got a great relationship, but you've been married for 20 years, what thoughts do you have on that to to combat the habituation where maybe just unconsciously you're taking that relationship for granted a little bit? And how do we avoid doing that in order to make that relationship more fulfilling or even a successful job to make it interesting again? Yeah. So, you know, we're not relationship experts, but um we um well, my co-author was lucky enough to be at a wedding and he was seated next to Esther Pel, who is potentially the number one relationship expert in the world.

Yes. um and they were they were sitting next to each other um doing a wedding at the same time that we were writing the book. Um and in fact what she has said and she said this you know on her TED talks uh many times is that she um after surveying hundreds of people there are two things that she found were most important um or most likely to cause people to be attracted to their partners partners that they've been with for a very long time and those two things are exactly those two things that we talk about in regard to disabituation what are they so first she says says people say they're most attracted to their partners when they've been away for a while and then they come back.

So basically they there was a break, right? So you're with your partner day in day out every day then you go away whether it's a weekend or more you know business trip vacation you come back and that's when people feel most attracted to their partner because what happens they had disabituated. What what does disabituation mean? It means um having a a response, physical, emotional response to that thing again because it was not in front of you for a while, right? So you eat mac and cheese every day, every day, every day. The first you really love your the mac and cheese, you know, by day 10 you don't.

But then you have a break from mac and cheese and a week later you want mac and cheese again. Same thing with, you know, relationships. So that's number one. And then the number one she said um she found that people are most attracted to their partners when they see them in a novel situation uh something that is not out of the ordinary. So for example you see your partner talking to strangers um your partner is on stage um doing something right something different. And that is the second way to disabuate which is trying new things right diversifying your life. Um yeah so so th so those are her two recommendation and it fits perfectly with everything that we know about about science right so it's a good idea to have separate experiences and then come back together share new information new ideas and you've had time apart so you're not habituated to seeing them every day and it adds flavor and excitement to the relationship.

Yeah. and trying new things, right? You know, it's it's good to have, you know, you you want, of course, a good amount of shared experience and some routines, but at the same time, you know, doing things that are completely different, putting yourself in that novel um context. Now, one of the things I thought was interesting in the book was that you touched on a lot of successful relationships are based on someone who one partner who seeks a lot of variation and new experiences and one person that's a little bit more routine oriented. And this struck a chord with me because my wife is great about seeking out new experiences and I thrive on those new experiences.

But because I'm running a business and a podcast and writing a book and have so much going on, I will get into my work routines and not I will forget to go actively seek those new experiences. And when she sets up a trip uh to a new random location, it breathes new life into our relationship and just makes everything new and exciting and shiny again. And then when I come back, those routines feel more exciting. And I wanted to get your your thoughts on that on on pairing up like that. Yeah. So that's our anecdotal observation. I don't have um actually an experiment to tell you that's true. But our observation was exactly this that you talk to people and they almost always say, "Oh, I'm the explorer, right?

And my my partner is we call it exploit. It doesn't mean it's not in a bad sense. This just means an exploit in in the way that we talk about it. Um is it just means that you found something that you like or enjoy or you know and it works for you and then you just do it again and again, right? You found that restaurant that you like and you go again and again. That that that's the exploit. Uh the explorer is like, "Oh, then I'll try a new restaurant. I'll try this. I'll try that." Right? So it it was our observation that in most relationships it seems that someone is more of the explorer and the other one is actually the exploiter.

Like in my relationship, I'm the explorer. Um, and my husband is is less of an explorer, more of the exploer. Um, and my co-author is is the opposite. He was the the exploer and she was the explorer. Um, I think my wife is going to find it hilarious that calling me the exploer. Uh, by the way, I continue. Yeah. Um, and we, you know, we think neither is is to be just like just a person who always explores and doesn't exploit. That's not good, right? You want to take advantage of the good stuff that you find, but also just exploiting you. You might not find the best things that are just over there, but you've never tried them.

So really, the best thing is a little bit of both. And so, you know, you often kind of theoretically when you think about these things, you think it makes sense for um people to partner up or teams, right? In a way, it's subconscious, but in a way that you get what you don't have that balances you out. Um so, yeah, that that's kind of the idea behind it. And I mean, it could at sometimes lead to some conflict because it's not your nature, right? You have to try something else. and vice versa. You know, if you want to go to the same place all the time, it might not be her nature to want to do that, but that's good for both sides.

