Overcoming Hedonic Adaptation
Given that hedonic adaptation is clearly a mixed bag, how, you might wonder, can we use our understanding of it to get more out of life? When adaptation works in our favor (such as when we get used to living with an injury), we should clearly let this process take place. But what about instances when we wish not to adapt? Can we somehow extend the euphoric feeling of a new car, city, relationship, and so on?
One key to changing the adaptation process is to interrupt it. This is exactly what Leif Nelson and Tom Meyvis did. In a set of experiments, they measured how small interruptions—which they called hedonic disruptions—influence the overall enjoyment and irritation we get from pleasurable and painful experiences. In essence, they wanted to see if taking breaks in the middle of pleasurable experiences would enhance them and if disrupting a negative experience would make it worse.
Before I describe their experiments and the results, think about a chore you don’t particularly look forward to doing. Maybe it’s preparing your taxes, studying for an exam, cleaning all the windows in your house, or writing postholiday thank-you letters to your horrid Aunt Tess and everyone else in your very large family. You’ve set aside a significant block of time to knock out this annoying task in a single day, and now you face this question: is it better to complete the chore all at once or to take a break in the middle? Alternatively, let’s say you’re soaking in a hot tub with a cool glass of raspberry iced tea, eating a bowlful of fresh strawberries, or luxuriating in a hot-stone massage. Would you want to experience your pleasure all at once or take a break and do something different for a short while?
Leif and Tom found that, in general, when asked about their preferences for breaking up experiences, people want to disrupt annoying experiences but prefer to enjoy pleasurable experiences without any breaks. But following the basic principles of adaptation, Leif and Tom suspected that people’s intuitions are completely wrong. People will suffer less when they do not disrupt annoying experiences, and enjoy pleasurable experiences more when they break them up. Any interruption, they guessed, would keep people from adapting to the experience, which means that it would be bad to break up annoying experiences but useful to interrupt pleasurable ones.
To test the painful half of their hypothesis, Leif and Tom strapped headphones to the ears of a group of participants and played for them the melodic sounds of . . . a noisy vacuum cleaner. This was no Dustbuster hum; it was a five-second blast of a large machine. A second, more unfortunate group of participants had the same experience, but theirs lasted for forty annoying seconds. Just imagine these poor souls gripping their armrests and gritting their teeth.
A third group of people experienced the displeasure of the forty-second-long vacuum sound followed by a few seconds of silence and then an additional burst of five seconds of the same annoying sound. Objectively, this last group experienced a larger quantity of unpleasant noise than either of the other two groups. Were they more annoyed? (You can try this at home. Have a friend turn the vacuum on and off while you lie on the floor next to it—and consider how annoyed you are in the last five seconds of each of these conditions.)
After listening to the sound, the participants evaluated their irritation levels during the last five seconds of the experience. Leif and Tom found that the most pampered participants—those who had endured only five seconds of sound—were far more irritated than those who listened to the annoying sound for much longer. As you may have guessed, this result suggests that those who suffered through the vacuum whooom for forty seconds got used to it and found the last five seconds of their experience to be not so bad. But what happened to those who experienced the short break? As it turned out, the interruption made things worse. The adaptation went away, and the annoyance returned.
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Evaluating an annoying experience with and without a break
Participants were exposed to a five-second vacuum cleaner sound (A), a forty-second vacuum cleaner sound (B), or a forty-second vacuum cleaner sound, followed by a few seconds’ break and then a five-second vacuum cleaner sound (C). In all cases the participants were asked to evaluate their annoyance during the final five seconds of the experience.
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The moral of the story? You may think that taking a break during an irritating or boring experience will be good for you, but a break actually decreases your ability to adapt, making the experience seem worse when you have to return to it. When cleaning your house or doing your taxes, the trick is to stick with it until you are done.
And what about pleasurable experiences? Leif and Tom treated two other groups of participants to three-minute massages in one of those fabulous chairs that people are always standing in line for at Brookstone. The first group received an uninterrupted three-minute treatment. The second group received a massage for eighty seconds, followed by a twenty-second break, after which the massage resumed for another eighty seconds—making their massage time two minutes and forty seconds, twenty seconds less than the uninterrupted group. At the end of the massages all the participants were asked to evaluate how much they had enjoyed the entire treatment. As it turned out, those who underwent the shorter massages with the break not only enjoyed their experiences more but they also said they would pay twice as much for the same interrupted massage in the future.
Clearly, these results are counterintuitive. What sweeter pleasure is there than that moment when you allow yourself to walk away from filing your taxes, if only for a few minutes? Why would you want to set down your spoon in the middle of eating a bowl of Ben & Jerry’s Cherry Garcia, especially when you’d been looking forward to it all day? Why get out of the warm hot tub and into the cold air to refresh your drink, rather than asking someone else to do it for you?
