Recently a friend and I took the Redline train to our destination north of downtown Chicago. We descended down into the subway system and were hit with a horrendous smell. (Those familiar with Chicago's Redline may not find this surprising as it also smells a bit off but this day it was nearly unbearable)
It smelled like a combination of sweat, body odor and rotting fish. Watching people walk into the station was like watching them walk into a sliding glass door. They stopped somewhere around the 3rd to last step after suddenly having their olfactory sense assaulted. Faces scrunthced up. People looked around nervously to make sure it wasn't a figment of their imagination.
All in all it was quite funny.
As we waited for the train the smell started to become less and less noticeable. It went from cripplingly bad, to mildly opressive, to bearable. By the time the train got there, 15 minutes later mind you, we could hardly notice the stench at all.
That may seem odd but this is actually a phenomenon they teach in Psychology. It is called Neural Adaptation or Sensory Fatigue. What happens is your body stops noticing old stimuli in order to stay aware of new, potentially dangerous, stimuli. It's pretty remarkable that our brains do this for us.
Turns out science is pretty cool after all.
But a form of this can also happen in different parts of our lives. There are different terms for it but my favorite is 'burnt out'. For a few weeks I got pretty burnt out of everything that had consumed my life for close to two years. Burnt out on blogs. Burnt out on books about advertising. Burnt out on magazines. Even burnt out on Twitter. I was caught in the sea of same.
The horror!
I had become myopic. It seemed like I was encountering same thing over and over. The same post, the same idea, the same sentance. Repeated ad nasuem until these things became a chore to read or encounter. I would sigh every time I checked my RSS feed - a far cry from a year ago when I couldn't add enough sources.
So I took a step away from that stuff. Marked hundreds of blog posts as read without reading them. Went to book stores and bought a bunch of books that have to do with everything except advertising. Watched a bunch of movies and TV shows. Listened to a ton of new music.
I only took a few days off from that stuff completely but it brought back the freshness. Things still aren't quite as interesting as they once were but I have found a decent amount of new stuff to obsess over - like John Hegarty's new book. It also let me realize that maybe I don't need to read every single thing that comes my way.
If you feel yourself getting burnt out take a few steps back and explore something new for a while. That's the surest way to make sure truly insteresting ideas don't slip by unnoticed.