Small children ask questions about almost everything. Somewhere around the second job, the first mortgage or the third year of the same commute, most of us quietly stop.
Nothing dramatic happens. You don’t wake up one morning and decide the world is boring. You just get efficient. You know how your phone works, how your job works, how your city works, roughly how people work. Answers become more useful than questions, and questions start to feel like a delay.
The trouble is that curiosity is what keeps a life from shrinking to its routines. It makes you better at learning, more interesting to talk to, and harder to bore.
The good news from the last two years of research is that curiosity isn’t a fixed allowance you burn through by 30. Some kinds seem to hold up well with age, and the general habit can be trained. You don’t need a sabbatical or a personality transplant. You need a few small changes to how you spend spare minutes, how you look things up and what you ask the people around you.
Here are 13 ways to do it, each backed by evidence, plus what to do when the habit slips.
1. Stop treating curiosity as a trait you either have or don’t
Most people think of curiosity like height. You got a certain amount, and that’s that.
A better comparison is aerobic fitness. It varies between people, but it also responds to what you do repeatedly. In a randomized pilot study published in May 2025 in The Journal of Positive Psychology, Madeleine Gross and Jonathan Schooler at UC Santa Barbara gave 55 young adults a smartphone program built around small daily curiosity challenges, while 36 others waited for access. After 21 days, the app users scored higher on several curiosity measures and reported more creative activity and a stronger sense of meaning than the waitlist group.
The fitness analogy holds in one way: repetition seems to matter more than talent. It breaks down in another. You can’t “overload” curiosity the way you add weight to a bar, and the evidence is still thin. This was a small pilot of mostly students, the control group got nothing to do, and the authors themselves call for longer studies with active controls.
Still, the shift in mindset is useful. If curiosity is a practice, then a dull month says nothing permanent about who you are. It just means you skipped the reps.
Start small: pick one daily “curiosity rep” for the next three weeks, such as asking one real question per day that you don’t know the answer to, and keep it boringly consistent.
2. Read something you don’t need to read
Reading for pleasure is one of the cheapest curiosity engines there is, and it’s disappearing fast.
In an August 2025 study in iScience, Jessica Bone and colleagues at University College London and the University of Florida analysed American Time Use Survey diaries from 236,270 people between 2003 and 2023. The share who read for pleasure on an average day fell from 28% in 2004 to 16% in 2023, a drop of roughly 40%, or about 3% a year. The definition was broad, too. E-books and audiobooks counted.
One detail stands out. Among people who still read, time spent reading rose slightly. The researchers read this as a split: some people reading more, many stopping entirely. The data is correlational, so it can’t tell you why people stopped, though the authors point to digital media, money and shrinking leisure time as likely factors.
What matters for you is the type of reading. Work documents and news alerts answer questions someone else chose. A book you picked on a whim lets you wander into questions you didn’t know you had. If you want an easy slot for it, fold it into an evening wind-down routine where a screen used to be.
Keep one book that has nothing to do with your job by the bed, and read two pages a night, even when you’re tired.
3. Follow the specific things that already pull you in
A finding from 2025 should take some pressure off. You may not need to become “a curious person” in general.
A 2025 PLOS ONE study of curiosity across the adult lifespan by Mary Whatley, Kou Murayama, Michiko Sakaki and Alan Castel surveyed 1,218 US adults aged 20 to 84. Trait curiosity, the general tendency to seek out new information, was slightly lower in older participants. But state curiosity, how curious people felt about specific trivia questions in front of them, was slightly higher. An exploratory analysis suggested state curiosity dipped lowest in middle age and rose again later.
The effects were small (correlations below 0.2), the design was cross-sectional, and only trivia was tested, so treat this as a hint rather than a rule. The hint is a helpful one, though: the broad “let’s try everything” urge may fade, but interest in particular things can stay strong or even grow.
So stop waiting for a general spark. Notice the narrow ones. The bird you keep seeing on your balcony. Why your sourdough failed. How the bridge on your route was built. Going deep on one thing is also one of the most reliable ways to get into a flow state, which makes the time feel well spent rather than indulgent.
Your move: write down three oddly specific things you’ve wondered about this month, choose one, and spend 30 minutes this weekend going properly down that rabbit hole.
