Hedonic Adaptation

Hi Everyone!

Thank you for stopping by my blog post!

Today I want to share some knowledge that I got from the course which is called "The science Of Well-Being" offered by Yale, that you can watch online on Coursera for free. I think it is awesome that we can learn a lot of new things without paying. But this is not what I was going to talk about.

Let's talk about happiness set point and hedonic adaptation!

Please watch my YouTube video about this topic by following the link - Hedonic Adaptation! This time I worked really hard on editing and I will be super grateful if you check it out! :-)

I think that if you want to be happy, you need to know first of all what makes you happy. And unfortunately we usually think that some external stuff can increase our level of happiness. But in reality it is not true and external events have very little to do with overall happiness level.

So what does really affect your well-being and in what proportion?

Well, external events do have some impact on your mood, but only for about 10%. 90% of your happiness doesn't depend on external world itself, but on the way your brain processes the external information, on your internal perception.

As shown on the chart below, you can see that 50% of our happiness depends on genetic. It is kind of the same as our physical appearance. And 40% of your happiness is contributed by your intentional day-to-day activities: what you do, what you think about, what you spend your time on. You can call it "Brain Training". And these 40% is something you should be focused on, if you want to improve your life.

Now let's go back for a minute to the impact caused by external world. First of all, it is very important to admit that you cannot control the world. If you try to do that instead of working on yourself - you doomed. It can work in some cases but if you think about your life in general, it is wasting of time and energy. And because we cannot control external world, it is very important to know how to deal with it.

And our brain actually knows how to adapt to negative events. It was proven, that when sad event takes place, in a while you get back to your happiness set point, just because our brain was built this way. And this is not bad, but we get to adapt to good things exactly the same way. This ability to adapt to life events is called "Hedonic Adaptation".

On the chart above you can see that you have some initial level of happiness, which is called "Happiness Set Point", and over time you get back to it.

On one hand, it is awesome! If you got fired or divorced eventually you should be able to get over it. But on other hand, this ability to adapt decreases the effect of nice things that we get, like marriage or promotion, for example.

Wouldn't it be great if you could easily adapt to negative events and at the same time keep the effect of positive ones longer?

Today I want to talk about the tools which can help you to stay focused on positive events and as a result boost up your happiness set point. There are a lot of exercises you can work on, in this article I want to focus specifically on things targeted to fight against hedonic adaptation to happy events.

Here is my list:

1. Savoring. It is very useful to stop and enjoy the moment. I think that savoring works the best with little pleasures. For example, when you eat something yummy, or if you spend time with the person you love. Try to stay present and pay attention to your feelings in the moment of joy. If you pay attention to the moment, it can help you to store it in your long-term memory, which can lead to increase of your happiness set point. The more pleasant moments you have stored in long-term memory - the better!

2. Negative Thinking. It might sound weird that in order to be happy we should think about bad stuff. But it can help you to appreciate good things that you have better. If you got a great job, in a while you get used to it and it doesn't bring you too much pleasure. Try to imagine that you lose it, or that you never got it. How your life would look like if you don't have any job at all? What if you don't have money to pay your bills? Or let's say you got used to your partner, you see the same person every day and don't get too excited anymore like you used to when you just met. Now imagine that you never met him or her. You don't have this person who is there for you, you don't have this support, you do everything by yourself. This negative thinking can help you to value your partner more and as a result be happy about his or her existence in your life even after years and years of living together. But please do it mindfully, always remember that these are just stories that you're making up, and don't get scared of losing the things that you have. This exercise is supposed to help you to appreciate what you have, not to go crazy about imaginary situations.

3. Gratitude. Both, savoring and negative thinking, lead us to gratitude. You cannot be happy if you are not grateful for what you have. You can get the best job in the world, or super caring partner, wonderful friends, but if you take all these things for granted, they will never-ever bring you joy.

The habit of taking things for granted literally kills your happiness. This is the worst behavior you can perform. Unfortunately our brain doesn't really know how to be grateful unless we train it. That is why it is so important to do gratitude exercises. It works kind of the same way as diet, for example. If you want to be healthy, you need to eat healthy food. If you want to be happy, you need to be grateful. One of the easiest way to increase the level of gratitude is to simply write down thing you are grateful for every day. And it is better to write down the things which took place for the past 24 hours. This way you will train your brain to scan events and stick with positive once and let go of negative. The other way to improve your gratitude level is to say "Thank you" to people around you. Say "Thank you" to your partner, to your friends, to your co-workers, to cashier in the store, server in the restaurant, to every person you meet on your way. This will boost up your happiness level in a great way!

To sum up: be aware of hedonic adaptation, don't chase external stuff, because it will bring you pleasure just for a while. Instead of that, learn how to appreciate what you have. Spend more time on working on your habits and your behavior instead of trying to change the external world. Remember - happiness requires some work, but this work is very well paid off in a long run!

I hope these simple rules will help you as much as they are helping me!

Be Strong And Love Yourself!

Love Wins!

From Dasha With Love!