The One You Feed - Why We Stop Noticing What Matters and How to Feel Alive Again with Tali Sharot

Episode Date: June 20, 2025

In this episode, Tali Sharot explains why we stop noticing what matters and how to start feeling alive again. She describes what habituation is and how our minds normalize what once moved us. Tali also explores ways that we can reawaken joy, purpose, and even moral clarity. It’s an eye-opening look at the subtle ways we lose and then can reclaim our aliveness.Feeling stuck? It could be one of the six saboteurs of self-control—things like autopilot, self-doubt, or emotional escapism. But here’s the good news: you can outsmart them. Download the free Six Saboteurs of Self-Control ebook now at oneyoufeed.net/ebook and start taking back control today!Key Takeaways:Concept of habituation and its effects on emotional responsesImportance of noticing the extraordinary in everyday lifeStrategies for counteracting habituation, such as taking breaks and diversifying experiencesRelationship between habituation and creativityImpact of social media on emotional well-being and habituationExploration of habits and addiction, particularly in relation to social mediaDiscussion on the nature of lying and habituation to dishonestyThe balance between exploration and exploitation in personal experiencesThe complexities of human emotions and expectations, particularly regarding women’s rights and happinessEncouragement to experiment with life choices to enhance well-being and fulfillmentIf you enjoyed this conversation with Tali Sharot, check out these other episodes:How to Stop Losing Your Mind (Literally): The Surprising Science of Attention with Amishi JhaHow to Create Elastic Habits that Adapt to Your Day with Stephen GuiseFor full show notes, click here!Connect with the show:Follow us on YouTube: @TheOneYouFeedPodSubscribe on Apple Podcasts or SpotifyFollow us on InstagramSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

If we weren't the kind of creatures that habituate to these negative things, we wouldn't be able to function, not as an individual, not as a species, right? We all have had these experiences of things that happen to us that are sometimes really tragic, sometimes just feel tragic, perhaps are not that tragic, but over time we bounce back. That's what people do. Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like, garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us.

We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf.

In Zen, we're taught to see the extraordinary in the ordinary. And for a while, I tried to live entirely that way. But eventually, I had to admit, novelty matters to me. I need newness to feel alive. That inner tug is exactly what neuroscientist Tali Sherritt names in her new book, Look Again. In this episode we talk about habituation, how our minds normalize what once moved us, and how we can reawaken joy, purpose, even moral clarity. It's an eye-opening look at the subtle ways we lose and then can

reclaim our aliveness. I'm Eric Zimmer and this is The One You Feed. Hi Tali, welcome to the show. Hi, thank you for having me. I'm excited to have you on. We're going to be discussing your book which is called Look Again, the power of noticing what was always there. But before we get into that, we'll start the way we always do with the parable. And in the parable, there's a grandparent who's talking with their grandchild and they say, in life there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents

things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops and they think about it for a second. They look down at their grandparent, they say, well, which one wins? And the grandparent says the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. Okay, well, I mean, I think feeding the good wolf and not feeding the bad wolf requires some kind of like conscious decision and some kind of reflection and control about regarding what you decide to do, but also what you decide should fill your mind, what kind of information you let in,

both from the outside and also what kind of information you focus on coming from the inside. I think from the outside, it's a very relevant task because there's a lot of different opinions and information and news and it's super easy to just go online and feed the bad wolf. And that is probably the easiest thing to do nowadays. You go on social media, you just go on any news website, and there you go, lots of food for the bad wolf.

So I think that requires some kind of like conscious control of making sure that you're making decisions about how much time to spend online on different platforms. And you know, when when is probably enough and how to evaluate the information that's coming in. Yeah, I think that so much of what you talk about in this book around looking again and about habituation speaks to how we engage online. And we may get to social media, which is a chapter in the book. But before we jump there, let's talk about the core idea in this book, which is that

we as humans habituate. Explain to us what that means. Sure. So habituation means that we respond less and less emotionally and physiologically to things around us that are constant or that are very frequent or that change but very, very, very slowly. So let's start with a really simple example. You walk into a room full of cigarette smoke. At first, the smoke is quite salient, but studies show that within 20 minutes, you cannot detect the smell of the smoke. Or, you know, there might be an AC in the background

at the moment, but because it's been there all day, you don't notice it anymore. So that's physiological habituation. And just as you habituate to a smell or sound, or even the temperature, we also habituate to more complex things in our life, from maybe the view outside your window, to even more complex things like a new relationship or a new job. So it could be good things like those things, right? It could be good things in your life,

but because they've been there for so long, they don't bring you as much joy on a daily basis as they probably should. And also you might habituate to the not so great things in your life, perhaps cracks in your personal relationship, inefficiencies in the workplace because they've been there all the time, you don't notice.

And if you don't notice, then you might not be likely to change. So that's basically the idea of habituation. Yeah, I think a lot of us have heard about the idea of the hadanic treadmill, meaning you know, something that once brought you pleasure doesn't so much over time and you need more to give you pleasure. But I also love the idea that you're framing it in the reverse in which that we habituate to bad things, which on one hand is a good thing. If we've got a circumstance in our life that is difficult, we don't want it to be like a constantly open wound. And yet there's a downside to that.

Yeah. So there are things that happen to you and there's not much you can do, right? Loss of a loved one, for example, sometimes you lose your job. So there could be quite difficult things that happen and the best you can do is just adapt. We need to move on. And in fact, if we weren't the kind of creatures that habituate to these negative things, we wouldn't be able to function, Not as an individual, not as a species, right? We all have had these experiences of things that happen to us that are sometimes really tragic, sometimes just feel tragic, perhaps are not that tragic, but over time, we bounce back. That's what people do.