4. Let some spare minutes stay empty
Curiosity needs a gap. Most adults have very few left.
According to the DataReportal Digital 2026 Global Overview Report (October 2025, based on GWI survey data of internet users aged 16 and over), the typical user now spends well over two and a half hours a day on social and video platforms combined, about 18 hours and 36 minutes a week. When asked why they use social media, 39.7% chose “filling spare time”, the second most common reason after keeping in touch with friends and family.
The likely chain runs like this. A gap opens: a queue, a bus ride, a pause before a meeting. Before your mind can drift to an unresolved question, the phone fills the space with someone else’s content. That content is designed to resolve quickly and lead to the next item. So the itch never builds, and an unanswered question, which is the raw material of curiosity, never gets a chance to form.
To be clear, this mechanism is an inference. The DataReportal figures describe how people spend time; they don’t measure curiosity. It’s cheap to test on yourself, though, and mindless scrolling is one of the easier habits that are bad for your brain to swap out.
Test it this week: choose one daily gap, like your commute or your coffee queue, and leave the phone in your pocket. If it feels uncomfortable, that’s normal. Learning to enjoy being alone with your thoughts takes a few tries.
5. Make a guess before you look anything up
This one feels almost too simple, which is why it’s easy to skip.
When you guess first, a few things happen in order. You commit to an answer. That makes the distance between what you think and what’s true suddenly visible. The visible gap creates anticipation, and anticipation is what a curious state feels like from the inside. Then the answer lands on a brain that’s ready for it.
The last link in that chain has decent lab support. In a 2014 study in Neuron, Matthias Gruber, Bernard Gelman and Charan Ranganath at UC Davis scanned 19 people while they waited for answers to trivia questions. When participants were highly curious, they remembered the answers better, both immediately and a day later. They even remembered unrelated faces shown during that waiting period better. Brain activity in reward-related regions and the hippocampus, an area central to forming memories, rose with curiosity.
Two caveats. The study is more than a decade old and small, and it didn’t test guessing directly. The guessing step is my suggestion for getting into that curious state on purpose, not something the researchers measured. Still, it pairs well with the techniques in this guide on how to improve your memory.
A quick experiment: the next five times you’re about to search for something, say or write your best guess first, then check. Notice which answers stick.
6. Do some of the digging yourself
AI chatbots are brilliant at giving you an answer. That’s exactly the problem when your goal is to understand something.
Shiri Melumad of the Wharton School and Jin Ho Yun of New Mexico State University ran seven experiments with more than 10,000 participants, published in October 2025 in PNAS Nexus. People were randomly assigned to learn about topics such as planting a vegetable garden using either a large language model or ordinary web search links. Those using AI summaries spent less effort, felt they had learned less, and later wrote advice that was sparser and less original. In one experiment, 1,501 independent readers who didn’t know where the advice came from rated it as less helpful. As their paper on large language models versus web search and depth of learning shows, the gap held even when the AI answers came with live links attached.
The authors’ explanation is friction. Clicking through sources, comparing them and stitching them together yourself is slower, and that slower work is where understanding forms. The study measured self-reported depth and the quality of advice, not long-term memory, so the full picture is still developing.
None of this means you should stop using AI. For a quick fact, use whatever is fastest. For something you actually want to understand, keep a bit of the struggle. It also helps to protect that time from interruptions, which is easier if you practise focusing on one thing at a time.
Next time, do this: when a topic genuinely interests you, open three different sources before you read any summary, and write two sentences in your own words about what you learned.
7. Sign up for something with a start date
Curiosity drifts without structure. A course, a workshop or even a free online class gives it a calendar.
Plenty of adults already do this, but many don’t. The latest European figures show how uneven it is (note that the surveys measure learning differently, so the numbers aren’t directly comparable):
| Measure (adults aged 25 to 64) | Source | Figure |
|---|---|---|
| Took part in formal or non-formal learning in the past 12 months, 2022 | Eurostat Adult Education Survey (latest edition) | 46.6% |
| Same, excluding guided on-the-job training, 2022 | Education and Training Monitor 2025 | 39.5% |
| Learning in the past 12 months, 2024 (up from 25.1% in 2022) | EU Labour Force Survey, via Education and Training Monitor 2025 | 28.5% |
| EU-level target for 2030 | Education and Training Monitor 2025 | 60% |
Eurostat also reports that participation falls with age and is higher among people who are employed and those with more education. The gaps between countries are huge: Sweden and the Netherlands reported rates above 65% in 2022, while Poland, Bulgaria and Greece were below 25%. The Adult Education Survey runs only every six years, so the 2022 edition remains the newest one.
