Think back to something you once desperately wanted.
You probably felt that once you finally got that thing, it would leave a permanent mark on how you felt for the rest of your life from that point forward.
At the time when you wanted it, the desire was… enormous.
You probably felt like by the time you finally got that thing, it would leave a permanent mark on how you felt for the rest of your life from that point forward.
Then you got it, and then you were happy to get it, and eventually… well, your life continued.
Yes, the getting felt really good – maybe it even still does – and yes, you felt all the amazing emotions you knew you’d feel, so it wasn’t like you were disappointed at any point.
However, now that you look back, that thing is now just a part of your ordinary, everyday life.
You can’t specifically point back to when exactly this shift happened, but somehow someway, it did, and now the phone is just a phone, the job is just a job, the trip was just a trip, and the thing that once had you tingling in anticipation is now just one of those many other things that once had you tingling in anticipation.
It’s clear that regardless of however high we place something on a pedestal of desire, when we do eventually get it, that thing stops feeling extraordinary after some time.
And, on the flip side, regardless of how much pain or grief an event causes us, eventually, after some time, it often stops being as painful, and it just starts to exist as a deep, present, day-to-day ache.
The question is, why does this happen?
Why do we, as humans, eventually, if we give it enough time, get used to everything?
The answer is that this happens because our brains were never designed to stay amazed forever, and the mechanism behind this is called hedonic adaptation.
The human brain is more wired to detect, and sometimes seek out, change, than it is to register permanence, and this design can be seen as more of a blessing than a curse.
Think about it.
If every sunrise you see is as beautiful and as mesmerising to you as the first one you ever saw, then you’ll never get anything else done because you’ll be outside every morning, staring at the sky in admiration.
If your favourite song hits with the same intensity on your thousandth listen as it did on its first, music might become unbearable rather than enjoyable, and you’ll probably never get to discover new songs to get blown away by.
The ability of our minds to adapt to events and stimuli around it is the reason our nervous systems can function properly in a world like ours that’s ever-increasing in stimulation.
Because of this innate wiring in our brains, in every single case – regardless of how intense the first or second stimulation was – the excitement always recedes eventually.
In fact, the more conversant your mind becomes with a certain stimulus, the faster this recession could happen, and the less “intense” it feels every time it comes again.
This is the reason addicts always keep chasing the high even when the habit doesn’t feel as good anymore, and it’s the reason you can sometimes go weeks without listening to your favourite album or your favourite artist.
These events or activities might not have lost their value or novelty, but because they stopped being “new”, the gratification we got from them began to reduce.
The unfamiliarity of that “newness” was playing a huge role in the emotional utility we were getting from such desires/activities, so our present state of familiarity now makes them appear… bland and less enjoyable.
In 1978, psychologist Philip Brickman, working with Dan Coates and Ronnie Janoff-Bulman, ran a study that’s become one of the most referenced findings in understanding the psychology of happiness.
They looked at two groups of people whose circumstances had shifted dramatically, in opposite directions:
One group was recent lottery winners whose lives had been transformed overnight by sudden wealth…
and
The other group was people who had recently become paraplegic or quadriplegic after ghastly accidents.
If you were to make a general assumption, you would probably say that the lottery winners would remain significantly happier in the long term and that the accident survivors would remain significantly less happy for the rest of their lives.
However, what the researchers found in their study was a bit more complicated than that.
Of course, the lottery winners did report a spike in their short-term happiness, but after some time a considerable number of them reported that they were back to feeling… “normal”.
In fact, they even went on to add that some of the “small things” in their lives that used to give them daily pleasures before their huge win – good conversations or funny magazines – now seemed to bring them less joy than they used to.
Meanwhile, many of the accident survivors reported levels of everyday happiness and meaning that were far closer to their pre-accident lives than anyone watching from the outside would have predicted.
It’s worth noting that subsequent research done later on has added an important nuance to this initial study.
It has been discovered that after experiencing certain events, many people don’t fully return to their old baseline of happiness, regardless of how much time has passed.