That's a good thing. It's a really good thing. And in fact, people with depression, for example, are unable to do it effectively. So people with depression don't bounce back as easily from negative things that happen to them in their life. However, on the other side, there are negative things around us that we can change, right? And so in those cases where it is changeable, in that case, habituation may be not a good thing. And again, it could be in your private life,

it can also be in society, right? There might be negative suboptimal things in society that's been there all the time. And so we don't even think about them, right? It could be racism, sexism, it could be just, as I said, inefficiencies in the workplace that we kind of don't notice because it's always been there. So it doesn't really attract our attention.

There isn't much of a reaction to it. Yeah, you've got a great line about how what's thrilling on Monday becomes boring by Friday. And conversely, you say something like what was a horror on Sunday is, you know, by Wednesday is it this isn't what you said, but something like an inconvenience. And so, this habituation being a good and a bad thing, are there ways or what are the ways that we can start to adjust how we habituate to become a little bit more active in the process of habituating or dehabituating, I guess would be the opposite of habituation that you call it. Yeah.

So, you know, as you said, habituation is a good thing or a bad thing. The thing is, it's a natural thing. So we all habituate. I mean, all of us habituate maybe to different degrees. And as I said, you know, some individuals actually have problems with habituation, but most of us habituate. And so we don't necessarily usually need to learn how to habituate.

What we need is to figure out how to dishabituate in many of the circumstances where it will be advantageous to us to dishabituate. Not because habituation is bad in general, but because it also leads to this, as we said, less joy, right? And less noticing and changing. And so it is helpful to first of all,

know about what habituation is, right? So we can recognize it in our life, but then also know about ways by which we can dishabituate. And dishabituate simply means noticing and feeling again, right? So reacting to things again. And so really there are two main ways to disobituate and they're somewhat related to each other.

The first is taking a break. So if you take a break from something, if you're not around it for some time, you will disobituate by definition. And then we come back to that thing you feel again. So you can imagine, you know, there's like the view outside my window, perhaps it's a nice view and I don't really notice it

because I'm sitting here every single day. But if I leave for a week and then I come back, I'll be more likely to notice that's the situation. Or let's take an easy example, food, right? So some people are, you know, you really like a certain dish, right? There was a nice experiment they did with mac and cheese. People love mac and cheese. They ate it every day, three times a day. Of course, after a few days, they didn't love the mac and cheese as much. But

if they then had a little break from the mac and cheese and came back a few days later, a week later, well, then they had a positive reaction. We can, you know, you probably have that feeling with friends and family members even. If you see them every, you know, you probably have that feeling with friends and family members even. If you see them every, every day, you might have less of an appreciation, but if you don't see them for a while, I mean, we all know this is part of life, then we see them again, we have more of a reaction.

This is dishabituation. So breaking, having breaks is one way, right, in which we can go. And sorry, you're about to ask a question. Go ahead. Oh, I was just going to say my editor is my best friend and I'm just letting him know now that I don't plan to see him for about the next six months, just to try and rekindle some fondness. Yeah, and you know what? It doesn't even have to be six months. We habituate and dishabituate

so fast. And you know, you may have had this experience that if you just go away for a business trip, not even a very long business trip you just go away for a business trip, not even a very long business trip, you go away for a weekend and then you come back. And suddenly, your kind of normal everyday world seems to re-sparkle. You're able to see things, the good things again. Before we dive back into the conversation, let me ask you something. What's one thing that has been holding you back lately? You know that it's there.

You've tried to push past it, but somehow it keeps getting in the way. You're not alone in this. And I've identified six major saboteurs of self-control, things like autopilot behavior, self-doubt, emotional escapism, that quietly derail our best intentions. But here's the good news, you can outsmart them. And I've put together a free guide to help you spot these hidden obstacles and give you simple actionable strategies that you can use to regain control. Download the free guide now at whenufeed.net slash ebook and take the first step towards

getting back on track. Do we re-habituate quickly to something we've already habituated to? So meaning, let's take your example of I come home after a business trip. I get three days away, I get home, the first 30 minutes, it's kind of novel and then before I know it, it's like, I might as well not have been gone. Is that because I was already sort of habituated to it and it would take a longer break for that that re-sparkle the last longer? Yeah.

Or are there ways in which I approach it that could? Well, I guess you said there was a second way. So breaks were one. Right, right. And although I can't think of a study specifically, I'm sure you're right that if we've already encountered something, we've habituated to it, sure, we go away, we disabituate, we come back, and it lasts for a certain amount of time, but not a very long time, you know? And I know this, like, in my own life, I live in two places. I live in Boston and out of London. And when I'm in one place, I really, there's things that I really miss in the other place. And then I go back to the other place place and it feels wonderful for exactly like two

or three days. Sometimes a little long. So okay, so that's one way. Now the other way is to make changes and diversify your life. So to do things differently, and it could be simple things. It could be things like just take a different route to work, right? Or it could be something a little bit bigger, like try a new sport. Take a class online in something that is away from your regular job.

