The riches you gain and goals you accomplish will only raise your expectations and leave you no better off. Essentially you can go through life accumulating all the material items/personal goals you want, only to remain stuck at your natural state of happiness. Using a treadmill as an analogy helps paint a picture of how HA makes us think. Where I work and where I live by far made me feel like I was on the “hedonic treadmill” so many times throughout my adult life. The things that the location has to offer don’t fulfill me anymore. I get sick of the state I’m living in and seeing the same place every day. The biggest motivation behind these moves has been boredom of my environment. I consider myself a gypsy and I have enjoyed living in different places over the past 15 years. Just having the understanding that we are programmed to adapt to our routine and environment really helped. Once I found out that hedonic adaptation is actually a thing, it really helped me get a grasp on my feelings. It bothered me so much I started researching why I felt this way. This feeling has plagued me so badly over the years. So what happens when you don’t have a traumatic event happening weekly in your life? Hedonic adaptation is still at work, so things just start to feel boring. It helps balance us after a traumatic event so we can go on living life and function day to day. If you experienced a traumatic event, like the loss of a loved one or a car crash, hedonic adaptation helps us go back to relatively normal level of contentment, a “set-point.” Every person’s set point or baseline is different, thanks to genetics. It’s also a theory of a survival mechanism in the brain. Essentially hedonic adaptation, or “pleasure adaptation” is the ability to adapt to changes in life, either good or bad. If you can relate to any of this you are experiencing what is called hedonic adaptation. You feel like you should experience euphoric feelings more frequently, but you just don’t. You are in love with your partner, but the relationship just doesn’t have the same thrill that it used to its first couple of years. You loved your job in the beginning, but now you’re bored and sick of it. You have everything you need and most of what you want, so why don’t you FEEL as happy as you think you should? On paper you should be happy, but it just isn’t that way day to day. But sometimes it all just feels like, blah. So you have a great job, you’re making decent money, you hang out with friends on a regular basis and things are going well.
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