Occurrences such as the death of a spouse, chronic unemployment, and severe ongoing losses tend to leave a more lasting imprint on happiness than the earliest adaptation research of 1978 assumed.
But even with these refinements, the core finding of that research has held up remarkably well across decades of further study, and it’s this:
People are considerably more adaptable to extremely emotional stimuli, in both directions, than intuition suggests.
Or to make it more relatable:
Your future self is surprisingly good at eventually making almost anything, whether wonderful or terrible, start to feel ordinary.
Like I briefly explained earlier, there’s obviously a very good side to this natural phenomenon being a staple part of us.
It can even be considered a… mercy, of sorts.
Let’s imagine, for a moment, if this baseline resetting didn’t happen to our minds at all. What kind of lives would we live?
Imagine if every car horn on the road hit us with the same startle as the first time we heard it, or if every compliment forever triggered the same rush of validation through our bones as the first one we ever received, or if every day of vacation felt like the discovery of a new country every single time you went there.
Sounds like a pretty miserable life to live.
We would not be able to function properly because our emotions and actions would be governed by a nervous system that doesn’t know how to separate stimulations into “known” and “unknown” and then move on from them.
Burnout and unfulfilment would definitely be inevitable.
Our “highs” feel high because we were coming from a place that was “lower”, and our “lows” feel low because we were coming from a place that was “higher”.
This ability of our minds to adapt and adjust is what makes living our daily lives livable and bearable.
Obviously, this mechanism also has its downsides, and the biggest one is that it quietly steals the wonder out of life and life occurrences, inevitably forcing us to always seek out new thrills.
The MacBook Pro you once couldn’t afford now sits open on your bed, unremarkable, while you complain about its ever-fading battery life.
You’re now used to having your partner around you, even though there was once a time their presence felt like a small miracle every time they walked through the door.
That friend whose messages you used to wait for eagerly now shows up as just one more notification amongst many others, and you’ve gone from once replying them in seconds to now replying them at your convenience.
The salary that once sounded like it would satisfy all your needs now barely covers up to half of your basic expenses.
The city where you live in, the one that tourists fly in from across the world to photograph, is, to you, just the place you have lived in all your life.
Like that, and like that…
The fact that we get used to or familiar with certain things that used to excite or gladden us doesn’t always necessarily mean that we have now stopped caring about them.
It’s just an inevitability that happens because we’re wired to not dwell on familiar pleasures for an eternity.
We can slowly become emotionally blind to the very things we once prayed and earnestly waited for, and this blindness can arrive so subtly that it won’t be until much later that we realise that those things don’t just feel as good anymore.
Most of the examples I’ve used so far have been largely positive, but this principle can also be seen in the way that we deal with difficult events and situations.
The same way it can be seen as a blessing that pleasure doesn’t last forever is the same way it can be seen as much more of a blessing that pain also doesn’t last the same forever.
We get over breakups, we move on from embarrassing moments, we recover after failures, we adapt to living with certain injuries, we get used to major life changes, and so on and so forth.
In the moments when we experience some of these things, it can often feel permanent – like that time or feeling will never, ever end.
And yet, weeks or months or years later, often without any single dramatic turning point, our lives tend to start feeling… normal again.
Or at least, we start to live with a semblance of normalcy.
We might still carry the scars and aches and the regrets of these situations with us, but the same adaptive machinery that eventually dulls our excitement over new purchases will also eventually dull the sharpest edges of our grief and failures over time.
But still, it’s true that many things never “go away” forever.
Many research studies on adaptation to bereavement generally agree that people don’t really “move on” from it but instead build lives that have learned to carry it alongside their other day-to-day activities.
The adaptation is still real here, but it’s slower, less complete, and less linear than the adaptation to smaller disappointments.
That’s why it would be dishonest to flatten all human pain into the same recovery curve and act like our minds all recover from devastating events the same way.
It just doesn’t work that way.
However, imagine for a moment that we as humans never adapted to pain, even just a little bit?
Imagine the same sharp pang of grief you felt when you got the call that your friend had passed away was the same exact thing you felt every time you saw her phone on your picture.
