What is your pleasure, Sir?
Now, if you are a horror movie addict like me, you might remember this line. It is the first and last line to the horror movie Hellraiser (I love this movie so much I even have a tattoo of it). If you have not seen this movie, one of the common misconceptions is that the bad guy is Pinhead, a demon sent from Hell to punish. But in reality, the antagonist is a man named Frank, a person who pursued pleasure all over the world trying to find it in its ultimate form, only to discover that it would lead to his death and him being literally dragged down to Hell. Hellraiser is a movie about the human condition of the pursuit of pleasure and what we will do to attain it.
Now I know what some of you might be thinking, that you would not go to such extremes as Frank to search the entire world over for the ultimate high of pleasure. And you most likely are not willing to sell your soul to attain it. But we have to ask ourselves if any of us is really that entirely different from him in that inner desire for the pursuit of pleasure or the longer-lasting feeling of happiness.
Take a moment and examine your own life.
I want you to take a moment and examine your own life. Think of a time when you might have landed that dream job you had strived for or got the promotion you worked hard for and how you felt inside. Think of those feelings you got from beginning a relationship with someone you yearned to be with. Or recall the emotions you might have had when you finally could purchase that home you wanted or the car you had your eye on. Humanity strives for pleasure and happiness; the body’s reward system keeps us pushing and pursuing in life.
Now, I want you to think of that moment you just recalled and the emotions you felt about it six months later…1 year…2 years…3 years. Did you keep that same high level of emotional happiness within you all that time, or did it lessen as the days passed?
What came up for you?
If you found that the pleasure you got from that job, relationship, or item you purchased lessened over time (I know this happened to me), then what you are suffering from is a condition known as hedonic adaptation. First described by psychologists Shane Frederick and George Loewenstein, this condition looks at the fact that all living things adapt to the environment around them, and that happiness (hedonic) is one of those things that we will adapt to. Hedonic adaptation has also been given the name of the hedonic treadmill as we all keep running towards that pursuit of happiness in the things we do in life. Still, we ultimately find ourselves always remaining in the same place with a base level of enjoyment.
Chasing more.
When we get that dream job or promotion that we work so hard for, we adapt to the presence of having it in our lives after we get it, causing the pleasurable emotions to decrease, which might push us to look for something bigger or better. When we can be in that relationship we have yearned to be in; we get used to having that person in our lives as time passes by, which could potentially trigger feelings of dissatisfaction and our mind to search for someone else to regain that rush of pleasure that we had once felt before with the person we are currently with. And when we get that house, we always dreamt of or something we always wanted to purchase, we grow used to having it within our lives as it becomes a part of our everyday experience, pushing us to look for something else that we can buy that might fulfill that absence of happiness.
Hedonic adaptation can even occur in situations that could be life-changing for the involved persons. A fascinating case study of lottery winners was done by Brickman, Coates, and Janoff-Bulman in 1978. Anyone who plays the lottery will think of everything they will do with the money and how much better their lives will be with financial concerns lifted from their shoulders. However, they discovered in their study that individuals who had won the lottery were no more happier than people who had lost it within 18 months. Even winning an unimaginable amount of money will still cause a person to adapt to it over time and cause them to return to the same levels of happiness they were at before they had even won.
Our minds will play tricks on us as the happiness begins to fade. We might find issues or concerns with our jobs that we did not see when we started working. Or we might find flaws in the person we are with that might have been easily overlooked when we were riding that high of pleasure but are now more challenging to look past with the emotions stabilizing. Pretty much all of us have probably experienced finding a better model with more features when it comes to the things we purchase. Nothing is wrong with what we have; we seek reasons to justify our pursuit of more as our emotions come back down.
Hedonic adaptation is saying that humanity is an addict in their own way. The high that we are striving for is a source of happiness, and the come down that we go through is the lessening of the emotion over time, causing us to seek out that next new high that can bring us back up. It is this addictive behavior that is the reason why it is so essential for those of us who have suffered from addiction and are living a life of recovery to be aware of it because we do not want to begin to transfer our addictions to other parts of our lives.
We need to break the cycle.
