You get the promotion, buy the car, or finally take that dream vacation—and, for a moment, everything feels exactly as good as you hoped it would. Then, gradually, it doesn’t. The excitement fades, life returns to normal, and you find yourself already thinking about the next thing. This isn’t a personal failing or a lack of gratitude; it’s hedonic adaptation, and it happens to everyone.
Hedonic adaptation is the well-documented psychological phenomenon that explains why happiness tends to be fleeting—and why chasing it often leaves us running in place. Understanding what hedonic adaptation is, what drives it, and how it affects our lives is the first step toward breaking the cycle.
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What Is Hedonic Adaptation?
Hedonic adaptation is the human tendency to normalize to a consistent baseline of happiness regardless of external circumstances. Over time, we get used to things that temporarily increase or decrease our happiness—whether that’s getting a new phone or ending a relationship—and our emotional state returns to its default level.
As a concept from psychology, hedonic adaptation explains why pleasures and hardships tend not to make much difference to our long-term happiness or unhappiness. Our brains gradually adapt to repetitive experiences of pleasure or displeasure until they seem more or less normal. Novelty fades as our expectations adjust to new circumstances, and, as psychologist and professor Barry Schwartz writes in The Paradox of Choice, pleasure is replaced by comfort—which, when we’re seeking pleasure, feels insufficient.
(Shortform note: What does “hedonic” mean to begin with? The word comes from the ancient Greek hedone, meaning pleasure. In modern psychology, it refers to the pleasure-and-pain dimension of experience—how good or bad something feels in the moment, as opposed to deeper sources of meaning or fulfillment.)
This process is also called the hedonic treadmill, because people constantly “run” after happiness but always end up in the same place emotionally. In The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, Mark Manson describes it this way: What makes us happy today won’t do so tomorrow, because our biology drives us to keep seeking further satisfaction. Fixating on feeling happy drives us to constantly pursue a goal we never quite reach—and not reaching it makes us feel inadequate.
In Happy, Derren Brown describes hedonic adaptation as a self-repeating emotional cycle of desire, pleasure, and disillusionment: You see something you want, you work to get it and feel happy, but the joy fades, and soon you’re seeking the next thing.
The Happiness “Set Point”
Central to hedonic adaptation is the idea that each person has a natural “set point” for happiness—a concept closely related to the Set Point Theory of Happiness, which holds that people have a baseline happiness level they’ll always return to, even after life-changing events such as a promotion or a divorce. Although we experience ebbs and flows, we always come back to that baseline. Schwartz notes that this doesn’t mean we self-sabotage; it just naturally happens. You simply stop enjoying things as much because you get used to them, the way a favorite meal eaten every day would lose its appeal.
Research supports this: Humans quickly return to their baseline happiness levels after both positive and negative life changes, because we’re wired to stop noticing familiar stimuli. According to psychology professor Sonja Lyubomirsky in The How of Happiness, circumstances account for just 10% of long-term happiness. Major life events can shift how you feel—marriage, loss, achievement—but those shifts are usually temporary, and genetics largely establish where your baseline sits. Lyubomirsky cites one study showing that the happiness boost newlyweds experienced lasted only two years before they reverted to their pre-marriage baseline.
The same dynamic applies to negative experiences: After a brief period of feeling upset or angry, people return to feeling how they did before. The intense grief following a breakup, for instance, lessens as a person adjusts to their new circumstances.
Taken together, both hedonic adaptation and Set Point Theory lead to the same conclusion: It’s impossible to make ourselves lastingly happy just by getting the things we want—whether experiences, relationships, or material goods.
