The Hedonic Baseline Reset

One must know how to conserve oneself: the hardest test of independence.
- Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

I’ve written this piece as a reminder to myself and anyone else that needs it. After having conversations with a few friends and colleagues recently, I’ve found that although this topic is typically common knowledge, it’s necessary to be reminded and incentivised to act on its findings.

In the late 70s, a group of psychologists led by Philip Brickman (before his tragic passing) studied lottery winners and paraplegics — people who had experienced extreme positive and negative life changes, and found something that upends most of our assumptions about happiness. A year after their life-changing events, both groups had returned to roughly the same level of happiness they had before, which is to say the lottery winners were no happier than they’d been before their windfall, and those suffering paralysis were no less happy than they had been before their accidents.

This is known as hedonic adaptation, with Brickman and his colleagues expanding this theory though the shorthand is simpler and more unsettling; we get used to things, all things, and faster than we’d like to admit.

This finding has been replicated hundreds of times since, across cultures, contexts and categories of experience. What it tells us is that we adapt to almost everything — raises, new cars, bigger houses, better phones, promotions, relationships, you name it. The initial spike of happiness fades within weeks, sometimes days, and we return to what researchers call our hedonic baseline, which is a kind of emotional set point that we orbit around regardless of what happens to us.

The implications of this are deeply uncomfortable if you sit with them for more than a moment, because it means that most of the things we’re chasing in the hope that they’ll make us happier won’t actually make us happier for very long, and it also means that most of the things we’re terrified of losing probably won’t make us as miserable as we think they will once we’ve had time to adjust.

I saw this with the Stoics, who arrived at the same conclusion from a different direction, without the benefit of controlled studies or peer review. They wrote extensively about people who kept accumulating wealth and possessions and never seemed any happier for it, no matter how much they acquired. They also pointed out, with their usual bluntness, that the things we think we need are almost always things we’ve lived without before and could live without again if circumstances required it.

They were trying to solve a practical problem that seems to have been just as persistent in ancient Rome as it is now:

How do you stay satisfied in a world that constantly encourages dissatisfaction, and how do you avoid becoming a prisoner of your own accumulated comforts?

The answer is not to keep adding more in the hope that eventually you’ll hit some threshold where enough becomes enough, because you won’t, the research is clear on that. The answer is to periodically subtract, to reset your baseline by temporarily removing things you’ve adapted to so completely that they’ve become invisible, then notice what happens when they come back into your life and you can actually feel their presence again instead of just assuming they’ll always be there.

Hedonic adaptation is sometimes called the hedonic treadmill (coined by British psychologist Michael Eysenck), you keep moving, you’re expending real energy, the effort is genuine, but you’re not actually getting anywhere in terms of lasting satisfaction.

A prime example is getting a raise and feeling great for a month, maybe less, then it becomes your new normal and you start thinking about the next raise, the next promotion, the next bump in status or income that will finally make you feel like you’ve arrived. You upgrade your living situation and it’s exciting for a few weeks while everything still feels new, then it’s just where you live and you start noticing the things that are still not quite right, the flaws you didn’t see at first or the ways it doesn’t quite match the image you had in your head.

You’ve bought something you’ve wanted for ages and the satisfaction lasts about as long as it takes to unbox it and set it up, and then it’s just another object in your house, invisible background furniture that you stop noticing entirely unless it breaks.

The problem we have isn’t desire itself. Desire is fine, it’s human and is probably necessary for getting anything done. The problem is thinking that satisfying desire will change your baseline permanently, or even for more than a few weeks. And then the new thing becomes invisible and you’re back where you started emotionally, except now you’re habituated to a higher level of consumption and anything less feels like deprivation even though objectively nothing has changed except your expectations.

This is how people end up on six-figure salaries feeling like they can’t afford anything, not because they can’t but because they’ve ratcheted up their spending to match their income, adapted to the new level, and now it all feels necessary in a way that would have seemed absurd to them five years earlier.