Talk to the type of people that you don't usually talk to. It could be big things. It could be like working on different projects or living in different places. But if we diversify our life, we are in constant kind of changing, right? And change means less habituation. But change also means learning. So every time you do something a little bit different, you put yourself in a state of learning. You have to learn the new rules and there's many studies showing that learning in and of itself brings people joy. So that's

one way to actually kind of enhance well-being just by the change in and of itself. I think about this a lot because I have been a Zen Buddhism student in the past and there's a lot in Zen about learning to look at the ordinary so that it becomes less ordinary. And at one point I think I went a little too deep into that and I began to not recognize the need that I seem to have for more novelty maybe than the average person. So it seems to me there's the strategy of doing different things,

which I think we can go more into. But then there's also, is there a strategy around how I learn to look at the things that I'm still around in new ways or fresher ways? Okay, so as we said, one way is just to actually take yourself out of that, right? Yeah. And then when you come back, you will see it differently. You can also use your imagination, right? So if you kind of close your eyes and imagine yourself, and

this is something that I saw Laurie Santus talk about, you imagine yourself without whatever it is that your home, your comfortable home, right, without the people who are close to you. Imagine it vividly. And that actually creates quite an emotional reaction. When you open your eyes, you have the same kind of feeling of like gratitude. It's a bit like you have this, you know, a nightmare when you're you suddenly don't have your close ones or something that you care about taking. And when you wake up, you're really kind of startled. And that's a little bit similar. And then you see things differently. Again, none of this, none of it, I find, lasts for very, very long.

And this is why it's really a combination of all of these things that is really needed to be able to kind of see things a little bit more vividly even though they're just routine. Yeah, I have a nightmare like that, relatively common, where I lose my partner and I don't know why I have it and I used to think of it as a bad thing and now I think it's a great thing to have happen to me from time to time because it does exactly what you say. It gives me that visceral feeling of what it would actually be like. And in the dream, it's horrible.

I mean, it's, you know, it's definitely a nightmare and when I wake up, I'm grateful. But I try and harvest that in a positive way to help me be less habituated. And that's one of the points you make early in the book is that many couples mistake adaptation for relationship failure. Say more about that. Yeah. And so this actually came about. So my co-author, Cass Sunstein, was he went to a wedding and he was seated at the wedding

next to Esther Perel, the relationship expert while we were writing the book. So it was quite good timing. And of course, they're in a wedding, so they talk about relationship. Well, she's a relationship expert. So I imagine everyone talks to her. I was going to say that's probably her constant stream of conversation. Yeah. That kind of took us into her work. And when we kind of read and saw her talks and so on, we found that what she says is that she surveyed many, many, many individuals. And when she asked them, hey, when are you most attracted to your partner? They say it's one of two instances.

Either I've been away from my partner, and then I come back, right? So this is like the break. Or I see my partner in a new situation. So maybe they are talking to strangers, maybe they are on the stage doing something, right? So in a novel kind of situation. And so this is variety, diversity. So it's exactly the two ways in which people will dishabituate a break and diversity. So it's exactly the two ways in which people will dis-habituate a break and diversity.

So it's a novelty. It's having the same thing, but in a kind of a novel way. But also, you know, I think we will say this in a book that we have this sense that we know our partner very well. I think many people do like, oh, you know, we know our partner very well. I think many people do, like, oh, you know, we know who they are. But in fact, you don't. You don't really know everything about them. They don't really understand what it is to be them. And so in some ways, they are always would be a sort of a stranger to you. But that is not a bad thing because that is exactly the type of thing that Esther

Perrell suggests will actually enhance attraction. In that section in the book, you're also talking about ways to enhance or to de-habituate, but also not to mistake habituation for a bad relationship necessarily. Yeah. I mean, I think you, it's kind of a tricky thing. It's a natural thing that would happen. So it's not necessarily an indicator of something specifically wrong, I would say, in a relationship, but it also is something that needs to be addressed, I think,

to the extent that one can, because you do wanna feel the joy, right, of being with someone and, you know, the ways to do it, I think, are the same ways that we've talked about. So take a break. And when I mean a break, it doesn't mean like a break from the relationship. It could mean just like, okay, an evening away, a weekend away, you come back, right? So having some kind of like space is helpful because every time you have a break and then come back, you dishabituate. There is a wonderful study, it will sound very unrelated,

but it is related. So they had people ask them, hey, what is like a song that you really, really like? Okay. And then they asked, Hey, would you rather listen to the song beginning to end without any breaks? Or would you rather listen to the song with little breaks in between? Every 30 seconds, you'll have a little break. And so 99% of the people said, I don't want any breaks. I wanna listen to the song beginning to end, right? But then they did the experiment and they had one group of people listening to the song,

beginning to end, no breaks, and another group listening to the song with little breaks in between. And they found that those people who took the breaks actually enjoyed the song more. And the reason is that if you, when you start listening to a song that you really like, you're really enjoying it, right? So joy is really high. And then joy starts going down. You're still enjoying

the song, but not as much over time, because you are habituating. But then if I break it and then you come back, you dishabituate. So when you come back, the joy goes back up, right? I think there's an analogy here where, you know, there's something that you love, you want to be near those things all the time, you don't want these breaks, you don't want to come and go. But in fact, by doing these things that are counterintuitive, that can actually be something that's positive, that's helpful. Right, you talk about chopping up the good but swallowing the bad whole. So the idea of swallowing up the bad whole is that it goes to these things that we said we can't really control or we can't change.

