What's the one thing in life that you know could really make you truly happy? Getting a raise? Buying a new car? Winning the lottery? Whatever the key to the happiness puzzle looks like for you, chances are you're searching in all the wrong places.
Since the 1970s, a growing body of psychological research has been looking into the ways that humans adapt to life circumstances. The findings suggest that even if you were to tick off every item on your wishlist, it wouldn’t keep you satisfied for long. The dopamine buzz wouldn’t last because humans are wired to always want more.
This niggling sense of dissatisfaction is such a familiar part of the human experience that psychologists have even coined a term for it: the hedonic treadmill.
First developed by researchers Philip Brickman and Donald Campbell in 1971, the metaphor neatly describes the universal tendency for us to boomerang back to a baseline level of happiness, despite life’s ups and downs.
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"When we experience extreme positive events, such as buying a new house or landing a great job, our happiness levels temporarily peak and life feels great," says Lara Aknin, professor of social psychology at Canada's Simon Fraser University and an associate editor of the World Happiness Report. "But as time goes on, we adapt to our new circumstances, eventually returning to a familiar state of equilibrium."
Left unchecked, this odd brain quirk can quickly lead to a familiar cycle of goal-setting, money spending and thinking 'I'll be happy when...' - all in pursuit of something that will finally make us happier.
Ultimately though, it's a futile endeavour. Even if we do manage to find our supposed 'Holy Grail' of happiness, we'll inevitably return to our baseline, once again, and, says Aknin, "our happiness suffers as a result."
Trapped on the treadmill
If this all sounds a bit depressing, the flipside is that the same principle applies to negative events.
“When people experience a setback, such as a redundancy or breakup, in most cases, it’s not going to hang over their heads for the rest of their lives,” Aknin says. “The intense feelings eventually lessen and people recover to their baseline, often quicker than they first thought.”
But why are we trapped on this treadmill at all? Why can’t we just hop off it? Researchers aren’t sure why we’re caught in this endless chase. From an evolutionary perspective, however, there’s a theory that it could be beneficial for us to quickly adapt to new circumstances, for coping and survival reasons.
"Some academics argue that we have a negativity bias, where we hone in on stressful stimuli for safety, because if bad things didn't capture our attention, it could be the end of us," says Aknin.
Unlike our ancestors, however, most of us don’t live in threatening environments where we could be in peril at any moment. Still, these ancestral biases hang over us, drawing our attention to the not-so-great stuff.
Crucially, everyone’s baseline happiness is different too. “Not everybody’s a seven on a 10-point scale,” says Aknin. “It varies depending where you are in the world, and the [majority] of happiness research we have solely focuses on relatively rich, western populations.”
So what determines your baseline score? Much research in positive psychology suggests that about 50 per cent of our happiness is determined by our genetics. A further 10 per cent could be influenced by life circumstances and external factors, such as income, relationship status and living conditions.
So if a large part of our happiness is down to factors out of our control, does this mean we’re powerless to do anything to change it? Not exactly. As much as 40 per cent of our happiness levels could be down to each of us and what researchers call our ‘volitional activities.’
“These are the everyday behaviours that we choose to engage in that are beneficial to our happiness,” says Aknin. “If you want to pour your efforts into changing your overall happiness levels, this is exactly where you need to look.”
Happiness articles tend to churn out the same advice: practice gratitude daily; exercise regularly; and spend time with friends and family. While these are all useful tips, the hedonic treadmill – once again – could be numbing their effects.
That’s why, for example, making daily notes in a journal of the things you’re grateful for feels good initially, but you’ll probably lose interest in it about a month later when the feeling starts to wane.
To combat this, we grilled experts to find out the lesser-discussed lifestyle choices that can boost your baseline happiness levels and, crucially, keep you happier for longer. No daily positive affirmations required…
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1. Quiet quit on time-sucking activities
Ask people what would bring them lifelong happiness, and most will say money. While Aknin says that extra cash in the bank does make us happy to a point, it's balanced with our time, which is the ultimate happiness currency.
“For people on very low incomes, a major increase in wealth can translate to higher levels of wellbeing, in part because it affords stability and predictability,” says Aknin. “But once people are in a comfortable living situation, the data shows that more money doesn’t buy much extra happiness.”
Supporting this theory, a study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found that lottery winners weren’t any happier than people who didn’t win, and they found less enjoyment in everyday tasks too.
In fact, funnelling all your free time into schemes to earn more money could actually be counterproductive. “Social relationships are a big predictor of happiness, so if you’re trading off your weekends to work, when they could be spending time with friends and family, it’s likely to be making you less happy,” warns Aknin.
For many people still in full-time work, ditching a job entirely probably isn’t practical, but we can all make choices to reclaim parts of our spare time. One idea is ‘quiet quitting’ – the trend of only doing your job’s contracted requirements, and no more. No late nights; no emailing at the weekend. Or if you’re retired, no taking on burnout-inducing responsibilities.
2. Opt for variety over becoming an expert...
The writer Malcolm Gladwell famously popularised the idea that with 10,000 hours of practice, you could become a master in any given field. But his magic number might not be so bulletproof (Prof Anders Ericsson, the author of the research Gladwell based the idea on, said himself that the number is totally arbitrary).
In fact, persisting through the same training routines might not actually be as beneficial for your happiness as you think. When you’re recycling the same daily movements – whether that’s running around the park or doing a well-trodden YouTube workout – things can get pretty stale.
