Cycle Breakers: Take Notes from… Rats?

Fans of Douglas Adams will get this.

It seems Homo sapiens may not be the third smartest species on this rock, but the fourth.

In addition to dolphins and mice, rats now join the league of extraordinary mammals that are... smarter than us.

That's my take on this anecdote shared by Richard Thieme . In the midst of my own escape from repetition compulsion, it resonated so hard it shattered the mirror it was holding.

"A researcher in rat behavior set up four long tubes but put cheese only in Tube 3. The rats sniffed all the tubes, detected the food, then went down the tube and ate the cheese. He repeated this until the rats ignored the other tubes and went straight to Tube 3, fetched the food, and came out again.

Then he changed the setup. He removed the food from Tube 3.

The rats went to Tube 3, down the tube, did not find any cheese, and came out again. They thought about it for a minute, then went down Tube 3 again, and again, and again.

What is the difference, I asked, between human beings and rats?

Eventually, the rat will stop.”

That hit me like a wheel of Gouda.

I’ve done this. Hell, we all do this—going back to what worked once, running the same play, chasing the same outcome... Even when we know the cheese is gone.

The path is familiar. It feels safe.

But it doesn’t feed us anymore.

For us humans, it’s not just instinct at play. We carry baggage—emotional attachments, fear, old stories we’ve told ourselves so many times they start to feel like truth. That’s what keeps us crawling down the same damn tube, long after the cheese has dried up.

Stephanie Harrison ’s New Happy nails this idea, too—how so much of what we’ve been told will make us happy (‘old happy’) is really just noise: chasing success, approval, status.

The problem is, we end up on a treadmill, chasing the end of a rainbow. Always running. Always striving. Reaching towards something outside of ourselves, that is ultimately unobtainable, in an attempt to make ourselves whole.

But here’s the real cheddar: We don’t need the cheese, or even the pot of gold. We never did. What fed us once? It doesn’t have to feed us forever.

The real move isn’t scrambling to find new tubes—it’s realizing we can leave the whole setup behind. We get to build something different. We get to decide what happy looks like for us now.

The rat stops. Eventually, so can we.

When it comes to Old Happy: The only winning move is not to play.

New Happy (Penguin,2024) is an international bestseller, available wherever you like to buy books!

My review of New Happy from this past August is available here: https://lnkd.in/d9EaRcr5

Richard's original post is available here: https://www.dhirubhai.net/posts/activity-7253793459789025280-tv_1

More on The New Happy can be found at https://TheNewHappy.com