The Hedonic Treadmill: Why Good News Never Lifts Your Baseline for Long

Imagine two people. One just won a substantial amount of money. The other just survived a serious accident that left them with a permanent disability. Common sense says the first person should be permanently happier and the second permanently less happy. That’s not what the research found — and the reason why has become one of the most important findings in the psychology of wellbeing.

The Original Study

In 1978, psychologists Philip Brickman, Dan Coates, and Ronnie Janoff-Bulman published a comparison of recent lottery winners, accident victims who had become paraplegic, and a control group. Within a relatively short window, both the lottery winners and the accident victims’ day-to-day happiness had drifted back toward roughly where it had started before the event. Neither extreme good fortune nor extreme misfortune produced the lasting shift that intuition predicts.

Psychologists call this hedonic adaptation. Most people know it informally as the hedonic treadmill: you run, and the scenery doesn’t change.

How the Treadmill Actually Works

The mechanism is adaptive, not broken. Human wellbeing appears to be calibrated around a baseline that resists permanent displacement in either direction — a useful trait for a species that needs to function after both good and bad events, rather than being permanently derailed by either. The problem is that this same mechanism applies to the achievements you deliberately chase. The promotion, the size of house, the number on the scale, the follower count — all subject to the same gravitational pull back toward baseline.

This is why “miswanting” — the term economists use for pursuing goals that won’t deliver the sustained satisfaction we expect — is so persistent. We predict the next achievement will be different. It rarely is, not because the achievement failed, but because the treadmill was never going to let any single achievement produce a permanent lift.

Why This Isn’t a Reason to Stop Trying

It would be easy to read the hedonic treadmill as an argument for giving up on ambition entirely, since nothing sticks anyway. That’s the wrong conclusion. The research doesn’t say achievement produces zero wellbeing benefit — it says the benefit is temporary and smaller than expected, particularly for extrinsic goals like money, status, and recognition. Edward Deci and Richard Ryan’s self-determination theory found that intrinsic goals — growth, connection, autonomy — produce a more durable wellbeing benefit than extrinsic ones, even when the extrinsic win is objectively bigger.

Getting Off the Treadmill, Not Off the Track

The practical answer isn’t to stop setting goals. It’s to stop expecting any single goal to produce lasting change in how you feel day to day, and to invest more deliberately in the things that don’t fully adapt away — strong relationships, a sense of autonomy over your own time, work that engages you regardless of outcome. These sources of wellbeing adapt more slowly and less completely than the external scoreboard does.

The treadmill keeps running either way. The only real choice is what you’re running toward while it does.

Recommended Reading

This article draws on ideas from Empty Success, the book this series is based on — and its sequel:

• Empty Success – Why Achieving Everything Can Still Feel Like Nothing, and How to Build a Life That Finally Feels Like Yours, by Kyomuhendo Janet
• Designing Meaningful Success – The Complete Guide to Excavating Your Values, Designing a Life That Lasts, and Sustaining It for Good, by Kyomuhendo Janet

Browse the full Strong Through Change library →