Constantly chasing short-term gratification can lead to disappointment, exhaustion, and inefficiency. Want more cool stuff? You can find all sorts of great tools at my Resources page. Hedonic adaptation is a psychological process that causes us to quickly adapt to positive experiences and return to a default state of happiness. Principles: Life and Work, by Ray Dalio.Quartz’s Prescribing Play to Kids article.Wait But Why’s Life is a Picture article.Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, by Shunryu Suzuki.

Record for Eating the Most Wisconsin Cheese Curds.Other things we mentioned in this episode: Todoist: If you’re a student or educator, you can get Todoist’s awesome Premium features – like project templates and automated reminders – for 50% off at.

Get 10% off your first domain name purchase by going to /cig.

Hover: Your personal brand is important, and it starts with your domain name.

I’m confident we can - it just means we’ll have to approach things a little differently than usual. So what can we do with this? Can we actually become happier, or is everything less useful than we had hoped? On the other hand, if you completely fail an exam you may be devastated this week, but after a little while you’ll likely not even remember the exam without prompting (unless it was particularly traumatic). So if you make more and more money, your lifestyle will simply change to require and expect that money, and you won’t feel nearly as excited about it a year after your big raise. It basically means that our expectations and desires in life respond in part to the circumstances in which we find ourselves. According to Wikipedia, The hedonic treadmill is the tendency of a person to remain at a relatively stable level of happiness despite changes in fortune or the achievement of major goals. The hedonic treadmill, or hedonic adaptation, may be to blame. Have you ever noticed that as certain things become better or worse, your overall happiness doesn’t seem to change very much? the hedonic treadmill trap, whereby we work harder and harder without ever achieving happiness.