🤯 Use Novelty To Rewire Your Brain and Restore Your Fire

☎️ The Loops That Break Us

There’s a particular kind of despair that doesn’t come from some big tragedy or breakdown. It comes from waking up every day and doing the exact same thing. Same job. Same route home. Same lunch at the same time, sitting in the same chair, staring at the same screen, thinking the same thoughts. That’s what got me.

For a while I thought I was just burnt out. I figured if I could just sleep more, or quit this one job, or wait for a weekend away, I’d feel better. But it wasn’t tiredness. It was something deeper. Like my brain had started to decay from lack of use. The world around me was still spinning, but I was stuck in a loop. Auto-pilot. Clicking the same buttons on the remote every night. Reaching for the same version of myself every morning.

Depression didn’t feel like sadness. It felt like sameness.

At first, you don’t even realise how far you’ve slipped into it. You think, maybe this is just adulthood. Maybe this is what life looks like now. You tell yourself everyone feels this way. But then one day, somewhere between brushing your teeth and opening your inbox, the question creeps in:

Is this it?

Is this what I’m doing for the rest of my life?

No major crisis. Just the crushing weight of routine. The slow erosion of aliveness. The quiet panic of being a conscious human stuck in a closed loop.

It wasn’t just the darkness.

It was the repetition.

🧬 Why Novelty Matters (The Neuroscience)

Let’s start with your brain.

It’s not fixed. It’s not stuck. It’s not fully cooked and done growing just because you hit adulthood. Your brain is constantly rewiring itself in response to what you do, feel, think, and experience. This is neuroplasticity—your nervous system’s ability to change itself through use.

Like trails in the forest, the more you walk a certain path, the more it becomes the default. But you can still carve out new ones.

When you’re depressed, that ability gets dulled. Certain parts of the brain that regulate emotion, motivation, and memory—like the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex—start to shrink in volume and function. Think foggier memory, blunted emotion, less motivation, flattened timeline. The “life” part of life starts slipping.

One of the main reasons for this is a drop in something called Brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF)—a growth factor your brain uses to build and strengthen neural pathways. When BDNF is low, it’s harder to form new connections. Things become rigid. You feel like you’re trapped in the same thought patterns, the same mood, the same version of yourself.

But here’s the part that really matters: novelty helps bring that spark back.

Doing something new—even something tiny—can boost activity in your hippocampus and midbrain reward circuits. This lights up the very areas that depression dims. Novelty releases dopamine, your brain’s “seeking” chemical, which doesn’t just reward you—it motivates you. It tells your system: this matters, pay attention. It makes you feel like things are moving again. Because they are.

There’s also something strange and magical that happens with your perception of time. When life is repetitive, time collapses. A whole year can go by and feel like nothing happened. But when you do new things, your brain encodes more memories, which makes time feel longer and richer. One hour in a new city can feel like a whole day. This is why holidays feel expansive and office jobs can feel like a blur.

Novelty stretches time. Depression compresses it.

Trying something new—even just taking a different route home or learning one fact you didn’t know yesterday—starts to loosen the grip. You don’t have to feel “better” first. You don’t need a full-blown recovery plan. You just need to start interrupting the loop.

Because sometimes, what saves you isn’t the big solution. It’s the little detour. A moment of surprise. The proof that your story isn’t finished yet.

🚨 Boredom as a Warning Light

I think I just have a brain that’s wired for newness. I pick things up fast—and then I get bored just as fast. That used to feel like a character flaw. Like I just couldn’t stick to anything. Like I was the problem for not being more content with the 9 to 5 and the occasional long weekend.

Over time I realised it wasn’t laziness or lack of discipline. It was rot. If I don’t do something with the creative energy building up in me, it festers. I get snappy. Stagnant. Sick. It’s like my system starts to corrode from the inside out. Boredom, for me, is not just an annoying itch. It’s a full-body shutdown warning.

Some people thrive in structure and routine. They build rhythm into their weeks and it keeps them grounded. I love that for them. I’m just not built that way. Repetition doesn’t calm me. It compresses me. Too many days of the same environment, the same screen, the same faces—my sense of time collapses. I start to feel like I’m wasting my life.

What’s tricky is that the problem doesn’t always look like a problem from the outside. Sometimes you’re in a “good” job. Sometimes you have flexible hours, decent pay, a nice team, even supportive managers. But inside, something’s off. The days blur together. You keep telling yourself you should feel lucky. But something keeps tugging at you. You look up from your screen and suddenly wonder, Is this it?

