The Perks & Perils of Habituation

What are you getting used to?

Do anything enough times and the edge wears off - we become accustomed to the pattern, the event, the experience.

The scary and foreign can become comfortable and familiar. Each new experience raises the threshold for what you think you can handle, and exposes us to a potential new normal. But the comfortable and familiar can be difficult to push, the ‘normal’ difficult to even notice.

Habituation can keep us blind to repeating loops of behavior and life - unaware of what we are even engaged in anymore because it now requires so little of us. We slip into autopilot, humming along terrain that’s been crossed a million times, not even noticing the moment when the effortful became effortless.

Or habituation can be leveraged — consciously used to inch us into new challenging waters, wisely wielded with the knowledge that if we keep it up, keep inching into the new and uncomfortable, this too will become easy. Or at least, easier.

Is habituation an insidious limit, keeping you stuck in a comfortable loop, blinding you to the magic all around, or is it a launchpad, catapulting you into places you once thought impossible?

What are you getting comfortable with, and is it serving you?