The research behind Hedonic Adaptation
Think about something you once wanted badly and eventually got. It might have been a particular job, an apartment, a relationship, a salary, a qualification or something you spent months saving to buy. Before it happened, the outcome probably occupied a disproportionate amount of your attention. Once it arrived, there may have been a period when it felt genuinely exciting. Then, at some point, it became part of ordinary life.
Psychologists use the term hedonic adaptation to describe our tendency to become accustomed to changes in our circumstances. Experiences that initially produce strong emotional responses can gradually lose some of their impact as they become familiar. This process can occur after positive changes and negative ones, although how much people adapt and how quickly they do so varies considerably depending on the person and the experience.
The idea is sometimes summarized as people always return to the same level of happiness. The actual research is more complicated.
THE RESEARCH
One of the most famous studies associated with hedonic adaptation was published in 1978 by psychologists Philip Brickman, Dan Coates and Ronnie Janoff-Bulman. The researchers compared three groups: 22 people who had won major state lotteries, 29 people who had experienced accidents resulting in paraplegia or quadriplegia and a control group of 22 people who had experienced neither event.
The researchers asked participants about their current happiness, their happiness before the event and how happy they expected to be in the future. They also asked about the amount of pleasure they experienced from ordinary activities such as talking with a friend, watching television, eating breakfast, hearing a joke or receiving a compliment.
Lottery winners did not report dramatically higher current happiness than the control group. They also reported receiving less pleasure from ordinary everyday activities than the controls did. The researchers suggested that one possible explanation was that the unusually positive experience of winning the lottery had changed the scale against which ordinary pleasures were evaluated.
The accident group, meanwhile, reported lower current happiness than the lottery winners and controls, although they still expected to be relatively happy in the future. Their responses provided some evidence of adaptation to an extremely difficult change in circumstances, but importantly, they had not simply returned to the same reported happiness level as everyone else.
That distinction matters because the study has been repeatedly simplified into a much stronger claim: that lottery winners and people who become paralyzed eventually end up equally happy. The original research did not demonstrate that. It involved small samples, was not longitudinal and found meaningful differences between the groups.
What it did help illustrate was a more interesting possibility: even very large changes in circumstances may have less permanent influence on everyday emotional experience than we intuitively expect.
THE FINDING
Later research has provided a much more detailed picture of adaptation. People do adapt to many changes, but adaptation is neither complete nor inevitable.
Large longitudinal studies have found, for example, that people often adapt substantially to marriage after an initial increase in life satisfaction, although individuals differ considerably in their trajectories. Research on unemployment has found a different pattern, with some people showing lasting reductions in life satisfaction rather than simply returning to their previous level. Other experiences, including disability, bereavement and divorce, also show considerable variation in both the degree and speed of adaptation.
The older idea of a fixed "happiness set point", in which life events temporarily move happiness up or down before everyone inevitably returns to a predetermined baseline, is therefore too rigid. Circumstances can change well-being and some changes persist.
Hedonic adaptation describes a tendency, not a psychological law.
What does appear to happen frequently is that repeated exposure changes the emotional significance of an experience. What was once new becomes familiar and what was once remarkable becomes part of the environment.
THE THEORY
There are several reasons positive experiences may lose some of their emotional impact over time. One is simply that attention changes.
A new apartment is highly noticeable when you first move in. You pay attention to the light, the view, the kitchen and the extra space. Six months later, you no longer walk through the front door consciously registering every feature that originally delighted you. Your attention has moved on to other things.
Expectations can change as well. An improvement that once felt exceptional can become the standard against which future experiences are judged. A salary that once seemed enormous becomes your normal income. Business-class travel can stop feeling luxurious if it becomes routine. The larger apartment becomes the amount of space you now expect to have.
This does not mean you stop valuing these things. Familiarity simply changes their psychological position. They move from something happening to you to part of the background conditions of your life.
Researchers Kennon Sheldon and Sonja Lyubomirsky have proposed that adaptation to positive experiences may be influenced by both diminishing positive emotions and rising aspirations. As circumstances improve, people can begin wanting the next improvement, which means yesterday's achievement becomes today's starting point rather than a continuing source of novelty.
NOT THE SAME THING
Hedonic adaptation does not mean that circumstances don't matter
This is where discussions of adaptation often go wrong.
If people adapt to income, homes, possessions and other improvements, it can be tempting to conclude that external circumstances have little relationship with well-being and that pursuing them is therefore pointless.
The evidence doesn't support such a broad conclusion.
Health, financial security, relationships, working conditions, safety and many other features of life can meaningfully affect well-being. Adaptation also varies considerably across different experiences. People may adapt relatively quickly to one change while showing lasting effects from another.
There is also an obvious difference between becoming accustomed to an improvement and receiving no benefit from it. If moving to a safer neighborhood substantially reduces your daily stress, you don't need to feel a burst of happiness every time you unlock your front door for the move to have improved your life.
Something can stop feeling exciting while continuing to make life better.
That distinction is important.
WHY IT MATTERS
Hedonic adaptation becomes particularly interesting when we think about how quickly an aspiration can become an expectation.
Before getting something, we compare our current life with the imagined life in which we have it. The difference between the two is highly visible. After getting it, that comparison gradually disappears. The improved circumstances become the position from which we begin making new comparisons.
This can create a strange feature of progress. Your life can improve considerably without your everyday emotional experience improving at the same rate.
The career you once hoped to have becomes the career whose frustrations you now notice. The apartment you couldn't believe you got becomes the apartment with the irritating plumbing. The salary that represented success becomes the salary you compare with the next level above it.
None of this means the original goal was a mistake. The career may genuinely suit you better. The apartment may make your daily life easier. The higher income may provide security and freedom that you did not previously have.
The problem arises when we expect the feeling of improvement to last as long as the improvement itself.
Understanding adaptation can therefore help separate two questions that are often treated as one: Will this make my life better? and Will this continue to feel exciting?
The answer to the first can easily be yes while the answer to the second is no.
TRY THIS
Choose something in your current life that you once wanted but now barely notice. It might be where you live, something you own, a relationship, an ability you've developed, a professional opportunity or a level of freedom you didn't always have.
Try to remember what it represented before it became normal. What did you expect it to change? What was difficult before you had it? Which parts of your life are genuinely easier, better or more interesting because it is there?
This isn't an exercise in forcing gratitude or convincing yourself to be satisfied with everything you already have. Wanting the next thing is not evidence that you've failed to appreciate the last one.
It is simply useful to remember that normal and valuable are not the same thing.
Some of the things you barely notice anymore may be things you once worked very hard to make ordinary.
References
Brickman, P., Coates, D., & Janoff-Bulman, R. (1978). Lottery winners and accident victims: Is happiness relative? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 36(8), 917-927.
Diener, E., Lucas, R. E., & Scollon, C. N. (2006). Beyond the hedonic treadmill: Revising the adaptation theory of well-being. American Psychologist, 61(4), 305-314.
Lucas, R. E., Clark, A. E., Georgellis, Y., & Diener, E. (2004). Unemployment alters the set point for life satisfaction. Psychological Science, 15(1), 8-13.
Sheldon, K. M., & Lyubomirsky, S. (2012). The challenge of staying happier: Testing the Hedonic Adaptation Prevention model. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 38(5), 670-680.