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Evaluating a pleasurable experience with and without a break
Participants were exposed to either a three-minute massage (A) or an eighty-second massage, followed by a twenty-second break and another eighty-second massage (B). In all cases the participants were asked to evaluate their enjoyment of the whole experience.
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Here is the trick: instead of thinking about taking a break as a relief from a chore, think about how much harder it will be to resume an activity you dislike. Similarly, if you don’t want to take the plunge and get out of the hot tub to refresh your (or your romantic partner’s) drink, consider the joy of returning to the hot water (not to mention that your friend will not realize that you are doing this to extend your own pleasure and consequently will highly appreciate your “sacrifice”).*
Adaptation: The Next Frontier
Adaptation is an incredibly general process that operates at deep physiological, psychological, and environmental levels, and it affects us in many aspects of our lives. Because of its generality and pervasiveness, there is also a lot that we don’t yet understand about it. For example, it is unclear whether we experience complete or just partial hedonic adaptation as we get used to new life circumstances. It is also unclear how hedonic adaptation works its magic on us or whether there are many paths to achieving it. Nevertheless, the following personal anecdotes might shed some light on this important topic. (And stay tuned, because more research on hedonic adaptation is on its way.)
TO ILLUSTRATE THE complexity of hedonic adaptation, I want to share some examples of ways in which I have not fully adapted to my circumstances. Because a large part of my injury is physically observable (I have scars on my neck, face, legs, arms, and hands), soon after my injury I started paying attention to the ways people looked at me. My awareness of how I appeared to them has given me a substantial amount of misery over the years. These days, I don’t meet that many new people in my day-to-day life, so I am not as sensitive about the way I look to others. But when I’m at large gatherings, and particularly when I’m with people whom I don’t know or have just met, I find myself highly aware of, and sensitive to, the way people look at me. When I am introduced to someone, for
example, I automatically take mental notes of how that person looks at me and whether and how he or she shakes my injured right hand.
You might expect that over the years I would have adapted to my self-image, but the truth is that time has not made a serious dent in my sensitivity. I certainly look better than I used to (scars do improve over time, and I’ve had many operations), but my overall concern about others’ response to my looks has not decreased much. Why has adaptation failed me in this particular case? Perhaps it’s like the vacuum cleaner experiment. Intermittent exposure to others’ reactions to my looks may be the influence that prevents me from adapting.
A second personal anecdote of failed adaptation concerns my dreams. Immediately after the accident, I appeared in my dreams with the same young, healthy, physically unscarred body I’d had before the injury. Clearly, I was either denying or ignoring the alteration of my appearance. A few months later, some adaptation took place; I began to dream about treatments, procedures, life in the hospital, and the medical apparatuses surrounding me. In all of these dreams, my image of myself was still unscathed; I still appeared healthy, except that I was weighed down by different kinds of medical devices. Finally, about a year after the accident, I ceased to have any self-image in my dreams—I became a distant observer in them. I no longer woke to the emotional torment of realizing all over again the extent of my injuries (which was good), but I never did get used to the new reality of my injured self (which wasn’t good). Disassociating from myself in my own dreams was therefore somewhat useful, but, Freudian dream analysis notwithstanding, it seems that my adaptation to my altered situation partially failed.
A third example of my personal adaptation has to do with my ability to find happiness in my professional life as an academic. In general, I’ve managed to find a job that allows me to work more hours when I feel good and work less when I am in more pain. In my choice of a professional career, I suspect that my ability to live with my limitations has a lot to do with what I call active adaptation. This type of adaptation is not physical or hedonic; instead, a bit like natural selection in evolutionary theory, it is based on making many small changes over a long sequence of decisions, so that the final outcome fits one’s circumstances and limitations.
As a child, I never dreamed about being an academic (who does?), and the manner by which I chose my career path was a slow, one-step-at-a-time process that stretched over years. In high school, I was one of the quiet kids in the class, raising my voice to tell an occasional joke but rarely to participate in any academic discussion. During my first year in college I was still undergoing treatments and wearing a Jobst suit,* which meant that many of the activities that occupied the other students were beyond my abilities. So what did I do? I engaged in an activity that I could take part in: studying (something that none of my previous schoolteachers would have believed).
Over time I began engaging in more and more academic pursuits. I started to enjoy learning and found considerable satisfaction in my ability to prove to myself and others that at least one part of me had not changed: my mind, ideas, and way of thinking.* The way I spent my time and the activities I enjoyed slowly changed, until at some point it became very clear that there was a good fit among my limitations, my abilities, and an academic life. My decision wasn’t sudden; rather, it was made up of a long series of small steps, each of which moved me closer and closer to a life that now fits me well and to which I’ve become gratefully accustomed. And thankfully, it’s one that I happen to enjoy a great deal.