Yeah, that makes sense because even the explorer who wants new experiences all the time, if you're constantly just having new experiences, you would habituate to that. I mean, if you love to travel and you just travel 365 days a year, eventually that will become habituated, I would imagine, and you need to go back to some sort of routine in order to offset that habituation and then make traveling to a new place exciting again. Um, well, I I think for one one thing, it's probably it takes a lot of energy and effort, right? Yes. To to to do that. Yeah. Speaking of travel though, you had some interesting anecdotes and insights in the book about how to make travel more interesting.

Mhm. Yeah. So, this is based on on work that I did with a tourism company where they wanted to know when um are people happiest on vacation and what makes them happiest. And so we went on the resorts um and we surveyed people and we found that um the happiest time was 43 hours into a vacation. So 43 hours and this wasn't a resort. So it wasn't a place where people kind of travel around. They came to one place and they kind of stayed there. So what happened within 43 uh hours is that that gave people enough time to you know land, unpack, get to know the place and so on. And then from that moment on that was a peak of fun and but from that moment on happiness started dwindling and it went down and down and down.

Now people were still happy 5 6 7 8 days in but not as happy as they were on day two. And when we asked people, hey what was the best part of your your um vacation? The one word that they used more than any other word was the word first. The first view of the ocean. you know, when you get there and you're suddenly ah like that, you open the window. The first um cocktail that I had, the first sun castle that I built, so the second cocktail, the first cocktail, the fifth cocktail was still good, but not as good um as as the first. So, you know, one a few things to think about that is, well, maybe we don't want to go on a really long vacation.

Maybe we would want more frequent vacations, but shorter ones, so we get more of those 43hour in uh peaks. Um, of course that's not possible if you're going something far somewhere far away, but sometimes maybe, you know, a vacation close by, a few of them is better than than one long one um far away. Um, so it's the idea of if you have those like breaks, right, and variation, you have more of those firsts, more of those peaks. Yeah. And you could even structure it with variations within the travel, right? I mean, if you you go to let's say it is a place far away and it doesn't lend itself if it's a 12-h hour flight to get somewhere to to only stay there for 12 or 36 hours and then fly right back.

But you could introduce variation through where you're staying, what you're doing. You could move from really rugged circumstances to luxury circumstances. I mean, that was something I connected with when I was reading your book because I thought about my honeymoon where we went to Brazil and we just had a few days of lying low after the wedding, nice and comfortable. Then we go to Brazil and we went up the Amazon River uh for seven days. That was like hardcore camping and just being out in the elements and dirty, disgusting, and living off of, you know, not very nice food. But it was an amazing experience.

Then went back to a more of a luxury situation where we're sipping a cocktail on the beach. And looking back, when I look at the pictures of the place we went to after the Amazon run, it was it was a nice hotel, but it felt like a $2,000 a night hotel because of where we had just come from, because of that variation. And that seems that really struck a chord with me when I was reading this. I was like, "Oh, that's the secret to keeping it keeping it varied, right?" Yeah. The contrast is so important. Um, and you know what you did is if you were staying in that same resort the whole time that you habituate to it.

But no, you took yourself out disabituated and then when you came back um it felt quite quite nice. And I think you know this probably happens I mean it happens in life all the time right you can you can have you can be in a situation where it's kind of really luxurious. It could just be people's regular life in their home. And um and in fact we we actually start I think this is like the very first chapter then um maybe after the introduction we start about this story about two women um and they both have you know charmed lives. They're wealthy. They have really nice homes and and perfect families and so on.

But um one of them is is much happier than the other. Um and the difference is that this person who who is happier they uh tend to leave for work for a while and then come back right leave and come back. Um, and in fact, so that person that's based on Julia Roberts on an interview that she gave, I think it was in New York Times, uh, when she says, you know, my daily life is I get up, I, uh, get the kids ready for school, I take them to school, I bike back home, I have lunch with my husband, then I pick up the kids from school, I take them to their activities, I make dinner, and she says, and it's wonderful.

It's so wonderful. But if I have did that every single day for the last 20 so years, I would probably not find it so wonderful. But the reason I find it so wonderful is that I go away on location for a while and then I come back and every time I come back, it's like pixie dust all over my very normal life. Of course, her life is not very normal, right? It's it's much more um than most people have. But I think she's describing actually a very normal phenomena um that you can have a wonderful life in in the sense the objective sense but it may not feel like it because you can't see it anymore. And then if you go and you come back suddenly you know that cocktail seems so luxurious.

