Reawakening Our Responses to Overcome Habituation
Image: “Little Care Crows for the Scare-crows” from Caw! Caw! Or, The Chronicle of Crows by R. M (1848), Illustration by Jemima Blackburn. Grant & Griffith / Public Domain
Most of us would agree—we are living at a time when great troubles stalk the land. Whether we have been impacted by wildfires, flooding, food shortages, job insecurity, health issues or other challenging situations, many of us are experiencing a heightened sense of survival fear—the fear of not surviving.
Self-preservation is a basic instinct humans share with other sentient beings. Real or perceived threats to our survival trigger a sympathetic nervous system response, the familiar “fight, flight, or freeze” behavior much researched in recent years. (See “Unfreezing Fear: Connection and Action Can Change Everything.”)[1]
What I’ve been wondering about is an opposite behavior I notice in myself and others: what is going on when we adapt to dangerous situations and no longer respond to a threat?
For example, I live in a city surrounded by four lakes. When I first moved here, the lakes were clean and unpolluted. But over the years, as a result of run-off from farm and lawn fertilizers and pesticides, the lakes have become unswimmable due to an overgrowth of aquatic weeds. A combination of warming weather and run-off chemicals has produced toxic algae blooms, bacteria that, when they decompose, consume oxygen from the lakes. The lack of oxygen leads to a die-off of fish and is injurious to birds and other creatures that feed on the fish. Humans and pets that swim in the lakes during an algae bloom become vulnerable to a variety of ailments.[2]
We, the people in the towns surrounding the lakes, have witnessed this process of eutrophication, or excessive nutrient enrichment, over decades. In our lifetime, the lakes have gone from being recreational gems to smelly and unsafe receptacles for our chemicals.
What I want to highlight is how we, the former lake users, have adapted to this threat to our environment. We have normalized the sorry state of our lakes. The problem no longer raises an alarm. Whatever one’s politics on the environment, I think we can all agree: we want our waterways to be clean and unpolluted.
We only have to look around to see that what once would have caused great concern, leading to responsible action now goes unnoticed, or if noticed, accepted as normal.
One helpful way to think about adaptation to harmful or threatening situations is the process of habituation. Let’s say we live in a jungle. One day, we hear a lion close by. The hair on our arms stands up; our heart races; we climb a tree or run for shelter. Let’s say we hear this roar every day for a week, two weeks—we hear the roar but see no lion. Pretty soon, we become habituated to the lion’s roar and no longer hear it or pay attention. This doesn’t mean a lion won’t race out of the bush and threaten us at any moment; it only means our alarm system for lion danger has been turned off. As we become habituated to repeated stimuli, our brains respond less.[3]
In their new book, Look Again: The Power of Noticing What Was Always There, MIT neuroscience professor Tali Sharot and Harvard law professor Cass R. Sunstein investigate the science of habituation, how it works in our daily lives, and offers ways to “dishabituate” from our conditioning. Their essential teaching is, as the book title suggests, to look again at what has become numbingly familiar, whether that is a simple routine or a significant threat.
“Habituation is a killer of creativity and innovation. It’ a guarantee of steady dullness. In business, creative people finds ways to dishabituate so that they can go back to their situation with fresh eyes.”—Cass R. Sunstein[4]
“Even exciting events lose their sparkle after a while. But there is a way to make the good stuff “resparkle”: Chop up the good experiences into bits.” —Dr. Tali Sharot[5]
Diversifying learning and experience and taking breaks from well-established routines wakes up new and different neurons in the brain. The call to “do things differently” can be as simple as changing what you eat for breakfast, taking a new path in the park, or learning a new language. We love to learn new things and are rewarded with feel-good pings of dopamine when we do.
To refresh our creative minds on plaguing societal issues, we might travel to another country and see how other societies function and what positive changes we might strive for when we return to our own. Or we might visit another part of this country and expose ourselves to different communities and discover new foods, new music, new slang, new solutions or ways of thinking about life.
Other strategies include opening ourselves to art—books, movies, theater, street art, murals, museums. Doing this brings us intimately into worlds we might otherwise not access, past and future, and which sensitizes us to the complexity of the experiences of others so that we may more fully understand ourselves.
The call to break cycles of habituation is a call to wake up, to reenergize our senses and reactivate sluggish neural pathways. This is not hard work! The possibilities for unexpected joy, novelty, solutions, and pleasure are everywhere if we pay attention.
Habituation is when we have diminished responses to repeated stimulation. It can be overcome. We can find ways to “dishabituate” and “resparkle.”
[1] Wise, Nan J., “Unfreezing Fear: Connection and Action Can Change Everything,” Psychology Today, March 25, 2025
[2] Algae: Cyanobacterial Harmful Algal Blooms, Wisconsin Department of Health Services, June 12, 2025
[3] Gershmon, Samuel J, “Habituation as optimal filtering,” Science Direct, August 16, 2024
[4] Sunstein, Cass R., “The Perils of Habituation,” McKinsey & Company Author Talks, April 15, 2024
[5] Sharot, Tali, “Joy Division: The Benefits of Breaking up Fun,” Psychology Today, March 4, 2024
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