So being an adult learner is common, but it’s far from automatic, and it gets less common with every decade unless you choose it. A class doesn’t have to be a career move either. Pottery, local history and beginner Italian all count. If you’re earlier in your career, this ties in with investing in yourself in your 20s.
Here’s a simple way in: search for one short course near you or online that starts within the next 30 days, and book it before you talk yourself out of it.
8. Treat curiosity as part of your job, not a distraction from it
Many people quietly shelve curiosity at work because it feels unproductive. Employers increasingly say the opposite.
The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025, published in January 2025 and based on a survey of more than 1,000 large employers covering over 14 million workers in 55 economies, lists “curiosity and lifelong learning” among the skills expected to keep rising in importance between 2025 and 2030. The same report estimates that, on average, workers can expect 39% of their existing skill sets to be transformed or become outdated over that period.
Keep the source in mind. This is a survey of employers’ expectations, not a measurement of what curious workers actually achieve. But it does mean that asking “why do we do it this way?” is less of a career risk than it used to be. Curiosity also sharpens the small stuff: people who ask questions about a process tend to spot problems earlier, which is the core of improving attention to detail at work.
Once a week, pick one routine task at work and ask a colleague from another team how it looks from their side.
9. Ask one deeper question than feels comfortable
Other people are the most interesting puzzle you’ll ever encounter, and most of us waste them on small talk.
In a series of 12 experiments with more than 1,800 participants, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in late 2021, Michael Kardas, Amit Kumar and Nicholas Epley paired mostly strangers to discuss either shallow or deeper questions. One deep prompt was: “Can you describe a time you cried in front of another person?” People consistently expected deep conversations to be more awkward and less enjoyable than they turned out to be. They also underestimated how interested their partner would be in hearing their answers.
This study is about five years old, older than most sources here. It’s included because it’s large, the pattern held across all 12 experiments, and it’s still the clearest test of this question. One limit worth noting: participants had agreed to discuss set questions, which is different from springing a heavy question on someone in a supermarket queue.
Small talk isn’t useless, and there are good ways to get better at small talk. But curiosity lives one level deeper, in follow-ups such as “What made you choose that?” or “What surprised you about it?”
Give it a go: in your next conversation with someone you don’t know well, ask one follow-up question about their answer instead of moving to your own story. These tips for having a good conversation can help you keep it going.
10. Join people who learn for the fun of it
Curiosity spreads socially. It’s much easier to keep going when someone expects you on Thursday evening.
The UK’s u3a movement is a good real-world example. According to u3a’s own site, there are now more than 1,000 local u3as with over 435,000 active members, supported by the Third Age Trust charity formed in 1983. The model is peer-led: members take turns sharing what they know in interest groups covering everything from languages to local history. In u3a’s words, “There are no teachers and students, no classes and no exams.”
The model works because it removes the two biggest barriers to adult learning: cost and pressure. Nobody is grading you, and the person leading the Spanish group might be in your astronomy group next term. The limitation is that u3a mostly serves people no longer in full-time work, so if you’re 35 with a busy job, you’ll need a different version of the same idea: a book club, a hobby group, a language exchange, a running club with a history-nerd route planner.
If big groups drain you, there are ways to socialize more as an introvert without burning out. Smaller groups of four to six often suit curious conversation better anyway.
Start small: find one local or online group built around a topic you know nothing about, and go to a single meeting as an observer.
11. Break one routine on purpose
Routines are efficient. They’re also where curiosity goes to sleep.
Picture this: you take a different street to the station on Monday. Nothing major. But you notice a bakery you didn’t know existed, a building with a date carved over the door, a mural half-covered by scaffolding. By Wednesday you’ve looked up when the building went up. By Friday you’ve told someone about it. Nothing about your city changed. Only your route did.
