The Hedonic Treadmill


September 22, 2014 by Brian

Hedonic-TreadmillWe surveyed the room before the start of the meeting and no one had ever heard of The Hedonic Treadmill.  Whew!  Glad I wasn’t the only one.

This was one of those nights where the conversation was so much broader, and better, than the video that writing a blog about it just isn’t sufficient.  Probably safe to say…it was was a “had to be there” kind of thing.

So, what is the Hedonic Treadmill?  This following is from  Here is a link to the full article:

The technical definition

Huh, what does that mean?
You essentially have a set level of happiness where you consistently remain. When good things happen, that level of happiness can spike up. When bad things happen, that level of happiness can dip down. After good and bad events in your life, you eventually return to your set level of happiness.

Here is the video that kicked off the meeting:  Love the part about No-Name Cola!


We read the following from an article titled “How to Reset Your Happiness Set Point.”  You can find the entire article here. Or, here:


The point is that there are things that we constantly pursue that, in the end, do NOTHING to increase our level of happiness.  Just like being on a treadmill, we end up in exactly the same place that we started.

We broke into two groups, each with their own list to create and define.  The first group created a list of things that we (men) pursue that do NOT permanently increase our overall happiness.  We then compared their list, to the list created by the psychology professionals and discussed the statistics of each.  They are:

  • Beauty
  • Money
  • Sunshine
  • Children
  • Education
  • Choice

Children don’t’ make you happy?  What???  Yeah…. We had fun with this one.  Consider the following from

Parents are unhappy. I’ve checked, and for every subgroup of the population I analyzed, parents report being less happy than similarly situated non-parents.

Parents also make a sacrifice – in choosing to raise children, they intentionally or not are choosing meaning over happiness.

There is a negative correlation between happiness and having kids.  They also showed that kids decrease rather than increase marital satisfaction.

Maybe kids will make you happy. Maybe they won’t. Even if they make your happier… it probably won’t be by much.

So if you’re looking to have children to improve your marriage or to make you happy, like 76% of Pew respondents, who answered that one of the main reasons for their having kids was the ‘joy of children’, you may be making a mistake.

Think about it – you’ll spend thousands of hours and hundreds of thousands of dollars raising your children. If you spent that same time meditating, exercising, and strengthening your social relationships, and learning new skills, you’d be guaranteed to be happier.

Takeaway: Kids are for meaning and purpose. Friends and vacations are for happiness.

The second group created a list of things that DO permanently increase our happiness set point.  They are:

  • Having A Gratitude Journal
  • New Experiences
  • Serving Others
  • Having Faith
  • Increasing Confidence through Personal Accomplishment

Here is an explanation of why serving others is such a valuable tool for improving our own happiness set point.  This is also from the Psychology Today article link from earlier.




Which led us into a discussion of the difference between Purpose and Happiness.  This was way too complex to describe in a blog post.

Until next time.

One thought on “The Hedonic Treadmill

  1. Bill Bramer says:

    Interesting. Ah the “pursuit” of happiness.

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