New Neuroscience Reveals 3 Secrets That Will Make You Happier

Why can’t we just be happy all the time?

From a neuroscience perspective, the best answer is probably “because of habituation.”

It’s the insidious process by which the extraordinary becomes the utterly banal, the miraculous the miserably mundane. Sadly, our brains are hardwired for buzzkill, ensuring that no matter how amazing something is, we’ll eventually end up taking it for granted.

You finally get that thing you’ve wanted for months, maybe even years — a new car, a promotion, a date with someone who bathes regularly — and it’s amazing. You’re on top of the world, strutting down the street like the universe’s favorite child. And then, like a cosmic kick in the crotch, habituation rolls in and shrugs, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, this is nice. What’s next?”

Habituation is a many-headed beast, feasting on the carcasses of our once-vibrant joys. Your seventh visit to the Grand Canyon feels more like looking into a particularly large ditch than one of the seven natural wonders of the world. Habituation takes a perfectly good marriage and makes it feel like a line at the DMV after a few years. Indoor plumbing is a miracle, but it’s tough to muster up gratitude every time you flush the toilet.

Yup, that’s habituation — and it’s perpetually screwing you over like a two-bit carny at a rigged ring toss. Why does this happen?

Unfortunately, the issue goes deep — right down to the neuron level. Brain cells just respond less and less to stimuli that repeat. If they didn’t, you’d constantly notice your clothes moving on your skin and background noise would never fade into the background.

Now when something new surprises us, your brain immediately pops up like a meerkat on watch duty. But anything that continues, even the greatest joys of life, fades and fades with time.

Habituation, it seems, is the universe’s way of reminding us that familiarity breeds, if not contempt, then a profound sense of “meh.” It’s the ironic joke at the heart of the human condition: our capacity for adaptation, a key to our survival, also ensures that we are forever chasing the next high on the hedonic treadmill.

So, what’s a poor, joy-seeking person to do? Some might say the key is to keep seeking out new experiences, to chase the dragon of novelty like a crackhead on a bender. You can try to outrun it — move to a different country every week, marry someone new every month, or switch religions every time you get tired of the previous one’s hymns — but habituation will always be two steps ahead, waiting at the next corner with a smirk on its face.

We need to learn how to outwit this foe. To turn the tables on its relentless march of indifference and keep the good feelings coming. And we’re gonna get some help…

Tali Sharot is a professor of cognitive neuroscience at University College London and MIT. Cass Sunstein is the Robert Walmsley University Professor at Harvard Law School. Their book is “Look Again: The Power of Noticing What Was Always There.”

Let’s get to it…

 

Dishabituate To Bring The Sparkle Back

We can bring back the positive feelings we have toward something by dishabituating.

The theory goes like this: by deliberately abstaining from the very things that sprinkle our dreary existence with fleeting moments of joy, we might, through some masochistic miracle, reset our ability to experience pleasure. It’s self-imposed deprivation, a sort of reverse hedonism, if you will.

“Hey, you know what would make this chocolate cake taste better? Not eating chocolate cake for a month.”

Yes, I know: this is becoming a terrible day to be literate. Who came up with this, and why are we listening to them? It’s like deciding to bang your head against the wall because it feels so good when you stop.

The thing is? You know it works.

Let’s start with coffee. This sounds blasphemous, because coffee is what stands between me and multiple felonies before noon. Many years ago, it felt like life in a mug. But then, over time, it became nothing more than a wet alarm clock. But what if you completely stopped drinking coffee for a while?

Yes, you’d be miserable at first. You’ll feel like someone’s poured sand directly into your veins. You go without it for a week, suffer the irritability, the sudden desire to throw objects at happy people. But then that glorious day comes when you sip it again…

Oh my God. It’s like finding out Santa is real.

And what brings back the warmth in a romantic relationship? Spending more time apart.

Absence makes the heart grow fonder, or at the very least, gives it a break from growing homicidal over your partner’s inexplicable belief that the dishwasher loads itself. It’s like your first date all over again, but with the added bonus of already knowing their credit score. You return to each other with stories that don’t begin with, “You’ll never believe what the cat did today.”

If you used to get more pleasure from something and want to renew that lease, step away for a while. It’s like “turn it off and then turn it on again”, but for your soul.

(To learn how to be much happier without really trying, click here.)

Okay, we’ve covered how to bring some joy back. Now it’s time to learn the secret to reducing misery. No, it’s not by winning the lottery or marrying a Hemsworth brother…

 

Habituate To Make Discomfort More Positive

I’m not going to give you a motivational speech about “seeing the bright side” or “finding your bliss.” You need to embrace the discomfort.

Actually, go further — marinate in it. Through the lens of habituation, you make bad things less bad by getting so used to them that you forget they’re horrible.

Researchers took 119 subjects and exposed them to a persistent, irritating noise. Then they asked the volunteers if they’d like a short break. 82 of the 119 said, “OH GOD, YES!” The others stayed in the room the whole time. At the end of the study, who reported suffering more? Yup, the ones who took the break. The people who stayed in the room the whole time had habituation dialing down the annoyance. They got used to it.

Oh, habituation. You sly devil, you. Just when we thought you were the enemy of all things joyful, you go and pull a fast one on us, revealing your hidden talent for making the unbearable, well, slightly less awful.