| Three Variables Impacting Hedonic Adaptation Studies Lyubomirsky references hedonic adaptation studies to support her theory that circumstances contribute to 10% of your happiness. However, researchers identify three variables in these studies that create ambiguity in determining how much circumstances and hedonic adaptation impact happiness. 1) Subjective interpretations: In hedonic adaptation studies, participants are often asked to self-report their happiness on a numerical scale such as one to 10. Given the subjectivity of this approach, participants may interpret the scale differently. For example, one participant may interpret a 10 as the absolute highest level of happiness they could achieve, whereas another may interpret a 10 as “higher than average” happiness. Subjective interpretation might also explain why happiness levels seem to revert to a baseline: The reset might not be a return to an objective baseline, but rather a shift to a new, higher baseline. In other words, participants, having become accustomed to higher levels of happiness, might no longer perceive the improvement as much as they did when their circumstances first changed. 2) Scale norming: Participants who have undergone specific life changes may subconsciously rate their happiness relative to others who have had comparable experiences. For example, newlyweds might evaluate their happiness during the first two years of their marriage relative to other newlyweds rather than to the average person. This subconscious benchmarking implies that comparisons influence a person’s reported happiness levels more than the actual life event. 3) Social expectations: Participants might feel obligated to report happiness levels that conform to societal norms. For example, if they believe that people expect them to feel happy after they get married or buy a new car, they might exaggerate how happy they feel. On the other hand, if they believe that people expect them to grieve after a breakup or to feel dissatisfied with their old car, they might downplay how happy they feel. |
Why We Never See It Coming: The Arrival Fallacy
One reason hedonic adaptation is so persistent is that we tend not to anticipate it—and nowhere is this more apparent than in what happiness expert Tal Ben-Shahar calls the “arrival fallacy.” When we make a choice expecting excitement and pleasure, we don’t account for the fact that pleasure will decline as we get used to it. We convince ourselves that, once we reach a certain milestone (getting the job, buying the house, publishing the book), we’ll finally be content. But, when we get there, the happiness we expected rarely materializes as we envisioned or lasts as long as we assumed it would. Instead, many people experience what some researchers call “summit syndrome”—a crash that leaves them feeling empty and purposeless despite their achievement.
Happiness expert and Harvard professor Arthur C. Brooks explains in The Happiness Files that neuroscience reveals why this happens. Dopamine (the brain chemical most associated with pleasure) isn’t released when we achieve something; it’s released when we anticipate achieving it. Dopamine drives us toward goals rather than rewarding us for reaching them. So, the moment we arrive at our destination, the mechanism that made the pursuit feel so meaningful stops firing—and what follows is emptiness or restlessness just when we expected to feel triumphant. The bigger the buildup, the bigger the letdown.
Brooks writes that the arrival fallacy is a basic feature of human cognition rather than a personal failing. And, critically, it’s what keeps the hedonic treadmill running: Because achievement never delivers the lasting satisfaction we expect, we almost immediately redirect our energy toward the next goal, which runs into the same mechanism and produces the same result. Schwartz points out that we repeat this pattern with every new and exciting purchase or experience—even though we’ve been through hedonic adaptation many times before. We keep running harder because we assume the problem is that we haven’t achieved enough yet.
Interestingly, research suggests it takes longer to adapt to numerous small gains than to a single large one, which means that separating positive experiences into smaller portions can extend the pleasure they provide.
What Causes Hedonic Adaptation?
Several psychological tendencies work together to keep us on the hedonic treadmill.
Rising Expectations and Social Comparison
Lyubomirsky identifies two key drivers. First, when your circumstances improve, your expectations and desires tend to rise in tandem—buying a sleek new car makes you happy until you get used to it and start eyeing a more luxurious model. Second, we tend to measure our achievements against others’, which means satisfaction is always vulnerable to someone else’s upgrade.
Derren Brown goes further in Happy, arguing that many of the desires fueling the hedonic treadmill are driven specifically by the need to impress other people. But the pleasure that comes from outshining others is fleeting in the extreme. Comparison breeds envy—especially when we’re measuring ourselves against peers—and Brown asserts that this places our self-worth and happiness outside ourselves and in the hands of others, the opposite of taking responsibility for our own feelings.
(Shortform note: While chasing after status relative to others may sabotage your chances to be happy, it can be valuable in other parts of life. In Pitch Anything, Oren Klaff highlights the importance of relative status for commanding attention. He identifies two types of status—”global,” determined by wealth and position, and “situational,” which fluctuates because of context. Klaff contends that status does matter if you wish to persuade others with an idea, in which case having a higher status than your audience will help your cause.)