That feeling hit me hard after I’d been working full-time for a while. At first, there was learning. Growth. I felt useful. I had momentum. But eventually the newness wore off. There were no more ladders to climb, no exciting mistakes to make. Just flat ground. No direction. The climb had stopped, and the wall just stretched sideways forever.

That’s when the mental health stuff starts creeping in. Not always dramatically. Just low-grade existential nausea. You feel yourself starting to disappear.

The problem isn’t always your job. Sometimes it’s just the loop. Too many days without variation. Too few signals to your brain that you’re still alive and choosing your life with agency. That’s when novelty becomes less of a luxury and more of a survival skill.

🧙‍♂️ My Own Experiments With Newness

📇 “I’m Not a Writer”

For a long time, I carried around this belief that I wasn’t a writer. I didn’t study writing. I didn’t do an arts degree. I’m a nurse—that’s the script I knew how to follow. So even though I had things I wanted to say, I never gave myself permission to say them properly. Writing a book? That belonged to some other version of me in an alternate timeline.

Then one day I just decided to stop waiting.

No one was going to appear and tell me I was allowed to write. No mentor. No gatekeeper. Just me, sitting at the page, with the full weight of my resistance and this tiny flicker of curiosity. Could I just do it anyway? Who cares what anyone else thinks!

Turns out, writing this book— starting this project—became one of the most healing and creative things I’ve ever done. It gave me structure and chaos at the same time. It let me explore things I hadn’t thought about since I was a kid. It forced me to research, to reflect, to wrestle with beliefs I didn’t know I still had. Writing became novelty, expression, and transmutation all at once. I didn’t have to be a “writer” to write. I just had to begin writing.

🃏 Tarot & The Unexpected Path

Tarot wasn’t something I thought I’d ever be into. I used to lump it in with all the stuff I secretly judged. Crystals. Horoscopes. Instagram witches. It didn’t feel like me.

But one day I pulled a card anyway. Then another. I got curious about it instead. Then I started using it to ask questions I didn’t know how to answer on my own. Not in a predictive way, but as a mirror. A language that could speak back to the things I was feeling underneath the noise. Now I post tarot readings on YouTube at least once a week. It still makes me laugh sometimes how much you can allow yourself change in a short amount of time.

Tarot cracked something open in me. Not just spiritually, but creatively. It gave me permission to approach healing through imagery, archetype, intuition—without needing it all to make rational sense or be explainable by evidence-based research. It also helped me stop performing as the old version of myself. The one who needed to be taken seriously. The one who didn’t want to look “weird.” The one who needed a justification or explanation for everything happening in my life.

You don’t have to pick up tarot. You don’t have to believe in any of it. But I will say this: try something that doesn’t feel like “you.” Try something that makes your self-image wobble just a little. There’s magic in that alone.

👷‍♀️ Workweek Alchemy

I still have a day job like many others. But I couldn’t keep doing five days in a row of the same thing without something in me breaking down. So I went part-time. Four days a week. Even though it wasn’t the smartest financial decision, it was one of the best mental health choices I’ve made in a long time.

Now, I never work more than two days in a row at my day job. I have Wednesdays off—a built-in circuit breaker. That’s my novelty anchor. Some weeks I get a massage, explore new healing modalities, or just wander around a new part of the city. Some weeks it’s writing, filming, or diving deep into a weird rabbit hole for this project. But whatever it is, it interrupts the pattern. It reminds my brain that life is still changing. That I’m still actively choosing how my life unfolds.

The happiest and most balanced I’ve ever felt was during the pandemic—surprisingly enough, when I had two casual jobs at the same time with rotating days and hours. Each week was different. Different roles, different teams, different rhythms. It was chaotic, but I thrived in that chaos. Because it wasn’t monotonous.

Maybe you don’t need to quit your job. Maybe you just need to remix it. Change your hours. Break up your week. Add something new in the middle. Make space for who you’re becoming—especially if the old structure is shrinking you.

🔧 How to Start Rewiring

Start with the places in your mind that feel fenced off. The things you’ve quietly decided aren’t for you. Maybe it’s writing. Maybe it’s dancing. Maybe it’s asking for what you actually want instead of biting your tongue. Get curious about those beliefs. Where did they come from? Who taught you that you couldn’t? Are they even true anymore?

