Dr Tali Sharot is the co-author of Look Again: The power of noticing what was always there.
Photo: Tali Sharot
The key to finding joy in your everyday life is to take a short break, so you can appreciate your circumstances anew on your return, a neuroscientist says.
Dr Tali Sharot is a professor of cognitive neuroscience at both University College London and MIT in the United States.
She is the co-author, with Harvard law professor Cass R. Sunstein, of Look Again: The power of noticing what was always there.
She told Sunday Morning host Jim Mora the process of habituation could be likened to growing used to a new perfume.
“When you first put the perfume on you, you can really detect its scent … a month goes by and you can’t detect the smell of your own perfume.”
Sharot said many people had great spouses, homes, jobs and friends.
However, “because those things have been there for quite a long time, they don’t really elicit the same job, the same happiness as they would otherwise”, she said.
Going away for a few days – whether on a business trip or a holiday – had been scientifically proven to help people see and appreciate what they had, she said.
That reset was referred to by neuroscientists as dishabituation.
It was also known as “resparkling” – a term Sharot said was coined by actress Julia Roberts.
“[Roberts said], ‘If I did the same thing again and again and again every day for years, it would be boring, but I don’t. I go away for filming, and when I come back, there’s pixie dust on it.'”
On a smaller scale, people could attain greater happiness by taking a short break during a massage, so that they appreciated the entire thing, or watching one episode of a Netflix show at a time, rather than bingeing the whole series.
Conversely, negative tasks should be tackled in one go, because the suffering associated with them went down over time as people became habituated to them, Sharot said.
“Break up the good into bits, but swallow the bad whole.”
Taking a short break from everyday life did not just help people to appreciate the good – it also helped them to identify aspects they were not happy with, but had got used to, she said.
However, that unhappiness was not necessarily bad: “It drives people to change their own reality.”