I’ve become recently fascinated with this pattern, and you can see why once you start paying attention to it in your own life. I echo the Stoics in that no amount of wealth is enough for the person who thinks wealth will make them happy. The happiness they’re looking for isn’t in the wealth, it’s in the psychological shift they’re imagining will happen once they have it. It’s how human psychology works at a fundamental level. But it’s also a trap if you don’t see it clearly, because you’ll spend your entire life chasing a feeling that disappears the moment you get close to it.

Here’s the counterintuitive part, If hedonic adaptation means we get used to improvements quickly, and we do, the research on this is overwhelming. It also means we get used to losses quickly, which most people find harder to believe until they’ve experienced it themselves.

But there’s an asymmetry here that matters more than it might seem at first. If adding something to your life gives you a brief spike of pleasure, removing something gives you a brief dip of discomfort, sharper at first than the pleasure of adding it was, then you adapt to the absence in roughly the same timeframe. But, here’s the key, when you bring it back after a period of absence, you notice it again, really notice it, in a way you couldn’t when it had always been there.

Let’s think of this a form of negative visualisation, though that term makes it sound scarier than it actually is in practice. Imagining what it would be like to lose the things you take for granted, i.e., your health, your relationships, your possessions, and your freedoms. Not to make yourself miserable or spiral into anxiety, but to make yourself aware of what you actually have right now in this moment.

Positive and social psychologies had arrived at a similar conclusion, which is satisfying in the way it always is when ancient wisdom and modern science point in the same direction. Studies on gratitude consistently show that it increases wellbeing in measurable ways, but not generic gratitude of the sort you might express in a journal prompt or a dinner table ritual.

What works is specific, concrete awareness of what you have now that you didn’t have before, or that you could lose tomorrow, or that someone else doesn’t have. One of the most effective ways to generate that awareness, it turns out, is through contrast. You don’t notice clean, cold water until you’ve been thirsty for a few hours. You don’t notice a comfortable bed or sofa until you’ve slept on the floor. You don’t notice how much easier your phone or computer makes your life until you’ve spent a day without it and had to navigate the world using nothing but your memory and your ability to ask strangers for directions.

A baseline reset is not deprivation. It’s not living like a monk or rejecting modern life. It’s a temporary, deliberate subtraction of something you’ve adapted to, so that you can feel its value again when it returns. The length and intensity will vary depending on what you’re resetting, but the principle is the same, remove something, notice the absence, bring it back, notice the presence.

Pick one category of spending you’ve habituated to and cut it for a month. Coffee shops, take out, clothing purchases, subscription services; whatever has become invisible background spending. Long enough that you notice its absence. Then bring it back again. What you’ll find is that the first coffee you buy after a month of making it at home tastes significantly better than the coffee you were buying every day without thinking about it. You’ve reset your appreciation for it. This works for almost anything you’ve stopped noticing because you have it all the time.

Spend a few days living more simply than you’re used to. Sleep on a harder surface. Eat plainer food. Wear older clothes. Walk instead of driving. The point is not to suffer. The point is to remind yourself that the baseline comforts of your life — the bed, the food, the temperature control, the convenience, are not neutral. They’re luxuries that you’ve adapted to so completely that they’ve become invisible. A few days without them makes them visible again.

I did a version of this in 2022 when I went mostly offline, and it’s the reset that had the most lasting impact. A period of time without your phone, news, social media, or streaming services. After a week without them and you’ll notice how much time you have, how much quieter your mind is, how differently you experience boredom. Then when you bring them back (if you bring them back), you’ll use them differently, and the control they have over you is diminished, because you’ll remember what it’s like not to have them.

This one is harder to prescribe because relationships are not commodities you can just remove and replace. But there’s a version of it that works. Spend some intentional time alone. Not just alone in your house while scrolling your phone. Properly alone. A day, a weekend, a week if you can manage it. What you’ll notice when you come back is how much you value the people in your life. You’ve reset your baseline for companionship and suddenly the people around you are truly visible again instead of just there in the background.

