why the 10th time you do something fun it doesn’t feel as good as the 1st time
In: Biology
Achieving a goal or completing a task can be accompanied by a “dopamine rush” literally a chemical released into our brain in reaction to rewarding stimuli. As a task is repeated, however, the “rush” from accomplishment can subside as a familiar or routine task does not give as great a sense of accomplishment as doing something unfamiliar or new.
So this is a topic that I actually have had some great discussions with my friends about. Anecdotally, I have gathered that most people are like this. However, I have never felt this way even once.
From what I’ve gathered it has a lot to do with being way too reliant on your emotional expectations. I have never lead my life by expecting emotional results from things. I merely accept the outcome or I don’t. I don’t compare previous emotional experiences with one that I’m experiencing at that moment. Something either was successful or it wasn’t. I don’t feel bad if it wasn’t “as good” as the time before.
You can control this, but it takes effort.
There’s a whole bunch of psychological explanations behind this, I’m sure, but I’m more of a practical person. So I tune my life in order to prevent being overly dependent on my emotions so that I can actually enjoy things.
When you do something for the first time, you have no basis for comparison or experience on what it’ll be like. If it’s good, you say “that was good!” with nothing to compare it to. The second time, if it’s good, you don’t say “that was good!”, you say either “that was better than the last one” or “that wasn’t as good as the last one.” As you do it more and more, you form a baseline expectation for how good it’ll be, and it has to exceed that expectation to actually feel good. If it meets expectations, it’s what you expected, and if it’s below expectations, you feel disappointment.
Your brain is kind of like a machine. It’s biological, so instead of using computer chips and electrical signals it’s cells and chemical signals. The way those signals work have been developed and honed over thousands of years, but are also subject to genetic mutation as nature is always experimenting.
The “normal” way the brain works is if you do something that accomplishes a goal it releases a chemical that makes you feel happy. If we treat that goal as like, “cooking a meal”, it’s clear why feeling good that you made food is good for your survival. But cooking 10 meals in a row isn’t as good for your survival, because after you eat a meal you’re not hungry so there are probably better things you should be doing. So the system that releases “happy” chemicals for accomplishing goals is set up to release less if you keep repeating the same task. This is why we get bored and burned out.
But if you wait until you’re hungry again, cooking that meal is probably going to start paying off again. The brain has some complicated allowances for “If I know you need to do this thing to satisfy my needs, I’ll relent and let you be happy even if you’ve repeated it a lot.” Still, that clashes with the “don’t do the same thing too much” parts of the brain, so if you cook the same meal every day eventually you just don’t feel satisfied with it.
That’s still a good thing! If all you eat is one meal the odds you get malnutrition increase. (Or at least, for 99% of human history it was practically impossible to eat one meal with everything your body needed and it will be thousands of years before our brains catch up to the last 50 years.) Your brain wants you to burn out on pizza because it wants you to be frequently eating lots of different things to increase the likelihood that you’re getting all of the nutrients you need.
That system where doing things you haven’t done before “pays off” more than things you have guides almost everything we do. So the 10th time you do something it isn’t as fun because you already know what to expect, there are no surprises, and our brains are tuned to make us get excited about surprises. There’s a balance, though. That’s why people have “comfort foods” or listening to certain music helps with stress: being presented with things where there are no surprises can help balance out your chemical machinery if it’s overproducing the “stress” or “excited” chemicals.
“Novel” things present options you didn’t have before and our biology really wants that. A lot of “novel” things get a human killed but nature’s not too bothered by that in the grand scheme, it can make more. Other “novel” things represent finding new food sources or new tools that make survival more likely, so we’re driven by our nature to seek new things and feel uncomfortable or restless if nothing is changing.
Because it’s biological machinery subject to genetic mutation, it’s not the same for everybody. Some people get bored and restless very fast. Other people never get bored with certain things. Some people have trouble with the “excited” chemicals and never get a payoff even if things are new. Other people have trouble where they overproduce it and get so overwhelmed by new things it terrifies them. There’s not really a “normal”, just a set of loose guidelines for how it tends to work. Nature does this because it reckons if it covers all of the possibilities and some disaster happens, if humans with a particular tendency are better at surviving then “humanity in general” is more likely to survive than if it just focused on one “best” tendency. Nature doesn’t “learn a lesson”, it will keep trying “failures” *just in case* something changed.
What we call “fun” is just some activity that engages our brain, ideally one that also makes our body release chemicals that make us feel good.
When your brain is occupied, it means it is basically building new roads to send messages on. The more difficult and new the experience, the more new roads it needs.
When you brain experiences something new, it works overtime to try and find patterns, memorize and categorize that information. It builds new roads to help if it sees that task again in the future.
Humans (and other animals) evolved to enjoy this, especially when young, because humans with more experiences are better prepared to face a wide range of challenges in the future.
By the time you’re doing something a 10th time, or 1000th time, your brain probably already built the roads it needs and now no longer has to work very hard to engage with the task.
You experience that as low focus and low engagement.
This is part of why adrenaline-seekers start with something small, like riding a bike fast as a kid, and eventually end up doing huge things like jumping out of planes. The brain eventually stops reacting to the original experiences in the same way.
You can sometimes trick your brain into re-engaging with an experience by doing it in a new way.
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