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“What did matter was that you were visiting new places, so it suggests that walking a different route to the subway on your commute, that taking a walk around your neighborhood and not going the same path that you might on a Saturday afternoon, that introducing some degree of novelty into your daily routine should be capable of producing these kinds of boosts in positive emotion. “It didn’t matter how far you traveled,” she said, referring to her study. I asked Hartley if incremental changes of scenery (working at a coffee shop) could have as much of an impact on your outlook as larger changes (visiting another country). Even small novel experiences can give you a boost This is why something as simple as working from a new room in your home can feel like it brings on a burst of creativity, or walking outside during a heated argument can feel like it clears your mind and brings new perspective,” she explains.
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You’re thinking thoughts you didn’t think yesterday. This can absolutely affect our mood and our outlook. “When you change things up, your brain is forced to be a little more open, receptive, and outside of the box to some degree. “Suddenly, our brain has to work a bit more to take in the new sights and sounds of our new environment, to scan for potential threats, and to make sense of, and tell a story about, what’s going on,” she explains. Tim Robberts Getty Images Change “wakes up” your brainĪmy Johnson, a psychologist and the author of the upcoming book Just a Thought, suggests that the idea of switching things up in your daily routine can “wake up” the brain. It could be that happiness drives exploration, or novelty drives our positive affect - our data suggests it’s a little bit of both,” Hartley says. But it could also be that I wake up in a good mood, and that drives me to go explore more and walk a novel route around my neighborhood. It may be that I walk a new route through my neighborhood, and the new things I see there make me happier. It’s thought that this circuitry enables novel things to be experienced as rewarding. This region of the brain has projections to the ventral striatum, another region of the brain involved in reward processing. “There are regions of the brain, the hippocampus in particular, that are extremely sensitive to environmental novelty.
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“In some ways, it’s consistent with what we know about what novelty does to the brain,” says Hartley. The researchers also looked at how often the participants visited new locations within four to five months and found more-novel locations were associated with a higher degree of positive affect, or feeling happier. On days when individuals had more variability in their daily movement patterns (according to their own histories), they reported being happier.
CHANGE OF SCENERY INSTALL
How did it work? Hartley told Shondaland that she and Heller had a large number of people in New York City and Miami install an app on their mobile phones and tracked them on their daily activities to measure the daily variability in their locations, or their “roaming entropy.” The more they moved around town, the higher their “roaming entropy.” The participants also had to rate how happy they were. Basically, for most people, the more variety of experiences in your daily routine, the happier you are. As it turns out, a recent study co-led by Catherine Hartley, an assistant professor in New York University’s department of psychology, and Aaron Heller, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Miami, found daily variability in physical location to be associated with increased positive affect (kind of where attitude meets mood) in humans.