As part of writing a newsletter on psychology, there’s an interesting phenomenon I came across the other day. It is called Hedonic Adaptation.
Hedonic Adaptation is the idea that no matter how good something makes us feel, most of the time we fall back to the initial feeling. You feel the excitement which was pitch high at one moment, coming off to the neutral level where it doesn’t affect you anymore as it used to.
One of the example of those moments is when the excitement of your promotion that you spent enormous effort for wears off. Or when you get bored of eating your favourite ramen every day.
So, how do you keep yourself excited and full of joy when the ‘limit’ hits? One possible solution is through the example of an experiment that was attempted and the findings that were shared in a study.
In this study, 68 participants were asked to eat some popcorn. 🍿
While half were told to eat the normal way, one kernel at a time, the rest used chopsticks. 🥢
Those who ate with chopsticks enjoyed the popcorn a lot more than the others, even though both groups ate slowly!
How does this help you?
This tells us that incorporation of variations & experiments in our usual lifestyle might be a way to change things up. Maybe it ‘tricks’ your brain into believing that this is something new that you’re doing and it interprets it as such as a different feeling.
If you are someone who is tired of working on the same thing, try changing the environment around you. Go on a work-cation where you can relax and work in this age of remote possibilities.
Doing the next iteration differently will help you in keeping that giddy-excitement intact.
P.S. You can read such fascinating psychological studies in the newsletter.