What is fascinating is how we can battle against the up-and-down roller coaster of hedonic adaptation through something we are often told to practice in recovery anyway. Gratitude. When we become grateful for the things we have, we can bump up our satisfaction with them and maintain an elevated sense of pleasure. Many of us might already have our own ways of building gratitude; we might have learned various techniques from rehab, worked with therapists and sponsors, or discovered our own self-discovered ways.
Stoic philosophers have an interesting technique to battle against hedonic adaptation that I will present here. It is one that I have used in my own life ever since becoming a follower of the philosophy. And it is specifically tailored for the ills of hedonic adaptation we suffer from.
In what has become known by the term ‘negative visualization,’ we are to imagine what we have in life and what we would do if we lost them. The negative part of this term is in reference to subtracting them from our own lives.
Start small.
What the Stoics suggest is to start with the small things. Do you have that favorite coffee mug you use every morning or item of clothing you like to wear? What would you do if they were suddenly gone from your life? Cups break easily, and clothing stains and tears, so it is a possibility. Now move to something more significant, like your car breaking down or an accident that causes it to be totaled. Think about where you live, being evicted by a landlord (if you rent), or your house being foreclosed on or destroyed in a natural disaster. Or take a moment to think about your job and what it would mean if you were fired or laid off. See, these are all things that could happen to anyone and have happened to many people throughout the existence of humanity. You might have experienced some of these moments (things breaking, car accidents, losing a job, etc.) in your life multiple times.
We can gain two potential advantages from practicing negative visualization in this way. First, we can become better prepared for the challenges of life. We have taken time to think about what we would do if these events occurred. We planned out our response and what steps we might take if we were to deal with the loss of these things. Second, we can also begin to build gratitude for what we have in life. Yes, you just imagined what you would do if you lost these things, but right now, for the moment, you can appreciate the fact that you still have them. It helps to battle against hedonic adaptation because we mentally practice them not being a part of our regular environment as we realize that they may not always be there.
The Stoics even recommend that we carry negative visualization to the ultimate level and think about it in relation to the people in our lives. Think about the partners we are with and what we would do if the relationship were lost. To think of friends and family and how we would respond if they moved away, or the relationships burned down. For those of us who have dealt with addiction, these kinds of scenarios might be pretty familiar to us, as we can have the remarkable ability to destroy relationships through addiction.
We are also supposed to consider the worst-case scenario that can happen to the people we love: their deaths. We are to imagine what we would do if they passed away and we had no chance of having them in our lives ever again. We all live a mortal existence, and the reality is that for any of us and those we care for, today can be our last day to live.
Contemplating the death of our loved ones could build gratitude in quite a unique manner. In the book The Guide to the Good Life by William Irvine, he imagines a scenario of two fathers: one who sees endless days ahead with his child and another who pictures every day as if it could be the last. He then posed the question of how each of these fathers might treat the current day with their child and who would have the potential of fewer things undone or unsaid if their child ever did pass away.
Finding a sense of gratitude.
Ultimately, what the Stoics realized is that it is through contemplating the death of our loved ones that not only can we prepare ourselves for the worst-case scenario of that occurring but also build a sense of gratitude within ourselves for having them in our lives each and every day. When the hedonic treadmill pushes for the happiness of having them in our lives to lower, negative visualization brings it back up as we imagine losing them.
One final thing to understand about the negative visualization technique is that this does not have to become something you are constantly doing every single day of your life at all moments. It is not good to walk around and think these bad thoughts constantly. It can be something that you do on occasion when you are finding yourself less appreciative of life or questioning the life situation that you are in.
I had recently practiced negative visualization myself when it came to my job. I had changed careers during Covid to become a data analyst and struggled to find a position in this new career, which was difficult since this was my first time doing this work. And I was so delighted when I finally gained a position. However, after a year of working in this job, I found that the happiness had faded, and I was getting restless thinking about other work I could find. So, I took a moment and imagined what would happen if I had lost my position. It allowed me to see the positives of where I was working and what I was doing, and I found that the restlessness began to fade away from inside of me.
Those of us in recovery have already fought the brutal battle of overcoming addiction. The last thing we need to do is find ourselves falling into the addictive trap of hedonic adaptation and the highs and lows that come with it. Build gratitude in your life every single day. Cherish all that you have. Practice negative visualization and build appreciation by contemplating what it would feel like to lose what is in your possession.
Jump off the treadmill.
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