Are you Climbing the Never-Ending Hedonic Treadmill?

Remember a time when you were daydreaming about how happy you’d be when you moved to a new area or bought that thing you’d been saving up for? And then it happened. And you did experience a burst of joy and excitement. But perhaps not for as long as you had anticipated. This phenomenon is what’s known as hedonic adaptation. It describes the cycle of returning to a steady, baseline level of happiness after some such positive, or indeed negative, event. Let’s take a closer look at how this works.