Tali Sharot

But then if you take a break and come back to the song, the joy can bounce back.

And so overall, you can enjoy this positive experience more if you have breaks.

They did the same thing with massages, and they found people enjoy massage more if there's breaks rather than no interruptions.

And so that is something that you could really use in many different situations.

We suggest, for example, take shorter vacations, but more of them rather than one long one.

and when it comes to the negative things you should do the opposite so if it's things that you really do not enjoy like for example it's household chores or it's admin work we usually like our intuition is oh let's just have a little break here and there but in fact what that same studies show is that if you do the unpleasant task from beginning to end no interruptions

you will suffer less because you will habituate to the bad, right?

But if you take breaks, let's say you're cleaning your house and you're taking breaks, every time you take a break, you dishabituate from the bad and then when you go back, you suffer more.

So we say, you know, break up the good, but swallow the bad whole.

Absolutely.

It's so unintuitive.

And they actually show 99% of the people say, no, I don't think I would enjoy it more with breaks.

So it's one of those results that is hard for us to imagine.

It's true.

It's unintuitive.

When you actually measure people's responses, that's what they found.

Yeah, there's something to novelty.

Novelty is something that we definitely respond to.

And the brain attends to things that are novel and responds to things that are novel.

And it should do.