These Are The Good Days
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.
The Strange Stability of Happiness
Psychologists have known for decades that people differ surprisingly consistently in their general levels of well-being.
Some people seem naturally cheerful. Their lives contain disappointments, frustrations and losses, but after a while they tend to regain their optimism. Others appear more vulnerable to worry, dissatisfaction or negative emotion, even when circumstances are relatively favourable.
Twin research helped establish that part of this difference has a genetic component.
In a well-known study of several thousand twins, David Lykken and Auke Tellegen estimated that roughly 44 to 52 per cent of the variation in well-being across individuals was attributable to genetic differences. That finding eventually contributed to the idea of a happiness set point: a characteristic level around which our happiness fluctuates.
Think of it less like the temperature on a thermostat and more like your body weight over several years. Christmas, holidays, and diets may temporarily affect it. Yet unless something more fundamental changes, it tends to move back towards its usual range. The word “set point“ can therefore create the false impression that our happiness has been programmed at birth and cannot change.
The evidence no longer supports such a rigid interpretation.
Why Good Things Stop Feeling Quite So Good
Suppose you replace your ten-year-old car with the car you have wanted for years. During the first week, you notice everything. The smell. The acceleration. The sound system. The stitching on the seats. You may invent unnecessary reasons to drive somewhere.
Six months later, you climb into the same car, answering a message on your phone and wondering why the traffic is so bad. The car has not changed. Your attention has.
Human beings are extraordinarily good at noticing change. We are much less good at continuously noticing what remains constant. This ability makes evolutionary sense. A nervous system that treated every familiar experience as though it were new would waste enormous amounts of attention. Once something becomes predictable, the brain can allocate attention elsewhere.
Unfortunately, happiness sometimes becomes collateral damage.
The promotion becomes your job. The new house becomes your house. The beautiful view becomes the thing outside the window. The person you desperately wanted to date becomes the person who forgot to put the milk back in the fridge.
Our expectations also move.
Yesterday’s luxury becomes today’s normal. Today’s normal becomes tomorrow’s minimum acceptable standard. That is the treadmill. We keep moving while psychologically remaining surprisingly close to where we started.
The Famous Lottery Winners
One of the most frequently quoted happiness studies compared lottery winners, people who had experienced paralysing accidents and a control group. The 1978 study by Philip Brickman and colleagues helped popularise the idea that people adapt to dramatic changes in circumstances. Lottery winners were no happier than controls in the study and actually reported less enjoyment from some ordinary activities.
Popular retellings sometimes go much further, claiming that lottery winners and accident victims simply returned to identical levels of happiness. That is an exaggeration.
The study was small and cross-sectional rather than a before-and-after longitudinal investigation. Later researchers have pointed out that the difference between the accident victims and control participants was actually substantial on some measures.
However, the larger lesson survived and became more sophisticated. People adapt remarkably well to many changes. They do not adapt completely to everything.
Time Does Not Heal Everything Equally
A large meta-analysis by Maike Luhmann and colleagues examined longitudinal research involving eight major life events, including marriage, divorce, bereavement, unemployment, re-employment, and retirement. The researchers found very different patterns of reaction and adaptation depending on the event and the type of well-being being measured.
Marriage, for example, often increases life satisfaction around the time of the event, followed by considerable adaptation. Unemployment behaves differently. Research has found that some people do not fully recover their previous levels of life satisfaction even after returning to employment.
Disability can produce lasting changes. Divorce and bereavement show their own patterns, with enormous differences between individuals.
Richard Lucas therefore argues that major events can sometimes change people’s long-term levels of subjective well-being. It gives us a much more realistic picture. Human beings are psychologically resilient, but resilience does not mean invulnerability. We often move back towards equilibrium after disruption, although the equilibrium itself can move.
Why Chasing Happiness Is a Problem
Consider how often we attach happiness to a specific milestone:
I’ll be happy when I earn more.
I’ll be happy when I lose ten kilograms.
I’ll be happy when I retire.
I’ll be happy when we finish renovating.
I’ll be happy when I become a director.
