Think back to something you badly wanted. A particular job, maybe. A flat in a decent neighbourhood. A phone you’d been eyeing for months, or a person who finally said yes.
I bet you had a little movie running in your head. In it, you got the thing, and afterwards you were different: calmer, sorted, and finished with wanting.
Then it happened, and the first few days really were good. You told everyone. You kept looking at it. Somewhere in the third or fourth week, though, you caught yourself scrolling through listings for the next thing, and a small, ugly thought showed up: is this it?
If you’ve had that thought, relax. Nothing is wrong with you. Psychologists have been studying this exact letdown for about fifty years, and they call it the hedonic treadmill.
Nobody Tells You About the Morning After
We grow up with a script. Study hard, get the marks, get the seat, get the profits, and get the house. Every step is handled like a bit-end line, and somewhere at the back of the remaining one, happiness is supposedly ready.
So when you cross a line and feel a polite “hmm, okay”, it’s confusing. Worse, it feels rude. You start telling yourself that people would kill for what you have and that you’re being ungrateful. Now you’re empty and guilty, which is a bad combination.
But look at it from a survival angle for a second. A mind that reached permanent satisfaction would have been a disaster for our ancestors. Why bother finding better food, better shelter, and a safer cave? The restless ones kept looking and survived. We’re their descendants, and we inherited the restlessness along with the ability to refresh a shopping cart at midnight.
Where the Idea Came From
The phrase goes back to 1971. Two psychologists, Philip Brickman and Donald Campbell, wrote about how human beings regulate to changes in their circumstances, good or bad. Their photo became a treadmill: you could run as tough as you like and nevertheless grow to be in which you commenced.
Here’s how it plays out. Something awesome occurs, and your temper shoots up. Something awful happens, and it plunges. But given enough time, most people drift back toward their usual level, which researchers call a ‘baseline’ or ‘set point’. The raise gives you a bump, then the bump wears off, and you’re your normal self again. Only now your rent is higher, or your EMI is.
“Hedonic” simply means to do with pleasure. So the hedonic treadmill is chasing pleasure and ending up, more or less, where you began.
Part of that baseline seems to be inherited. In the Nineties, David Lykken and Auke Tellegen studied twins and concluded that more or less half of the variations in long-term well-being between people may trace back to genes. Take the precise parent loosely, on account that people nonetheless argue about it. The rough idea has held up, though. Some folks just wake up with a sunnier default, and events push them around less than you’d guess.
The Lottery Study, and What It Actually Said
Almost every article on this topic mentions lottery winners, usually in one breathless line: winners aren’t any happier, and people who become paralysed adapt fully. Neat. Also not what the paper found.
The study came out in 1978 from Brickman, Dan Coates, and Ronnie Janoff-Bulman. They talked to 22 lottery winners, 29 people who’d been left paralysed by accidents, and a control group. Two results mattered. The winners didn’t rate themselves as clearly happier than the controls. And they enjoyed ordinary things, like a chat with a friend or a magazine, less than the controls did. The authors’ explanation was a contrast. After you’ve had a huge high, everyday pleasures look washed out.
The accident victims were, as you’d expect, less happy than the control group. They weren’t nearly as low as outsiders would have predicted, though, and many were hopeful about the future.
Now the fine print. It was small and old, and later research has pushed back. Bigger studies of lottery winners have found that they do report higher life satisfaction. So a fair summary is that windfalls don’t rewire your inner life the way you imagine, but they don’t do nothing either. What the study really shows is the gap between how good we expect things to feel and how good they feel once we have them.
Why the Shine Wears Off
Several things are going on at once, and they stack.
You stop noticing. The brain makes choices up on change a great deal more than on consistent situations. Your first morning in a new flat, you notice the smell, the balcony, and the sound of the door. By month three, you walk past all of it. The flat didn’t get worse. You just stopped seeing it.
The bar moves. When income goes up, spending goes up, and so do expectations. A salary that would have seemed unreal five years ago becomes the number you “need”. You’ve moved the finish line without telling yourself.
Other people. Leon Festinger wrote about social comparison back in 1954, long before Instagram. Now we do it several times a day. You get promoted and feel great until you see a batchmate announcing a bigger title at a bigger company. Suddenly your news feels small. A lot of happiness is relative, and we don’t only want good things; we want to be slightly ahead.
Wanting isn’t liking. The neuroscientist Kent Berridge has spent decades on this. His work points to two separate systems in the brain: one drives craving (dopamine is deeply involved), and another produces actual enjoyment. Craving can be loud and urgent. The enjoyment of finally having the thing is quieter and shorter. It explains why the hunt often beats the trophy.
We guess badly. Daniel Gilbert and Timothy Wilson call it the affect bias: we overestimate how intensely and how long a future event will affect us. We imagine the peak and forget the rest, meaning the traffic, the bills, and the dull Tuesday meeting that comes right after the celebration.
Put together, you get what Tal Ben-Shahar labelled the arrival fallacy, the belief that reaching a goal will leave you happy for good. It’s a lovely belief. Reality just doesn’t cooperate.
But Is It Really a Treadmill?
Most articles stop above. I don’t think they should, because the science moved on.
