Hedonic treadmill

 I learned a term yesterday that I can't believe I didn't encounter in AP psychology or any other psychological studies since: the hedonic treadmill, referring to the tendency of humans to quickly return to a relatively stable level of happiness despite major positive or negative events or life changes. 

I have to admit that as bizarre as this sounds, it has obvious applications in my life: Even after strongly negative events like my grandfather passing away last year, I slept on it for a few nights and sadly went back to a relatively stable of happiness, going back to my work the next day and just returning to normalcy, no drastic change in my life or some sort of epiphany about the meaning of it all. It's like my body/brain just got back on the treadmill and kept pumping out life and gettng back to the business of it. On the flip side, and this is where I think the hedonic treadmill reall applies, even if a really awesome thing happens for me, I accept it in the moment and am really happy about it, but then that new reality becomes the new normal and I'm already on to the next thing. Even if made 10% in stocks the previous year, I'm not content with that gain, I'm already looking forward to the next way to make money. Probably happens with money for most people, the more we make, the more we want to make more, no matter how hard we try to gain in increase in happiness, we remain the same level of happy. (Maybe that's why people say money can't buy happiness, because even if you do get more money, you're not that much happier!) Also, no wonder some lottery winners try to win the lottery again, they're not satisfied with the money they won the first time! 

It also makes a ton of sense why we enjoy things the most the first time.....that first dodgeball game I played, the first season of fantasy baseball, the first awesome detective novel, that first excitement of learning a new language. After that first experience we get used to that happiness level, and anything that's similar to it won't give us that jump from never having it to having it. (Sounds so much like drugs, I'm so glad I never got into drugs and built up a tolerance for things so that it'd take more and more of a drug to get a high). 

Sensory overload is another form of hedonic treadmill, where we keep wanting to get the next Youtube video, the next Facebook news feed item, move on to the next podcast. 

The definition I heard on the Omnibus podcast was actually in eating foods, where adding more and more salt or making food spicier will eventually run out of utility as we get too used to the strong tastes of those particular additions. I kind of already knew that, where we get addicted to sugar and keep wanting more and more sugar and build up a tolerance to it. MJ needs more coffee to get the effect of waking up, where my tolerance is super low. On the flip side, MJ has also tried to keep our diet low in salt, something that I never paid attention to in my twenties but definitely recognize the necessity of now. Salt can make tons of food tasty and appeals to our taste buds, but oh boy does it do damage to our bodies if consumed excessively, as well as causing us to run extra laps on that hedonic treadmill and not being satisfied by light, organic-tasting dishes. (There's a good food that works well without salt, you guessed it: tofu). 

My takeaway from this concept is to appreciate the good things that happened every day, every month, every year! I am definitely guilty of being one of those people who never "counts his blessings" and take the good things that happen to me for granted and only obsess over what I didn't get, what I can get next to make myself happy. Maybe get off the treadmill once in a while and take a shower, let the mind and body recover and enjoy itself!