The Happiness Trap: Why You’re Never Satisfied and How to Break the Cycle

You keep working and working — slogging through the doldrums of day-to-day life, repressing your desires for pleasure — looking forward to the day when it all pays off. The moment when you achieve that elusive state of happiness.

…Or maybe it doesn’t pay off. Maybe the expectations you’ve set — the (arbitrary) milestone you’ve defined as success — will never be reached.

Or maybe when you do reach your goal, that dopamine hit of success is only short-lived. After a few days — or weeks or months — you find yourself desperately seeking that next hit.

Hedonic adaptation is the tendency for humans to quickly adapt to major positive or negative life events or changes and return to their base level of happiness.

As a person achieves more success, expectations and desires rise in tandem. The result is never feeling satisfied — achieving no permanent gain in happiness.

“The joys of loves and triumphs and the sorrows of losses and humiliations fade with time.” — Sonja Lyubomirsky

After a significant life event, hedonic adaption occurs as a result of cognitive changes. These changes can include a change in values, goals, attention…