Tali Sharot's Look Again and the Cheerfulness Facet (E6)

Tali Sharot and Cass Sunstein's Look Again explains a small cruelty of the brain: it is built to stop noticing whatever stays the same. A new love, a new city, both thrill at first and then quietly fade into background, not because anything got worse but because your attention moved on. Sharot, a neuroscientist, puts the emotional cost plainly in an NPR interview: "Even great things in your life, if they're always there, they don't excite you as much. They don't bring you as much joy." In the Big Five, the capacity for that joy is one facet, and habituation is what erodes it.

Sustained joy is the Cheerfulness facet

The facet is Cheerfulness (E6), under Extraversion, the readiness to feel joy and high spirits. A high scorer lights up easily; a low scorer runs cooler and takes more to move. But Sharot's work adds a wrinkle that catches even high-E6 people: whatever your baseline, habituation keeps dragging you back toward it. The joy of a good thing is loudest when it is new and gets quieter the longer it sits still, which is why the second half of a wonderful year rarely feels as wonderful as the first.

What makes the book practical is that habituation runs backward too. Break the sameness and the feeling returns. Sharot's research finds that variety and breaks reset the response, so the same song or the same view can spark again after a genuine pause. As the authors write, "When things are the same, we stop noticing what is most wonderful in our own lives." The move is less about acquiring new good things than about interrupting the ones you have: a trip that makes home feel new again, a week apart that makes a partner visible again. A little variety is what keeps E6 from going numb.

We break the facet down on its own in Cheerfulness (E6). If your E6 runs high, Look Again explains the faint restlessness that comes when even good things settle: your joy machinery is idling, not broken. If it runs lower, the reassuring read is that a flat stretch may be habituation rather than unhappiness, and the fix is often a change of angle instead of a change of circumstances. Step away from something good for a while, then come back and look at it like you have not seen it in years.

Read the book: Look Again: The Power of Noticing What Was Always There by Tali Sharot.

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