The mistake is thinking that the reset is the point. The point is what you learn from it. Most people, if they try a baseline reset at all, treat it like a challenge or a cleanse, something you do once to prove you can, then return to normal. That’s not useless, but it’s not the practice either. The practice is using the reset to recalibrate your awareness of what “normal” actually is.

When you remove something temporarily and then bring it back, you’re not just resetting your appreciation for that specific thing. You’re training yourself to see the gap between necessity and habit. Most of what we think we need, we don’t. We just got used to it, and now the absence feels like deprivation. The reset shows you the difference. You start making different decisions because you’re operating from a clearer picture of what is actually adding value to your life versus what’s just there because it’s always been there.

We live in an economy designed to accelerate hedonic adaptation. Every app, every service, every product is optimised to give you a quick hit of satisfaction and then immediately suggest the next thing. The entire business model of most consumer technology is based on keeping you slightly dissatisfied so you keep consuming. Not unhappy enough to quit, but not satisfied enough to stop. It’s not a conspiracy. It’s just how the incentives are structured these days. But the end result is that your baseline keeps ratcheting up without you noticing.

The research on this is clear. People in the west have access to comforts and conveniences that would have seemed like science fiction a few generations ago, and yet reported happiness has not increased. In some demographics it’s decreased. We get used to improvements so fast that they stop registering as improvements. But part of it is also comparison. We’re comparing ourselves to more people, more often, across more dimensions than any previous generation, and because everyone else is also trapped on the hedonic treadmill, we’re all chasing each other in circles.

The baseline reset is one of the few ways out of this that doesn’t require rejecting modernity entirely. You’re not giving up your phone, your job, or your house. You’re just periodically stepping back from them so you can see them clearly again. It’s a recalibration. Most of what you have is optional, and that optional doesn’t mean worthless, but it does mean you get to choose it, rather than being controlled by it.

Here’s what a sustainable version of this looks like. Pick one area to reset every few months. Not all of them at once, that’s just asceticism and it’s not sustainable. One area. Material, comfort, digital, or social. Remove something from that area for a defined period; a week, a month, whatever feels significant but not punishing. Notice what happens. Notice what you miss and what you don’t. Notice how quickly you adapt to the absence. Then bring it back and notice how differently you experience its presence.

The goal is not to live in a state of constant deprivation. The goal is to prevent your baseline from drifting so high that ordinary life feels insufficient. You’re not trying to be grateful all the time, that’s plain exhausting. You’re trying to maintain the capacity for gratitude by periodically resetting your frame of reference. It’s the same logic as taking a break from exercise to let your muscles recover, except you’re letting your hedonic baseline recover from the constant upward creep of adaptation.

The default strategy most western people use for improving their lives, whether consciously or not, is addition. Add more income, more possessions, more experiences, more comfort, more options, more of everything that seems like it might close the gap between where you are and where you think you should be.

Subtraction is the opposite strategy, and it feels wrong at first because it runs counter to every message we’re getting from the culture around us about what makes a good life. Remove something, temporarily, and feel the gap where it used to be. It’s not a permanent lifestyle change or a commitment to minimalism or a rejection of modern comforts; it’s a reset button, a way of clearing your palate so you can taste your life again instead of just consuming it automatically.

And the strange thing is that it works better than addition for the thing addition is supposed to do. It makes you appreciate your life more, makes you feel like what you have is enough. Our ancestors knew this many moons ago without the benefit of controlled studies or replication or any of the mechanisms we use now to verify what’s true.

The question is whether you’re willing to try it, to test it against your own experience instead of just reading about it and nodding along before returning to the default strategy of accumulation that clearly isn’t working but at least feels familiar.

One thing a month, just one simple reset. See what you notice when it’s gone, and then see what you notice or feel when it comes back. That’s the entire practice.

Memento vivere,

Enda (The Irish Stoic)

Latest writing:

Currently reading: How to Think Like Leonardo Da Vinci by Michael J. Gelb
Listening to: Anything John Coltrane or Chill Music Lab (for work)
Learning: Polish phrases for upcoming trips