There is nothing wrong with wanting any of those things. Some may substantially improve life. The mistake lies in assuming that the emotional reward will remain as intense as it feels when we imagine it. The human mind is very good at turning destinations into starting points.
You reach the salary you once dreamed of, then discover people earning twice as much. You get promoted, then begin thinking about the next position. You move into the larger house, and within months the additional space feels perfectly ordinary.
This helps explain a peculiar feature of ambition. Success frequently produces another ambition rather than permanent satisfaction.
Can You Actually Raise Your Baseline?
This is where positive psychology became both interesting and, occasionally, overenthusiastic.
An influential model once suggested that approximately 50 per cent of happiness was attributable to genetics, 10 per cent to circumstances, and 40 per cent to intentional activities. Those figures became enormously popular, but they should not be treated as a formula.
Kennon Sheldon and Sonja Lyubomirsky, two of the researchers associated with the original model, later acknowledged legitimate criticisms of the famous “happiness pie”. They concluded that the specific percentages had outlived their usefulness. Horner, their more important argument has survived: what people repeatedly do can influence their long-term well-being.
Experimental research suggests that changes in ongoing activities may sometimes produce more sustainable improvements than changes in circumstances. A new possession eventually sits there doing nothing new. An activity can keep creating experiences, relationships, skills and memories.
Sustainable happiness appears possible. Permanent euphoria does not, so stop expecting achievements to carry your happiness indefinitely. Instead, enjoy the promotion. Celebrate the new house. Take the holiday. Buy something beautiful if you can comfortably afford it. Just don’t give these things a psychological job they cannot perform. A promotion may improve income, status and career opportunities. Expecting it to make you permanently happy sets it up to disappoint you.
Learn to Notice What Has Become Normal
One of adaptation’s great tricks is converting privileges into wallpaper.
Imagine someone who once dreamed of having the family, career, health or home they now barely notice. Savouring deliberately reverses some of that attentional drift. You can occasionally drive your normal route as though seeing it for the first time. Eat without simultaneously scrolling. Notice the person sitting opposite you. Spend a few seconds appreciating the garden you worked for years to create.
Constant availability accelerates adaptation. If you love good coffee, drinking six cups every day may make each one less special. If you watch your favourite programme every evening for weeks, its pleasure may diminish.
Research on interruption and restricted consumption suggests that occasional breaks can restore attention and enjoyment. We sometimes appreciate things better after briefly going without them.
Build a Life That Works Even When You Are Not Particularly Happy
This may be the most important lesson.
If happiness naturally fluctuates, designing your entire life around maintaining a pleasant emotional state becomes exhausting. A better question might be: Is my life worth living on an ordinary Tuesday?
Do I have people I care about? Am I doing something I find worthwhile? Am I learning? Do I have some autonomy? Do I occasionally help someone other than myself? Can I experience enjoyment without needing every experience to be extraordinary?
A meaningful life will still contain frustration, boredom, disappointment and grief. That does not make it unsuccessful.
We often imagine happiness as a destination. Reach the right combination of money, relationships, achievement, health and freedom, and perhaps we can finally remain there.
Human psychology seems to work differently.
We react. We adjust. We compare. We get used to things. Our expectations change. Yesterday’s extraordinary gradually becomes today’s ordinary. Something about that is frustrating, but there is also something profoundly hopeful.
Our baseline acts as both a restraint and a form of resilience. And because that baseline is neither perfectly fixed nor completely outside our influence, the pursuit of well-being still makes sense. We need to pursue it more intelligently.
A more realistic ambition is to build a life that repeatedly creates the conditions from which happiness can emerge. This includes relationships worth maintaining, activities worth doing, things worth learning, people worth helping and experiences we remember to notice before familiarity makes them disappear.
Happiness will still rise and fall. That may be exactly what it was designed to do.
References
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Brickman, P., Coates, D., & Janoff-Bulman, R. (1978). Lottery winners and accident victims: Is happiness relative? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 36(8), 917–927. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.36.8.917. (PubMed)
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Lykken, D., & Tellegen, A. (1996). Happiness is a stochastic phenomenon. Psychological Science, 7(3), 186–189. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.1996.tb00355.x. (Sage Journals)
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