Why Success Stops Feeling Good: The Psychology of the Hedonic Treadmill
We’re taught to believe that once we reach a certain milestone—be it a job title, financial status, or life dream—we’ll finally feel like we’ve “arrived.” We’ll finally be happy.
But when, after years of striving, we finally reach the place we’d been aiming for, many of us feel… suspiciously empty. Like we should be more fulfilled—but we’re not.
Research shows that even our biggest successes quickly become our new normal, and we end up chasing the next milestone just to feel the same.¹ This tendency to return to our baseline level of happiness—regardless of major positive or negative experiences—is known as hedonic adaptation, or the hedonic treadmill.
Especially for the high-achiever, over-worker, and perfectionist, learning about the hedonic treadmill can be life-changing—giving us not only permission, but incentive, to break free from the narrow cage of striving and success.
In this article we’ll explore why—and discuss which new sources of joy and meaning are scientifically shown to fill our cups, and keep them filled.
The Hedonic Treadmill: How Striving Keeps Fulfillment Out of Reach
Think about the greatest achievement you’ve experienced so far.
When you finally got there—when you finally hit that goal you’d spent months or years reaching toward—how long did the satisfaction last?
If you’re anything like me or the high achievers I’ve coached, your answer will probably land somewhere between “Honestly, I hardly celebrated; I just looked to the next thing” to “It felt good for a week. Maybe two? But it didn’t last long.”
I can speak for myself: writing a book had been my dream all my life. I still have my journal from age four, filled with backwards Rs and stick-figure drawings of the boys I liked in my preschool class.
Throughout adolescence, fantasy novels offered companionship and comfort when I couldn’t find them elsewhere. And later, as a young adult, books like The Dance of Intimacy by Harriet Lerner and Facing Codependence by Pia Mellody gave me language for feelings I hadn’t been able to name.
Writing a book was the only dream of mine that ever had staying power—others, like becoming a Senator or a music promoter, flitted on and off center-stage—so I assumed I would feel an enormous sense of arrival if, and when, I ever got there.
When I established myself in the world of coaching and finally pitched my first draft of STOP People Pleasing to agents, I was excited. When my agent moved the book through the pitch process to publishers, I felt surreal, seized by electricity.
The dream was so close. I could practically taste it.
On a warm day in mid-May, my book deal was finalized with Simon and Schuster. I drove over the University of Washington bridge with the windows down, golden evening light beaming through the Cascades as The 1975 blared on the stereo. Drumming on the steering wheel, singing full-volume, I was riding a full-blown high.
That night, I called my parents to celebrate.
The next day, my partner and I sat with our morning coffee, talking over the details of the deal, excited.
The next day, my editor called with edits for the manuscript, ideas for titles. I paced back and forth outside, phone pressed to my ear, feeling the first hint of anxiety as we discussed quick turnarounds and looming deadlines.
The next day, one of my peer’s books got a front page spread in a major publication. I felt an unwanted dose of adrenaline and concern: Would my book do well? How well? Who would blurb it? How would it compare? Would it be good enough?
Within four days, the high of my achievement had worn off, and unfamiliar anxieties, challenges, and metrics became my new reality. I was no longer an aspiring author; I was an author, in a saturated landscape of other authors, trying to put out a successful book.
Just like my old goal of getting a book deal, this new benchmark of having a successful release beckoned, shimmering with promise—and I was willing to walk a harrowing road there, including a wildly fast manuscript turnaround, 14-hour days every day for weeks, and a summer spent catching the last rays of the sunset from the grocery store parking lot—the only outing I had energy for.
Despite careening at double speed toward a full-fledged burnout, I told myself it didn’t matter, because it would all pay off when I “finally got there.”
To say the quiet part out loud: I never “got there.”
The moment I hit every new goal—the press feature, the overseas book deal, the release, the copies sold, the reception—the promised land dissolved beneath my feet and materialized just down the road.
Like a donkey chasing a carrot on a stick, I moved blindly forward—until, as I share in my story here, the endless striving ultimately led to an acute clinical burnout, a complete disenchantment with achievement for achievement’s sake, and an existential crisis.
HAVE YOU BEEN HERE BEFORE? Can you relate?
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Psychologically, what’s happening when we reach our long-awaited goal and the satisfaction immediately dissolves?
And despite experiencing this over and over again, why do so many of us keep striving anyway?
The Hedonic Treadmill: Striving to Nowhere
In 1971, psychologists Philip Brickman and Donald Campbell proposed a theory that people return to a stable level of happiness regardless of external changes. They named their theory hedonic adaptation, or colloquially, the hedonic treadmill.
