Why our brain tunes things out and how to overcome it when you need it

I was scrolling through TikTok recently when my brain failed me. I watched a video of Donald Trump berating CNN reporter Kaitlan Collins for “not smiling” after she asked him about matters involving sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

And I passed by.

I didn’t stop. I didn’t get angry. I didn’t think about the implications of a person—let alone a president—saying such offensive words to another human being. Still, I’m not a monster. I thought about these comments while writing this column and found them to be disgusting, unprofessional and sexist.

My brain hasn’t failed because I don’t care. It failed because of an evolutionarily useful neurological trait called habituation. When I realized this, I wanted to find out exactly how it affects our lives and how to overcome it – and when we should.

Habituation is the brain’s way of normalizing our experience of the world so we can get on with life. It’s an elegant neural shortcut. Without it, we would be unable to filter out irrelevant stimuli and would instead be paralyzed by sensory overload.

Right now, trance music is playing in the cafe I work from, my ski jacket feels heavy on my shoulders, and a bright light is shining nearby. As long as I wasn’t consciously thinking about them, my brain quietly tuned them out and got used to being able to focus on those words.

Remarkably, this ability begins before birth. In the last quarter, fetal brain activity suggests that babies can already get used to it to repeated flashes of light and sound, learning to put aside familiar stimuli in order to attend to something new.

Habituation frees up neural resources so we can quickly focus on new stimuli that can kill us, feed us, or otherwise aid our well-being. “We see this ability in every single species on Earth because it’s important for survival,” he says Tali Sharot at University College London.

Our ability to habituate can also help us cope with sadness or chronic pain, normalizing anxiety to make life more bearable. One striking example of this comes from research on people with locked-in syndrome, who are fully conscious but unable to speak or move except to blink or move their eyes. They asked their happiness, most said they were satisfied – vital, the longer they were incarcerated, the more likely they were to report having a decent quality of life.

Habituation can also motivate progress. For example, when the excitement of a new job wears off, satisfaction stagnates due to habit. Sharot says that this waning spark of enthusiasm fuels our desire for progress. “Our response to good things fades over time, so we’re motivated to explore and progress.”

But habit is not always helpful. If we ignore, for example, chronic pain, we risk delaying a visit to the doctor. If we normalize toxic behavior at work or at home, we can tolerate what should never be accepted.

The inability to get used to it is also a problem. “Almost all mental health conditions are characterized by some form of habit disruption,” says Sharot. Studies suggest, for example, that people with depression detach from negative events slower than those without depression. In other words, they have a hard time getting used to bad news, which delays their emotional recovery.

Sharot’s recent and as yet unpublished work suggests another problem: people who make repeated risky financial decisions dull their emotional response to danger, thereby increasing their risk over time. They got used to the climate of risk. “You can see how this could be relevant to stock traders,” says Sharot.

At a trivial level, habituation also explains why our homes feel smaller than they once did, or why new clothes quickly appear uninteresting, leading to overconsumption.

Back off and slow down

So how do we quit? How do we teach our brains to notice again?

One way is mindfulness, in which you purposefully increase your awareness of the present moment. It has been shown in studies to decrease the likelihood of getting used to things like food – consider how easily you can overeat without thinking because you don’t really notice what you’re tasting anymore.

Another is to simply take breaks – which can sometimes seem counterintuitive. Leif Nelson at the University of California, Berkeley and Tom Meyvis at New York University they proved it interrupting pleasant experiences—music, vacations, etc.—actually makes them more pleasantbecause breaks break the habit. Similarly, they found that despite our natural tendency to take breaks from unpleasant experiences, it irritates them because it prevents habituation.

The news also helps. If you run the same route over and over, you’ll enjoy it a little less each time. “Just taking a different route every now and then means you’ll enjoy it more,” says Sharot. The same goes for moving furniture around the house, sitting in a different place in the classroom, or putting clothes away for a short period of time. “All these little things… you’d be amazed at how much joy you can get from presenting new information to your brain. It can make a huge positive difference,” says Sharot.

However, where quitting may matter most now is social media. “Over the last decade, we as a society have become accustomed to very rude behavior online. We are very quickly becoming accustomed to bad things that happen globally, politically or socially,” says Šarot. Constant exposure makes the shocking sensation normal, which means we no longer respond to it properly. Of particular concern is that children are increasingly being exposed to internet hostility. A number of studies have proven this exposure to media violence desensitizes children’s emotional reactivity to future violenceboth in the media and in real life, and has been linked to increased risk of violent behavior in later adolescence.

The solution, Šarot says, is as simple as leaving. “We need to see the world again with new eyes,” he says. “Small changes can have a huge impact.”

I took this advice to heart by removing social apps from my phone for a while, booking several shorter breaks instead of one long vacation, and even switching gyms to expose myself to new surroundings. I hope that when I return to social media, I will experience not only more joy, but also a sharper emotional response, so that my brain can once again notice the things that really deserve my attention.

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