How Simply Interrupting Pleasurable Life Experiences Makes Them Even More Enjoyable

Interrupt Good Experiences, Focus On Bad Experiences

By interrupting / breaking up positive experiences and focusing on the negative ones, we can increase our overall happiness in life.

In life, we have our highs and lows. But, as with most anything, we end up regressing to our mean level of happiness. This phenomena, known as ‘The Hedonic Treadmill’, is a product of human adaptation and looks like the following:

Recognizing the regular ebb and flow of happiness allows you to manipulate your experiences to gain more from them. The key to this is in mitigating complacency.

Consider the prospect of buying a new car. Driving it off the lot is likely one of the peak experiences you will have with that car throughout its lifetime with you. In the week that follows, you make sure that it’s spotless and take plenty of photos to post on social media to show off your new wheels.

Over the course of a few months, the vehicle is no longer new and novel to you. While you certainly still appreciate it, you don’t experience nearly the same level of joy as you did when you first got it. This is basic human adaptation, and it’s nearly unavoidable for the things which we purchase in our lives that we consume on a regular basis.

Transient Experiences

In sharp contrast to these long-lived goods are transient experiences — these include: weekend getaways, yoga, skydiving, etc… Because these experiences are often short-lived, we seldom adapt and take their novelty for granted. And when we introduce them into our lives on a regular basis, effectively spacing out our peaks of happiness, we get the following:

Seeing this, one might assert that the joy they get from a new car dwarfs that of a transient experience like skydiving. The fact of the matter is that one can only be so happy and it’s unlikely that your experience of getting a new car was that much more enjoyable than that of skydiving. But, if you insist that it was indeed more enjoyable, consider the possibility that you didn’t actually feel happier, but rather that the experience more greatly contrasted the other things you had going on in life. Let us not forget, everything is relative.

Dealing With The Bad

And this applies to negative experiences, as well! In fact, when people elect to take breaks throughout a negative experience (e.g. yard work, laundry, doing taxes, etc…), they actually prevent themselves from adapting to it and experience even more unhappiness, in aggregate.

So, if you have something you don’t wish to do, don’t take breaks and power through it! Over time you’ll adapt to the situation and it will not impact as negatively as when you first began.

Interrupt Good Experiences, Focus On Bad Experiences

To drive this point home, further — imagine that you did really well in the stock market one day and made off with $1,000,000 in gains. Do you think that the happiness of that moment would exceed the happiness that you would get from 10 days with two weeks between each where you made $100k (assuming taxes all came out to be the same)?

The only reason why someone would believe the former would bring them happiness is because humans greatly exaggerate their future positive / negative experiences and fail to account for the regression to the mean which always follows, thereafter.

So, if you’d like more overall happiness in your life, break up your positive experiences and power through the negative ones. And if you’re still trying to work out what things bring you the most happiness, check out Committed’s free assessment.