How often do you find yourself sitting at home, dreaming of obtaining something you desire? It could be a better job, a better car, or a better apartment, all with the accompanying thought that if you could just get it, you’d be so much happier.² However, if you look around at what you already have, there was likely a time when you thought that once you obtained all those things, you’d be happier. Briefly, this may have worked—but eventually, your level of happiness returned to normal and you began to desire new things once more.

The cycle of returning to a ‘normal’ level of happiness is called the hedonic treadmill, and it extends beyond our achievements or material possessions. This phenomenon suggests that our general level of happiness, after being moved in either a positive or negative direction by some major life event, eventually returns to a baseline level where it was before the experiences causing the rise or dip.³

The hedonic treadmill explains why we are relatively stable creatures whose happiness levels don’t fluctuate much over the long term. This means we can bounce back fairly quickly after something bad happens—but it also means that when an event brings us a lot of joy, that surge of happiness will only last a little while. Much like someone running on an actual treadmill, the hedonic treadmill can make us feel like we’re moving while we remain in the same place. We adapt to the events in our lives, which is why the hedonic treadmill is often also referred to as hedonic adaptation.

Importantly, the hedonic treadmill does not apply in all situations. Research suggests that much of our happiness is either determined by genetic factors or under our control, while only a small portion of our happiness is influenced by life circumstances.¹¹ While the hedonic treadmill describes a strong tendency for our happiness to return to a baseline over time, research suggests that certain increases in happiness can be long-lasting.

Hedonic: Related to or characterized by pleasure.⁴ 

Hedonic Adaptation: The tendency for humans to return to a stable level of happiness despite major life events or changes. This process occurs with both positive and negative events. You can think of hedonic adaptation as the actual psychological process by which this happens, while the hedonic treadmill is more of a metaphor used to describe the overall concept or phenomenon.

Hedonic Well-Being: Well-being derived from attaining pleasure and avoiding pain. The hedonic approach to studying happiness focuses on happiness as subjective well-being, characterized by the prevalence of positive and negative emotions.¹⁵

Eudaimonic Well-Being: Well-being and happiness derived from the pursuit of meaning, self-realization, and authenticity.¹⁵ The eudaimonic approach to happiness is oriented toward personal growth and explores how our happiness is dependent on our sense of purpose.

Habituation/Desensitization: A decrease in response or emotion to a stimulus after being repeatedly exposed to it.⁵ 

Gratifications: Activities we become very engaged in which cause us to lose track of time. This suggests that gratifications are less susceptible to hedonic adaptation than pleasures.⁶ 

Relativism: The idea that happiness and sadness exist in relation to other things—for example, our own or others’ past experiences—meaning that happiness is not absolute, but relative.

Resilience: The ability to quickly recover from negative experiences or emotions.

The hedonic adaptation theory was first proposed by Canadian psychologist Philip Brickman and American psychologist Donald Campbell in their 1971 paper, “Hedonic Relativism and Planning the Good Society.”⁷ In this paper, Brickman and Campbell suggested that people experience pleasure or sadness when faced with an event or stimulus that is more positive or negative than their current hedonic adaptation level. The hedonic adaptation level was thus said to be considered as a ‘baseline’ level of happiness. Brickman and Campbell also posited that fleeting moments of happiness or sadness could actually shift the baseline level of happiness up or down, therefore changing a person’s ‘neutral’ level. Since happy and sad events are incorporated into the baseline level, joy and dissatisfaction both fade over time. Brickman and Campbell suggested that the only way to ensure consistent happiness is to continuously experience new positive events.⁸

The psychologists believed that hedonic adaptation had serious individual and societal implications, as they found that new events were compared not only to one’s own past experiences but also compared to the experiences of the people around them. This finding suggested that new stimuli did not have to only surpass one’s own individual ‘neutral’ level of happiness, but also other people’s happiness levels. For the individual, hedonic adaptation suggests that pleasure is always fleeting and that the higher your baseline is, the harder it is for you to experience happiness because new stimuli must surpass that level.⁸ Brickman and Campbell also suggested that any societal interventions aimed at improving people’s happiness would ultimately fail because people would just incorporate the new experiences into their baselines through hedonic adaptation.⁸

Twenty years later, British psychologist Michael Eysenck used the term ‘treadmill’ to refer to hedonic adaptation² because just as you run on a treadmill only to stay in the same place, your happiness levels always end up back where they started.⁶

