Tali Sharot

But studies show that within 20 minutes, you cannot detect the smoke any longer, right?

Your olfactory neurons stop responding to the smoke.

And in a similar manner, just as we stop responding to different smells or stop responding to the cold of a pool when we jump in, we also stop responding to these wonderful and terrible things in our lives.

And so you're saying, well, that's, you know, it's a good thing.

And you're right.

I mean, habituation is there for a reason.

It has an adaptive purpose.

And one of the adaptive purposes is that if something bad happens to us, even something really terrible, like a loss of a loved one,

it is good that over time we adapt and we don't feel the pain as much, right?

And we can go on with our lives.

But as with most of these rules that our brain functions by, there is the good side and the bad side, right?

And so

The problem here, and especially in how we habituate to the less so good things in our life, is that we may stop noticing them and then we don't try to change them, right?

Now, if it's something that you cannot change, it's good that you habituate, you don't think about it, you don't notice it, you don't respond, you don't feel bad about it.

But if it's something that we can change around us and both in our personal life, right?

Maybe it's a relationship that has gone sour or it could be societal problems.

Then for those things, it is a problem if it doesn't bother us anymore because we won't be driven to change.

Yeah, and I have the same experience.

And here's the thing, and you may have felt this as well.

If you go for a while, if you go on a business trip, you're out for even a few days, maybe a week, maybe two, and then you come back, you may have noticed that it kind of, and we call it re-sparkles, right?