And we mean mostly things that are like just like annoying jobs, you have like admin or tax, or you need to clean the toilet, or you need to travel somewhere. So the idea here is that habituation is actually your friend, because the habituation to negative things, let's say you have to clean, so you have this negative feeling, but it will habituate, so the negative will go down over time. But if you take a break, and then you come back, then the negative feelings go back up. So, so this is why we suggest, you know, the good stuff, you want to break into bits and the negative stuff, the bad stuff that things that you just need to do. I'm not, I'm not talking about things that I can actually control and

change. But those things that are just, they need to be done with then swallowing it in one go could be a good thing. So a long dental procedure versus going back three separate times. Oh, yes. Yes. There are of course limits, you know, to these. Yes, of course. Is there anything that controls or what causes some people to habituate more than other people or some people to need more novelty than other people? And I'm thinking a little bit about you talk about Warren Buffett and Bill Gates's reading styles as an example of different ways of approaching this. Yeah. So in psychology, the idea that there are individual differences in people's tendency to explore, to try new things,

is well known. There are people who are more of explorers, and there are people who are more in kind of psychology, you call it exploits, there's nothing bad in it. It just means that you kind of do the thing that you like over and over, than try different things, right? So the explorer will try different restaurants and they exploit, we'll find the one that they like and they'll go back again and again. So that's the exploit. Neither exploring all the time or exploiting all the time is probably the best way to go because if you're exploiting, you're probably missing a lot of other things, right?

Just because you don't know they even exist. So you think it's your favorite restaurant, but you haven't tried other things. And also, you're missing the challenge of change and learning and variety. But if you're on the kind of extreme of exploring, then you might never actually progress because you're like moving from place to place, just looking around, right? So probably something in the middle is a good idea.

And what we have kind of non-empirically observed is that it's often the case that one individual in a couple tends to be more of the explorer and one tends to be more of the exploiter. And it probably, we guess maybe it is not a coincidence that couples end up being one is the explorer, one is the exploiter, right? It's probably like, maybe we're attracted to what we actually need, right? If you're an explorer, you need someone to like, take you in, you know, okay, this is a good thing, let's do this. And if you're like the

exploiter, you need someone to take you out of your comfort zone. Yeah, my relationship is definitely that way. I am the explorer and she is more the, you know, exploiter, meaning she's far more comfortable like in a comfortable area, just settling down, relaxing, enjoying. And I'm, you know, I'm all over the place. And so I do think we are good for each other because she helps me realize like, you can just sit on the couch for a few hours and relax. It's really not a big deal. And then I can help encourage her to do more.

And I think it turns out to be a good blend. Yeah. And we suggest that exploration exploitation, it could be in the stuff that you're actually physically doing. But it can also just be that you mentioned Warren Buffett and Bill Gates. The reason we mentioned them is because we think it's also the type of things, information that you collect into your mind. The Warren Buffett, so we looked at the books that they recommend.

And Warren Buffett's all the books that he recommends. I would say 97% is all about investment, right? Investing like this way, that way, it's like, right? 100 books, all investment. While Bill Gates, it's all over the place. It could be about tennis, sure, it could be about business. It could be about, there's Asperger's syndrome, there's like a syndrome, there's all sorts of things

in that list, very, very different history, all sorts. So we think he's probably within the domain of knowledge. He's probably more of an explorer and Warren Buffett is more of an exploiter. Both of them are hugely successful. Maybe they're both hugely successful, partially because of those traits. Right. Right. I mean, there is studies showing that at least when it comes to creativity, actually the kind of the change is an advantage.

So the more I would say more towards the explorer, if you will, I mean, what the studies show is that there's two things that they show. But the first thing perhaps is people who habituate slower are actually tend to be more creative. So there's many ways to test how you to measure how fast you habituate you could be the what they did is just had the same sound they had the same sound that introduced to people like and they can measure their skin conductance response. So if you hear, for the first time, you have a lot like a physiological response quite large, and then the next time is like less and so on. So they can measure that. And they found that those individuals who didn't have this typical reduction in their response, they kind of like remain kind of aroused high. They tended to be more creative in the sense that they were more likely to be people who had a patent under their name, wrote a book, had art displayed in galleries, and so on.

And the suggestion was that people who obituate slower, they kind of have more information, I would say, like, you know, floating around inside their mind. The information stays there from longer. It could be like visual, olfactory, like pieces of knowledge. And because they're kind of a mishmash, a soup in your mind, it could be quite confusing in source, right? Distracting. But it also means that different pieces of information that seems like they're not really related to each other suddenly, like if you will collide and create this new idea. So that is the relationship between habituation and creativity. They also found in a different study that if you just change your immediate environment,

so let's say I'm in my office, I go out, I go for a walk outside, then I come back, then I go sit in the kitchen. Every time I'm changing my immediate environment, they saw that creativity was enhanced. Now, it wasn't only enhanced for about six minutes on average. So not very long, but so six minutes could be a eureka moment. Yeah. But six minutes multiple times a day actually adds up to something useful. I mean, it's one one strategy that I try and use is just I'm working at first from my porch and then I go to the co-working space, then I take a walk and think about, you know, like I just find that that for me and again, I

think I'm higher on the openness to experience need, right? So I think it serves me well to do more of that. Yeah, because every time you do that, the information coming into your mind is different, right? It's not like now you're sitting and you have the same colors and the same things coming in and the same time of like maybe smell and that, but then you go into a different room and it's completely different. So your mind kind of like opens up and takes in, it starts processing again and that boost what they found is helpful. Before we wrap up, I want you to think about this. Have you ever ended the day feeling like your choices didn't quite match the person you

wanted to be? Maybe it was autopilot mode or self-doubt that made it harder to stick to your goals. And that's exactly why I created the Six Saboteurs of Self-Control. It's a free guide to help you recognize the hidden patterns that hold you back and give you simple, effective strategies to break through them. If you're ready to take back control

and start making lasting changes, download your copy now at oneufeed.net slash ebook. Let's make those shifts happen starting today. Oneufeed.net slash ebook. So let's talk a little bit about social media because I think social media is one of those things we hear all the time about how it gives us these quick little hits of dopamine, which is in essence a way of us feeling something new. And yet for a lot of people, it ends up being an overall

deadening experience. Talk to me about how those two things combine. Yeah. So I think the the problem that we talk about is about social media in the book is that it's a little bit like that AC in the background. Or maybe you have some like there's TV in the background. And you don't really notice it because it's been there so long, but then someone turns it off and suddenly like, it's a relief. You're just like the silence, you know, that feeling. And you didn't even realize that it was annoying you

until someone turned it off. I think social media is like that to some extent, which is we mostly probably think that it has some negative effect on us or we think it probably has maybe stresses you out to some extent, but we don't really know because it's constantly there. It's there every single day.

