The Brain’s dirty little secret: the hedonic treadmill

Have you ever spent a few seconds or minutes staring at a hamster running in its little wheel?

Fascinated by the small creature’s efforts and determination and chuckling to yourself at the futility of the endeavor?.…

Well…Would it spoil the joy of that moment to find out that, biologically speaking, you are doing the exact same thing with your life?

I don’t know about your minds, but mine definitely has a LONG checklist of things to achieve or obtain, and infers that once I had them, they would “make me happy”: that dress, those shoes, that car, the toned abs, the nice apartment, maybe a promotion, the Oculus Rift I ‘ve been thinking about for 6 months, and so on….

This list weights heavily on your mind like a twisted iron hat and you feel the pressure constantly . This in turn motivates you to ambitiously “run the treadmill” in order to obtain those things one by one, while many more keep piling up on the waiting “to achieve” list…. And this is the moment when that hamster laughs back at you in contempt .

Apparently our brain software includes some sort of thermostat, because as you may have realized by now, the brain is a very conservative, status quo driven machine that hates change as it equates it with danger and doom. So nature created a wonderful little trick called ”adaptation” or “desensitization”.

It goes like this: Remember when you bought that 200$ bottle of perfume? You dress up in the morning , give it puff and the amazing smell floods your senses and makes you feel irresistible….for about 2 to 5 minutes ..then you could even forget you used the perfume in the morning, since the nose stubbornly refuses to acknowledge the existence of those molecules. (while others around you who had just been exposed, definitely sense them)

..and by the way, it goes the same with the other end of the scale type of smells ..

Or when you entered a 70 degrees Fahrenheit room after spending some time outside freezing…Oh, the Heavenly sensation of warmth that surrounds you and overwhelms you with pleasure!… again, for a few minutes, or how long it takes your body to reestablish its temperature. Then you feel nothing special anymore and go back to your own business as always.

So the nose has it, the skin receptors have it , unfortunately the brain has it to.. The chemicals that control feelings of pleasure and bliss are like hard core bankers, very tight on their assets. You get the desired thing you’ve fought for, chemicals are triggered- the pleasurable feeling rewards you for a short while, and then the brain says “Party’s over! We don’t like too much chemistry change around here, lets get back to our default state”

If you think this sounds bad, you haven’t heard the rest of it.

So not only do we cease to get pleasure from all the external things that we’ve struggled more or less hard to get and thought would bring us immense joy, but it also forever alters our EXPECTATIONS of what joy will mean in the future.

17 years ago when I was still in highschool the internet had just became a thing for Romanians too. There were Internet Cafees, places where you would pay good money, wait a lot in line for your turn, just to get half an hour or an hour of internet access (there were strict ratios, nobody could stay more than 2 hours). The Internet Cafee administrators were like some Gods on Earth..we could only imagine with envy how much time they would spend unencumbered surfing the net after the closing hours.

So imagine the pleasure of spending those minutes surfing the web….and contrast it to what we feel now daily. But at the same time consider the inner agony when you get to a hotel and realize there’s no wifi , or when a short blackout leaves you unable to continue watching your favorite series. Your expectations have forever been altered, and while having Wifi is not particularly pleasurable, NOT having it is millennial torture.

And to give the hamster the opportunity to laugh one last time, we humans have known about this important fallacy in our behavior for centuries…and done nothing about it…

I’ll leave you with the wise words of some 18th century guy, Jean Jacque Rousseau…It’s like he KNOWS us :)

“Since these conveniences by becoming habitual had almost entirely ceased to be enjoyable, and at the same time degenerated into true needs, it became much more cruel to be deprived of them than to possess them was sweet, and men were unhappy to lose them without being happy to possess them."

               Jean Jacques Rousseau in his Discourse on Inequality (published in 1754)