When you rotate through your hedonic activities this way, you also enable variety, which counters the adaptation process. Kind of like the joy you feel when you find money in the pocket of an old pair of jeans.ĭo this for all your pleasures periodically. When you get back to it, you’ll have a new-found appreciation for it. Identify a “pleasure” you have become habituated to and cut it out temporarily. By strategically depriving ourselves of things we take for granted, we can get more value out of them. Maybe we should purposely lose things from time to time.
How does that saying go? About how we never realize the value of something until it’s gone. Relevant Plug: Building Habits - Are you taking it seriously enough? Hedonic Resets Because when we do something repetitively, it becomes second nature. The goal should be to make it a habit - maybe in form of gratitude journaling or simply counting the things you are grateful for before you go to sleep. Take time out to think of the time when you wanted what you now have. Expressing gratitude is an easy way to resist this process. Gratitude is the perfect antidote to hedonic adaptation.Īs our minds adapt to new experiences, we start taking things for granted. And know what would be enough.Īll that being said, here are a few ideas to resist hedonic adaptation: Gratitude Keep in mind that what you want isn’t always what will make you the happiest. So factor in hedonic adaptation when you’re setting your priorities or making major life decisions. And everyone should strive for it because it enables freedom, which is priceless.īut lifestyle upgrades won’t have much of an impact on the quality of your life. This is not to say that setting goals or material pursuits are pointless. “Since these conveniences by becoming habitual had almost entirely ceased to be enjoyable, and at the same time degenerated into true needs, it became much more cruel to be deprived of them than to possess them was sweet…” Some guy named Jean-Jacques Rousseau put it quite eloquently: And yet, if the surveys are to be believed (it’s quite obvious), we are no happier than before. We are significantly better off than previous generations in almost every aspect. We are left chasing the dangling carrot of external achievement, sometimes even compromising our health and relationships in the process. Now we make decisions assuming that more income, comfort and achievements will make us happier, failing to recognize that hedonic adaptation (and social comparison) will come into play, changing our aspirations and leaving us feeling no happier than before.
We are programmed to seek status and accumulate stuff because that kind of behavior increased the likelihood of mating and survival back in the day. They were killed or outbred by the ones who were cunning, greedy, and eternally discontent. Any peaceful humans who felt content and lived in harmony died ages ago. The evolutionary explanation for hedonic adaptation goes something like this. Relevant Plug: The Negativity Bias - Your Brain Loves Negativity Perhaps due to our inherent negativity bias. But when it comes to positive experiences, the adaptation is quite efficient and quick. Interestingly, hedonic adaptation is “less complete” and slow when it comes to negative experiences. For instance, lottery winners tend to return to their original level of happiness after the novelty of win has worn off. This tendency of humans to return to a baseline level of happiness (or life-satisfaction) despite major recent positive or negative events is called Hedonic Adaptation. No matter what or how much we accomplish and accumulate, our minds get habituated to the new setting and expectations get quickly readjusted. There’s an important lesson in there which might seem obvious but does not come intuitively to us.Īs humans, we are wired to be perenially dissatisfied.
Heller responds, “Yes, but I have something he will never have… enough.”
I was flipping through Morgan Housel’s new book The Psychology of Money and an anecdote caught my eye.Īt a party given by a billionaire on Shelter Island, Kurt Vonnegut informs his pal, Joseph Heller, that their host, a hedge fund manager, had made more money in a single day than Heller had earned from his wildly popular novel Catch-22 over its whole history.
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