why the 10th time you do something fun it doesn’t feel as good as the 1st time
In: Biology
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.
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