The title of an article in the local newspaper caught my eye this morning: “Winning Lotto five times won’t buy you happiness”. A man won the lotto several times, even picking up some 6-figure prizes twice in one week. Lucky, right? Well, save your envy for someone else. Apparently his winnings led to a downward spiral that left him depressed and unhappy. Imagine that!
In his very interesting book “The Happiness Hypothesis”, Jonathan Haidt discusses hedonic adaptation, which explains how we often get less of a mood boost from obtaining things we genuinely expect will make us happy (like winning the lottery), and how our emotional state very quickly returns to, or sometimes even ends up lower than, the pre-winning levels.
So what’s going on here? Why does this happen?
Think of the difference between weather and climate. Day-to-day weather at a particular location can vary a lot. It can be dry in the morning and rain in the evening, or be pretty warm one day and have a cold front push in the next. Weather is changeable, mercurial. Any particular state of weather doesn’t usually last long.
The climate of a place, however, is something else. It’s the long-term tendency of the weather, the typical way of things. You may have the odd cool day in a sub-tropical region, but the overall tendency in such places is toward warm, muggy days. Weather shifts day to day, while climate changes over longer periods.
Confusing weather for climate can lead to all sorts of problems. Consider the man who sees one strong rainstorm in the distance over the desert, and takes that to mean he can cross to the other side without bringing any spare water with him.
This is exactly how your emotional landscape works. You have your emotional weather, which is the day-to-day ups and downs you experience: moments of happiness, excitement, joy and relief, but also moments of fear, trepidation, anger and anxiety. Your emotional climate is more about the set point of your emotions: Are you a generally happy person, even when you are facing challenges? Or perhaps you are typically anxious and fearful, even when you are secure and have no obvious problems facing you.
As with the natural world, your emotional weather can rapidly change from moment to moment or day to day, but your emotional climate is much more stable, whether for good or for ill.
And that brings us back to the lucky devil with his multiple lottery wins. Hedonic adaptation means that even when a change in our circumstances (like winning the lottery) can give us a nice boost to our happiness, that kind of boost is always experienced as part of our emotional weather. It usually does not shift our emotional climate at all, which means that within just months even the luckiest lotto player in the world will be brought right back to his base level, his climatic zero.
So what are we to do? Does all this mean that nothing will ever bring us lasting happiness?
Intriguingly, most people would argue that they feel a certain way because of their situation (the external circumstances), and that if only that would change, they would achieve lasting happiness. However, it ends up only affecting their emotional weather.
The key to unlocking true happiness starts with the realisation that lasting happiness and fulfillment come from within and takes the form of a directed and purposeful life journey taken by us, born explorers.
The journey is yours and yours alone – embrace it, direct it, own it.
With love,
Jean-Pierre