I wrote a whole post about this recently—about rebuilding your inner belief system like a personal grimoire. Your own metaphysical operating manual. Because so many of the limits we carry aren’t real. They’re inherited. Or outdated. Or never even ours to begin with. Shaking up your external life starts there: by questioning what you think you’re “allowed” to do.

Once you’ve poked around a little, try something small. Just once. Walk up and talk to a complete stranger in a public place. Pick up an instrument and make some noise. Try a sport or physical activity you always swore you’d never understand. Join a random gym class. Use your body in a way that feels foreign.

One of my favourite cheat codes is using your non-dominant hand. Seriously. Swap your knife and fork hands. Brush your teeth with your left hand. Open doors, scroll your phone, write a sentence—whatever it is. It short-circuits the autopilot. You notice more. You become more present. Your brain lights up just a little differently, and that’s the whole point.

Novelty doesn’t have to be big or dramatic. It just has to be new.

Wear something you’d never normally wear. Watch a documentary on something weird. Take a different route home. Try talking about something you’ve never talked about before. You don’t have to be confident. You don’t have to be good. You’re allowed to be a beginner. You’re allowed to mess around. No one is keeping score.

What if today’s action was the first domino in a new timeline?

You’ll never know unless you knock it over.

🌀 The Spell of Change

Novelty isn’t a phase. It’s a portal. A crack in the pattern. A chance to remember that your life is still in motion.

Trying new things teaches your brain something it forgets when you’re depressed: you are not stuck. You can change. You can choose. You are not just the product of what’s come before—you are a participant in what happens next.

For me, trying something new every day helped save my life. It wasn’t a dramatic breakthrough. It was slow. Messy. Sometimes uncomfortable. But little by little, it worked. I started to feel more like the real me again. More present. More like I could shape the story instead of just being dragged along by it.

Novelty won’t fix everything. But it will open something. Sometimes, that’s all you need.

There’s more to come. Expect more novelty…

✍️ Journal Prompts

• What’s something you’ve always told yourself you’re “not” (e.g. “not creative,” “not spiritual,” “not a writer”)? Where did that belief come from—and is it still true?

• Think back to a time when you did something new or unexpected. How did it feel? What shifted afterwards?

• What part of your daily life feels the most repetitive or draining? What’s one small way you could disrupt that pattern this week?

• If you had total permission to reinvent one area of your life, what would you change first—and why haven’t you yet?

• What would it mean for you to live a life that surprises even you? What might that version of you try this month?

• 🤯 Bonus: Novel Actions to Try This Week

  • Brush your teeth using your non-dominant hand
    A fast-track to neuroplasticity—your brain has to pay attention.

  • Talk to a stranger while waiting for coffee or in a queue
    Keep it simple: ask what they’re reading, what drink they ordered, or compliment something they’re wearing.

  • Watch a documentary on something completely outside your usual interests
    Bonus points if you disagree with it. Let your brain stretch.

  • Wear something that doesn’t feel like “you”
    Could be louder, softer, more formal, more playful. Notice how it shifts your posture or interactions.

  • Take a new route to somewhere you go often
    Walk, ride, or drive a different way—even if it’s slower. Let your brain map the unknown.

References

Brian Knutson, Jeffrey C. Cooper, The Lure of the Unknown, Neuron, Volume 51, Issue 3, 2006, Pages 280-282, ISSN 0896-6273, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2006.07.017.

Mudgal SK, Nath S, Chaturvedi J, Sharma SK, Joshi J. Neuroplasticity in Depression: A Narrative Review with Evidence-Based Insights. Psychiatr Danub. 2022 Fall;34(3):390-397. doi: 10.24869/psyd.2022.390. PMID: 36256972.

Pittenger C, Duman RS. Stress, depression, and neuroplasticity: a convergence of mechanisms. Neuropsychopharmacology. 2008 Jan;33(1):88-109. doi: 10.1038/sj.npp.1301574. Epub 2007 Sep 12. PMID: 17851537.

Tse, P.U., Intriligator, J., Rivest, J. et al. Attention and the subjective expansion of time. Perception & Psychophysics 66, 1171–1189 (2004). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03196844

Yu-Bing Wang, Ning-Ning Song, Yu-Qiang Ding, Lei Zhang, Neural plasticity and depression treatment, IBRO Neuroscience Reports, Volume 14, 2023, Pages 160-184, ISSN 2667-2421, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ibneur.2022.09.001.