Listen, happiness is a slimy creature.

It will slip between your fingers, no matter how tightly you make a fist. 

You can build walls around it, but walls will eventually crack, and soon enough happiness will seep out, like water dripping from a faulty plumbline.

You can lure it with strategic planning. For a second, you might think you have achieved it. A fleeting Eureka moment. 

But the next thing you know; you look over your shoulders; it’s gone.

Just like that. As if it was never there, to begin with. 

You are confused. 

You ask yourself: Did I imagine I was happy? I must have because I feel the same. 

You do not feel a sense of contentment, or ecstasy, or a warm wholesome fullness.

It is the same old feeling of missing something, something that tells you, what you have right now- is NOT enough. 

So you begin again…..

Quite like Sisyphus rolling his boulder uphill. Inch by inch. Drop by drop -of sweat and anticipation. Till you reach the top of the mountain and the boulder sits at the summit. 

This moment of stillness is what happiness feels like.

Until you see the rock rolling down taking with it, your hard-earned moment of joy. 

Blame it on the shifty nature of the construct of happiness, but the malady is in your own mind really. 

It has a fancy name even: hedonic adaptation

Hedonic adaptation simply means that your mind will get used to pretty much anything.

No matter how spectacular or terrifying an experience is-your mind is armed with a compass and it leads its way back to sea level.

Your mind finds its way back to the bottom- wanting to rise high, into the sky-again and again. 

You found a lamp (and rubbed it of course) and a genie grants you three wishes. Three-finger clicks later you have a mansion, a Porsche, and a private jet. Surely your mind is shooting stars in the sky, reeling with an inexplicable surge of happiness. But give it a few days. The euphoria subsides, and your mind (which I think you know now is the real culprit here), settles down like a feather on the ground.

Your find that your mind is totally used to the comforts of the house, the car, and the jet and is now yearning for something else.

The same thing happens when you fall in love. You find someone you think is perfect for you, and everything falls into place for a few days. if you are lucky for a few months, maybe a few years. 

But eventually, you get used to the comforts of companionship. The things about your partner that moved you, seem commonplace. Your time together becomes a routine endeavor. The spark that crackled between you, the chemistry that had seemed like magic dissipate.

Many people who are not conscious of this process may drift apart, without knowing what went wrong. They will blame each other or their circumstances. Those capable of introspection will remember the early days of romance with nostalgia, wondering why things have changed now, when in all probability nothing had changed really.

It is only your mind that now sees the same things differently. Or rather, it is your mind that has stopped seeing the beauty in things, simply because it has been around for a while. 

So how do we deal with this? 

How do we hold on to our sense of wonder and experience happiness, when we have minds that insist on getting stuck in a loop on a hedonic treadmill.

 Our minds are momentarily lifted with joy over an achievement, only to settle down into a state of wanting again.

How do we finally grasp the essence of happiness, when it makes itself visible for a moment, only to disappear?

There are a few hacks to tackle the problem. Different things will work for different people.

To begin with, it helps to be conscious of our mind’s tendency to adapt to a new circumstance (positive or negative) and reach its baseline set-point of happiness.

In most cases, we are ignorant of this fact and we tend to grossly overestimate the ability of things or achievements to boost our sense of well-being. This is called Impact bias (more on this later)

We also spend significant amounts of time and energy in procuring these possessions with the idea that once achieved, they will uplift our level of mental wellness in a long-lasting fashion. 

So, it obviously is a major downer, when after an intervening period of elation (after you finally buy those killer stilettos or the latest iPhone ) you find that your mental state is back to where it was before you had this really nice stuff. 

In a way, it is also a liberating realization, if you change your way of looking at it. Because of the way your mind works, your happiness is actually not dependent on the acquisition of material things. They can at best provide you with a short-lived burst of euphoria. 

One of the lasting ways to change one’s mental framework about the pursuit of happiness is to view it as a process rather than an isolated concrete endpoint to arrive at. 

Look back at the last amazing dinner that you had hosted. Or a birthday bash, or a date night in a fabulous new restaurant in town. It was at best a 2-hour affair, which in the company of your friends, family, or sweetheart had whizzed past. 

But remember the time when you first set out the plan the event. Did it fill your heart with excitement to plan the menu? Maybe you tried out a new recipe, or went on a recon mission, staking out bakeries for that perfect cake. Did you go shopping for a new dress?

 If you look closely, your sense of psychological boost related to a positive experience is not just around the event but drawn across the whole process leading to the event. Being mindful of this simple fact leads to an improved perception of one’s own sense of well-being.

Secondly, it can also help you to savor the entire process of a positive experience, not just the endpoint. 

A mind hack as simple as this can help you to work your way around hedonic adaptation and prolong one’s state of mental wellness.

More on thwarting hedonic adaptation in the next post!

References:

Lyubomirsky, S. (2011). Hedonic adaptation to positive and negative experiences. Oxford University Press.

Wilson, T. D., Meyers, J., & Gilbert, D. T. (2003). “How happy was I, anyway?” A retrospective impact bias. Social Cognition, 21(6), 421-446.