Hedonic Adaptation Quotes

After the rings, the priest should just say, “Enjoy it, bing-bongs. Due to our brain’s tendency toward hedonic adaptation, you won’t feel quite this giddy in a few years. All right, where’s the pigs in a blanket? I’m outta here.

Hedonic adaptation, the tendency to quickly return to a baseline level of satisfaction, no matter what happens to us in life, is Mother Nature’s bait and switch. All sorts of life events we think would make us happier actually don’t, or at least they don’t for long.

Something wasn’t right though. That golden rule of positive psychology, hedonic adaptation, states that no matter what tragedy or good fortune befalls us, we adapt. We return to our “set point” or close enough anyway. It’s been fifteen years since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Why hasn’t Luba adapted?

No longer satisfied with what we already have, we treat our withdrawal pains by incrementally upping the dosage. More shoes, more booze, more sex, more food, more "likes," just more. This phenomenon is known as hedonic adaptation>

I tend to imagine the self-regulating system like little gremlins hoping on the pain side of the balance to counteract the weight on the pleasure side. The gremlins represent the work of homeostasis, the tendency of any living system to maintain physiologic equilibrium. Once the balance is level, it keeps going, tipping an equal and opposite amount to the side of pain. In the 1970s social scientists Richard Solomon and John Corbett called this reciprocal relationship between pleasure and pain "The Opponent Process Theory". Any prolonged or repeated departure from hedonic or adaptive neutrality has a cost. That cost is an after-reaction, that is opposite in value to the stimulus, or as the old saying goes: "What goes up, must come down".

How many times have we heard from people who got rich or famous and it wasn’t enough? Rock stars with drug problems. Lottery winners who kill themselves. There’s actually a term for this—“hedonic adaptation.” When good things happen, we bake them very quickly into our baseline expectations, and yet the primordial void goes unfilled.

Positive psychologists call this process “hedonic adaptation,” and it’s one of the biggest hindrances to long-term life satisfaction.16 The more we consume, acquire, and elevate our status, the harder it is to stay happy. Whether it’s money, grades, promotions, popularity, attention, or just plain material things we want, scientists agree: seeking out external rewards is a sure path to sabotaging our own happiness.

Hedonic adaptation has the power to extinguish our enjoyment of the world. Because of adaptation, we take our life and what we have for granted rather than delighting in them. Negative visualization, though, is a powerful antidote to hedonic adaptation. By consciously thinking about the loss of what we have, we can regain our appreciation of it, and with this regained appreciation we can revitalize our capacity for joy.

After the last twenty-four hours and one night in the first-floor barracks, I’m starting to realize that this quadrant is a strange mix of we-might-die-tomorrow hedonism and brutal efficiency in the name of the same reason.

When we combine the adaptation principle with the discovery that people’s average level of happiness is highly heritable,11 we come to a startling possibility: In the long run, it doesn’t much matter what happens to you. Good fortune or bad, you will always return to your happiness setpoint—your brain’s default level of happiness—which was determined largely by your genes. In 1759, long before anyone knew about genes, Adam Smith reached the same conclusion: In every permanent situation, where there is no expectation of change, the mind of every man, in a longer or shorter time, returns to its natural and usual state of tranquility. In prosperity, after a certain time, it falls back to that state; in adversity, after a certain time, it rises up to it.12 If this idea is correct, then we are all stuck on what has been called the “hedonic treadmill.”13 On an exercise treadmill you can increase the speed all you want, but you stay in the same place. In life, you can work as hard as you want, and accumulate all the riches, fruit trees, and concubines you want, but you can’t get ahead. Because you can’t change your “natural and usual state of tranquility,” the riches you accumulate will just raise your expectations and leave you no better off than you were before. Yet, not realizing the futility of our efforts, we continue to strive, all the while doing things that help us win at the game of life. Always wanting more than we have, we run and run and run, like hamsters on a wheel.

What was going on? Brickman surmised that, in the case of the lottery winners, they now derived significantly less pleasure from ordinary events like buying clothes or talking to a friend. What was once enjoyable was no longer so. Psychologists call this the “hedonic treadmill.” Much like a regular treadmill, the hedonic treadmill makes you sweat and should be avoided at all costs. Unlike a regular treadmill, however, the hedonic variety is definitely not good for your health. It will drive you nuts, this infinite cycle of pleasure and adaptation. Interestingly, there are two notable exceptions to the hedonic treadmill. Noise and big breasts. Studies have found that we never really get used to loud noises, despite prolonged exposure. Another study found that women who get breast implants never tire of the enjoyment it brings them, and presumably their companions feel the same.

