Modern Life Numbs You. Here’s The Neuroscience Of Waking Up | Tali Sharot
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 happens.
- How it negatively impacts the joy we feel in 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, and taking a different route to work
- The interesting relationship between creativity and people who habituate slowly
- How habituation impacts our relationships. (As she says, habit and routine are anti-aphrodisiacs.)
- Why 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 lying.
- And lastly, we talk about the dangers of habituating to a slow, incremental rise in tyranny – and how dis-habituation entrepreneurs can help.
Related Episodes:
#345 How to Change Your Habits | Katy Milkman
Making and Breaking Habits, Sanely | Kelly McGonigal
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