In 1978, Brickman and his colleagues put their theory to the test. They surveyed three groups—recent lottery winners, accident victims who had become paraplegic, and a control group—to test how these events affected their happiness levels over time.
We would assume that lottery winners’ happiness would be permanently elevated, while accident victims’ would be permanently reduced—but this wasn’t the case. Brickman and his colleagues found that study participants adapted to both good and bad changes, and their overall happiness tended to stabilize over time.
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According to psychologists Frederick and Lowenstein, the hedonic treadmill is the result of a few psychological processes happening at once:¹
Shifting reference points: When we reach a milestone we once aspired to, that level becomes our new normal (like me and my book deal). What used to feel extraordinary now feels standard—and this upgraded comparison baseline means we need more to feel the same level of satisfaction. (For example: After your promotion, you get used to your higher salary. Later, a small raise feels underwhelming, because your expectations have adjusted upward.)
Habituation: Repeated exposure to the same situation reduces our emotional response, so what once felt exciting gradually feels normal. The emotional intensity fades, even though the stimulus itself hasn’t changed. (For example: You land your first big client and feel thrilled at the success. After a few months, winning similar clients feels routine, and the initial excitement fades, even though your business hasn’t changed.)
Social comparison: We evaluate our happiness relative to others’ successes or possessions, so someone else’s achievements can make our own feel less significant. (For example: You get a book deal, but then you hear that another author in your circle got a larger deal or a bestseller status. Your achievement feels smaller because you’re comparing yourself to others’ successes rather than valuing your own.)
As a result of these processes, no matter how much we keep “running” on the hedonic treadmill, we don’t get much further in terms of lasting happiness.⁷
It’s worth noting—as a lover of nuance—that since 1978, a few caveats have been added to the hedonic treadmill theory. They’re footnoted at the end of the article for you to browse, if you’d like. As with any overarching trend, individual differences and outliers exist.
Psychologist Ed Diener concludes that “Hedonic adaptation is a powerful force— but it is not so complete and automatic that it will defeat all efforts to change well-being.”⁵ (We’ll go over the efforts that do work in just a minute.)
So yes: hedonic adaptation is a fact of life.
Worst-case scenario, we ignore this fact—continue living over-worked, anxious, and rushing toward new goal posts—and ignore our present-moment lives for the sake of some false promised land.
But the best case scenario is that we use our knowledge of the hedonic treadmill to our advantage. Here’s how 👇
3 Ways High Achievers Can Use The Hedonic Treadmill to Our Advantage
1) The hedonic treadmill is justification, motivation, and incentive to stop building our lives around chasing the next thing.
Typically, the cycle of success for high achievers looks something like this:
But knowing about hedonic adaptation can break this cycle. Instead of Step 5—assuming that our lack of satisfaction is due to not being successful enough—we can realize that our dissatisfaction actually comes from the hollowness of the cycle of striving itself—and the way the cycle prevents us from pursuing activities that would allow us to enjoy the here and now.
2) The hedonic treadmill reduces personal shame by reframing burnout and disenchantment as the inevitable consequences of striving on a treadmill that leads nowhere—not as the result of something we did “wrong” or “not well enough.”
I can’t tell you how many times I—and the high-achievers I’ve worked with—have assumed that our lack of fulfillment from success was a personal pathology.
When we don’t find joy in the narrative of achievement-driven happiness we’ve been fed by our media, schools, and communities since childhood, we assume we must be broken.
“I have everything I wanted, so why do I still feel empty?”
“I must be lazy, because I just don’t want to hustle anymore.”
”I’m so ungrateful. I have it all and I still want more!”
The hedonic treadmill shows that burnout and disenchantment aren’t personal failings. In many cases, they’re powerful (albeit painful) awakenings, where we realize that we were sold a false promise of fulfillment—and can now choose another way.
I LEFT A LIFE THAT LOOKED GOOD ON PAPER
TO BUILD A LIFE THAT ACTUALLY FELT GOOD.
READ MY STORY HERE.
3) The hedonic treadmill gives us permission to diversify how we spend our time and energy.
As high achievers, we spend energy on activities that will “set us up for the future” while neglecting activities that would contribute to our well-being in the present—like community, creativity, play, service, and connection.
In retrospect, I’m so saddened by how many of these sacrifices I’ve made since childhood.