Instead, researchers investigating how exercise can help our happiness reckon we should be looking to build a training routine that incorporates lots of different types of movement, such as boxing one day, football the next, with rock climbing and Pilates at the weekend.
“Consistency and routines are still important with fitness, but pursuing different types of exercise means there’s space for more variability. This staves off the adaptation effect, meaning we’re less likely to get bored and dissatisfied,” says Aknin.
3. ...And try new things just for the fun of it
Being a beginner at something can be embarrassing. Hitting discordant notes on the piano; barely touching your toes in yoga; drawing everything a little bit lopsided… All too often, ego can get in the way of us pursuing activities that are genuinely enjoyable because we’re too focused on comparing our shaky efforts to the polished version.
But there’s a huge bonus to being immersed in a new hobby that we haven’t yet mastered: our thoughts are laser-focused on the present moment.
“The hedonic treadmill lives in the fallacy of the past and the future,” says behavioural scientist Michael Rucker, author of The Fun Habit: How the Pursuit of Joy and Wonder Can Change Your Life. “Mindfulness is a big mitigator of this process because we’re enjoying the moment so much that we don’t have time to ruminate on the things we think we’re lacking.”
Rucker says that there’s a multitude of research that proves how beneficial fun is to our wellbeing. Yet all too often, we’re not making the best of this freely available tool – a situation Rucker calls being fun-starved. “We end up feeling that happiness is somewhere in the distant future and not available to us now.”
Instead, Rucker suggests we should actively seek out ‘micro-joys’ – new hobbies and interests that bring us immediate satisfaction and joy, without the pressure to make any serious progress or achieve specific goals.
4. Rip up your current goals, write new ones
We’re constantly fooled into thinking we’re able to switch off the hedonic treadmill with each new goal we set. This tendency was named ‘impact bias’ by psychologists Dan Gilbert and Timothy Wilson in 1998 to describe our inclination to overestimate how much a future event will affect our emotions, and how long for.
“Impact bias is the reason we tend to think that achieving our goals will make us happy for the rest of our lives,” says Dr Christian Ehrlich, a senior lecturer in organisational behaviour at Oxford Brookes Business School. “Basically, our brains aren’t reliable estimators of how happy things will actually make us.”
Ehrlich says setting goals isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but we spiral off track when our overall intentions don’t align with our most deeply held notions of purpose and meaning. “It’s the doing, not the achieving, that really matters,” he says.
To fix this, he suggests writing down your goals and examining how many are intrinsic (those pursued for their inherent satisfaction) and how many are extrinsic (based on external rewards or to avoid negative consequences). Shifting your focus towards intrinsic efforts can help you chase goals that will remain enjoyable from start to finish.
5. Tap into the 'deinfluencing' trend
The most powerful drivers of the hedonic treadmill are our friends, family and… the people on our social media feeds that we know very little about. It’s all down to something called ‘social comparison theory’, which argues that we determine our social and personal worth based on how we think we stack up against others.
And when we see those people flaunting items we don’t own on social media, it can feed our desire to buy and own things – things that tend not to bring us sustainable happiness.
“When people are on their deathbeds, they generally say two things: they wish they’d worked less, and they wish they’d spent more time with the people they love. Yet despite this common knowledge, most of us do the exact opposite,” says Christopher Boyce, an honorary research fellow at the University of Stirling’s Behavioural Science Centre.
“It’s difficult to make these choices when the environment we live in doesn’t encourage us to prioritise them. Everything around us is distracting, causing us to consume items that have a very short-lived boost to our happiness.”
The deinfluencing trend is one solution to this and aims to encourage us to more carefully consider the often over-hyped purchases we’re spurred on to buy. Boyce, for example, has a rule dictating that he can’t buy something until he has been outside and touched a tree first.
“It may sound strange, but there’s always something vying for my attention, so just being in nature can help to build an awareness of what’s actually serving a deeper human need and what has an agenda behind it."
6. Start a book club, don't invite your friends
You may feel like the last thing you want on public transport is for someone to strike up a conversation with you, but recent research shows that even brief interactions with strangers can boost your momentary happiness.
In fact, studies on bus and train commuters in Chicago and London found that introverts and extroverts benefit from talking to strangers. While approaching random people on the street may not be your thing (or theirs), joining a local hobby group can help you tap into the benefits of connecting with new people.
“Connection is such an important predictor of happiness and there are lots of new lines of research that are looking at the potential for non-human, AI conversations to bring the same emotional rewards as chatting with a stranger,” says Aknin. “There’s much we don’t know yet and more research is needed, but it’s an intriguing and exciting new area of possibility in the realms of happiness literature.”
About our experts
Lara Aknin is a professor of social psychology at Canada's Simon Fraser University and an associate editor of the World Happiness Report. Her work has been published by Science, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, and Journal of Happiness Studies (to name a few journals).
Michael Rucker is a behavioural scientist and author of The Fun Habit: How the Pursuit of Joy and Wonder Can Change Your Life. His work has also been published in International Journal of Workplace Health Management and Nutrition Research.
Christopher Boyce is an honorary research fellow at the University of Stirling’s Behavioural Science Centre. He has been published in PLoS One, Journal of Affective Disorders, and Chile Development (to name a few journals).
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