Today we're going to talk about a concept that might feel intuitive. You might know what this feels like kind of deeply on your own, but we're going to talk about it through the lens of how you can use it to your advantage. This is a psychological principle. It's been shown to be true, and you will likely resonate with the realities that you've experienced around this concept. This simple concept is called hedonic adaptation. What is hedonic adaptation? If you've heard of this, you've probably heard of it in a negative context, a negative context, because hedonic adaptation is typically referred. When we're talking about how humans respond to emotional input, hedonic adaptation basically says that after a given stimulus, we will return to our baseline level of happiness. Think about this for a second. After a given, sometimes even intense change. An intense stimulus. We will return to our baseline level of happiness. This means that even if you get your dream job, even if you get a 25% raise, almost anything that happens in your job, in your personal life, most people, those changes, those incidental changes throughout your life. Are not going to have a lasting impact on your happiness because of this psychological principle, hedonic adaptation. Now here's the flip side. Most of the bad things that could happen will not change your baseline level of happiness. It goes in both directions. You can have an extreme negative event. Some extreme examples of this might include losing your job, or maybe even more extreme, losing a limb. Now there are limits, of course. There are limits to how much hedonic adaptation can handle. For example, if you were able to suddenly retire, that might have a different level of effect or different impact on your happiness than just getting a raise. Similarly, there is some amount of money you could lose that would have a lasting impact on your happiness. But for the most part, humans are adaptable. That is what hedonic adaptation tells us. If we know this about ourselves, if we don't let this surprise us, we can use it to inform, for example, how we might go about forming new habits. Simple example of this, if you used an emotional event, an emotional change to try to form a habit, your hedonic adaptation might kick in. And that's what we're going to do. And the very positive feeling that you got from that emotional change is going to result in a letdown when that change doesn't persist. If you try to form a habit out of the sheer feeling that you have, the sheer feeling of motivation that you have, the moment that you fail to follow through on that habit, you're going to have kind of a whiplash effect because of hedonic adaptation. You got used to the high very quickly. You adapted to the high of that motivation feeling. And when the motivation disappeared, you adapted. If you've never thought about this concept before, it may also help you set goals or values in your career. If you imagine a world where getting that next job or achieving that title is going to make you significantly happier than you are. That may be true for a short period of time, but it's unlikely to be a lasting change in your baseline level of happiness. However happy you are today, assuming that you don't have major negative situations that are affecting your baseline happiness, however happy you are on average is likely to be however happy you are in the long run. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. thanks so much for listening to today's episode of developer tea i hope you enjoyed this discussion on hedonic adaptation i hope you can turn around and use this to your advantage when you think about your life and the changes that you go through on a regular basis and how you come back from those things whether that's a difficult thing a negative thing or a positive thing how you return to your normal your kind of emotional homeostasis this is very important for understanding what you care about in life thanks so much for listening and until next time enjoy your tea