As a kid, my mom gave me one Personal Day every year: a day where I’d play hooky from school to do fun activities with her, like roller skate, do craft projects, or, most often, take a trip to the Jersey shore. In fifth grade (!), I refused my Personal Day, concerned that missing a day of school would affect my grades. (It wouldn’t.)
In college, instead of doing a semester abroad in Greece—an experience that would have ignited my appetite for adventure and broadened my lens of the world—I, certain I wanted to have a future into politics, chose to do a “domestic” semester in Washington DC. I literally spent four months alphabetizing blue file folders from 9-5 instead of wandering the whitewashed cliffs of Santorini.
And when my book was coming out, I can’t begin to tell you how many birthday parties, backyard concerts, family visits, and campfires I turned down in order to create “just one more post” or “one more marketing email.”
The formula behind each of these decisions was: This is worth it, because the path I’m choosing will ultimately make me happier. The hedonic treadmill shows this isn’t true.
We can use our understanding of the hedonic treadmill to help us divest from fruitless striving—but we can also use it to help us invest in activities and practices that research shows build sustainable fulfillment.
4 Ways to Combat Hedonic Adaptation and Create Fulfillment That Sticks
“As successful as you are, were, or hope to be in your life and work, you are not going to find true happiness on the hedonic treadmill of your professional life. You’ll find it in things that are deeply ordinary: enjoying a walk or a conversation with a loved one, instead of working that extra hour, for example. This is extremely difficult for many people. It feels almost like an admission of defeat for those who have spent their lives worshipping hard work.”— Arthur Brooks
As researchers deepened their understanding of the psychological processes underlying hedonic adaptation, they began to strategize how those processes could be circumvented.
Psychologists Lyubomirsky, Sheldon, and Schkade developed the Hedonic Adaptation Prevention (HAP) Model: a selection of activities that have been proven to slow the rate of hedonic adaptation, helping us find more fulfillment and reliably increase our baseline happiness.⁴
At this point, it won’t come as a surprise that the activities in the HAP Model don’t involve ambitious goal setting, striving, or climbing the professional ladder 😉 They involve things that are, admittedly, a little more ordinary:
1) Doing intrinsically motivated activities—not externally motivated ones.
Intrinsically motivated activities are those we do for the sheer enjoyment or interest they bring, while extrinsically motivated activities are those we do for rewards or validation—as a means to some other end.
Many high achievers forget how to access intrinsic motivation. They’ve spent so many years pruning away the roles, joys, and hobbies that don’t serve success that doing something for its own sake feels foreign.
But learning how to reconnect with intrinsic motivation and desire is crucial, because they’re the backbone of lasting fulfillment. Intrinsically motivated activities buffer against hedonic adaptation because the pleasure comes from the activity itself, not its fleeting results, and that pleasure doesn’t fade as quickly as novelty-driven highs.
We can’t succeed our way into a happier future—but we can build a happier present by engaging in activities we actually enjoy for their own sake.
(I work with many of my private clients to excavate their intrinsic motivation and determine their desires beyond the ladder they’ve been climbing. You can learn more about my Hustle to Heart private coaching work here.)
2) Replacing pursuits that are pleasure-driven with pursuits that are meaning-driven.
Instead of activities that produce a short-lived spike in positive emotion, research shows that activities that give us a deep-rooted sense of meaning—like helping others, nurturing relationships, pursuing personal growth, and working toward intrinsic goals—deepen our sense of self and contribute to our sense of belonging. Both of these are more stable and lasting components of well-being than fleeting positive emotions¹²
(For more on meaning-driven activities, be sure to read my article Research says these 4 things give life meaning—and we’re missing them after this!)
3) Meditation slows the rate of hedonic adaptation and increases our capacity to savor positive experiences.
One of the forces driving hedonic adaptation is habituation: the more we experience something, the more the novelty wears off, and our emotional response fades.
Mindfulness meditation—the intentional, nonjudgmental awareness of the present moment, observing thoughts, feelings, and sensations as they arise—has been shown to combat the habituation process. It helps us pay deeper attention to, and savor, our experiences, keeping these moments fresh and alive.
In some studies, meditation has been shown to not just slow hedonic adaptation, but increase our baseline state of happiness, helping us cultivate a more enduring sense of well-being that doesn’t depend on our circumstances.⁶
(If you’ve been wanting to experiment with meditation but haven’t known where to start, I recommend checking out some of Tara Brach’s guided mindfulness meditations. They’re where I started with meditation years ago.)
4) Practicing gratitudes prolongs happiness by keeping special moments special.