But when you do the experiments, it was found that people who go off social media have a positive enhancement, and they don't choose to. So it's like, they actually manipulate. They take one one group of people pay the money to get over social media another group of people pay the money to just continue doing what they're doing right so it's not self selection anything like that. When they come back at the end of the month they do find that the people who went off social media. I'm doing better in every single measure they're happier there less stress there meeting people in person they they're playing on the piano. So they're much, they're much better. And I think what's interesting is they are often surprised by the impact. They may be some suspect, oh, there probably has some impact on me, but they don't really predict the actual magnitude that that going off social media has.

Now, all that being said, it's also was found in that study that they went off social media has. Now, all that being said, it's also was found in that study that they went off social media, they felt better, but then at the end of the month, they just went back on social media. So there's this kind of pull, right? That is very hard to overcome. I mean, it is reminiscent of addiction where we know, like if someone is addicted, they know it's not good for them. You know, they want to get off, and if they manage to get off for a while, it's like positive,

but then there's this like pull that takes you back in. And it's a combination of a few things, like why, and I think screens in general, but it does matter what you do on, you know, it's not just screens, it does matter what you're doing and what kind of like things you're bringing in. There's a lot of reasons why it can have a negative effect. I think one is just this kind of continuous like it's easy, but the information is not

very, it doesn't enhance your knowledge or deeply enhance your knowledge or degree. So it's kind of nothingness. It's like, you know, just like I said, it's like watching TV, although I really love a lot of shows, I absolutely love it. And it's in the sense that you don't need to do much, but it doesn't teach you even as much as like maybe a TV show does, right?

I think a lot of TV shows, there's a really careful thought behind them, not all TV shows, but many, there's a careful thought about what are we trying to express, what is the message, what are you learning about different characters and different cultures. It can go deeper because for it's a longer time.

When it's literally seconds that you're like people with random opinions about random things, you don't really gain much. I mean, sometimes I'm like, oh, that's interesting. Someone I put in an article that I was like, you're like people with random opinions about random things, you don't really gain much. I mean, sometimes I'm like, oh, that's interesting. Someone I put in an article that I was like, oh, that's interesting piece of information, but mostly it's just like goes in and out

and doesn't really stay. So sort of a waste of time. And I think that relates to this idea that, it's so important for humans to feel like they're progressing and learning. Even if we're not conscious that it's important, it's important for every single person. And on social media, you don't get that.

You're not getting the feeling of progressing and learning. If anything, you might be getting the opposite, which is like the obvious other problem with social media, which is it's not real, you know, a lot of it is not real. You're seeing other people doing things, which is like, well, that's not even reality and make you feel bad about your own life for no real reason. So those are all the problems. But I think, you know, it's both habit, which a habit is not quite like habituation. Habituation is feeling less in response to things. Habit

is like doing just doing the same thing again and again and again. Automaticity. Exactly. Without any kind of like real conscious desire, I would say. Yeah, I'm curious about this people going back to social media, even after reporting it being better while they're off of it, because I spend a lot of time thinking about how people change and we see this over and over in all sorts of different domains. I mean addiction is one. I've been in recovery for a long time so somehow that pull back I've managed to get beyond. But we see people go on diets and feel better and then they do it for six months and then the next thing, you know, they slide all the way back. So there's some element of that pull back and I'm always curious as to what the different pieces of that are, how much of that is, you know, how long it takes to erase a bad habit,

not a habituation but an actual bad habit, which seems to have an energy to itself. Yeah. So there's habits and there are addiction. situation but an actual bad habit which seems to have an energy to itself. Yeah So there's habits and their addiction. I mean addiction is a habit, but most habits are not an addiction So it's not quite the same thing. I mean everything is biological everything starts in your brain, but but addiction does have this kind of biological Elements to it that make it really hard to overcome, meaning the actual substance is addictive, which is a little bit different. There's a lot of habits that we do. It's just like I wake up in the morning, I do this, I do that. It's like I was it's like, as you say, and it's not an addiction per se. So an addiction is mostly and I'm not an expert in addiction. It's a whole field, you know, medical field. But it's often would be to a substance that often it's things that you consume, but it could be also a behavior that elicits that biological response, right? So things that we can see, we know it's like, okay, whether it's cigarettes, or it's things that you consume, but it could be also a behavior that elicits that biological

response, right? So things that we consume, we know it's like, okay, whether it's cigarettes, or it's food, or it's alcohol, but it could also be like, it could be sex, or it could be social media. Gambling, right, exactly. So it could be behaviors, but they elicit a very particular biological response that I guess, you know, one distinction that people talk about in kind of the field is there's stuff that you like and there's stuff that you want. And like means I experienced this thing