behaviors. Alcohol becomes more important because drinking it excessively tricks a primitive, unconscious part of our brain into believing it’s more critical to our survival than it actually is. The artificially high levels of dopamine that flood the brain when we ingest alcohol begin a cascade of other reactions and responses. The brain has a hedonic set point (a term coined by Dr. Kevin McCauley), which means that it both needs a certain amount of dopamine to register pleasure, and is programmed to downgrade levels of dopamine when we receive too much pleasure. Our bodies are constantly trying to find stasis, or balance, and the hedonic set point is an example of that. When high levels of dopamine are regularly released into the system from chronic use of alcohol, the dopamine is down-regulated (or balanced) by something called corticotropin-releasing factor, or CRF—a hormone that makes us feel anxious or stressed. If we flood our system with higher-than-normal levels of dopamine, we also flood our system with higher-than-normal levels of CRF, or anxiety. Over time, when our system is assaulted by surges of dopamine, our hedonic set point goes up (requiring more dopamine to feel good), and things that used to register as pleasurable (like warm hugs or our children’s laughter) don’t release enough dopamine to hit that raised baseline. To boot, activities that normally relieve stress, like a bath or a brisk walk, also lose their effectiveness. Alcohol becomes the quickest way our body learns to handle anxiety (which begets more anxiety because alcohol is a depressant, and the body reacts to it by releasing cortisol and adrenaline, which means the net effect of a glass of wine is more stress, not less). Our bodies are adaptive, and they adapt to an environment that expects the effects of alcohol. So here we are: we start using alcohol because it gives us more pleasure than sex and does more for stress management than chamomile tea. Over time it gets wrapped up in our survival response, so we are motivated to drink with the same force that motivates us to eat—only the force is stronger than the desire to eat because our midbrain, which ranks everything based on dopamine, thinks we need alcohol more than food. That seems like enough fuckery to contend with, but there’s more to the story.

Lie #1: Having more and more of something (love, sex, fame, drugs, etc.) will make you happy. Unfortunately, if you are not careful, the more pleasure you get, the more you will need in the future to continue making you happy, something called hedonic adaptation.

Like the value system of more, the thieves operate according to a psychological construct called the “hedonic treadmill,” which states, “Whatever we have, we will adapt to it, and soon we will want more.” The hedonic treadmill, sometimes referred to as hedonic adaptation, is our tendency to reset our level of contentment after each advance. As we achieve more (drive), finesse more (excellence), know more (information), and do more (activity), we get used to each new plateau and quickly feel it’s a little unexciting. Whenever we get where we think we are going, the finish line moves.

You don’t realize that the restlessness you feel is simply part of being human, so you look for ways to eliminate it. But ask yourself, even if you were handed everything you wanted, would it make you truly happy? Dan Harris explains this as hedonic adaptation: “When good things happen, we bake them very quickly into our baseline expectations, and yet the primordial void goes unfilled.”117 Generally, the more we consume the more we desire.

Once the initial excitement wears off, you’ll move on to crave the next exciting thing. This phenomenon is known as ‘hedonic adaptation.

hedonic adaptation. It’s the tendency of humans to quickly adapt to where they are and what they’ve got. It leads to never being satisfied, and to constantly seeking the next thing. 7

The Hedonic Treadmill By failing to anticipate the extent of our hedonic adaptation, as consumers we routinely escalate our purchases, hoping that new stuff will make us happier.

satisfaction treadmill. Suppose that in addition to adapting to particular objects or experiences, you also adapt to particular levels of satisfaction. In other words, suppose that with great ingenuity and effort in making decisions, you manage to keep your “hedonic temperature” at +20 degrees, so that you feel pretty good about life almost all of the time. Is +20 degrees good enough? Well, it might be good enough at the beginning, but if you adapt to this particular level of happiness, then +20 won’t feel so good after a while.

The hedonic treadmill is one example of the common human trait of adaptation. Studies of human response to positive and negative events have shown that we are very adaptable creatures. When things around us change, we get used to it pretty quickly, and return to near our individual set point of happiness.

While denial is the process of refusing to acknowledge a mistake, and loss-chasing is the process of causing more damage while trying to hastily erase the mistake, hedonic editing is a subtler process of convincing ourselves that the mistake doesn’t matter.

Happiness Habits I have a series of tricks I use to try and be happier in the moment. At first, they were silly and difficult and required a lot of attention, but now some of them have become second nature. By doing them religiously, I’ve managed to increase my happiness level quite a bit. The obvious one is meditation—insight meditation. Working toward a specific purpose on it, which is to try and understand how my mind works. [7] Just being very aware in every moment. If I catch myself judging somebody, I can stop myself and say, “What’s the positive interpretation of this?” I used to get annoyed about things. Now I always look for the positive side of it. It used to take a rational effort. It used to take a few seconds for me to come up with a positive. Now I can do it sub-second. [7] I try to get more sunlight on my skin. I look up and smile. [7] Every time you catch yourself desiring something, say, “Is it so important to me I’ll be unhappy unless this goes my way?” You’re going to find with the vast majority of things it’s just not true. [7] I think dropping caffeine made me happier. It makes me more of a stable person. [7] I think working out every day made me happier. If you have peace of body, it’s easier to have peace of mind. [7] The more you judge, the more you separate yourself. You’ll feel good for an instant, because you feel good about yourself, thinking you’re better than someone. Later, you’re going to feel lonely. Then, you see negativity everywhere. The world just reflects your own feelings back at you. [77] Tell your friends you’re a happy person. Then, you’ll be forced to conform to it. You’ll have a consistency bias. You have to live up to it. Your friends will expect you to be a happy person. [5] Recover time and happiness by minimizing your use of these three smartphone apps: phone, calendar, and alarm clock. [11] The more secrets you have, the less happy you’re going to be. [11] Caught in a funk? Use meditation, music, and exercise to reset your mood. Then choose a new path to commit emotional energy for rest of day. [11] Hedonic adaptation is more powerful for man-made things (cars, houses, clothes, money) than for natural things (food, sex, exercise). [11] No exceptions—all screen activities linked to less happiness, all non-screen activities linked to more happiness. [11] A personal metric: how much of the day is spent doing things out of obligation rather than out of interest? [11] It’s the news’ job to make you anxious and angry. But its underlying scientific, economic, education, and conflict trends are positive. Stay optimistic. [11] Politics, academia, and social status are all zero-sum games. Positive-sum games create positive people. [11] Increase serotonin in the brain without drugs: Sunlight, exercise, positive thinking, and tryptophan.