So if you’re doing an unpleasant task or suffering through anything uncomfortable, you might want to persist and get it over with in one shot instead of breaking it up into chunks.

No, this isn’t fun at first. Suddenly time feels like it’s measured in glacial epochs. You find yourself longing for the sweet release of death, or at least a well-timed aneurysm. But here’s the thing – if you stick with it, if you let habituation work its twisted numbing magic, eventually, the misery starts to lose its edge. It’s like your mind says, “Okay, this is our life now. Might as well get comfortable.”

Sounds awful but we know it’s true. Hang in there. Those uncomfortable moments are the resistance bands of the soul, quietly strengthening our ability to not give a crap. They make us more resilient.

(To learn five rituals to keep you happy all the time, click here.)

And now for the most surprising way we can trick habituation into serving our needs: we can choose to dishabituate to bad things. I’ll let you process that for a second. Yes, that means “making terrible stuff feel as awful as it did the first time.” Sounds about as fun as sticking your face in a beehive.

But it also has a powerful upside…

 

Dishabituate To Negative Things To Drive Change

Here’s a simple truth about human beings: we’re experts at getting used to anything. Truly, anything. As we just discussed, when we’re constantly surrounded by unpleasant stuff, our brains start to think that’s just how life is supposed to be.

And that’s where dishabituation comes in. It’s the art of stepping away from the horrifying situation you’ve passively come to accept just long enough to remember how much it actually sucks. Get yourself a nice, long break from “normal” and you realize, “My God, how does anyone live like this?”

Use dishabituation to motivate you to change.

The water pressure in the shower is so weak that it feels like you’re being spit on by a lazy toddler. You’re used to it. You’ve even started to think of it as “quirky,” which is just code for “embarrassing when friends come over.”

But go spend a weekend somewhere with a great shower that just pummels you. When you return to your place, it’ll feel like you’ve stepped onto the set of a horror film about middle-class despair. And that’s when you finally call the repairman because you’ve remembered that not everyone lives in a place that feels like it’s been abandoned by hope.

Similarly, you can use dishabituation to help you break bad habits. For one night, just one night, follow all the rules we’ve discussed on how to sleep better. Stop caffeine early, dim the lights during the evening, cut the screen time before bed, etc., etc. And the next day you realize that, no, it’s not normal to feel like you’ve been run over by a steamroller every morning.

A revelation strikes like a bolt of lightning from the heavens: life doesn’t have to be this way.

You’re suddenly filled with the rage of 1,000 trapped souls. “How have I been putting up with this?!”

This is the magic of dishabituation. You need to remember how bad things are to actually get mad enough to fix them. A break isn’t just a reward – it can be a wake-up call.

(To learn 11 things that will make you more positive, click here.)

Okay, we’ve covered a lot. Time to round it all up – and we’ll also learn the exceptions to habituation that can allow us to escape its samsara cycle where all good things eventually become wallpaper…

 

Sum Up

Here’s how to trick habituation into improving your life…

• Dishabituate To Bring The Sparkle Back: By voluntarily entering a self-imposed exile from things we love, we can hit the reset button on joy. Or as I like to call it, “playing hard to get with your own happiness.”
• Habituate To Make Discomfort More Positive: Think of it as exposure therapy for the soul. Instead of gently facing your fears, you’re belly flopping into a pool of unpleasantness and staying there to make the lousy less lousy.
• Dishabituate To Negative Things To Drive Change: You’re never going to change your life if you’re too busy being numb to it. Step away from the chaos, and when you return, let your renewed horror motivate you like a very uncomfortable type of rocket fuel.

So how do we escape the clutches of habituation?

By giving and learning —two lessons you probably thought you’d left behind in kindergarten, right next to nap time and the flavor of paste. Now, I know what you’re thinking: “Oh great, so the solution to chronic dissatisfaction is charity and homework?” Yes. Yes, it is. But stick with me, because it actually makes sense…

Researchers gave study subjects five dollars each day and said, “Treat yourself.” This made people happy. But, of course, habituation waltzed in and after five days the happiness boost dropped by one point on a seven-point scale — they started taking it for granted.

But what happens when the instructions were changed to “spend it on someone else”? The joy they got from helping others only dropped by half a point over the five days.

We habituate far less to the happiness we get from being kind to others.

So what about learning?

Two neuroscientists, Bastien Blain and Robb Rutledge, had subjects report their feelings every few minutes while playing a game. Unsurprisingly, winning money in the game made them happy. But something else made them even happier – learning about the game. You know when you have that Ah-ha! moment of insight and figure out how to play better? That brought the most joy. Why?

You can get used to winning money. But you cannot, by definition, habituate to learning because learning is change.

And when change stops altogether, when we are no longer learning and progressing, we don’t feel so good. Which is likely why people experience midlife crises.

We slog through a day that feels like it was copy-pasted from every other day. But life isn’t supposed to be a predictable conveyor belt of blah, trudging from coffee to email to dinner to unconsciousness.

You can use the techniques above to strategically get habituation and dishabituation working in your favor. And you can keep giving and learning to stop habituation in its tracks. (This blog makes me happy because I get to give and learn at the same time.)

Incorporate these simple habits and your life will get much, much better.

Having trouble believing it could be that good?

Don’t worry – you’ll get used to it.