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Hule. It's fuel for humans. Hule. See what they did there? Now, I was curious about the relationship between habituation and the midlife crisis. Yeah. So, that's what we talked about at the beginning of the podcast, right? That what happens during midlife is that we have a lot of sameness um and things are um the same in terms of like your relationship, you've been in the same relationship for a while, the same um job for a while, and it could be great, but it hasn't really changed, right? So that probably is one of the reasons for the midlife crisis. And then you can see how people react sometimes, right?

What do they do? They make these changes. They're not necessarily like deep changes, but it's just a change, right? It's not necessarily better. It's just different. Um, and making changes is could be a good idea, right? But, you know, you don't have to necessarily buy a new red car. Um but in fact some of the changes are best um are changes that involve some kind of learning. So for example taking an online course that is different from anything related to your job for example or at least you think it's different because in fact from anything anything probably um will go back and benefit you in whatever else you're doing.

Um but it could also be small little things. It's it's amazing how you could change um what you notice and how you feel by making small different small changes in your routine like taking a different route to work instead of like going in a car, biking, trying a new sport, right? Um so creating more of these changes. It could be bigger things. It could be that you decide to to go live in a different place or maybe you go on a long long holiday somewhere. Um but that is really important. And in fact, there there's a really um interesting study that was conducted by Steven Levit where um he asked people to go online and write down something that they were considering to change.

And it could be really small. It could be the color of your hair or it could be big like exiting and entering a relationship, starting a new job, taking on a new hobby. And um he said, "Okay, now um toss a virtual a virtual coin." So they had like a virtual coin on on the website. You toss it. If it's heads, you should go and make the change and if it's tails, stay with the status quo. And then he went back to people 2 weeks later and 6 months later. Thousands of people. And he found that those people who who got the heads were in fact more likely to make a change. And most importantly, those people who did make a change were happier.

They were happier 2 weeks in and they were happier 6 months in. And so why is that? Well, first of all, I think if you're considering to change something, probably there's some suboptimality there, right? Otherwise, you wouldn't consider changing it. Now, it doesn't doesn't tell you how to change, right? If you're considering to change um your relationship, it doesn't mean necessarily divorce. It could mean go see a counselor, right? It can mean many things, but a change is needed. And the second thing is change puts yourself means that you're putting yourself in a in a state of dishabituation.

Whatever the change is, it doesn't matter what it is. You're putting yourself in a in a new context. There's something new for you to learn about the environment. And we know that learning induces joy. There's a great other study where um uh two neuroscientists gave this task to people and then every few minutes asked them how how happy they were. And if they did well in the task, they got money. And they found that when people did well, they were happy. However, they were happiest when they learned something new about the task. Um, so change puts you in a state of learning. Um, and you can't actually habituate to change and learning because you can only habituate to things that are not changing.

Um, and so what one of the um conclusions that Steven Levid got to was that people are not actually making enough changes, right? And I think the reason is it's the easiest thing you can do is stay with the status quo. It's effortless, right? And making a change not only requires effort, but it's also um anxietyinducing. There's uncertainty. If I just do the same thing over and over and over, I know what the outcome will be. But if I make a change, I don't know what the outcome will be. And that is uncertainty. And people are averse to uncertainty. But I think what his um study suggests is that we should we should not look at kind of like the short term of like, oh, I'm I'm put in effort and and I was scared but it suggested in the long term changes on average um will actually enhance a well-being.

Yeah. And that makes sense. I mean I uh spent a number of years working for Dr. Czech sent me high who wrote the book flow many years ago. uh but one of the findings that I feel like is very under reportported in his work was that flowinducing activities usually require a lot of learning. we need challenge to meet skill. And he found that it was even though people self-reported they enjoyed those activities much more. They on average had a lot of difficulty starting those activities because the amount of psychic energy that was required to begin the activity. Right? It's if you love to snowboard, there's a lot of energy required in getting the gear, driving to the place, buying the tickets, probably finding someone to go with you.

It's a it's so much easier to open up Tik Tok or Instagram on your phone. And because it requires almost zero psychic energy in the beginning, but the there are very few if any long-term benefits to that time spent on social media. Whereas the snowboarding leads to huge long-term benefits. And you can continue, just like you said, continue to learn over time and those long-term benefits start to compound on top of each other. What I'm wondering is when we make these small changes to connect all this together, are the small changes just as valuable if they lead to learning as the major shakeup changes?

Because when I think about the midlife crisis, I think about people making bad decisions to shake up their life. and maybe people would be better served to add a date night to their marriage rather than say go seek out a new partner and blow up their family. Is there any research on that? The small changes are just as valuable if they lead to learning and the dishabituation. Mhm. Yeah. I I don't know if even in his study whether he looked specifically at how large the change was, but rather looked at it in in general. So, so I don't have an answer to this. Um, you you know, again, the data is based on thousands and thousands of people making thousands thousands of changes and some people were happier and some people were not happier.