and I have a hedonic reaction. I know consciously and also like physiologically, I like this, right? But wanting doesn't necessarily have to come with liking. You can like, I want to do this, I'm doing it, I have like an action, even if I don't have any conscious or even like physiological like response, hedonic response to that, to that action. So the two things can be dissociated in that sense. It's more like something's overcome you. I think there's a lot of debate around whether social media is something you could consider

an addiction or not, or whether you just consider it a really strong habit pattern. And I think the jury sort of seems out. And I think we have a tendency to use addiction as a phrase perhaps more often than we should. You know, if we like a piece of cake, we're suddenly addicted to it. Yeah, it's just an interesting crossover area between when does something go from being something I do habitually that I feel sort of driven to do to versus feeling fully addicted. But we don't need to fully take that apart here because I would like to move on to lying. You've got a chapter

in the book about Pinocchio and long noses and lying. Tell me what you found about lying in relation to the rest of this. Yeah. So the study about lying is actually what started the whole book. The whole book started from this study that I conducted with colleagues. It was published in 2016. And what we found is that people adapt to their own dishonesty. So if people have an opportunity to lie for their own gain, at the expense of someone else, they tend to just lie by tiny little bit, right? And we had a little game you could lie and get a little money. So they just lied a little bit.

But then the next time around, they lied a little bit more, and then a little bit more, and a little bit more. So their dishonesty escalated over time. And while they were doing this, we actually had them in the brain imaging scanner so we could look at what's going on in the brain. And what we found is at the beginning when they lied, even if it was a light a little bit, they had a strong reaction in the emotional center in the brain called the amygdala.

But over time, the amygdala just habituated as it does. It's well known, our emotional reactions to anything, even if it's our own behavior, will just go down over time, just pure habituation. And so the amygdala response, the we'll just go down over time, just pure habituation. And so the amygdala response, the emotional response just went down over time. And because you no longer had this kind of negative arousal response to your own lying, there was nothing that was curbing your dishonesty.

So the more the amygdala went down, the more likely we were to lie more and more and more the next opportunity that you got. And this study was actually published just weeks before the 2016 presidential election. So it got quite a lot of press at the time. And people were very interested in this idea that this physiological thing of habituation can really impact our behavior to such an extent. And I thought, well, that's, you know, we know that habituation goes beyond just dishonesty,

it really impacts almost every element of your life, the way you behave, the way you observe the world, your relationships, society. And so I thought, well, that that would be a really interesting book to have, you know, with the different chapters on all the ways that habituation is impacting us in ways that we don't realize. There was an interesting section in that part of the book where you make a distinction between selfish and selfless lies. A selfish lie is one that is intended to make me feel better at somebody else's expense and a selfless lie is one where is intended to make me feel better at somebody else's expense.

A selfless lie is one where we're trying to make somebody feel better. For example, I'm telling Chris he's a good editor as an example of a selfless lie. I can't resist. It's just too much fun. He actually rarely is sitting in the other room and he's there right now, which is making it harder for me to resist. But in what ways do we habituate differently to selfless lies? So the thing with selfless lies is that it doesn't elicit as much of an emotional negative

response. You really when you're lying and it's for your own good and it hurts someone else, that's where you really have a strong negative reaction. And that strong negative reaction is what's carving your dishonesty mostly, right? That's one of the main reasons you're not doing it. So people say that they believe that's wrong. Now, although people do believe that lying is wrong, like, you know, full point, it's a bit of a gray area when it comes to like lying

for to help someone. And we did have a condition where you could lie and it would cost you money, but it will help the other person. And there was no habituation there because there's nothing to habituate to, right? There wasn't much of a negative feeling. And even when we had a condition where you could lie

for your own benefit and the benefit of the other person, like win-win situation. Again, we didn't see habituation. I'm assuming there's some, maybe you have a little bit of a negative reaction to just the lie itself, but it wasn't like a strong enough thing to change people's behavior,

to cause them to escalate over time. So in the book, you talk about lying being something that we habituate to lying. We do it the first time it's hard, the second time it's a little bit easier, and by the twentieth time it's pretty easy. You talk in the book about how we adapt to our own behavior and we suddenly think something that was bad before becomes pretty normal. And society across the board, lots of places in society where we habituate in

a negative way, meaning we suddenly now don't think something that normally would be a problem is a problem because we've just gotten used to it. What are ways of dehabituating in this case? We talked about ways of dehabituating to make something fresh again for us, how do we de-habituate with something that is negative to make it salient again? Or essentially to make it, in essence, hurt again, which is a counterintuitive thing to do, but kind of what you need in order to do it. It has to suddenly hurt again. Yeah. So, okay. So first of all, both strategies work, right?

So if you take a break from your everyday life, when you come back, you would not only be able to see the good stuff again, but you'll see the bad stuff a little bit more clearly. So if you were away and then you come back and so those annoying things may be like more salient. We actually wrote a piece about it, there was an op-ed and there was a lot of comments to that piece.

And a lot of people talked about how, for example, when they lived in a different place, a different country, and they came back to their country, so a person was talking about they were living in the US, they went to Sweden, they come back. Well, now they saw things completely differently. Sure, they saw the good stuff that they missed and now they're reacting, but also they suddenly realize how things can be different in terms of whether it's the way society works or policy or whatever it is. Sweden and the US are very different in many different ways,

and they could really observe these things. So living in different cultures, living in different places is one way. It's very common in the workplace to have employees rotate through different departments. The benefit of this is, first of all, it's change, it's diversity, which we know is important for a psychologically rich life. But also when they come back to their own division, sure, they could see the great stuff, but they'll be able to see the not so great stuff.

