Imagine that tomorrow morning you receive some genuinely wonderful news. 

You get the promotion you have been chasing for three years. Your investment finally pays off. The offer on your dream house is accepted. Or perhaps the person you have been hoping to hear from sends the message you wanted to hear. You would probably feel happier.

Now imagine yourself six months later.

You still have the job. You still live in the house. The money is still in the bank. The relationship still exists. Yet there is a fair chance that you no longer wake up every morning thinking how extraordinarily fortunate you are. Life has become normal again.

That simple observation sits behind one of the most interesting ideas in the psychology of happiness: hedonic adaptation. We respond emotionally to changes in our lives, sometimes very strongly, but over time we often become accustomed to them. Our happiness then drifts back towards something resembling its previous level.

A recent Instagram reel by Dr Anna Fry neatly describes the idea: happiness can often be changed in the short term, but changing it over the long term is much more difficult because we tend to return to a baseline.

Broadly speaking, the science agrees. The interesting part lies in what happens when we ask a second question. “If we keep returning to a baseline, can we ever become sustainably happier”?

The answer appears to be yes. But probably not in the way we usually try to do it.