What The Model Of Addiction Can Teach Us About Hedonic Adaptation

" There are sufficient resources in the world for the needs of everybody, but not enough for the greed of even a significant minority. "
― Millard Fuller

The reward center of your brain is a sucker for this pleasurable bad boy called dopamine. Repeat the behavior often enough, and you’ve formed a habit. For a behavior to turn into an addictive one, it has to meet two conditions. The first being repetition. The second being the “reward” that results from the repetition of the behavior of choice. The more a behavior is being rewarded, the more likely it is to happen again. (Hence why you still haven’t been able to get off social media yet;) )

The process doesn’t end there. The more we repeat a behavior that stimulates the reward center of our brain, the more our tolerance for that specific behavior increases. In other words, it takes more to reach the same type of euphoria. For instance, a long-distance runner who gets injured and can no longer run hours at a time may experience a psychological withdrawal as he no longer is provided with the same “high” that his longer runs used to provide him with.

Hedonic adaptation is a concept in the field of psychology that explains why we habituate ourselves to any life circumstances -whether they are positive or negative. In that way, we tend to return to what is called our preset “happiness baseline.” This is why injecting more money into our bank accounts, drugs into our veins, infatuation into our bloodstream, only comes with the promise of a short term high.

Before we know it, we need more to feel as “happy” as we would like to be. Yet sometimes, it’s no longer us that is in control of those impulses. More drugs would certainly not bring an addict any more happiness, in fact it might quite decrease it. But the thing is that through the repetition of consistent use, the reward center of his brain has grown dependent on the substance to keep on going at the same pace as it was before the use of substance entered the picture.

When it comes to the hedonic treadmill, consumerism can trap us into seeking more and wanting more. But by allowing our minds to cultivate such a mindset, we are shooting ourselves in the foot. While our thirst for “more” may never fade -our satisfaction certainly will. When we take part in this chase for higher highs -we teach our brains that it “needs” more to reach a certain level of contentment.

And sadly, all new things, new lovers, new experiences, new cars, new trips, new jobs, become old in time. One day, we may wake up in a yacht, in the most exotic of locations, free of any obligations, sitting on millions of dollars, and yet look at the view while thinking to ourselves that after all, this isn’t “it”.

But all this time, we have failed to understand that we don’t need more of the wrong things to reach a stable place of contentment - but rather a few of the good things poured into endless amounts of gratitude.