Because as long as they're different in other divisions, as long as something is not a norm in other places, you can see it again, then you can evaluate it, whether it's good or it's bad. It would be more salient. And so you could do that physically. I think this is what art is for partially, you know, you can take yourself and put yourself in a different time and place, not by going there, not getting into a time machine, but reading books, you know, movies, talking to different

people who are living in different places and periods of time. It's quite effective actually if you're watching a movie and it's so clear. I mean, now this is the opposite of what we're saying, but when you watch the old, some of the old movies who are wonderful old movies, but you know, people are kind of smoking indoors, smoking on the plane, you know, it's clear, it's very clear that that's very different, or the way that, you know, the role of women in these films, it's very clear that there is a change. But, I mean, perhaps if you are watching movies

or reading books about places where things are better, then, you know, you could observe more clearly what needs to be changed and where things are better, then you know you could observe more clearly what needs to be changed and where you are. You mentioned the role of women and you have a chapter on progress and you talk about how that there was this strange phenomenon where as their societal conditions became better, that they actually seemed to report lower life satisfaction for a while.

Can you explain what was happening there? Yeah, so the data shows that women were actually happier on average in the 50s and the 60s, and actually, and happier than men actually. And then it started kind of switching around at the same time where when women rights were gaining momentum, so in the 70s and up until today.

And I think now maybe the difference is becoming smaller, but there was an advantage for men. So men's well-being and happiness was over that of women. There was just a new paper coming out and I think maybe things are getting better now, but I don't really remember that. But not only over time, it's not only over time that as women were gaining rights and equality, their happiness was plummeting, but also over places. So you can even see at present time, women who in countries that have less rights are not necessarily

less happy and sometimes report higher happiness. So what's going on here? Absolutely not. The suggestion is not that having rights is not good for us and should be taken away. Um, I think what we are seeing is that in places or times where women were not expecting, uh, certain rights, um, not expecting to have certain jobs and positions, um, there was less of, um, a gap between their expectations and what was happening.

But as, as women's rights were getting, um, better and equality was happening. But as women rights were getting better and equality was getting better, women's expectation was far exceeding the reality because women were told you are equal, you can get any job that you want, you're equal to men, your salary should be equal, right? But in reality, that is not the case. Even today, that is certainly not the case. And so now there's a gap of what women expect they should have and what they actually have,

which wasn't as salient before. Now, I think this is a phase that we have to go through. Because as things change, I mean, so expectations were simply higher and as things change, yes, it could lead to a decline in well-being, but we have to go for this phase in order to get to the situation where actually there is equality and hopefully when we get to the situation, maybe not in our lifetime, but maybe soon after, then well-being of women will be equal to that of men, at least equal. There's an equation that gets thrown around around happiness, which is basically happiness is your expectations divided by reality, which is a way of sort of saying the similar thing

that you're doing, right? You have this expectation and then your reality comes in down here that creates, as you call in the book, is that a negative prediction error or a positive prediction error? Yeah, a negative prediction error. Exactly. Yeah, walk us through those. Okay, we have to be careful here because there's a few elements that happen in the same time

and it's confusing. And I think it's important, I'll tell you while he's confusing all these conflicting things going on. But it's important in general to realize that this is kind of obvious, but people overlook it. The humans are complicated, the brain is complicated, right? It's not in general to realize that this is kind of obvious, but people overlook it. The humans are complicated. The brain is complicated, right? It's not one thing.

You can't say, oh, you'll be happy if you have this, and this thing makes you unhappy. And often, this is what people want. They're like, well, but this causes that. So like, no, it's a lot of things together. OK, so on one hand, it is the case that what we call negative prediction errors, that means that reality is not as good as expected. A positive prediction error will be like,

reality is better than expected. So there's certainly studies and it's certainly true and I think it's intuitive that if you have a negative prediction error, you expected like something great and it didn't turn out that great, they will have a negative impact on your mood. And if you didn't expect it and it was like, oh, I got this huge award, I got this bonus money, that will have a negative impact on your mood. And if you like didn't expect it and it was like, oh, I got this huge award, I got this like bonus money, that will have a positive impact

on you, positive prediction errors, you can measure them in the brain, there are studies doing this, you can look at the part of the brain that's called the reward center in the brain, and you can see like you can measure people's predictions and their outcomes, the difference between them, and you can see the brain signaling that, right? And you can see there's a nice tight relationship between that and how people feel on a moment to moment basis. Okay, so that all works with this idea

of women's wellbeing were going down because they had high expectations, because legally, I mean, they should have equality, but in practice they didn't. On the other hand, there is a lot of research, and I think this is absolutely true, that shows just having positive expectation is good for you. It brings you happiness. It is important for motivation. My first book is called The Optimism Bias. And really, a huge part of that book and the message

is it is important to have optimism and to have positive expectations. It's really what keeps us going. Plenty of research showing optimists are happier on average. Of course, there are extremes in all of that. So you have to kind of live with these two things at the same time. And they're not really, I mean, they work together because anticipation is longer in terms of time relative to these prediction errors. So if I think like I'm interviewing for a job, you know, and I think I'm going to get it. So it's like it has a positive impact on my happiness at the time.

