Maintain the Magic and Avoid Hedonic Adaptation

Why is it that when a relationship is new it is exciting and makes us happy but after a while the excitement wears off and we’re not quite so happy anymore? Science suggests it is because of Hedonic Adaptation. This theory says that while a life change can cause us to become happier (or unhappier) after a while the change becomes normal and we return to a similar level of happiness as before. We might think that dating the perfect person, getting a pay raise or buying a new thing will make us eternally happy and breaking up, taking a pay cut or even injuring ourselves will make us forever unhappier, in reality the change in happiness is short lived. Human beings are amazing, we can adapt to almost anything from living in freezing sub-zero temperatures to scorching heat so in many ways our ability to adapt is a good thing. But wouldn’t it be nice if we could make that magic last a bit longer? Maybe we can.

According to Hedonic Adaptation, our happiness decreases for two reasons. The first is when something ‘new’ arrives our brain sensitivity to it increases, as it becomes ‘normal’ our brains are less sensitive. An example of this is the sounds I noticed when moving from an area close to an airport in London to Brighton, near the beach. When I first moved to the coast the seagulls woke me up at daybreak every morning — they are noisy and not something I enjoyed hearing at 4.30am in summer. After living with seagulls for a while I stopped noticing them and they rarely wake me up these days. I can go to the area I grew up and be constantly aware of aeroplanes overhead, a thing I never noticed when I lived there. The second reason is that as we get used to our ‘new’ thing our aspirations rise — we live to our means. When my husband and I first started living together the sofa we had was not very comfortable. As soon as we could we bought a new, extremely comfortable sofa. For the first month or so every time I sat on it I felt such comfort, such pleasure. After a while when I sat down I just sat down and didn’t notice the pleasure from our sofa but I wanted some cushions and a foot stool, because if I could sink back in some soft cushions and put my feet up I’d be really comfortable. The sofa isn’t any more or less comfortable than it was but once I got used to the initial comfort my thoughts moved to wondering what would be even better?

Luckily, there are things we can do to slow down our adaptation to a new relationships and keep the magical feeling alive for longer: variety, appreciation and breaks.

Variety

New experiences are by their nature new and so can slow down adaptation. You may have noticed that relationships tend to fall into rhythms and routines, breaking the routine gives variety, brings newness and slows down adaptation. Go and do new and different things together, if you like to go out for a meal on a Friday night go to a different restaurant with different cuisine each week, go on a Wednesday or a Tuesday and switch up when you go out to eat. Choose a new activity to do together, whether it is going to an art gallery, canoeing, having a cocktail making competition or going on a weekend away, it doesn’t matter what it is so long as it is something you don’t do together usually.

Doing new things also helps us experience time more slowly so the times we spend with our new date will seem to last longer too, in the way summers lasted forever when we were children but disappear in the blink of an eye as we get older. Introducing variety can also make us and our partner feel more attracted to each other because of the theory of Misattribution of Arousal. This theory says that when we do an exciting activity on a date, let’s say bungee jumping, we will feel a host of physical symptoms because of the activity and our brain will mislabel and link those feelings of excitement to the person we’re on a date with.

Appreciation

Remembering life before we met this fabulous new person, comparing it to what we experience now and showing appreciation helps us slow down adaptation. I can sit a million times on our (what is now an old) sofa and not notice how comfortable it is but when I remember our previous sofa I appreciate the one we have now so much more. Relationships are the same, remembering all the things we didn’t like about being single or our lives before this person arrived and how they make us happy now helps us to slow down adaptation.

Telling that person what and how we appreciate them also helps us, it could increase our persuasiveness with that person (according to Robert Cialdini’s Six Scientific Principles of Persuasion) and increase our own physical and psychological health. Appreciation is also shown to improve our self-esteem and mental health, according to other scientific studies. We can employ a variety of ways to express our appreciation and can include messaging, love notes, reciting a short poem, buying a gift and telling someone outright what we appreciate about them.

Breaks

When we are in a great new relationship it’s normal to want to spend as much time as we possibly can with together. Taking breaks, whether purposely planned or as a result of circumstance, slows our adaptation. The old saying that ‘Absence makes the heart grow fonder’ is true here. The science of Hedonic Adaptation finds that people in long distance relationships tend to be more resistant to it and even short breaks increase our pleasure. This even works with watching a TV programme — I can’t think of anyone I know that enjoys the commercial breaks during

their favourite programme but numerous studies have shown that advert breaks actually increase our enjoyment of the show. If you’re in a long distance relationship you don’t have much choice about breaks but there are many good reasons to cultivate an interesting and happy life when we are single and maintain that life as a person in our own right even once we start a relationship. While it’s not unusual to want to see our friends or do our hobbies less often because we’re busy kissing our new hottie it is way healthier to keep on doing the things we did before we met them.

So if you want to keep that excitement alive for longer, make variety, appreciation and breaks a regular part of your life and relationship. Even if you are already in a relationship you can introduce these things and relight the magic.

Jacki Hickman Williams

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