Satisfaction, happiness and the hedonic treadmill

Most of us have a love-hate relationship with the treadmill.  For example, I chose to do a long run outside this past weekend in single-digit, freezing conditions because I would rather suffer from the cold than spend 2 hours on a treadmill.

But the treadmill, as you may know was initially invented as a way to punish prisoners in England.  It was the pointlessness of a never ending, never relenting, never stopping grind that those Victorian reformers had in mind.  That was the point.  The treadmill was punishment that never ended.  It was constant and inevitable.  It wouldn’t stop and you couldn’t get off.  You had to keep up the grind.  In a way it mimicked the Victorian theory of life.

So it should be no surprise that psychologists adopted the metaphor of the treadmill to describe how people experience happiness and satisfaction.

They call this the ‘hedonic treadmill’.

We can all agree that happiness is a basic human need.  It is also one of the most perplexing problems in our world.  Everyone wants to be happy.  Many people struggle to be happy.

And the basic question studied is how do we achieve happiness?  And how to we sustain it?

It’s a tricky topic.  It’s hard to measure.  I can measure how tall you are but how do I measure how happy your are?

So- this is what scientists, being scientists, have tried to study and quantify.

Some key things that they discovered.

It’s not normal to be happy all the time.  Happiness is an adaptation.  It’s an evolutionary reward system.  If finding berries makes us happy, then we will look for more berries.  It’s a survival skill.

But we humans also have a well-known negative bias.  That negativity is an evolutionary adaptation as well.  There may be berries in the bush and that will make us happy, but there may be a tiger in that bush and that will make us dead.  We tend to weigh the negative outcomes more. It’s a a survival skill.  We can argue how useful a skill it remains in the modern day.

Another finding: everyone has a baseline level of happiness.  It’s basically how we are designed out of the box.  It varies by individual.  It’s our normal set point.

This baseline level of happiness is hard to change.  It is resistant to change.

We nturally tend to revert to the baseline.  If something bad happens to you, you will be unhappy for a while but then return to your baseline over time.  If something good happens to you the same thing, brief happiness, then you revert to baseline.

For example; say you get a raise at your job.  That makes you happy for a day or a week, but before long you are grinding away looking for a way to get your next raise.

There are, of course, interesting and informative outliers to this return to the mean behavior.  These outliers are when something significant happens and it breaks your baseline.  It alters your frame of reference.  You see this with cancer survivors or other life-changing experiences.

These life-changing experiences have the strength to adjust your baseline happiness.

Surviving something horrible makes people appreciate life more and through this appreciation or gratitude they ironically live with more happiness.

Ironically, events which we would think of as highly negative can break our baseline and make us systemically happier.

So what does this have to do with treadmills?

Thanks for asking.

Since the baseline is very resistant to change, we find ourselves constantly needing to get the next reward in order to get that next hit of happiness.  The ‘hit’ you might say.  Very much like a drug addict.  Achieving something just makes us hungrier for that next something and so on and so forth.

This is called the hedonic treadmill.

You may see it in your own life or in those around you where they are never satisfied and are constantly grinding for that next achievement, that next confirmation, that they are good enough, but, somehow, never get there.

You see it in those politicians and famous people who, from our point of view have everything, but they are deeply unhappy because, in their minds there is never enough.

It is a happiness destination fallacy as well.  They think ‘If only I can get to this next step, this next big thing, this next achievement I will find happiness.

But they never get there.

It’s very much like an addictive drug.  That first hit gets you high.  Then you keep searching for the next hit, and each time our system adapts so it takes more and more to get that high.

The great irony being that we get so focused getting more things and more experiences and more accomplishments that it makes us miserable.  It’s a game that can’t be won.  You’ll never have enough.  You’ll never be happy.

Like that Victorian treadmill, it is a never-ending grind that has no real reward.

Modern society, of course, helpfully reinforces the hedonic treadmill.  Constantly prompting our monkey brains with all the wonderful things we don’t have yet and all the places we haven’t been and all the people who are younger, more beautiful and sexier than we are – so we’d better get busy and run faster and catch up because happiness is there, just up ahead, just around the next corner, just out of reach…

The person who dies with the most stuff wins? Right?  Nope.  Not if they want to be happy.

Got to work on your bucket list, right?  Nope.  Not if you want to be happy.

What happens when you step off the hedonic treadmill?  Do you find happiness there?

Because you don’t have a choice.  Even as your monkey mind is driving you to do more and get that next happiness hit, you are aging and losing your ability to achieve.  Life, by its nature, makes you lose ground over time as you grind away on the treadmill compounding your desperation.

At some point you fall off the treadmill.

So what’s the answer?

Turns out the answers that the scientists come up with sound very much like common sense.

There is a point at which you have enough money and stuff to be happy.  And it’s relatively low.  After that, you’re just on the treadmill.

The things that in the end will make you the happiest are relationships.  Real, deep, trusting, loving relationships.

The other thing that helps with all this is your health.  Again, common-sense, age-old wisdom, if you are too sick to enjoy your life all that stuff you’ve achieved and collected isn’t going to matter.

The studies show that paraplegics and cancer survivors are happier than lottery winners?

It’s gratitude.  It’s learning to be happy with what you have.  It’s being shown how lucky we are to just be alive and be here to live our lives with the people we love.

Happiness, it turns out comes from being satisfied.

So, my friends, as many of us are navigating the holidays and the start of a new year, take a second to check whether or not you are on the hedonic treadmill.  Have you told yourself that your happiness is going to manifest when you reach for and grasp that next brass ring?

Give yourself a gift.

Step off the treadmill and find your happiness in simpler things.