The Hedonic or Pleasure Circuit.
Making it last: Combating Hedonic adaptation in romantic relationships.
This satiation, known as Hedonic adaptation, occurs for nearly everything that makes us happy.
Hedonic happiness- also known as‘subjective wellbeing'1- pertains to
positive affect and appraisals of life satisfaction.
Disaqbility and sunshine: can Hedonic predictions be improved by drawing attention to focusing illusions
or emotional adap-tation?
In contrast to Hedonic well-being, these items are all regarded as constituents
of eudaimonic happiness(also known as‘psychological well-being'2).
The biggest problem with the Hedonic treadmill is that once you step on,
it's really tough to hop off.
In a previous blog in which
I discussed why our screens don't make us happier, I mentioned Hedonic adaptation.
Psychologists(and renown happiness experts)
Kennon Sheldon and Sonja Lyubomirsky argue in a recent paper that our Hedonic adaption occurs for two reasons.
However, the truth is that fame, wealth,
and beauty are all part of the“Hedonic treadmill” that we are convinced we should get on.
In particular, I make a distinction between Hedonic wellbeing, which relates to the emotions that people experience,
and eudemonic wellbeing, which reflects their sense of purpose.
While it might feel sweet to get even with your employer who broke his/her promise to you,
we know that the Hedonic high of“getting even” is short- lived.
While the happiness we feel after an activity diminishes each time we experience it,
a phenomenon known as Hedonic adaptation, giving to others may be the exception to this rule.
Thus, after having ingested the donuts we imagined above,
our body feels good and the well-known Hedonic pleasure is produced, which constitutes
a positive reinforcement on the behavior of“eating donuts”(which, we will do again).
This has often been misconstrued as a call for rampant hedonism,
but actually involves a kind of Hedonic calculus to determine which things,
over time, are likely to result in the most pleasure or least pain.
Without a conception of a good life,
without a way to distinguish progress that's important from that which keeps us on the Hedonic treadmill, our collective inertia will mean
that we never reach Keynes' 15-hour working week.