One of the drivers of the hedonic treadmill is the shifting of reference points: when something becomes “normal,” we no longer appreciate it and crave more. But the practice of gratitude helps us harness all we can from our original positive experiences and retain their position in our minds as something “special.”
When we spend time savoring how special something felt—like a loving text from a friend, a meaningful client session, or the sunset we caught on our evening run—our reference points shift more slowly. Turns out that all the hype about gratitude lists is warranted—not as a corny practice, but a habit that actually shifts our brain chemistry.
As a coach who helps disenchanted high achievers find meaning and purpose beyond conventional success, I find the fact of the hedonic treadmill incredibly grounding: the most compelling case I’ve heard for being present, here and now, for what really matters.
When you live in a world that celebrates the hustle, it takes courage to step off the hamster wheel and build a life rooted in real fulfillment, not just achievement. Even when we’re aware that hedonic adaptation exists and the success treadmill leads us nowhere, it can still be difficult to take the leap and build a life designed around something more.
I would love to help you get there. You can learn more about my private coaching offerings—including my flagship private coaching program, Hustle to Heart—here.
If you enjoyed this, you might like these other reads on the blog:
👉 My Story: How I left a life that looked good on paper for a life that actually felt good.
👉 Research says these 4 things give life meaning—and we’re missing them.
Nuances to Hedonic Adaptation
Psychologist Ed Diener—a prolific happiness researcher endearingly referred to as “Dr. Happiness”—noted in a 2006 paper that happiness is not a single measure, but is composed of distinct ingredients: the presence of positive emotions, the absence of negative emotions, and overall life satisfaction. An event can affect some of these ingredients more than others—and adaptation can happen for each at different rates.⁵
Additionally, some studies show that major life events can produce lasting shifts in happiness for some people—and some people’s adaptation processes are slower or faster than others’.
Citations
¹ Frederick, S., & Loewenstein, G. (1999). Hedonic adaptation. In D. Kahneman, E. Diener, & N. Schwarz (Eds.), Well-being: The foundations of hedonic psychology (pp. 302–329). New York, NY: Russell Sage Foundation.
² Mauss, I. B., Tamir, M., Anderson, C. L., & Savino, N. S. (2011). Can seeking happiness make people unhappy? Paradoxical effects of valuing happiness. Emotion, 11(4), 807–815. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0022010
³ Schaffner, A. K. (2025, June 26). How to escape the hedonic treadmill and be happier (M. Neuhaus, Ed.). PositivePsychology.com. https://positivepsychology.com/hedonic-treadmill/
⁴ Sheldon, K. M., & Lyubomirsky, S. (2012). The challenge of staying happier: Testing the hedonic adaptation prevention model. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 38(5), 670–680. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167212436400
⁵ Diener, E., Lucas, R. E., & Scollon, C. N. (2006). Beyond the hedonic treadmill: Revising the adaptation theory of well-being. American Psychologist, 61(4), 305–314. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.61.4.305
⁶ Fredrickson, B. L., Cohn, M. A., Coffey, K. A., Pek, J., & Finkel, S. M. (2008). Open hearts build lives: Positive emotions, induced through loving-kindness meditation, build consequential personal resources. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 95(5), 1045–1062. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0013262
⁷ Brickman, P., Coates, D., & Janoff-Bulman, R. (1978). Lottery winners and accident victims: Is happiness relative? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 36(8), 917-927. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.36.8.917
⁸ Diener, E., & Seligman, M. E. P. (2002). Very happy people. Psychological Science, 13(1), 81–84.
⁹ Ryff, C. D. (1989). Happiness is everything, or is it? Explorations on the meaning of psychological well-being. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 57(6), 1069–1081. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.57.6.1069
¹⁰ Baumeister, R. F., & Vohs, K. D. (2002). The pursuit of meaningfulness in life. In C. R. Snyder & S. J. Lopez (Eds.), Handbook of positive psychology (pp. 608–618). Oxford University Press.
¹¹ Lambert, N. M., Stillman, T. F., Hicks, J. A., Kamble, S., Baumeister, R. F., & Fincham, F. D. (2013). To belong is to matter: Sense of belonging enhances meaning in life. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 39(11), 1418–1427. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167213499186
¹²Lyubomirsky, S., Sheldon, K. M., & Schkade, D. (2005). Pursuing happiness: The architecture of sustainable change. Review of General Psychology, 9(2), 111–131. https://doi.org/10.1037/1089-2680.9.2.111