Why Do Vacations Lose Their Magic After 43 Hours? How to Use ‘Dishabituation’ to Stay Happy

Should You Take Breaks During Massages? The Surprising Neuroscience of Maximizing Pleasure and Minimizing Pain

Why does the thrill of a new job or a beach holiday fade so quickly? Join neuroscientist Tali Sharot as she explains the biology of ‘habituation.’ Discover why you should interrupt your favorite songs, power through household chores without breaks, and how to trick your brain into falling in love with your life all over again.

Stop sleepwalking through your best moments—read the full summary below to learn the simple ‘break’ technique that resets your brain’s ability to feel joy.

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Why do people become desensitized to social injustices like racism and sexism? And why do pleasurable experiences like vacations lose their allure with time? The answer, says neuroscientist Tali Sharot, is the human propensity to “habituate” to both the good and the bad. Learn to “dishabituate” by injecting change and variety into your life. In conversation with Google technical writer Sanders Kleinfeld, Sharot reveals the secret to rediscovering your joy for life’s pleasures and reigniting your contempt for life’s cruelties.

Take-Aways

• “Habituation” causes humans to grow apathetic to both pleasure and misery.
• Enhance pleasure by inserting breaks into the activities you enjoy but tackling chores you dislike with a single effort.
• Variety is the spice of life.
• “Dishabituate” to negative behaviors by calling out liars and cheats early on and shaking up the rules to discourage excessive risk-taking.

Summary

“Habituation” causes humans to grow apathetic to both pleasure and misery.

A study sponsored by a tourism company found that holidaymakers are happiest 43 hours into their vacations. Thereafter, the sheen of the trip starts to fade. Why? By 43 hours, vacationers have settled into their lodgings and enjoyed a string of firsts: their first glimpse of the ocean, their first taste of local cuisine, and so on. Then habituation sets in. Second experiences are rarely as enjoyable as firsts.

Habituation is defined as a “diminishing physiological or emotional response to a frequently repeated (or constant) stimulus,” and it is responsible for humans’ desensitization to both the good and bad aspects of life. Consider your disgust upon entering a room filled with cigarette smoke, and how, 20 minutes later, you can hardly detect the smell. The neurons in your brain react strongly to new stimuli, but unless you leave or change the environment, inhibitory neurons will fire to quell your brain’s initial response.

Habituation is necessary for survival. Once you have established that something is not a threat, you can dedicate more energy to assessing new potential threats. Habituation also promotes motivation. The veneer of, say, a new job wears off quickly, urging you to progress and get promoted. Moreover, habituation benefits mental health. A University of Miami study found that subjects who struggle to habituate to — and bounce back from — negative events tend to exhibit symptoms of depression. But when habituation dulls your appreciation for the good and your disdain for the bad, how can you overcome this foible?

Enhance pleasure by inserting breaks into the activities you enjoy but tackling chores you dislike with a single effort.

An experiment found that people reap more enjoyment from listening to their favorite song if it is played at intervals rather than from start to finish without interruptions. Initial enjoyment wanes slightly as the song progresses, but each interruption resets the listener’s pleasure level to high. Similarly, people enjoy a massage more with breaks than without.

“Swallow the bad whole, but break up the good things into bits in order to enhance pleasure.”

Maximize your appreciation for the good aspects of life by inserting breaks: For instance, take several short vacations instead of one long one, or watch the commercials during your favorite TV show. But execute unpleasant jobs, like household chores, in one fell swoop to habituate to your aversion to the activity.

Variety is the spice of life.

Diversity accentuates human happiness and sense of meaning, but stepping outside your comfort zone can feel uncomfortable. Nevertheless, people who live more diverse lives by, say, living in different countries, working a variety of jobs, or befriending people from different cultures tend to enjoy richer lives, because learning defines their experiences. To diversify your life, consider moving to a new place, learning a new skill, getting a new job, or moving department at your current job.

“Learning is, by definition, change, and we can’t habituate to change.”

Change begets creativity. A 2020 study by Kelley Main found that a minor change to your work environment or process, such as grabbing a coffee or taking a short walk, can boost creativity for up to six minutes after each interruption. This might seem like a short window, but six minutes is enough time to trigger an epiphany about a problem you’ve been stuck on.

“Dishabituate” to negative behaviors by calling out liars and cheats early on and shaking up the rules to discourage excessive risk-taking.

Neuroscientist Tali Sharot set up a game that encouraged participants to lie while she monitored their brain activity. Initially, the participants told small lies, and their amygdalae responded accordingly, betraying their sense of guilt. But as the game continued, their amygdalae habituated to their lying and stopped responding — that is, their sense of guilt dwindled — and their dishonesty escalated. Thus, if you catch someone lying, reprimand them early on to discourage them from telling bigger lies later.

Individuals who habituate the fastest tend to take greater risks. Consider a child who initially fears jumping into a swimming pool, but who, once she has succeeded, begins diving in head first or from a springboard. Repetition quells initial trepidation. However, excessive risk-taking can be dangerous. To dishabituate and reintroduce caution, consider changing the rules. On September 3, 1967, Sweden, to conform with the rules in neighboring states, changed its traffic regulations from driving on the left-hand side of the road to driving on the right. Subsequently, traffic accidents decreased by 40%, as drivers, in a new heightened state of alert, drove more cautiously. Two years later, the number of accidents had returned to the baseline as drivers habituated to the new rules. Similarly, the FDA frequently changes the graphic pictures on cigarette packets to dishabituate smokers to the shocking images. Alas, a mere awareness of habituation will not counter the phenomenon; individuals must make proactive changes to reduce it.

About the Speakers

Tali Sharot is a professor of cognitive neuroscience at University College London and MIT. She is the author of The Optimism Bias and The Influential Mind, and the co-author of Look Again. Sanders Kleinfeld is a senior technical writer at Google.