The hedonic treadmill brings us back to baseline mood over time and makes it hard to be fully satisfied.

This pattern is unavoidable, so work with the treadmill without accelerating its immiserating dynamics.

Self-actualisation can overcome the treadmill by generating pleasant, fulfilling, and valuable experiences.

This requires harmonising your emotions, motivations, values, and reasons.

Do you “just want to be happy,” but feel like something is always missing?

Do you feel like you’re sprinting towards a rest that never arrives?

Do your highs never last as long as you’d like?

You might be stuck on what psychologists call the hedonic treadmill.

There are two bits to the treadmill. The first is homeostatically protected mood. Our high-arousal states, whether positive (joy) or negative (sadness), tend not to last. We return in short order to a mildly positive, low-arousal state.

The second is always being able to see ways that life could be better. For example, in our research interviewing people about how they report their life satisfaction, many say they would never give more than 8/10 because they wouldn’t want to say that they are completely satisfied.

One respondent who was 8/10 said: “If I’m really honest, I think ‘what could make my life better?’ I don’t actually know. I really have no clue.”

But they were still adamantly 8/10.

The hedonic treadmill has evolution’s fingerprints all over it. If we were always ecstatic or depressed, we wouldn’t prepare for the winter so industriously. If we weren’t on the lookout for ways to make things better, we’d eventually be overwhelmed by parasites and predators or outcompeted by rival tribes.

Why fear the treadmill?

Historically, we invented social technologies for........

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