How Our Habits Influence Novelty Perception and Experiential Richness

An interview with behavioral scientist, author, & habits expert Samuel Salzer

Habits are a central feature of successfully navigating the world. They enable us to operate on “auto-pilot”: exporting well-learned routines to a lower bandwidth, and freeing up our other mental faculties to focus on tasks which require more deliberate attention and resources.

While these advantages are clear, the psychology of habits also teaches us that they also come with trade-offs: When we outsource our behavior to a habitual state of mind, we lower our perception of novelty, deplete the richness of the experience, and render it far less meaningful and memorable.

How should we think about these tradeoffs between results-oriented habits and experiential richness? To help explore this question, we speak with behavioral scientist and habit expert Samuel Salzer. In this interview, we dive into this fundamental tension.

At this point, you’ve helped hundreds, maybe thousands of people form better habits. What do people think about when they’re thinking about changing their habits? What are they trying to do?

For the most part, individuals like to think about the things that might enhance their lives. They consider activities that offer them more pleasure, make them feel more present or mindful, or elicit positive emotional responses. It's about enhancing some aspect of their well-being, right?

If you were to ask about how someone wants to feel or what they aim to improve, they might express a desire to feel more present with their children or experience more emotional fulfillment. Often, it's about genuinely feeling and experiencing things. Conversely, the entire notion of a habit centers around eliminating conscious effort from behavior.

The objective with habits though, is to place your mind on autopilot so that you naturally engage in behaviors that contribute to your success or well-being. You seek to streamline these actions and eliminate the conscious effort involved. It's a bit like trying to outsource a task.

In your mind, are there downsides to this aspect of habits as auto-pilot? If we put so much into habits, do we miss out on experiential richness?

One thing it makes me think about is this old Adam Sandler comedy drama called “Click”. Adam Sandler’s character stumbles upon a remote control that grants him control over his reality, much like a VCR or DVD player. With this remote, he can pause, fast forward, and rewind through his life's experiences.

At first, he views his life with disdain, longing to fast forward through the difficult moments to find happiness. However, he inadvertently fast forwards too much and realizes that he has missed out on crucial moments, including watching his daughters grow up.

This realization dawns on him that putting his entire life on autopilot - reducing it to mere habits, was not what he truly desired. It's a poignant exploration of the consequences of living life without being fully present, culminating in regret for the missed opportunities and experiences. In these instances where habits become the primary focus, it can backfire dramatically, especially at the extremes.

This makes me think of the show, Severance, on AppleTV, where the characters who work in the office are “split in half”, and their memories for their work life are totally divorced from their personal life in evenings and weekends.

That’s almost exactly what habits are like. Habit essentially serves as a form of cognitive outsourcing, allowing the brain to allocate less cognitive effort to repetitive tasks, thus optimizing awareness for more crucial matters.

It really is like the concept of “Severance”, where these mundane activities are automated to conserve cognitive capacity for more important pursuits. In real life, this optimization enables individuals to focus on higher-priority tasks and benefit from increased efficiency. And this ultimately shapes how we allocate our cognitive resources and engage with the world around us.

There’s all kinds of work in psychology on the psychology of novelty perception. Novelty perception influences the strength of our memories, the richness of a given experience, and in much detail it will be remembered later. How have you come to think about this connection between novelty and habits, and these other aspects of our lives?

I think about this idea of novelty perception a lot in my own life, and especially with food. For example, there was a time when I got pretty good at meal prepping. You know, every weekend, I'd just prepare meals for the whole week. So, every day, I'd have the same lunch ready to go in the fridge. It made things super easy. I even tried this meal replacement drink called Huel, and people were like, "Isn't that too repetitive?" Despite the doubts, sticking to these routines just made life simpler for me.

There's been some interesting research floating around about how novelty interacts with how people approach meal choices throughout the day. While most people are totally cool with having the same breakfast every day, they start itching for something different by the time lunch and especially dinner rolls around. Some people are fine sticking to their usual meals, while others need a bit more excitement on their plate, and these preferences fluctuate throughout the day.

Personally, I'm firmly in the camp that's perfectly content with eating the same stuff regularly. But here's the thing: a lot of those same folks who swear they couldn't stomach the same meal every day are the ones hitting me up, asking for tips on how to build more eating habits. And I'm like, sure, I can help you out with that, but just remember, more habits might mean less variety, which kinda defeats the purpose. It's a bit of a paradox.

How should we think about the trade-offs between habits and the richness of the experience? When should we automate a task, and when should we try to savor it and make it memorable?

Some people really enjoy food, and so it wouldn’t make sense to make that process a habit. This would mean outsourcing and making it easier, but also less rich and less memorable.

Other people, though, may like the eating part, but not the cooking part. That's where the whole idea of automating comes into play - maybe you just want to create habits around cooking and cleaning. You could not just outsource it to your cognitive self, but also, if you have the ability to do so, to another person entirely.

Depending on your social status and ability, you might have the luxury of outsourcing those tasks to someone else. But then you’d be freeing up your own time at the expense of someone else’s. And there also may be elements of the experience you do enjoy, even though they feel less obvious.

Overall, it’s really interesting to see people trying to navigate this whole automation versus enjoyment dilemma. People are constantly exploring new ways to optimize routines and make life a little easier, but it's often hard to know which areas we want to create habits out of.

More from Samuel Salzer, on The Psychology of Habits and how we can reconcile The Paradox of Habit Psychology

Photo by Hector Reyes via UnSplash