How Giving Up Something Pleasurable May Increase Your Happiness

You are very likely familiar with the benefits of fasting...you abstain from something in order to improve your health and enjoy exactly that - health - more and longer. Equally, if, for example, we eat too much chocolate because it makes us happy, the effect of the chocolate making us happy will decrease over time. I.e. while we'd continue eating chocolate, the effect of us being happier because of it will decrease over time.

This phenomenon is also called 'hedonic adaptation'.

The same can be observed in my parts of our lives: e.g. in Austria, where I come from, people tend to complain when the bus or tram is 2min late. However, in other countries, you may not even have public transport or it leaves whenever. Since Austrians are so used to having public transport readily available, we rarely appreciate it anymore. And, from initially being happy of having had it, we even tend to get angry when it isn't available once.

What is one aspect of your life where you have observed hedonic adaptation?

p.s. this has been studied extensively in research. One such research article is "Give It Up: A Strategy for Combating Hedonic Adaptation" (Quoidbach & Dunn, 2012)

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