Hedonistic adaptation (or a hedonistic treadmill ) is the tendency of people to stay at a relatively stable level of happiness, and also to quickly return to this level after serious positive or negative events or changes in life.
According to this theory, the more a person receives pleasure, the higher his expectations and desires, which does not lead to happiness. Birman and Campbell came up with this term in their essay Hedonic Relativism and the Formation of Social Well-Being.
In the late 1990s, this concept was modified by the British psychologist Michael Eysenck to become the current “hedonistic treadmill theory” that compares a person’s happiness pursuit to a person on a treadmill who must keep going to stay in the same place. This concept was mentioned by the writer Saint Augustine, who was quoted in 1621 in Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholia.
Hedonism gained considerable weight in positive psychology, where it was opened and revised later. Considering that hedonistic adaptation in general demonstrates that events do not significantly affect a person’s long-term happiness, positive psychology has attended to the discovery of things that can lead to significant changes in levels of happiness.
Theory
Hedonistic adaptation is a process or mechanism that reduces the affective impact of emotional events. As a rule, hedonistic adaptation includes a “reference point” of happiness, according to which people maintain happiness on the same level throughout their lives, despite the events around them.
The process of hedonistic adaptation is often defined as a monotonous mechanical work, since a person must constantly work to maintain a certain level of happiness. Others determine that the hedonistic adaptation functions similarly to a thermostat (negative feedback system), which works to maintain an individual’s established level of happiness. One of the main problems of positive psychology is to determine how to maintain or increase the level of happiness, as well as what methods lead to long-term happiness.
Hedonistic adaptation can take place in various ways. As a rule, the process includes cognitive changes, such as changes in values, goals, attention and interpretation of the situation. In addition, neurochemical processes desensitize overly stimulated hedonic pathways in the brain, which may prevent persistently high levels of strong positive or negative feelings.
The process of adaptation can also occur through the tendency of people to construct complex reasoning in order to consider themselves “deprived”, the social theorist Gregg Easterburg calls this “denial of abundance”.