Shifting Reference Points
Schwartz explains that hedonic adaptation can also occur in response to a changed reference point. If you eat the best chocolate cake you’ve ever had, other chocolate cakes will start to pale in comparison—because that peak experience has unconsciously raised your standards. Over time, what once delighted you becomes the new baseline, and you need something better just to feel the same level of pleasure.
Those who recognize this pattern, Schwartz notes, tend to accept it and become more realistic about the diminishing returns of purchases and novel experiences. Others, however, try to outrun it—constantly accumulating new things in pursuit of sustained pleasure. Schwartz sees this as an ineffective strategy: nobody can achieve pleasure all the time through novelty, and those who try end up stuck on the treadmill, perpetually chasing a feeling they can’t hold onto.
Inaccurate Predictions About Future Happiness
Psychologist Daniel Kahneman adds another layer in Thinking, Fast and Slow: The hedonic treadmill is also powered by our tendency to consistently overestimate how much changes will affect our future happiness. Our current self overestimates how much our future self will continue to think about those changes—but, in reality, we quickly adapt to new circumstances and stop thinking about them at all. People commonly believe, for instance, that more money would make them happier. But, once they reach their financial goals, that level of wealth becomes their new normal, and happiness settles back to where it was before.
The Harmful Effects of the Hedonic Treadmill
The hedonic treadmill doesn’t just limit happiness—it can actively work against it. Barry Schwartz notes that, while adaptation can be valuable in difficult circumstances (helping us recover from loss or hardship), it causes unnecessary emotional distress when our circumstances are largely positive. Moving to a new city, for example, might bring initial excitement that fades into dissatisfaction—even if that city is genuinely the best place for you to live. Hedonic adaptation can make good situations feel mediocre simply because they’ve become familiar.
The effects can go beyond emotional dissatisfaction. In Dopamine Nation, psychiatrist and Stanford professor Anna Lembke argues that our brains evolved in an era of scarcity, so our modern age of abundance creates the perfect conditions for overstimulating our dopamine systems. As our brains build up a tolerance to pleasure, we have to work the treadmill harder just to achieve the same good feelings as before—a cycle that can tip into compulsive behavior.
Shopping is a familiar example. It’s easy to get trapped in a pattern of buying things to get a regular jolt of pleasure, but studies have shown that accumulating material possessions actually makes people less happy. The pursuit of happiness through consumption is self-defeating: Hedonic adaptation kicks in quickly, the pleasure fades, and the cycle begins again.
Gap-Thinking
One particularly damaging expression of the hedonic treadmill is what organizational psychologist Benjamin Hardy and entrepreneur Dan Sullivan call “gap-thinking” in The Gap and the Gain. The authors describe two ways of measuring progress: gap-thinking focuses on the distance between where you are and where you want to be, while gain-thinking focuses on how far you’ve already come. Gap-thinking, they argue, is detrimental to happiness, self-esteem, and physical health—whereas gain-thinking improves all three.
The difference comes down to the direction of comparison. Gap-thinking measures forward, using your ideal future self as the benchmark. Gain-thinking measures backward, using your past self instead. The authors contend that gap-thinking is particularly harmful because hedonic adaptation keeps moving the goalposts: As you achieve goals, your ambitions update upward, and you’re never satisfied with what you currently have.
Exercise: What Have You Adapted To?
No doubt, you’ve experienced hedonic adaptation. It’s worth thinking through.
- Reflect on an exciting experience you had or a purchase you made.
- When did the excitement begin to wear off?
- How did you react when it did?
- Think about something in your life that you’ve adapted to but that you’re still grateful for.
- How does this aspect of your life make you feel?
- How will you practice gratitude for this more regularly?
- Think about a purchase or experience you’re planning.
- How do you expect it will make you feel?
- When you begin to adapt to those feelings, what can you do to avoid the hedonic treadmill of continually searching for more exciting experiences?
Dig Deeper
To learn more about hedonic adaptation, check out these books and Shortform’s guides to them:
- The Paradox of Choice by Barry Schwartz
- Happy by Derren Brown
- The How of Happiness by Sonja Lyubomirsky
- The Happiness Files by Arthur C. Brooks
