UC Riverside

Happiness seekers tend to focus on changing their life circumstances, such as buying a new house, switching jobs, or getting married. However, people have been found to adapt to both positive and negative life changes, such as marriage, job promotion, disability, and widowhood. This process-known as hedonic adaptation-can serve as a formidable barrier to achieving lasting happiness. The Hedonic Adaptation Prevention model outlines why people adapt to life changes and sheds light on how adaptation to favorable events can be forestalled and how adaptation to unfavorable events can be hastened. In this chapter, we focus on a positive change as the model's starting point, which is associated with an immediate boost in well-being and a gradual decline back to baseline. Individuals adapt to positive life changes due to increasing aspirations and declines in the number of positive events and emotions associated with the change. Fortunately, lasting happiness change is indeed possible, as adaptation can be slowed or arrested in a number of ways, such as feeling greater appreciation for the good things in life and introducing greater variety.