The Hedonic Treadmill

Think about the last time you wanted something. Really wanted something. The thing you were convinced would make you happy once you had it. Was it a new iPhone? A high-paying job? A relationship?

Now think about what happened after you got it. Did it make you happy? if yes, did it still make you happy after a fews day? A month? a year? Do you still sit around each day thinking about how happy that thing makes you even now?

Or like the vast majority of people, did you just sort of get used to it, find something new to chase after and convince yourself that this was the thing that would actually make you happy? If so, it sounds like you’ve found yourself on the hedonic treadmill.

The hedonic treadmill, or hedonic adaptation, is the idea that we tend to return to stable levels of happiness, even after a major change in our lives. That’s why there are lottery winners who find themselves no happier than before they won millions, and amputees who are no less happy than they were before they lost a limb. It doesn’t matter if at the time they thought what was happening to them was the greatest thing ever or the worst. Humans adapt, they start taking things for granted, they find themselves with new things that bring them happiness and new sets of problems.

On the one hand, this is great news. Not getting into the college of your choice, not getting that promotion you wanted, not ending up with the person you were convinced was the one…none of those individual things are going to affect your long-term happiness. I know it feels like the worst thing ever, but guess what? Scientific research shows that people are really bad at predicting how happy or unhappy something is going to make them.

But wait, what about the good things? Does that mean nothing’s actually going to make you truly happy? It turns out, there are a few ways you can increase how much happiness you get out of the good things.

For starters, you can take some time each day to practice gratitude. I’ve done this practice off and on over the years, but I’ve only really gotten serious about dedicating time to it in the last few weeks. I spend about ten minutes writing about a few things in my journal that I really appreciate. It can be something good that happened that day or it can be something or someone that’s been there all along. Sometimes, I’ll find myself writing about things I never even think about, like the fact that I have two working eyes that let me appreciate all the beauty in the world or that I have running water in my apartment. It makes me feel fortunate for all the good things in my life, even on days when things aren’t going my way.

Another thing you can do is practice savoring. If you’ve ever seen a Korean variety show, one staple is the cast being presented with some kind of food. It doesn’t matter if it’s home-cooked kimchi fried rice or a meal prepared by a world-class chef. The cast will ooh and ahh over it, making noises of exaggerated contentment and smiling with each bite. It’s the reason why I always find myself ordering Korean takeout after watching these shows. They’re so good at enjoying something simple, that it makes me want to experience the same sort of joy. Try it the next time you find yourself eating something delicious, having a really good conversation with friends, traveling somewhere amazing. Be present in the moment, and really engage all of your senses. Savor every moment and keep reminding yourself how lucky you are to enjoy the moment.

But one of the absolutely best things you can do is to change what you actually value. Prioritize experiences over possessions. What are the moments from your past that still make you smile after all these years? I bet it’s that time you baked cookies with your family, rocked out at an amazing concert, watched cheesy romcoms with your best friend. I’m willing to bet one of those memories was not the day you bought your AirPods.

All my life, I had the mindset that once all the things on my checklist were completed, I would be perfectly happy and find myself wanting for nothing else. I did check some of those things off, but then I would find new things to add to the list making it impossible to truly ever make it to the end of the list.

I think the most important lesson of the hedonic treadmill is this: you don’t need to wait for everything to align perfectly in your life. Happiness isn’t some distant thing that will always be just out of reach. Hop off the treadmill. When you stop running, you’ll find the thing you’ve been chasing all these years has been within reach the whole time.

Rewiring Your Brain

In Christine Hassler’s book Expectation Hangover, the author explains:

Repetitive thoughts form what are called neural nets in our brain, which are clusters of chemically connected or functionally associated neurons. What that means is that if you think the same thought or type of thought over and over, it forms an actual physical cluster of neurons in your brain. Over time these neural nets create “grooves” in your brain that your thoughts gravitate toward. For instance, if you repeatedly think, “I’m not good enough,” you create a neural net around that limiting pattern of thought. Once the neural net is formed, it becomes habitual to think in the direction of “I’m not good enough.” Thus you will tend to see things that occur in your life through the lens of “I’m not good enough.

This idea of neural nets fascinated me, and it also offered me great comfort. If the brain can be trained to think negative thoughts, that means it can also be trained to do the opposite.

In fact, the author went on to make this very point, revealing a technique called self-directed neuroplasticity. There are a few ways you can rewire the brain, and it starts by imagining your runaway thoughts as a wild horse. It’s much easier to control this horse when you’re riding it and maneuvering the reins. One way of getting the horse/your thoughts under control is by saying “whoa” to yourself whenever you feel your mind drifting into territory you don’t want it go. This helps you bring yourself back to the present moment. Another similar technique is carrying a childhood picture of yourself in your wallet or on your phone. Anytime you feel negative thoughts starting to rise up, pull up that picture and imagine saying those negative things to the little boy or girl staring back at you. It’s much harder to be mean to sweet baby you with those big eyes and chubby cheeks, isn’t it?