A few years after Eysenck coined the term hedonic treadmill, behavioral scientists Shane Frederick and George Loewenstein classified three different types of processes involved in hedonic adaptation: shifting adaptation levels, desensitization, and sensitization. The shifting adaptation level followed what Brickman and Campbell had theorized would happen when people experience a new stimulus: the return to baseline. Desensitization describes a process through which it becomes harder for people to feel negative shifts in their happiness because they grow accustomed to negative stimuli. Sensitization describes the opposite experience of desensitization: because of prolonged and continuous exposure to pleasure, people’s sensitivity to new pleasurable events increases.⁹

What is the difference between the hedonic treadmill and the eudaimonic treadmill?

Both of these concepts describe how people adapt to happiness over time. On one hand, the hedonic treadmill suggests that pursuing pleasure initially increases our happiness, but those positive effects eventually return to a stationary level. On the other hand, the eudaimonic treadmill explains how engaging in meaningful activities and seeking self-fulfillment can lead to more lasting increases in well-being.¹⁵ In this way, the eudaimonic approach is less of a treadmill and more of a staircase! On a hedonic treadmill, you may feel like you’re running in place, but on a eudaimonic staircase, you can experience a sense of upward movement. Rather than experiencing fleeting happiness from simple pleasures, each growth-oriented step on the eudaimonic staircase leads us toward a more sustained sense of fulfillment.

What is the purpose of the hedonic treadmill?

The hedonic treadmill is a psychological concept intended to illustrate how people adapt to negative or positive emotions regardless of what they experience. Exactly why this happens is unclear. Some researchers suggest that the treadmill might function as an evolutionary adaptation—to moderate intense feelings (like fear, hunger, or stress) when they are no longer useful.³ Conversely, after a positive life event, returning back to baseline levels of happiness can encourage us to continue seeking pleasure. This would have been adaptive in the past but may be responsible for many of the destructive addictions we experience today.¹⁶ 

Is the hedonic treadmill good or bad?

The hedonic treadmill has both benefits and drawbacks. On a positive note, hedonic adaptation helps us bounce back from bad events, which is incredibly beneficial for people who have faced trauma, such as accident victims. This resilience helps us continue functioning after we experience something awful.¹⁶ Unfortunately, this also means we can become complacent to a quality of life that is not good for us—like staying in a toxic relationship that we’ve gradually accepted as normal.

When pursuing experiences or possessions that boost our happiness, the hedonic treadmill can serve as a form of motivation. Unfortunately, this often drives us to take the easiest path toward a short-term increase in happiness, such as buying new things or engaging in unhealthy behavior. This can also make it difficult to maintain our long-term goals. Think about how engaging in a new workout routine often feels rewarding at first, but when its effects on happiness fade, it becomes challenging to maintain that initial motivation.

How do you overcome a hedonic treadmill?

Noticing that you’re running in place on a hedonic treadmill can feel discouraging. Why pursue personal happiness if you’re always bound to return to your baseline? The good news is there are ways to mitigate the effect of hedonic adaptation and enjoy long-lasting well-being. Research suggests you may even be able to raise your happiness baseline (more on this later).² The key is to shift away from the short-term pursuit of pleasure and instead set your sights on growth, meaning, and purpose. With that in mind, here are a few ways to escape the hedonic treadmill:

• Practice Mindfulness: Focus intently on the ‘here and now’ and maintain an awareness of the enjoyable aspects of the present moment. This can help you appreciate the small things that bring you happiness instead of always reaching for some future happiness point.
• Build Relationships: The hedonic treadmill can contribute to a sense of monotony in long-term relationships (see our case study below). To combat this, work on building up your relationships and evolving alongside the other people in your life. A sense of continuous growth and reciprocal gratitude can provide meaningful satisfaction that promotes more stable levels of happiness.
• Pursue Meaningful Goals: Pursue activities you enjoy because they are meaningful to you, not because they are meaningful to someone else or in some way valued by society. Working your way toward personal long-term goals is a great way to give your daily life a sense of purpose.

