Why Making More Money Never Feels Like Enough

You finally get the promotion.

You sit down with your boss, and they hand you a piece of paper telling you that you’re getting that $10,000 salary bump you have been chasing for the last three years.

Almost immediately, start mentally spending the extra money you’ll be making.

You think this is the tipping point where things finally get easier, where you can stop stressing about the bills and finally get ahead.

Fast forward six months.

You look at your credit card statement, you look at your checking account, and you realize you are exactly as broke and stressed as you were before the promotion.

Our inability to feel satisfied with a higher income happens because our brains are biologically wired to adapt to our surroundings as quickly as possible.

That’s good if you live in a cace and hunt for survival.

It’s not so good when you need to actively push against adapting to a slightly more expensive lifestyle following every pay raise.

There’s nothing easier than letting your lifestyle catch up to your income.

This psychological blind spot is called Hedonic Adaptation, and it was perfectly illustrated in a foundational behavioral study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology by researchers Philip Brickman, Dan Coates, and Ronnie Janoff-Bulman.

The researchers wanted to know what happens to people when they experience the ultimate financial windfall.

So, they studied people who won the lottery.

You would think that handing someone millions of dollars would set them on an irreversible path to a happier, easier life.

But the researchers found that sadly, that wasn’t the case.