It's just on average. It just says like on average there's a benefit to change. But whether you're going to end up being happier after the change is a consequence of so many other things, right? So, you can think of it as like an equation. everything that you do and you're trying to like predict how happy would I be and so on this side of the equations are a lot of things um that will determine how happy or how good that decision is. One of it is like oh change is has a little benefit. It has a benefit right? It doesn't mean that the overall number will be positive. So there's a little positive number here, but then there's many other things here that would then uh so what these experiments allow us to do is to isolate these components and say change on its own has has a good benefit.

That's not to be confused with like any change will make you happier. Um but it is a case that we're not doing enough of it. Um and so it's a good idea to to kind of induce more variety actively. And as you said, it's it's effortful just like learning is effortful, right? You're talking about like um snowboarding. Well, of course that's a lot of physical effort. But even um let's say already someone signed me up for the course and like you know, but even starting the the learning process itself, the learning is effortful. It's joyful and I think maybe some of the joy comes from the effort. Um but you know any it it's kind of a cliche but anything worthwhile is not effortful right it is but usually there's some truth situated in something that becomes a cliche it gets repeated because there there's something there and I know from my personal experience I mean this morning I woke up popped out of bed because we had this conversation on the books and and I know since starting this podcast.

It has introduced so many new challenges, new things to learn and it's wonderful that the the show now produces income. But I regularly say to people, I would absolutely do this for free because it has introduced so much variation in my life that is just interesting and motivating. I mean over the past week it was yeah there was effort required because I was going okay I got to read the book look again and and and read it quickly. So that required a lot of a lot of time to get through the entire book, look at past interviews so that I'm not trying to just ask the same questions. But all of it in the end becomes very fulfilling and makes life more interesting um by embracing that challenge and those learning opportunities.

What are some other because we don't want to necessarily uh dump something huge into somebody's life like um go go start a a podcast, but what are some small easily attainable changes people can make that that you've seen can be can be effective to combat this habituation and make things more interesting. Mhm. So, okay, there's something really really small and that relates to another benefit of this habituation which is there's a benefit to creativity as well. Um, so there's a study uh that was conducted at Harvard that showed that if you just change your immediate environment, meaning you know I'm sitting in my office working, I'll go out and have a walk and maybe have a meeting while walking or something and then I I come back or I go I'll work in the coffee shop for a little bit.

I'll go work in the kitchen. So the study shows that every time that you change your immediate environment, creativity is enhanced. Um the in that boost lasts only for six minutes. But that could be the time where it's you know your Eureka moment. So 6 minutes that's that's good. Um so just changing your immediate environment in that kind of way, right? Literally putting yourself geographically somewhere else will enhance your your creativity on average. Um, and the reason is because if you're sitting in the same room, everything around you is the same, right? Like visually, the smell, the temperature, right?

But you're taking yourself to somewhere else. Suddenly, everything is different. And so your brain kind of opens up and starts taking in more, right? And kind of changing the way that that it's it's working. And that could lead to new ideas. And in fact, if I think about all the times where I had like my, you know, Eureka moments, it was never when I was sitting in front of the computer um you know, in my office. It's all it's always where someone and often when like at just just at that those first six minutes or so, I don't know if it was six or 10, but I I definitely remember every single case that led to, you know, one of the important changes in my research or or the pathway that I took.

And in one case, I was sitting in the office. I'm trying to solve this problem and I just couldn't solve the problem. So I decided to go to the gym. Uh which is very good idea. So I stepped out and started walking and within minutes this solution came to me. Um and I remember this cuz then I I I called uh the student that I was working with, you know, to kind of tell him, oh this is what it is. Um and that was huge cuz that that it sounds small, but it was something that would change years and years and years of what I did later. Um, and I can remember all of these instances. One time it was I was sitting in a in a car in in Napa Valley after a conference waiting waiting for someone.

Um, and that's when the idea came cuz everything that I heard in that conference now came together in front of, you know, these like vineyards. Um, so yeah, so that's a small thing, right? And I mean I I can I can see that when I'm when I'm sitting in the same place like you know I I'm actually in not in my home office but I was for the weeks before that I was sitting in my home office and it kind of like the same you know every day the same thing and so then just coming somewhere else um to you know this office in my in the university made a huge change to to the way that I feel. Um so it it could be something easy like that.

