The Hedonic Treadmill: Exploring Happiness , Meaning, and Hedonic Adaptation (#38)

“‘I shall take the heart,’ returned the Tin Woodsman; ‘for brains do not make one happy, and happiness is the best thing in the world.’” —L. Frank Baum

The topic of this episode is happiness and hedonic adaptation, otherwise known as the hedonic treadmill. Hedonic adaptation is a phenomenon of our psychology and physiology that keeps us at a stable level of happiness over time. This adaptation is like an immune system that desensitizes us in relation to negative and positive experiences, making us continually find our happiness baseline.

The Hedonic Treadmill

The concept of hedonic adaptation dates back to a 1971 paper by Philip Brickman and Donald T. Campbell called "Hedonic Relativism and Planning the Good Society", and it was made even more famous in a 1978 study called "Lottery Winners and Accident Victims: Is Happiness Relative?" The study compared lottery winners and paraplegics with a control group to show that both groups eventually adjusted and returned to a baseline of happiness.

The hedonic treadmill, or happiness treadmill, is named as such because no matter how much you chase happiness and increase it in the short term, you end up in the same place continually chasing. The hedonic pathways in our brains become desensitized to pleasurable things that we encounter regularly. So after big life events like winning the lottery, getting a job promotion, getting married, etc, we will tend to settle back to our happiness set point.

The Meaning of Happiness

Aside from the science of hedonic adaptation, we also talked about the philosophy of happiness and whether it is a good goal in life. How is happiness different from words like joy, pleasure, tranquility, peacefulness, excitement, satisfaction, content, cheerful, or well-being?

Is happiness something we get from the external world or does it come from within? Do we seek happiness or are we really running away from suffering? And what is the difference between a meaningful life and a happy life?

Solutions to the Hedonic Treadmill

“Now and then it’s good to pause in our pursuit of happiness and just be happy.” —Guillaume Apollinaire

Lastly, we talked about ways to overcome hedonic adaptation so that we do not continually get caught in the same traps throughout life. Routines such as a dopamine detox and spiritual practices like gratitude and Beginner's Mind are all ways to avoid getting stuck on the hedonic treadmill.

Timestamps:

• [06:08] What is happiness?
• [10:05] What is the difference between happiness and well-being?
• [15:28] Dopamine
• [27:57] What is hedonic adaptation?
• [35:14] Hedonic adaptation towards negative phenomena
• [39:23] How to combat the hedonic treadmill
• [50:40] Why negative emotions are necessary

Links:

• A French poet’s beautiful advice on how to be happy (Luke's Medium article)
• Lottery winners and accident victims: is happiness relative? P Brickman, D Coates, R Janoff-Bulman
• Stepping Off the Hedonic Treadmill
• Beyond the Hedonic Treadmill: Revising the Adaptation Theory of Well-Being
• How Does Hedonic Adaptation Affect the Pursuit of Happiness? - with Joe Gladstone

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