It’s important to rein in these harmful ideas, because what you think about yourself sets the course for your life. I spent many years thinking I wasn’t good enough and dealing with a total lack of self-confidence. I thought I was lucky to receive any attention from men, so I chose people who were unavailable—men who had just gotten out of serious relationships or who lived all the way across the country. When they rejected me, it only served to validate my beliefs. Now that I’ve learned to love myself more and reject these ideas, I added a note to my dating profile making it clear that I’m not looking up for hookups or casual dating but to connect with someone in a meaningful way in the hopes of it leading to a long-term relationship. I plan on asking dates about their intentions early on, communicating my wants and needs often, and not investing in people before they invest in me. I imagine my dating experience will be much different this time around.

After learning about this bit of neuroscience, I’m not as surprised to find myself constantly trapped in negative thought cycles. I always thought there wasn’t much harm in lingering in these thoughts, but now I know better. Now I’m determined to rewire my brain so positive thinking becomes more natural to me.

I know my life isn’t a movie or anything, but this morning I woke up to gloomy, downcast weather. Rather than letting it get me down, I tried thinking about how thankful I was to be alive, to exist in this world, to have this rainy weather so I could appreciate the coziness of my apartment. And I kid you not, just like that the sky cleared up.

Okay, it wasn’t an instant thing or anything but it was supposed to rain all day, and instead the sun came out and shone brighter than it had in weeks. I don’t usually believe in signs, but in the interest of being a more positive thinker, I’m interpreting this one as a sign that I’m headed in the right direction.

The Wisdom of the Stoics

Lately, I’ve been thinking about setbacks. In yesterday’s post, I shared a list of setbacks I encountered throughout the year. I’d like to share that list again, but this time with updates or actions I’m taking to overcome them.

-My mom fell and broke her wrist and elbow. Update: she texted me today to tell me she got the all-clear from the doctor and she’s fully healed.

-My uncle went into a coma. Update: he continues to show signs of progress every day.

-At 29 years old, I was diagnosed with a diminished ovarian reserve. Update: I decided to freeze my eggs and have been reading up on all the latest research and making lifestyle changes to increase my odds of success.

-The person I’ve been dating for the last 14 months ended things with me. Update: I’ve already started putting myself out there again and have a few dates lined up.

Not everything is where I want it to be, but having a plan and taking action instead of sitting on my couch and wallowing in my own sadness brings me a lot more happiness than doing nothing. Even if I haven’t reached all my goals, I’m at least moving forward and that’s what’s important.

I listened to an episode of The Happiness Lab yesterday, where the guest was Professor William B. Irvine, the author of The Stoic Challenge. After listening to the podcast, I immediately checked out the book and devoured the whole thing in one sitting.

The Stoics were a group of ancient philosophers, who came up with a way of dealing with setbacks in a way that minimizes negatives emotions. At the core of this strategy are two important techniques: anchoring and framing.

Anchoring involves practicing negative visualization to better appreciate your life. For example, this morning I took a few seconds to visualize going to take a shower and having no running water. I visualized being thirsty and going to take a drink of water, only to find the faucet running dry. Even though I only spent a few seconds doing this exercise, you better believe I was more grateful to step into my warm shower that morning and take my first sip of water of the day.

Framing involves casting your situation in a different context. There are a few different frames you can use. One might be humor, so instead of getting angry about a setback, you can find a way to laugh about it. Another is storytelling, which means you go through the situation thinking about how you will tell the story later, but to have a good story you have to come up with a better resolution than just stomping your feet and getting angry, because that’s not a very good story at all.

My favorite framing technique, however, is pretending you’re being tested by the imaginary Stoic Gods. Whenever an obstacle presents itself in your life, pretend it’s these mischievous beings meddling in your life. They’re testing you with this obstacle because they think you’re capable of handling it (so really, you should be flattered) and also to help make you even stronger and more resilient. Afterwards, you can grade yourself on how well you reacted emotionally and the efficiency of your solution to the problem.

I tried practicing this technique when I had a very minor setback today. Someone I’d had a good conversation with on a dating app and planned to meet up with suddenly unmatched with me (welcome to the world of online dating!) I got a little upset, before I remembered the wisdom of the ancient philosophers. I laughed and thought to myself, good one, Stoic Gods!

Admittedly, I did wallow for a few minutes before I enacted the technique, but I imagine with more practice it’ll become more of a habit.