So, it's only six minutes, but it's a critical six minutes. On average. On average. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Um, and what where is your research taking you now? What's what's next? What new things are you exploring? What's getting you excited right now? Mhm. Yeah. So, you know, I have a lab with with a bunch of people and they're all interested in different things. So, we're working on different things, but I can tell you about some of the things that I'm excited about. So one thing that we're studying a lot is related a little bit to some things that we said which is kind of the pleasure of thinking uh the joy of thinking.

Why is thinking can be something that's really joyful? Um and like the cognitive what is it about cognition and thinking can I can I isolate those little components? Can I identify and define them? Um and why is it that some people have can uh can get more joy from these elements than others? How does it develop like over age? When when do these things kind of sprout? Uh do they go down over age? Maybe they go up. Uh what exactly um how does a brain process this? Does it use the same mechanism that it already has in place to process other joyful things and rewarding things in life like food and sex or or maybe it's like a different mechanism or way maybe they're working together.

So we're we're trying to understand I would call it the the joy of thinking. Um that's one thing. The other thing we're really interested in is um how people decide what they want to know. So we seek information all the time, right? I mean, you're asking me questions, that's information seeking. Um, you're going online any you Google something, that's information seeking. You're asking your wife how her day was, that is information seeking. So, we we seek information all the time. We don't even think about it, right? But how how did you decide make all these decisions, right? What is driving you?

And again, there's interesting individual differences in what is driving those decisions. And so, we can look at that by doing experiments, but we can also look at that by looking at your web browsing behavior. what is what is the stuff that you're consuming into your mind? What is the impact of that? Um and can we make it can we make it better in some ways? Um so for example, we developed um a plugin that if you download it um when you Google something, the Google results come like they usually do, but next to each results you you see free scores. One tells you how positive or negative the information in that website is.

Um, so for example, if you had a bad day and you don't want more bad news, you might, you know, decide not to click on on the the one with like an not a smiley face. Um, another score tells you how useful the information is on average um to most people. So it it does this by an algorithm that we developed by feeding it ratings of many many many people. And um the third score tells you how likely it is to enhance your knowledge. again on average. So it's not the same for everyone, but based on the average population. And so you can then potentially make better choices about what am I consuming? What am I putting in my mind?

A bit like when you go to to a grocery store, you know, before you eat a bar, you kind of look how what are the calories, what is the fat, what is the sugar, and you make a decision. But when you go online, no, you don't have those labels to help you make better decisions. So we're consuming like you said we can scroll absolutely useful useless content not going to enhance your knowledge in any way you're just wasting your time maybe even u making your mood worse what we found it can have an effect on your mental health like if you're people who consume a lot of negative information that is related to um problems with mental health so um yeah that's another another line um of research that we're working on that's fascinating I would love to see a confirmation bias score on there and it kind of we have to know we have to know what you exactly think but you would you would need the history of what they have looked at before but it would be very interesting to yeah because if you had the browsing history or the the social media history you could see oh I'm at a nine out of 10 hearing the same message over and over again maybe that would cue I could try looking at something different because the information bubbles seem to be very net negative to society and it almost doesn't matter what bubble you're in.

It's just being bubbled is not good because you're none of these beliefs are being challenged. And my understanding is that that's how beliefs grow more extreme over time because those algorithms are targeting us for engagement and in order so that we don't become habituated. Uh they ratchet up in extremity over time and it might just serve as a nice little warning. I would also be really curious how people responded to a confirmation bias score because like you said, some people are excited by thinking about something. Some people get excited about their existing beliefs being challenged. Other people are are they they repel uh challenges to their beliefs.

That's a really interesting line of study. I think you've got a great book in the making there. taking a little break before the next one. But yeah. Yes. Yes. It is a grueling process. Uh no doubt. If somebody wants to learn more about you, certainly I absolutely recommend uh your book, Look Again, and your past books. Um I'm just going to look up the names of them again. We've got the influential mind and the optimism bias. And if they want to learn more about you online, where are the best places to find Dr. Sherrod? So my lab is effective brain lab with an a a effect like emotion. So effectivebrainlab.com.

Um and there you can find both all our academic papers but also all all you know um articles for for um everyone else as well. um and from like you know the popular press and um there's links to videos. Yeah, I think that's probably the best place. Okay. Absolutely. We'll have links to all of it in the description in the notes depending on what platform uh everyone is consuming this in, but we'll link to all of that stuff past TED talks and all of that good stuff. It was such a pleasure to learn about this. Thank you so much. It was it was a pleasure. Okay, everybody. Until next time, ask questions, don't accept the status quo, and be curious.

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