Chapter 6
On Adaptation
Why We Get Used to Things
(but Not All Things, and Not Always)
Man is a pliant animal, a being who gets accustomed to anything.
—FYODOR DOSTOYEVSKY
The late nineteenth century was a rough time for frogs, worms, and a number of other creatures. As the study of physiology blossomed in Europe and America (thanks in part to Charles Darwin), scientists went wild dividing, dismembering, and relocating these unfortunate subjects. According to scientific legend, they also slowly heated some of the animals in order to test the extent to which they could adapt to changes in their environments.
The most famous example of this kind of research is the apocryphal story of the frog in boiling water. Supposedly, if you place a frog in a pot of very hot water, it will scramble around and quickly leap out. However, if you put one in a pot of room-temperature water, the little guy will stay there contentedly. Now, if you slowly increase the temperature, the frog will stay put as it acclimates to the rising change in temperature. And if you continue to turn up the heat, the frog will eventually boil to death.
I can’t say for sure if this frog experiment works since I’ve never tried it (and I suspect the frog would, indeed, jump out), yet the boiling-frog story is the quintessence of the principle of adaptation. The general premise is that all creatures, including humans, can get used to almost anything over time.
The frog story is usually used pejoratively. Al Gore has found it a handy analogy for pointing out people’s ignorance about the effects of global warming. Others have used it to warn about the slow erosion of civil liberties. Business and marketing people use it to illustrate the point that changes in products, services, and policies—such as price increases—must be gradual, so that customers have time to adjust to them (preferably without noticing). This analogy to adaptation is so common, in fact, that James Fallows of The Atlantic argued, in a Web column called “Boiled-frog Archives,” that “Frogs have a hard enough time as it is, what with diminishing swampland and polluted waters. Political rhetoric has its problems too. For the frogs’ sake, and that of less-idiotic public discourse, let’s retire this stupid canard, or grenouille.”15
In fact, frogs are remarkably adaptive. They can live in water and on land, they change their colors to blend in with their environments, and some even mimic their toxic cousins in an effort to scare off predators. Humans, too, have an amazing ability to adapt physically to their environments, from the frigid, barren Arctic to scorching, arid deserts. Physical adaptation is a much-touted skill on mankind’s collective résumé.
TO GET A better view of the wonders of adaptation, let’s consider the way that our visual system functions. If you’ve ever gone to a matinee and walked from the dark movie theater to the sunny parking lot, the first moment outside is one of stunning brightness, but then your eyes adjust relatively quickly. Moving from a dark theater into bright sunshine demonstrates two aspects of adaptation. First, we can function well in a large spectrum of light intensities, ranging from broad daylight (where luminance can be as high as 100,000 lux) to sunset (where luminance can be as low as 1 lux). Even with the light of the stars (where luminance can be as low as 0.001 lux), we can function to some degree. Second, it takes a little bit of time for our eyes to adjust. When we first move from darkness to light, we are unable to open our eyes fully, but after a few minutes we get used to the new environment and can function in it perfectly. In fact, we acclimate so readily that after a while we barely notice the intensity of the light around us.
Our ability to adapt to light is just one example of our general adaptive skills. The same process takes place when we first encounter a new smell, texture, temperature, or background noise. Initially, we are very aware of these sensations. But as time passes, we pay less and less attention to them until, at some point, we adapt and they become almost unnoticeable.
The bottom line is that we have only a limited amount of attention with which to observe and learn about the world around us—and adaptation is a very important novelty filter that helps us focus our limited attention on things that are changing and might therefore pose either opportunities or danger. Adaptation allows us to attend to the important changes among the millions that occur around us all the time and ignore the unimportant ones. If the air smells the same as it has for the past five hours, you don’t notice it. But if you start smelling gas as you read on the couch, you quickly notice it, get out of the house, and call the gas company. Thankfully, the human body is a master at adaption on many levels.
What Can Pain Teach Us about Adaptation?
Another kind of adaptation is called hedonic adaptation. This has to do with the way we respond to painful or pleasurable experiences. For instance, try this thought experiment. Shut your eyes and think about what would happen if you were badly injured in a car accident that paralyzed you from the waist down. You see yourself in a wheelchair, no longer able to walk or run. You imagine dealing with the daily hassles and pain of disability and being unable to resume many of the activities that you currently enjoy; you think that many of your future possibilities will now be closed to you. In imagining such a thing, you probably think that the loss of your legs will make you miserable for as long as you live.
It turns out that we are very good at conceiving the future but we can’t foresee how we will adapt to it. It’s difficult to imagine that, over time, you might get used to the changes in your lifestyle, adapt to your injury, and find that it’s not as terrible as you once thought. It’s even harder to imagine discovering new and unexpected joys in your new situation.
Yet numerous studies have shown that we adapt more quickly and to a larger degree than we imagine. The question is: how does adaptation work, and to what degree does it change our contentedness, if at all?