It also probably makes me perform better so therefore more likely to get it when I don't get it sure there's a negative prediction error and has a negative impact on me but then if I then kind of like think about it as ooh well okay well next time will be better then I'm back on the horse right right right I do I do think you're absolutely right that it's a tricky balance of you know the answer isn't set your expectations to zero. Because as you say, I think we know that motivation in general tends to go up when we feel confident in our abilities, when we feel like we have a chance, right? That causes more motivation, whereas we feel like it can't

happen or we can't do it. Mot, motivation tends to be, you know, pushed downward. So there's this balance between these two different things. Makes me think a little bit, I'm pivoting here, a little bit where you talk about a psychologically rich life. Talk about what that means and how you use it in this book. Yeah. So when you ask people, hey, what makes a good life? The first answer that they usually give is happiness. I wanna feel good, I wanna be happy. The second answer that they usually give

is I wanna have my life have meaning, purpose. But the problem is that a lot of the things that bring you happiness and meaning tend to do so less over time because of habituation, right? Even if you have a really meaningful job, you're researching cancer, what once may have felt as kind of awe-inspiring may actually feel as routine over the years.

But there is a first ingredients to a good life that counters that, which is variety. And so if you have a more varied life, we talked about this a little bit before, you go and live in different places, you work in different projects, you interact with different type of people, then you have a more psychologically rich life. And by putting in variety and diversity, you're actually enhancing both a feeling of happiness and a feeling of meaning, right? Because you're constantly introducing change,

you're introducing dishabituation, you're introducing learning, which is very much related to people's happiness, and also a sense of progression, hopefully, as long as the changes are not downhill. Mostly change means like I learned something new, and if I learn something new, there's progression, and that is something that is important

for individuals one of the things that we know is that a Lot of things in life that end up being worthwhile happen over a long period of time. They they take time Things accumulate you could just take exercise as an example, right little by little it builds up and it becomes a good thing The problem is that along the way, you often habituate. So for example, I start exercising and for the first couple months, I'm like, wow, I feel really amazing. But then I just get used to feeling amazing.

And yet in order to sort of stay on the journey, I need to continue to take these little steps that are in many ways routine, and yet I'm also trying to not fully habituate. Do you have any thoughts on in the midst of something that takes a while to do or that you're going to be doing sort of in perpetuity, any other additional thoughts beyond what we've always already covered about how to fight habituation in those circumstances? Yes, I think you're raising a few things. One is there's often we're doing things because of a goal, right? Maybe sport partially is a goal to be healthy in the

future, maybe you want to lose some weight, or you're working on a project, writing a book, right? And the goal is to finish the book and it's like, it's far away. And the problem is how to keep you motivated throughout this. And so I think it's important to think about what are the immediate rewards that I can get, only so let's take physical exercise as you mentioned not only am I Exercising because it's good for me in the future What is the thing that immediately I can get that is worthwhile and so often like people would say well I anytime I go the gym and I go on the treadmill for example I let myself watch a trashy thing on TV that I don't usually let myself so while I'm running, you know, or maybe not even trashy, I can listen to podcasts, right? I mean, I enjoy that I like when I go running, I sometimes listen to podcasts. And so that is her husband to go to the gym. And finally, he went to the gym. And when he got back, she was like, oh, your muscles are much larger now. So now he's super motivated to go to the gym every time

because he comes back and he gets this reward. So whether it is rewarding other people for these little steps, right? Or whether it's rewarding ourselves, like figuring out what can I give myself for doing this thing? You know, a lot of it is also just we do get naturally an emotional reward. So if I work on a book and I'm done with a chapter, well that feels great. You know, if even I did like five pages. That feels great even though it's, you know, because it's just a little step towards like the final

goal. Yeah, I think about that a lot about this idea of paying attention to the very, they're very subtle signals. But when I am doing the things that I think are important to do, there's an internal feeling of being, I call it like being lined up in alignment that feels good. It's subtle, but it's there. And the same way as we talked about before, when I don't, there is a subtle feeling of not greatness that can also be helpful as a way of saying, oh, I don't really like that. And again, they're not big things. There's a, I think some of what you're

pointing to with habituation is we have to sort of start to tune in to the nuances a little bit more. Yeah, yeah. The more you know, the better. So let's end with you talking about something that I think you got the phrase from John Stuart Mill, which is experiments in living. Experiments in living, yeah. So this, this go back to idea, I mean, we talked a little bit about social media and taking a break and how if you take you don't really know the impact it has on you until you take a break. The idea is here that you are experimenting, right? We don't really know for sure the impact on things in our life, if those things have been there all the time. So we don't really know the magnitude, either the positive or the magnitude that these things have on us until we do the experiment.

Just like in science, I need to do the experiment to figure out how A is impacting B. In our life too, we need to take things out for a while, see what happens, bring new things in, take things that are already there, but do them in a different way. And, you know, be attuned to the impact, whether it's on your emotions, whether it is perhaps on your curiosity, you can even like literally like, you know, make little notes and rate. But do the experiments because if we just do the same thing in the same way all the time, we don't really know. There might be some things that you're doing the same way all the time and

really they're really bad for you and you don't really realize it. Or it could be the really great, so great, continue. Or they could be, well, if I do it a little bit differently, I gain a lot myself, or maybe someone else that I'm related to or around me is gaining out of that changes. So that's the idea of doing experiments, trying things out. Almost always it's not permanent, right? There are things that we can do that are permanent, but almost always we could do experiments and then we can go back to our own ways if that's what we wanted, which is what happened to these people. It went off social media and then we can go back to our own ways if that's what we wanted, which is what happened to these people.

They went off social media and then most of them went back. Okay, that's their choice. They were informed at least. Well, Tali, thank you so much for joining me on the show. I've really enjoyed this conversation and I really enjoyed the book. My pleasure. Thank you for having me. Thank you so much for listening to the show.

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