OVERALL, WHEN I look at my injury—powerful, painful, and prolonged as it was—it surprises me how well my life has turned out. I’ve found a great deal of happiness in both my personal life and my professional life. Moreover, the pain I experience seems less difficult to bear as time progresses; not only have I learned how to deal with it, but I’ve also discovered things I can do to limit it. Have I fully adapted to my current circumstances? No. But I have adapted far beyond what I would have expected when I was twenty. And I am thankful for the amazing power of adaptation.
Getting Adaptation to Work for Us
Now that we have a better understanding of adaptation, can we use its principles to help us better manage our lives?
Let’s consider the case of Ann, a university student who is about to graduate. During the past four years, Ann has lived in a small dorm room with no air conditioner and old, stained, ugly furniture that she shares with two messy individuals. During this time Ann has slept on the top level of a bunk bed, and she hasn’t had much space for her clothes, her books, or even her miniature-book collection.
A month before graduation, Ann lands an exciting job in Boston. As she looks forward to moving into her first apartment and being paid her first real salary, she makes a list of all the things she would like to purchase. How can she make her purchase decisions in a way that will maximize her long-term happiness?
One possibility is for Ann to take her paycheck (after paying her rent and other bills, of course) and go on a spending spree. She can throw away the hand-me-downs and buy a beautiful new couch, an astronaut-foam bed, the biggest plasma television possible, and even those Celtics season tickets she’s always wanted. After putting up with uncomfortable surroundings for so long, she might say to herself, “It’s time to indulge!” Another option is to approach her purchasing very gradually. She might start with a comfortable new bed. Maybe in six months she can spring for a television and next year for a sofa.
Although most people in Ann’s position would think about how nice it would be to dress up their apartment and so would go on a shopping spree, by now it should be clear that, given the human tendency for adaptation, she would actually be happier with the intermittent scenario. She can get more “happiness buying power” out of her money if she limits her purchases, takes breaks, and slows down the adaptation process.
The lesson here is to slow down pleasure. A new couch may please you for a couple of months, but don’t buy your new television until after the thrill of the couch has worn off. The opposite holds if you are struggling with economic cutbacks. When reducing consumption, you should move to a smaller apartment, give up cable television, and cut back on expensive coffee all at once—sure, the initial pain will be larger, but the total amount of agony over time will be lower.
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How to space purchases to increase happiness
The graph below illustrates Ann’s two possible approaches for spending her money. The area under the dashed line shows her happiness with the shopping spree strategy. After the shopping spree Ann will be very happy, but her happiness will soon wear off as her purchases lose their novelty. The area under the solid line shows her happiness with the intermittent approach strategy. In this case, she will not reach the same level of initial happiness, but her happiness will be continually revitalized because of the repeated changes. And the winner? Using the intermittent approach, Ann can create a higher overall happiness level for herself.
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Another way of getting adaptation to work for us is by placing limits on our consumption—or at least our alcohol consumption. One of my graduate school advisers, Tom Wallsten, used to say that he wanted to become an expert on wines that cost $15 or less. Tom’s idea was that if he started buying fancy $50-a-bottle wines, he would get used to that level of quality and would no longer be able to derive any pleasure from cheaper wines.* Moreover, he reasoned that if he started consuming $50 bottles, over time he would have to escalate his spending to $80, $90, and $100 bottles, simply because his palate would have adapted to a higher level of finesse. Finally, he thought that if he never tried $50 bottles in the first place, his palate would be most sensitive to changes in wine quality of varieties in his preferred price range, further increasing his satisfaction. With those arguments in mind, he avoided the hedonic treadmill, kept his spending under control, became an expert in $15 wine, and lives very happily that way.
IN A SIMILAR vein, we can harness adaptation to ma
ximize our overall satisfaction in life by shifting our investments away from products and services that give us a constant stream of experiences and toward ones that are more temporary and fleeting. For example, stereo equipment and furniture generally provide a constant experience, so it’s very easy to adapt to them. On the other hand, transient experiences (a four-day getaway, a scuba diving adventure, or a concert) are fleeting, so you can’t adapt to them as readily. I am not recommending that you sell your sofa and go scuba diving, but it is important to understand what types of experiences are more and less susceptible to adaptation. Thus, if you are considering whether to invest in a transient (scuba diving) or a constant (new sofa) experience and you predict that the two will have a similar impact on your overall happiness, select the transient one. The long-term effect of the sofa on your happiness is probably going to be much lower than you expect, while the long-term enjoyment of and memories from the scuba diving will probably last much longer than you predict.
TO HEIGHTEN YOUR level of enjoyment, you can also think about ways to inject serendipity and unpredictability into your life. Here’s a little demonstration of this point. Have you ever noticed how hard it is to tickle yourself? Why? Because when we try to tickle ourselves, we know exactly how our fingers will move and this perfect predictability kills the joy of tickling. Interestingly, when we use our right hand to tickle our right side, we don’t feel any tickling sensation; but when we use our right hands to tickle our left sides, the slight difference in timing between the nerve system on the right and left side of the body can create a low-level unpredictability, and hence we can feel a slight tickling sensation.