That scenario is invented, but the idea behind it comes from the UC Santa Barbara curiosity program in item 1, which included a “break your routine” challenge: change a habit, even something as small as which side of the bed you sleep on, then note how it felt. Madeleine Gross, who developed the program, put the principle neatly in a June 2025 university article: adults keep asking fewer questions because “we just stop noticing them,” not because the mysteries have gone. She also argued that curiosity is as much about approaching everyday things with interest as it is about finding new things to do.
A small disruption is enough. It knocks you off autopilot long enough to notice something new.
Your move: change one small, low-stakes routine each week for a month. A new route, a new lunch spot, a different seat in the meeting room. Afterwards, note one thing you noticed that you’d missed before.
12. Say “I don’t know” out loud, and mean it
Adults are rewarded for having answers. That’s why “I don’t know” can feel like a small failure, especially at work or in front of your kids.
Tenelle Porter, an assistant professor of psychology at Rowan University who studies intellectual humility, defined it in a March 2025 episode of the TED podcast How to Be a Better Human as understanding what you don’t know and recognising that you might be wrong. Her practical advice was refreshingly ordinary. Model uncertainty out loud. When you don’t know something, suggest looking it up together. And try to treat being corrected as a discovery; as she put it, “it’s great to learn that I’m wrong.”
Why does this matter for curiosity? Because you can’t be curious about something you’re pretending to already understand. Every time you fake an answer, you close a door that a question could have opened. Admitting a gap reopens it. It also makes disagreements less tiring, which helps when you’re dealing with people who always think they are right, including, occasionally, yourself.
Practise this phrase this week: “I don’t know, but I’d like to find out.” Use it at least once in a setting where you’d normally bluff.
13. Tie your curiosity habit to something you already do
Good intentions fade. Habits stick, but slower than most people think.
A December 2024 systematic review and meta-analysis in Healthcare by Ben Singh and colleagues at the University of South Australia pooled 20 studies with more than 2,600 participants trying to build health-related habits. In the studies that measured timing, habits took a median of 59 to 66 days to form, with individual times ranging from 4 to 335 days. Habits practised in the morning, habits people chose themselves and habits they enjoyed tended to become stronger.
Only four of the studies directly reported formation time, and they were about health behaviours rather than curiosity, so take the exact numbers loosely. The broader lesson transfers well: pick a curiosity habit you actually like, attach it to a fixed part of your day, and give it two months, not two weeks. If you want ideas for other routines worth anchoring, this list of good habits to have is a useful companion.
Test it this week: attach one tiny curiosity habit to your morning coffee, such as reading one page from your question list or one article on a topic you know nothing about, and track it on a calendar for 60 days.
What to do when you slip
You’ll have weeks when you scroll through every gap, ask nobody anything and read nothing but emails. Life gets loud sometimes, and curiosity is usually the first thing to go quiet.
What you do next matters more than the slip itself. In a 2023 study in Appetite, Charlotte Hagerman and colleagues at Drexel University tracked 140 people in a weight-loss programme through six smartphone check-ins a day for a week. When people responded to a lapse with self-compassion, especially self-kindness, they reported a better mood and a greater sense of control over their behaviour in the following hours. Self-compassion didn’t stop another lapse later the same day, and the study was observational and about diet, not curiosity. But it suggests that being harsh with yourself after a setback is more likely to make you quit than to get you back on track.
The habit research from item 13 adds another reason for patience. If formation time can range from days to almost a year, one lost week barely registers.
When you notice you’ve slipped:
- Shrink the habit. One question a day instead of a whole reading session.
- Restart with the easiest item. Guessing before you search (item 5) takes ten seconds.
- Look for the leak. Usually it’s the phone filling a gap that used to be empty.
- Talk to yourself like a friend. “Busy month, back to it” works better than “I’ve lost my spark.”
If the self-criticism gets heavy, the ideas in radical acceptance can help you stop fighting the slip and simply restart.
Where to start
You don’t need all 13. Pick two that feel almost too easy, maybe guessing before you search and leaving one daily gap phone-free, and run them for a month. Add a third when those feel automatic.
Curiosity in adulthood rarely arrives as a big wave of wonder. It comes back in small questions you let yourself ask. Ask one today.
For more practical, research-backed ideas on building a better routine, explore the self-improvement section.
