Recognizing When We Are in the Throes of Hedonic Adaptation

What we can do to get ourselves off of our treadmills of forgetting pleasure and pain then repeating the same actions over and over again.

We’re programmed to want.

Success, more money, relationships, fame, children. The latest gadget. A house, a car. This works very well for businesses and the economy. But does wanting work out well for us?

What about the consumers?

Every time we achieve one of the above it’s a positive stimulus. We are excited, happy. We are also programmed to forget that excitement as life returns to its routine. We adapt. We fix our minds on the next pay rise, the next episode of our favourite TV show. Binge-watching Netflix is a very popular pastime.

How about relationships?

That first giddy flush of a new love interest is the excitement of your sex pheromones as they are attracted to your lover’s smell and they to yours — or you might have bought a pheromone-enhanced bottled perfume to do the same job. How you feel in the first year of a new intimate relationship doesn’t last much longer than a year, two at most. By then you are two people who have learned to live with each other, to adapt. [1]

None of my relationships was enough to keep me interested. I would cook a full English breakfast with variants of eggs, with beans or tomato, a hash brown or toast to keep the dish interesting for me. My partner would just inhale whatever I plonked on the table. The most interesting man because he was spontaneous, but he stayed the same, never wanting more than he had. I wanted more for a long time, but was I certain what the more was, and would I be happier when I found it?

Hedonic adaptation

Who knew that wanting new and shiny all the time would always end up in the state of hedonic adaptation regardless of how many relationships, new pairs of shoes, and life-changing decisions I made?

You’d think that horrifying experiences like childbirth, living in an itching/scratching hell after being bitten by mosquitos every day for six weeks, and experiencing diarrhoea every day for nearly six months on an island in the Atlantic would stay with you forever. But as any woman who has ever had a baby will tell you, the horror fades.

The delight and crazy new tasks involved in looking after a newborn help chase the pain and screams away. Where the mosquitos are concerned, I don’t think about them at all nowadays, unless I’m bitten again.

In Scotland, we have noseeums, especially on the beach. A few bites will start my whole body itching in places where I know I had been bitten in the past.

We get used to a way of living.

We’ll have another baby. New relationships are started every day by the optimists who still believe there is someone for everyone. And if you’ve stopped producing sex pheromones you can buy a scent with added pheromones to attract the man or woman of your dreams.

Apparently, the whiff of a doughnut will have men queuing at your door. I’d prefer a tuberose perfume, personally. But the best smell is your natural one.

Life continues despite the loss of a loved one, providing you don’t go into denial for five years. In which case, life still continues it’s just a hell of a lot messier and might involve a psychiatrist.

We are wired to not realise that the new house, relationship, shoes are not going to keep us happy long term.

Likewise, death, the end of a relationship, and mosquito bite hell are destined to fade (and has, in my case, faded) into the background as we pursue our dreams or just participate in life.

It’s all an illusion.

Imagine, if you will, a dinner table covered with ten of your favourite pizza. Do you think you will be as excited by the fifth one as you are the first?

Maybe your first thought is, yummy! But as you work your way through them your waistband will dig into your gut, you might feel queasy and, in the end, you’ll stop.

The illusion of each pizza being as delicious as the first is soon replaced with regret and discomfort. Eyes bigger than belly, my step mum used to say.

Dan Gilbert et al identified retrospective impact bias. Illusions of how amazing getting that new job, house, pair of shoes is going to quickly dissipate. We overestimate how we’ll feel in two ways, intensity, and duration.

We predict owning a new house will be the best experience and that we’ll always feel that way. But when we get it it’s either perfect and we get used to it or there are things wrong with it that in our euphoria we didn’t notice before, we live with or fix them. A year on, our happiness level is back to what it was before we thought about buying the house.

You see an advert from Oxfam with a starving child, you can see her bones through her skin. You might cry. You might make a donation. But no matter how disturbed you were by the image; you will move on from that heart-wrenching moment and you will distract yourself with the next advert or find an uplifting TV show to watch. Before you know it, you’ve forgotten.

Our wiring makes us think, at the time, that a fantastic or horrific event will stay with us forever. Plus, we don’t get better at predicting our impact bias with repeated positive or negative events. Not without recognising them for what they are.

Focalism

At the age of thirty-eight I stopped smoking, I developed hypertension. I nearly broke the machine the doctor asked me to wear when I walked to the top of a very steep hill, and my blood pressure was higher while I was asleep than when awake.

As the doctor was telling me I would have to take angiotensin-converting enzyme (ACE) inhibitors for the rest of my life, I was imagining my life was over. There was nothing I could do about it, it was hereditary. I had no control over this silent killer.

This feeling was named ‘focalism’ by Dan Gilbert. [2]

“wonderful things are especially wonderful the first time they happen, but their wonderfulness wanes with repetition” ~ Dan Gilbert

Likewise, negative things are especially negative when they first happen, but the negativity wanes.

The twenty-two years I’d smoked had been more than an emotional crutch, the cigarettes had also been keeping me calm. But on the negative side, they were creating plaque which was lining my blood vessels.

My father has never smoked. He has high blood pressure too, which could be down to thirty-one and a half years of second-hand smoke from his second wife. Or he inherited it from his mother who died from a heart attack at the age of fifty-six. I’m guessing from untreated high blood pressure.

How did I feel a few days later? It was a tiny pill to take every day for the rest of my life. It was going to keep me alive and unlikely to develop heart disease! A fast turnaround from my initial reaction which was to think my life was over.

That was focalism illusion at play.

Psychological immune system

We all have one. No matter the situation, a breakup, finding out you’ve lost your dream job, a long-term illness, we are sometimes unaware of the power of our psychological immune system.

We have a tendency to adapt to cope with a negative situation. I mispredicted the impact of having to take a magic pill which would ensure the vessels in my body widened to let my blood through, thus saving my life!

Thankfully, my common sense kicked in and I didn’t take long to wise up and cope with the situation. I barely even think about taking a tablet every morning. I just do it.

What could we do to stay excited and happy longer?

Over the years since then, I’ve developed resilience to negative happenings. For example, I’ve learned to give myself enough time to get ready for work in the morning so I can remain calm after a refreshing night’s sleep. I no longer forget that I need to get up earlier to give myself time.

I can focus on the pleasurable because I know how to avoid stressing myself out every morning. Unwittingly, I developed this routine and others that thwart focalism before I actually found out about hedonistic adaptation and focalism.

The more I was looking for was giving myself more time to do what I loved doing. Working fewer hours and writing more. I do it often. There is no chance for me to forget the happiness writing gives me!

I am also grateful for recognising and remembering (by establishing a positive routine) that if I get up late, I have to rush and that I hate rushing because it stresses me out!

To help you remember what you are grateful for in your life, you might enjoy writing exercises for fifteen minutes per day on topics such as;

• What would my life be like if I hadn’t met my husband/wife?
• What would I be doing if I wasn’t doing my current job?

To avoid forgetting, repeating the same actions, and continue getting the same results, I recommend creating and practising routines for yourself sooner, rather than later.

We have the power to change our lives and use our resilience to control the way we react to news or situations.

[1] Happiness adaptation to income and to status in an individual panel. Tella et al studied 7812 people in Germany from 1984 to 2000. https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Publication%20Files/Happiness%20Adaptation%20to%20income_8ad30890-6af9-43b7-b185-a29eeb15d8ea.pdf

[2] Dan Gilbert Gilbert (2007). Stumbling on Happiness. Gilbert (2007) New York; NY: Vintage Books.

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