Implications for Happiness and Well-Being

The hedonic treadmill challenges some of our ideas about how to achieve happiness. While it suggests that humans are resilient in the face of challenges, it also suggests that happiness is momentary and fading. It is from the hedonic treadmill theory that the saying “money can’t buy you happiness” originates. In fact, a 1978 study by Brickman and fellow psychologists Dan Coates and Ronnie Janoff-Bulman found that lottery winners had the same levels of happiness before and after winning the lottery, demonstrating that the happiness boost gained from money is fleeting.¹⁰ 

This might be because, with more money, your expectations and desires also change; for example, the trip to Florida you always dreamed of may now look like a trip to Fiji now—but whatever goes wrong or right on the trip will still induce the same feelings of pleasure or aggravation. In other words, your baseline level of happiness will have increased after more money has been added to your bank account, meaning the experiences required to lead to an actual feeling of pleasure will have to be of a higher caliber than before. In this way, pleasure can be seen as a drug; as humans, we are addicted to this drug and our tolerance is in constant fluctuation.

Shifting the Pursuit of Happiness

The hedonic treadmill shows that we need to shift our understanding of how to pursue happiness. An entire field called positive psychology is dedicated to understanding what makes life meaningful for humans. Although the hedonic treadmill seems to be a fact of life, that is not to say we are doomed to never be happy. Research conducted by positive psychologist Sonja Lyubomirsky suggests that 10% of our happiness is based on life circumstances (which is on track with the hedonic adaptation theory), but that 40% of our happiness is under our own control.¹¹ We therefore need to find strategies to counter or complement the hedonic treadmill.

Since hedonic adaptation occurs when we adjust to pleasures, we should try to mix up the kind of activities we seek happiness through so that they always feel fresh and novel.⁶ Another idea is to keep a gratitude journal. This way, when the happiness associated with your new job, apartment, or car runs out, you can remind yourself of how you felt when you initially obtained those desires.⁶ 

Alternatively, instead of shifting the kinds of activities you partake in, you might need to shift your understanding of happiness and success. Instead of finding happiness in obtaining material items or specific goals, which end up losing their appeal, we can focus on the joy that we obtain from less ‘achievable’ aspects of life, like gratifications, meaningful relationships, or passion projects.¹¹ Since these things are less tangible, they are harder to compare to other people’s lives, which means you’re less likely to compare your happiness to other people’s, or even to your previous self.

All of these strategies involve shifting away from hedonic pursuits to more eudaimonic ones. From being mindful of your daily life experience to building and cultivating relationships, aim to enrich your life with meaning rather than chasing short-term pleasure.

Hedonic Adaptation and Baseline Happiness

Hedonic adaptation stipulates that when we experience positive events, we incorporate the happiness we feel into our baseline level and thus become desensitized to the happiness brought on by the continued positive experience. However, some research suggests that the happier we are, the more positively we think about other life events and life circumstances. Lyubomirsky conducted a study in 1998 that showed that happy individuals perceive and interpret neutral events in a more positive light than unhappy individuals.² Unlike the hedonic treadmill, which suggests bouts of happiness are only fleeting, this research suggests that when our baseline level of happiness shifts, it might actually be easier for us to maintain a level of happiness because our mindset adjusts and we begin to generalize our happiness elsewhere.

Other researchers have proposed revisions to the hedonic treadmill model to account for individual differences in baseline happiness levels. For example, E. Diener and colleagues reject the idea that efforts to increase happiness are futile, arguing that baseline happiness levels are not necessarily neutral or fixed.¹⁷ Instead, each of us has a kind of “happiness set point” that determines our baseline, and some people may naturally have higher happiness set points than others. Not only this, but people may have different baselines for different types of well-being—someone might have a high sense of life satisfaction but experience more unpleasant emotions overall. Most importantly, critics of the hedonic treadmill theory argue that people’s happiness set points can change under certain conditions, suggesting that interventions to improve well-being might be more effective than the hedonic treadmill assumes.

Temperament and Personality

The idea of the hedonic treadmill also overlooks important individual factors that influence our baseline happiness. For example, research suggests that one’s personality traits—particularly levels of neuroticism and extraversion—play a significant role in subjective well-being and overall life satisfaction. In one study on the relationship between personality and life satisfaction, researchers suggest that negative and positive emotional tendencies might color our evaluation of life events.¹⁸ This suggests that hedonic adaptation might vary between individuals with different temperaments or personalities.