The thing about setbacks in life is that they’re unavoidable. They’re also costly. They can cost us our time, our money, our health, our relationships, among other things. But when I think back to some of my biggest setbacks, I realized that what followed was always better. When I got laid off from my last job, I got hired at a company I liked more where I got a significant pay raise and was happier overall. After my last relationship ended, I met someone I connected with more and who dating helped me grow considerably as a person. I mean, isn’t that what happens when you go through hard times? Good times almost always follow.

The most important change I’ve had to my mindset recently is that you won’t be magically happier after accomplishing x, y, and z. You might be happier for a time, but then there will be more obstacles and setbacks. Good times and bad times go hand in hand, and it’s the bad times that make you really appreciate how great the good times are. But that doesn’t mean you can’t use the wisdom of the Stoics to make the bad times feel a lot less bad.

If you’re interested in learning more about the Stoic philosophy, I highly recommend checking out The Stoic Challenge.

And if you’re going through a hard time right now: good luck, and don’t let those Stoic Gods get the best of you!

Finding Happy

So I think we can all agree that 2020 has been A YEAR. Besides all the general yuckiness of the last twelve months, here are some other things that happened in my life:

-My mom fell and broke her wrist and elbow

-My uncle went into a coma

-At 29 years old, I was diagnosed with a diminished ovarian reserve

-The person I’ve been dating for the last 14 months ended things with me

That last one happened about three days ago, and you know what? I feel fine.

Don’t get me wrong, I was definitely disappointed. I cried when he came over to talk, I cried on the phone to my friend for an hour after, but by the time I hung up I felt mostly okay.

That’s not because I didn’t care about him or I didn’t want to be with him. I did, and wanting to be with him had been one of my greatest desires for the last year. To give you a little context, we met three weeks after I just had stopped seeing someone else. I lived in New York and he lived in San Francisco. We met up and I was smitten from the start. We ended up spending the whole day together and then he flew back home. We stayed in touch, texting and occasionally talking on the phone. I saw him two more times over the next ten months when he came to visit the city, and then he finally moved here. I was so certain everything was going to fall in place when we were in the same city, but it just never worked. He was always busy with work or other obligations, we discovered we weren’t on the same page with our intentions, we didn’t communicate our needs often enough.

When he came over for The Talk, I wasn’t exactly surprised. I’d hoped I would be wrong, but things more or less ended the way I’d expected. I couldn’t stop thinking about all the things I should have done differently, the things I could have done if only we had more time together.

When my last relationship ended, I fell into an unexpected depression. I didn’t get any sleep, negative thoughts cycled through my head all day and night, I didn’t have an appetite or motivation to do the things I loved. My family got so concerned they encouraged me to sign up for virtual therapy.

For a long time, the fear of falling into that depression again was the main reason I didn’t end things, even when I started to think that maybe I should. I cared about him and I wanted to be with him, but I spent a lot of time unhappy.

I recently started reading Expectation Hangover by Christine Hassler, and it made me realize that it wasn’t the circumstances or the other person who’d caused my unhappiness. It had been my own expectations.

During our talk, he said to me, “we’ve only hung out a few times over several months and there’d be weeks we didn’t even talk to each other or know what was going on in each other’s lives.” That just sounded all wrong to me, until I took off the rose-colored glasses and realized, it was true, we hadn’t spent much time together at all. I had dedicated so much of my mental space towards my expectations—imagining what a relationship together would be like, introducing him to friends and family—that he’d been this constant presence in my head every day for 14 months. Meanwhile, he’d been focusing on his work, his friends and family, hobbies, dating other people. He had a whole and fulfilling life outside the two of us, something I had neglected because I’d unfairly pinned all my hopes for happiness on him.

Luckily, a few months earlier, I started taking active steps towards focusing on my own happiness. I started meditating, practicing gratitude, took Dr. Laurie Santos’ online course on happiness, started listening to podcasts like The Happiness Lab and Hidden Brain, that focus on the psychology of happiness, and because of those things, I didn’t fall into a deep depression this week.

In the past, a disappointment like this would have devastated me, but here I am. Still full of hope, going through my regular routine, and able to find the joy in the everyday.

The experience opened my eyes to how much our happiness comes from within. In my previous entries, I documented my progress towards goals that I thought would bring me happiness, but if this year has taught me anything, it’s that happiness isn’t something to chase, but a thing that’s there all along if we can open our eyes to it.

As I learn more about happiness and the psychology behind it, I find myself wanting to share my experiences and lessons with others, so that’s what the main focus of this blog will be going forward. I hope you’ll join me on this journey and that together we can all learn how to be a little bit happier.