How to See Your Life With Fresh Eyes

This week on the Next Big Idea podcast, I pass the mic (and this newsletter) to my charming and insightful colleague Michael Kovnat, who talks with MIT neuroscientist Tali Sharot about our natural tendency to "habituate" to new circumstances, and how we can "dishabituate" to see the world with fresh eyes. Listen on Apple or Spotify, and share your thoughts in the comments below.

Listen, I can’t lie. My life is pretty good. I’ve got a cool job, a loving family, a comfortable home in a beautiful place.

But, as good as all these things are, they’ve lost a bit of their sparkle. I’m sure many of you can relate. What was once fresh and thrilling over time becomes …ordinary. We get used to things, and inevitably, they lose their luster. That’s just life, right?

Well, maybe it doesn’t have to be. What if I told you there were actions you could take that would let you “resparkle” your life, let you “dishabituate,” and see your world -- good and bad -- with fresh eyes? You might experience more gratitude and joy with what you have, and be more motivated to change the negative things around you.

It turns out there’s a science to habituation and its opposite, and that science is the subject of the new book Look Again: The Power of Noticing What Was Always There by Cass Sunstein and Tali Sharot. You may know Cass as the oft-cited legal scholar, Harvard law professor, and author of bestselling and influential books like Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness. You may be less familiar with Tali, but she’s a cognitive neuroscientist who splits her time between MIT and University College London. Tali also runs something called the Affective Brain Lab, where she and her colleagues try to understand the neurological underpinnings of human emotion and behavior. She’s studied topics like why some people are optimists and some are pessimists, how our emotions impact our decision-making, and why some of us are better at persuasion than others.

Now, Tali and Cass have turned their attention to habituation, and they try to understand it from the roots up: how it works in our brains, not to mention in our marriages and careers. And while there are good, evolutionary reasons why habituation exists, Tali and Cass also offer some techniques for strategically dishabituating, helping you remove the scales from your eyes to see the world anew.

So if your life could use a little resparkling (and really, whose couldn’t?), you’ll want to check out my conversation with Tali on this episode of The Next Big Idea.

Listen on Apple or Spotify, and share your thoughts in the comments below.

?-- Michael Kovnat