Wouldn’t that be miserable?
I know I’d definitely hate it.
With all this in mind, we can understand better the subtle and unconscious changes that happen to our expectations as our circumstances change for the better or for the worse.
The more we have, the more that more becomes normal, and that normal can quietly redraw, in our minds, the line of what we once counted as “enough”.
As children, we dream about the day we’ll finally be old enough to drive and to move out of the house, while adults spend that same privilege complaining about traffic and the prices of rent.
Teenagers dream about getting into university and counting down the years, while as graduates, a few years later, they complain about the demands of their jobs and the terrible attitude of their bosses.
And on the flip side, you can get used to pain and bitterness, right up until the point where it becomes your “normal”, and you make it your initial expectation of everything that comes out of life.
Life has a habit of promoting extraordinary things into ordinary ones, and if we are not careful, we will find ourselves on a “hedonic treadmill” that will have us chasing toward a finish line that’s always moving the moment we get close enough to touch it.
Unfortunately, the broader connection of billions around the world on the internet has not helped us at all.
Before social media, this adaptation mostly happened at its own natural pace, shaped by how quickly novelty wore off in our own private experiences.
However, because we can compare our lives and situations to those of people hundreds of miles away who don’t even know us, that process is now sped up considerably.
Rather than the “treadmill” just resetting your own mental expectations alone, it’s now being updated in real time by everyone else’s highlight reel, LinkedIn posts, and monthly dumps.
When you’re ideally meant to be on Level 20, due to your life experiences and circumstances, you’ll find yourself sprinting on Level 50 because that’s where everyone else around you is.
You can buy the phone you’ve wanted for a year, and within days, you’re seeing a newer model being unboxed by someone on your TikTok feed.
You can take the trip you’ve been saving for, and somewhere on Instagram, you’ll see someone else posting pictures from a place that looks even more remarkable than where you can.
The social comparison theory, first proposed by Leon Festinger in 1954, explains that people evaluate their own standing largely by measuring themselves against others rather than against some fixed internal scale.
And social media has turned that process from an occasional, local comparison into a constant, global one.
Like I said before, we will always be chasing things because our minds are designed to seek new thrills; that’s normal.
However, if we are not much more careful, these thrills will be defined by external influences, and we will always be chasing the desire to meet up with other people’s lives even before our own has finished settling.
Is it possible for a person to ever get off this “hedonic treadmill”?
I don’t think so.
And fortunately, the key is not to try to completely avoid this adaptation.
It’s not even advisable to do so given what permanent, unfiltered emotional intensity would actually do to a person.
The key, rather, is to try to enjoy what we have now in the present before we get used to it and it becomes mundane.
So, we will not be trying to get permanent satisfaction, but we will be trying to slow down the process of adaptation for as long as we possibly can.
Sonja Lyubomirsky’s research on happiness, along with Fred Bryant’s work specifically on savouring, points toward a few things that seem to genuinely slow down this “hedonic treadmill”.
Some of them include:
Paying deliberate attention to good experiences while they’re happening rather than only in retrospect.
Practising gratitude as practically as possible rather than as a vague sentiment.
Seeking out novelty on purpose instead of waiting for it to arrive.
Occasionally putting the camera down long enough to actually experience something instead of only documenting it.
(This last point tackles a present-day occurrence that is so pervasive that it’s disturbing to see it happen in action.)
Whatever it is that you’re chasing at this exact moment will, one day, long after you’ve finally gotten it, very likely become ordinary too, and it will do so on its own schedule, without asking your permission.
So, the next time you’re doing something you enjoy or once enjoyed, take the conscious effort to keep your attention on it.
Whether you’re walking the same street you’ve walked a thousand times or watching that movie again, try, even if it’s for a second, to see it as a stranger would.
You might be surprised to discover some new wonders lying in what you now see as mundane.
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Thank you for this enlightening piece, Ebun.⭐
The hedonic treadmill is one of my favorite sociological phenomena cause it’s so real. Like everything is so fleeting😭