In 2006, Ed Diener, Richard Lucas, and Christie Scollon published a paper called “Beyond the Hedonic Treadmill”. They argued that baselines aren’t nailed down. Following the equal humans for years showed that a few occasions leave an enduring mark: losing a spouse, long-term unemployment, and severe disability. Adaptation is real; however, it is uneven. It’s faster for some occasions than others, and it varies from person to person.
Marriage is a good example. Lucas and colleagues followed thousands of people and found that, on average, satisfaction rises around the wedding and then settles back. But an average hides individuals. Some people ended up durably happier, and some durably less so.
Money has a similar plot twist. A famous 2010 paper by Daniel Kahneman and Angus Deaton claimed that everyday emotional well-being stopped rising past roughly $75,000 a year in the US. Matthew Killingsworth’s later data disagreed, and in 2023 the two sides published a joint paper. Their finding was that for most people, happiness keeps climbing with income. Among the unhappiest group, extra money stops helping at some point, probably because what’s bothering them isn’t a money problem.
So the treadmill is real, but it isn’t a brick wall. I’d call it a strong current. You can’t stop it, but you do get to decide how you swim.
The Old Indian Version
There’s a story in the Mahabharata that could pass as a case study. King Yayati is cursed with sudden old age. He persuades his youngest son, Puru, to trade youth with him, and Puru agrees. Yayati then spends a thousand years indulging every pleasure available to him. At the end, he arrives at a conclusion that’s hard to improve on: desire doesn’t die when you feed it. It grows, as if with ghee poured on it. He hands the youth back and leaves.
The Gita covers similar ground, more quietly. In chapter two, Krishna traces how fixating on what we crave leads to attachment, attachment to desire, and blocked desire to anger and confusion. Not far from that passage is the well-known advice to do your work without clutching at the result. Buddhism has a word for the whole pattern: tanha, thirst, which it treats as the root of dissatisfaction.
You don’t need to be religious to get something out of this. These weren’t sermons meant to soothe anyone. They were observations, made by people in different centuries who watched the same loop run and drew the same conclusion: whatever you’re chasing can’t carry the weight you’re putting on it.
What Actually Helps
You can’t turn adaptation off. What you can do is slow it down and aim your effort at things that fade more gently. Here’s what the research supports.
Put money toward experiences and people. Leaf Van Boven and Thomas Gilovich noted in 2003 that stories tend to present longer-lasting pride than items. A trip will become a tale you may tell for years. A device turns into a gadget. Experiences are also more difficult to rank in opposition to another person’s.
Protect your relationships. The Harvard Study of Adult Development has tracked its members for more than eighty years, and its clearest result is that near relationships predict health and happiness in later lifestyles higher than almost anything else. One reason is probably that humans do not get bored the manner a brand-new couch does. They stay unpredictable.
Mix things up. Adaptation loves sameness. Sonja Lyubomirsky has argued that varying your pleasures slows their fading. Take another route home. Cook something you’ve never tried. Don’t binge a whole series in a weekend. A little bit of scarcity keeps things interesting.
Be grateful, but don’t overdo it. Robert Emmons and Michael McCullough observed in 2003 that those who frequently indexed matters they were grateful for reported better well-being. Lyubomirsky’s work provides a wrinkle: a weekly practice appeared to overcome doing it 3 times a week, possibly due to the fact that each day’s lists grow to be recurring. Also, be specific. “I’m grateful for my family” slides right off. “My sister drove two hours to help me shift house” sticks.
Spend on someone else. In a 2008 experiment, Elizabeth Dunn, Lara Aknin and Michael Norton observed that folks who spent cash on others felt happier than individuals who spent the identical quantity on themselves. It isn’t always magic, and it may not be paintings if it feels like a responsibility, but giving your thoughts something to experience that has nothing to do with comparison.
Choose goals you’d still want if nobody clapped. Status, follower counts, and bigger numbers are the fastest way back onto the treadmill, because they have no natural ending. Goals built around getting better at something, or around people you love, behave differently. They reward you along the way, so there’s less to lose at the finish line.
Pay attention to the walk. I know this sounds like a poster in a dentist’s waiting room. It’s also the most practical thing hidden inside all this research. If all of your pleasure is stored on the finish line, you’ll spend most of your life without it. If some of it lives within the daily work, the small wins and the people around you, the end-line matters much less.
So, Why the Emptiness?
We feel empty after getting what we wanted because we handed the goal a job it couldn’t do. We wanted it to make us permanently content. All it could really give us was a burst of pleasure and a new starting point.
That isn’t always a tragedy. It’s how the machine is built, and understanding that makes it easier to stop blaming yourself. Next time you experience a flat after a huge win, attempt to analyse it as a message and no longer as a verdict. Your mind is saying the goal has been absorbed and it’s ready to move on.
What you do with that restlessness is your call. You can chase the next bright component and stay in the system. Or you could appear nicely at what’s already around you, the human beings, the routines, the paintings you sincerely like, and give it the attention you once gave the intention.
Neither choice switches the treadmill off. But one of them lets you enjoy the run.
If the emptiness sticks around for weeks, or starts to feel heavy and hopeless, it’s worth talking to a counselor or doctor. That isn’t the treadmill anymore, and support helps.
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