Boredom, negativity bias, and rumination can each prompt us to distraction. But a fourth factor may be the cruelest of all. Hedonic adaptation, the tendency to quickly return to a baseline level of satisfaction, no matter what happens to us in life, is Mother Nature’s bait and switch. All sorts of life events we think would make us happier actually don’t, or at least they don’t for long. For instance, people who have experienced extremely good fortune, such as winning the lottery, have reported that things they had previously enjoyed lost their luster, effectively returning them to their previous levels of satisfaction.

Hedonic adaptation is a wildly interesting quirk that humans possess to adapt to both positive and negative experiences. Victory wears off; agony does too. Euphoria fades; despair too. Love wanes; heartbreak too. And life events that we expect to clinch eternal happiness, or spell cataclysmic lifelong doom, just…don’t.

hedonic adaptation’.

hedonic adaptation.

We lust after material gain, confident it will bring us joy. Indeed, our anticipatory radar overstates what’s coming to us. The reality is that most material gains bring with them only short-term happiness. We then experience what’s called hedonic adaptation. That is, we simply become accustomed to whatever we’ve got and start looking for the next thing we might aspire to.

Ideals are like a horizon in the desert. No matter how many steps you take forward, the horizon continues to move out of reach. Psychology has a term for this moving horizon, hedonic adaptation. It’s the tendency of humans to quickly adapt to where they are and what they’ve got. It leads to never being satisfied, and to constantly seeking the next thing.

The ‘one day I will’ myth Do you believe that one day you will achieve your dream and finally be happy? It is unlikely to happen. You may (and I hope you will) achieve your goal, but you won’t live ‘happily ever after.’ This thinking is just another trick your mind plays on you. Your mind quickly acclimates to new situations, which is probably the result of evolution and our need to adapt continually to survive and reproduce. This acclimatization is also probably why the new car or house you want will only make you happy for a while. Once the initial excitement wears off, you’ll move on to crave the next exciting thing. This phenomenon is known as ‘hedonic adaptation.

All children live in a world rich with surprises. Each new thing, no matter how ordinary, inspires a sense of wonder and delight. But novelty naturally declines with age, and our surroundings begin to dull with familiarity. Psychologists call this phenomenon hedonic adaptation. I imagine that hedonic adaptation is much worse in the modern era than when we were nomadic hunter-gatherers, out in nature with all of its dynamism. Our solid, unchanging indoor environments don’t harbor surprises unless we put them there. The danger of hedonic adaptation is that it sparks a kind of desperate materialism. Hungry for novelty, we often throw out functioning objects that have lost their luster and replace them with shiny new versions. In fact, hedonic adaptation is often known as the hedonic treadmill, because the cycle can repeat endlessly without bringing us any closer to happiness.

Humans live forever on the Hedonic Treadmill; whatever our life experiences, whatever our transient miseries or joys, we eventually revert to a mood set-point that depends not on circumstance but on individual predisposition. Lose your legs in a car accident, win the lottery—it makes no difference. Within a few years, hedonic adaptation will take over, returning you to your personal set-point of contentment or misery. That is, except if you suffer from chronic pain. Research has shown that chronic pain is among the only experiences that have the capacity to shift your happiness set-point toward the unhappy end of your spectrum.

Survival and replication drive put us on the work treadmill. Hedonic adaptation keeps us there. The trick is knowing when to jump off and play instead.

How many times have we heard from people who got rich or famous and it wasn’t enough? Rock stars with drug problems. Lottery winners who kill themselves. There’s actually a term for this—“hedonic adaptation.” When good things happen, we bake them very quickly into our baseline expectations,

It is strange being at home I grow dull to little things.

This observation is connected to the phenomenon psychologists have labeled “hedonic adaptation.” Over time, people generally get used to changes in their circumstances, whether positive or negative, and tend to revert to the same level of happiness they had before the change.

Hedonic adaptation has the power to extinguish our enjoyment of the world. Because of adaptation, we take our life and what we have for granted rather than delighting in them. Negative visualization, though, is a powerful antidote to hedonic adaptation. By consciously thinking about the loss of what we have, we can regain our appreciation of it, and with this regained appreciation we can revitalize our capacity for joy

There’s actually a term for this—“hedonic adaptation.” When good things happen, we bake them very quickly into our baseline expectations,