Mental health: how to ‘unhabituate’ the brain and avoid situations that are harmful to us

If you live near the train tracks and they pass at the same time every morning, it is very likely that you will not even hear the noise that can bother unaccustomed ears.

The same happens if you enter, for example, a coffee shop: no matter how pleasant the aroma of freshly ground coffee is, the longer you spend there, that particular scent will disappear until it becomes imperceptible to your sense of smell.

“There is an adaptive evolutionary reason for this. It is that we need to conserve our resources”, explains Tali Sharot, professor of cognitive neuroscience at University College London, to BBC News Mundo (BBC Spanish service).

“Responding to something new that we see, smell, or feel for the first time makes sense. But when after a while you realize that it’s still alive and that everything is okay, you don’t need to respond as much as you used to.”

“It’s better to save these resources and prepare ourselves for the next situation we will have to face”, adds Sharot, co-author of the book Look Again: The Power of Noticing What Was Always There… (“Look again: the power to perceive what has always been there…”, in free translation).

This mechanism helps, on the one hand, to motivate us, to move forward.

Sharot gives an example of a work situation.

“Think about your first, entry-level job. You were probably excited and happy. But if you were still that excited 10 years later, you wouldn’t be as motivated to seek a promotion.”

Habituation also allows us to overcome difficult situations, such as losing a job or a loved one.

“It’s good that over time we get used to it, because this will allow us to continue functioning”, says the neuroscientist.

“It would be very difficult if you felt as angry and sad as you did at the beginning.”

But, just as it helps us move forward, this tendency to get used to it, to stop responding to situations that become stable, can turn against us.

We become so used to it that even if a situation or relationship hurts us, we stop considering it toxic because it has become a habit and we lack perspective.

This also happens to us in pleasurable situations: over time, we take what happens to us for granted and this reduces the intensity of the emotion they used to provoke in us.

However, Sharot points out, it is possible to trick your brain into overcoming this natural tendency to get used to things and ignore them.

The trick is to simply pause, distance yourself from the situation so you can see it with fresh eyes.

The idea is to make “things stand out, whether they are good or bad,” explains Sharot.

To achieve this, the expert says that there are two paths to be taken, related to each other.

“One of them is to take breaks. That is, if you move away from a situation, even for a short period of time — it could be a weekend, a few days or more — you will become unaccustomed to a certain point and it will be able to better understand the things around you.”

An example that Sharot uses in his book is our connection to social media, where we feel that they have a negative impact on us.

“People know that [as redes] they cause some stress, but they don’t know exactly why and they can’t measure the magnitude and be sure because they are always present in them.”

“What has been found is that when people take a break—say, for a month—stress is reduced and people feel happier.”

“If you take a break from your everyday life—it could be at work, rotating through different departments, or working on different projects—when you come back, you’ll be able to see things more clearly, both the bad and the good,” he says. Sharot.

Keeping your distance or taking a break when you’re in a good mood may seem like a completely counterintuitive measure, but according to research, it increases pleasure.

During one of her research, the scientist discovered, for example, that the happiest moment on vacation came at 43 hours.

That is, as soon as people had some time to unpack and get settled. Then, as the days went by, the pleasure diminished.

“It’s not that they weren’t happy on day 7 or 8, but the happiest moments came after 43 hours and then subsided.”

The same happened when study participants were asked about the best moments of their vacation: the word that was repeated countless times was “first”.

The first time they saw the sea, the first cocktail, the first sand castle they built on the beach and so on.

For this reason, although we normally aspire to the opposite — thinking that long vacations are the best way to rest because they completely disconnect us from work — taking a series of short vacations has produced better results.

This is because there are also expectations that holidays generate.

When Sharot measured happiness before the trip, he found that the day before was the happiest, “because you’re imagining what the vacation will be like.”

And when they occur, they are good, “but not as good as in the imagination.”

In short, the trick is simple: distance ourselves from the situations we are used to, break the routine and introduce changes.