Exceptions to the Hedonic Treadmill

Additionally, the hedonic treadmill might not apply to all kinds of pleasures. One kind of pleasure that seems to be particularly resistant to hedonic adaptation is the pleasure derived from undergoing plastic surgery. Multiple studies have shown that the majority of plastic surgery patients feel satisfied with their procedure, and that this feeling is typically maintained over a long period of time. For example, a 2013 study compared the happiness levels of 544 patients with the happiness levels of 264 people who had considered getting plastic surgery but decided against it. Those who had undergone surgery had higher levels of self-esteem and reported higher rates of happiness, which persisted at both their three, six, and 12-month check-ins.¹²

It is unclear why something like plastic surgery would be resistant to the hedonic treadmill theory, but it does show that the theory is not applicable to all kinds of experiences. It could be that experiences thought of as ‘self-improving,’ like plastic surgery, continue to make someone feel happy for extended periods of time. This hypothesis is somewhat supported by Maslow’s pyramid, a theory that suggests that the highest level of happiness is self-growth.

Other research also suggests that gratifications, rather than pleasures, are more immune to the effects of hedonic adaptation.6 This aligns with the idea of eudaimonic happiness—related to feelings of personal growth or self-improvement—being longer-lasting than short-term, hedonic happiness.

Bouncing Back After Tragedy

While research surrounding the hedonic treadmill often paints a grim picture of how difficult it is for humans to ever be truly happy, it should also be of interest how we are able to return to a stable level of happiness after we experience a negative event. Instead of seeing ourselves as passive agents who let our experiences mold our outlooks, could it be that we actively engage in activities that will make us happy after a disaster occurs?

A study conducted by behavioral economist Jayson S. Jia and colleagues examined how people’s behavior changed following an earthquake and how the kind of behavior they engaged in impacted their notion of perceived risk.¹³ They wanted to examine whether people would engage in more pleasurable activities following a disaster, a hypothesis based on research showing that seeking positive emotions is part of the mood-repair process. The researchers used mobile phone activity to interpret people’s behavior, suggesting that how people use their phones reflects their day-to-day real-world behavior. For example, increased phone calls to friends likely correlate with more physical interactions with friends.¹³

The researchers found that after the earthquake, individuals increased their engagement with communication apps, hedonic apps (those engaged in for pleasure, such as music, games, etc.), and functional apps (those used as information tools). Specifically, the researchers found that engaging in hedonic apps helped decrease people’s perceived risk of another earthquake.¹³ These results suggest that we are good at returning to our baseline level of happiness because we counterbalance negative life events with pleasurable activities, instead of us just becoming used to a lower neutral level of happiness.

Monotony in Romantic Relationships

When you first get together with a new romantic partner, you are likely to feel a great deal of happiness almost akin to euphoria. Eventually, you come down from cloud nine—you might still be happy, but not in the exuberant way you were before. The hedonic treadmill suggests that this occurs because you end up incorporating the joy that you feel from being with that person into your baseline level of happiness. Once subsumed in the relationship, it becomes part of your everyday routine and is no longer exciting, causing some people to take their relationships for granted. Unfortunately, this hedonic adaptation is often the cause behind cheating, as people go searching again for that ‘high’ they once felt.¹⁴

By being aware of the hedonic treadmill, you can try to prevent this feeling of boredom so that your relationship doesn’t go stale after the honeymoon phase ends. This may mean ensuring you and your partner spend time apart so that seeing each other again feels novel and exciting,⁹ or engaging in gratitude, which is more resistant to hedonic adaptation.¹⁴ For example, you and your partner may practice thankfulness daily by telling each other something each person did that day to make them feel good.

Are We Happier Than We Think We Are?

The hedonic treadmill theory suggests that we need to change how we conceptualize and pursue happiness because obtaining our desires only leads to a shift in baseline happiness which makes our new level of happiness feel neutral. This article examines a theory put forward by psychology professor Hillel Einhorn. Einhorn suggests that instead of focusing on our wants, we should focus on the things that we are glad not to have. Since his theory is based on what we don’t experience instead of what we do experience, the practice might allow us to appreciate our ‘neutral’ level of happiness by realizing that we could be much worse off.

Can Money Buy Happiness? A Deeper Dive

Despite the cliché that money can’t buy happiness, research suggests that earning more money actually does make us happier—depending on how we approach earning it! People find satisfaction in the meaningful pursuit of growing their income rather than achieving specific income thresholds, which aligns with the idea of hedonic versus eudaimonic happiness. This article explores the complex relationship between money and personal happiness in the context of theories like the hedonic treadmill.

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