Why are humans never satisfied?
'Hedonic adaptation is the tendency for humans to quickly adapt to major positive or negative life events or changes and return to their base level of happiness'
There you have it, it's science! When humans go through a significant life change, the emotions this brings are temporary. Even if you achieved a major goal, the satisfaction will only last a short time before your brain re-adapts to its new situation and starts asking for more!
In the same way, if you've lost a fortune and have to go back to being poor and working long hours, instead of becoming depressed, you get used to it. The sadness this event bring only lasts a short time, then you've adapted to this new life.
What does this mean? Well, if we thought reaching a 'destination' will bring us happiness, we're wrong! Turns out our brains will adapt to the new situation really quickly and return to its happiness set point. Then we start looking for the next journey, the next goal, without actually being content. So the road we think we're travelling on never really ends.
A happiness set point is where humans generally maintain a constant level of happiness throughout their lives, despite events that occur in their environment.
We get most of our happiness set point genetically and from our early childhoods, but by increasing our awarness of ourselves and our reality, we can help raise it.
The crucial problem that gets in the way is comparison. We lose touch with our reality when we focus on others instead. You might be happy with your 75k salary until you make a new friend who makes 500k, then your perception switches completely.
When we stop comparing, we might realize that our wage is enough for us at the moment. If we focus on our life as it is, as well as on our dreams, we might find a lot of things we are grateful for right now. By getting to know ourselves better we can set achievable goals and gradually increase our happiness base-line. It's really important to spend more time being in 'the now' and aware of the good things in our life as it is.
Thank you for reading and I hope you found this post useful.
Until next time, Steem on!
Corina
The emotions of human being is quite volatile with distinct frequency, especially when our goals met, but not all people never satisfied, many people settle less and that's what they get. But to those achievers and successful will never be satisfied because they gets bored easily, they need more challenging task it's quite exhausting to think about it, but it is more exhausting to just sit and relax, even if we are resting we can't rest forever because of the boredom, Boredom is indeed a great motivator to do something that accomplishes task.
This is the human nature of selfish sinning with his own hands and then blames his life, we must learn gratitude
Be yourself Be good
Thanks for sharing
Great post from you
This is human nature with never ending demand. Today I have good house to live, next day need a car, then social status. People find hapiness within it. If you want to be happy, do not require to find, it will automatically come. Thanks for sharing such nice thoughts.
Thank you for the very sobering post. I couldn't agree more that our happiness is constantly being reset. I've come to realize, as you've said, to not envy and compare yourself to others. That is the source of unhappiness. I think the source of continual happiness is love for friends, your spouse, and your family. Every other form of happiness is just temporary pleasure. Thanks for the grounding perspective.
Thank you for your comment. You are right, I also think loving and caring for others is the greatest source of joy in life.
By conscious breathing you can learn how to get control over your hormonal system and release happy hormones on will.
There is no such thing as an autonomous nervous system. Our cortex (thinking brain) can influence all systems in our body. Including the "autonomous" system which release hormones. Happy, sad, DMT, adrenaline. You name it.
Wim Hof is teaching you how to do this. You can start by watching this documentary:
yes this is true. but why exclude comfort zones? youve adapted but remain happy and it doesnt fade?
Why be satisfied when you can switch to Geico and get more? Lol!
Don't get me wrong. I know that I joked about it. But, being satisfied is good and healthy. However, when it's time for change or upgrade, then make the change.
nice post
Great topic
thanks for the great writing and for warning people.
Satisfaction can be viewed from different angles. Satisfaction brings about complacency when you are below what you ought to be. Not being satisfied brings about greatness with perils