A new job, apartment or relationship can all come with a sheen of excitement. But that luster fades after a while. And everything seems a bit duller.
There’s a term for that phenomenon, says Tali Sharot, a cognitive neuroscientist at University College London and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology: habituation. It’s “our tendency to respond less and less to things that are repeated or constant.”
Its evolutionary purpose is to help us adapt to our surroundings so we can be on high alert for new threats. But it can also impair our creativity and affect our levels of stress and happiness.
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