DURING MY FIRST year at Tel Aviv University, I had the opportunity to reflect and later empirically test the idea of adaptation to pain.* One of the first classes I took was a course on the physiology of the brain. The purpose of the class was to understand the structure of different brain parts and relate them to behavior. How, Professor Hanan Frenk asked us, do hunger, epilepsy, and memory work? What enables the development and production of language? I did not have particularly high expectations going into a physiology class, but it turned out to be extraordinary in many ways—including the fact that Professor Frenk relied on his own personal history to direct his research interests.
Hanan was born in the Netherlands and emigrated to Israel in 1968 when he was about eighteen. Soon after he joined the Israeli army, an armored vehicle in which he was riding went over a land mine and exploded, leaving him with two amputated legs. Given this experience, one of Hanan’s main research interests was—not surprisingly—pain, and we covered the topic in some detail in class. Since I also had a substantial personal interest in the topic, I stopped by Hanan’s office from time to time to talk with him in more depth. Because of our similar experiences, our discussions of pain were both personal and professional. Soon we discovered many shared experiences with pain, healing, and the challenges of overcoming our injuries. We also found that we had been hospitalized in the same rehabilitation center and treated by some of the same physicians, nurses, and physical therapists, albeit years apart.
During one of these visits I mentioned to Hanan that I had just been to the dentist and that I hadn’t taken any novocaine or other painkillers during the drilling. “It was an interesting experience,” I said. “It was clearly painful, and I could feel the drilling and the nerve, but it didn’t bother me that much.” Surprised, Hanan told me that he too had refused novocaine at the dentist’s since his injury. We began to wonder whether we were just two strangely masochistic individuals or whether there was something about our long exposure to pain that made the relatively minor experience of tooth drilling seem less daunting. Intuitively, and perhaps egotistically, we concluded that it was likely the latter.
ABOUT A WEEK later, Hanan asked me to stop by his office. He had been thinking about our conversation and suggested that we empirically test the hypothesis that, assuming we were otherwise normal, our experiences had made us less concerned about pain. And thus my first hands-on experience with social science research was born.
We set up a small testing facility in the infirmary of a special country club for people who had been injured while serving in the army. The country club was a fabulous place. There were basketball games for people in wheelchairs, swimming lessons for those missing legs or arms, and even basketball for the blind. (Blind basketball looks a lot like handball. It’s played on the entire width of the court, and the ball has a bell inside.) One of my physical therapists in the rehabilitation center, Moshe, was blind and played on one of the teams, and I especially enjoyed watching him play.
We posted signs around the country club that read “Research volunteers wanted for a quick and interesting study.” When the eager participants, all of whom had endured a variety of injuries, arrived at our testing facility, we greeted them with a tub of hot water outfitted with a heating generator and a thermostat. We’d heated the water to 48? centigrade (118.4? Fahrenheit) and asked each participant to put one arm into it. At the moment a participant’s hand entered the hot water, we started a timer and asked him (all the participants were male) to tell us the exact point when the sensation of heat became a feeling of pain (which we termed “pain threshold”). We then asked the participant to keep his hand in the hot water until he could no longer stand it and at that point to pull his arm out of the tub (this was our measure of pain tolerance). We then repeated the same procedure using the other arm.
Once we finished inflicting physical pain on our participants, we asked them questions about the history of their injuries and about their experience with pain during their initial hospitalization period (on average, our participants had sustained their injuries fifteen years before submitting to our test) as well as in recent weeks. It took us some time, but we managed to collect information on about forty participants.
Next, we wanted to find out whether our participants’ ability to sustain pain had increased due to their injuries. To do this, we had to find a control group and contrast the pain thresholds and tolerances across the two groups. We thought about recruiting people who were not afflicted by any serious injuries—maybe students or people at a mall. But on reflection, we worried that a comparison with such populations would introduce too many other factors. Students, for instance, were much younger than our experimental group, and people selected randomly at the mall would likely have wildly varying histories, injuries, and life experiences.
So we decided on a different approach. We took the medical files of our forty participants and showed them to a doctor, two nurses, and a physical therapist at the rehabilitation hospital where Hanan and I had spent so much time. We asked them to split the sample into two groups, the mildly injured and the more grievously injured. Once that was done, Hanan and I had two groups that were relatively similar to each other in many respects (all participants had been in the army, injured, and hospitalized, and were part of the same veterans country club) but differed in the severity of their injuries. By comparing these two groups, we hoped to see if the severity of our participants’ injuries influenced the way they experienced pain many years later.
The severely injured group was made up of people like Noam, whose army job had been to disassemble land mines. At some unfortunate point, a land mine had exploded in his hands, piercing his body with numerous shrapnel wounds and costing him a leg and the sight in one eye. In the mildly injured group were men like Yehuda, who had broken his elbow while on duty. He had undergone an operation that had involved restoring the joint by adding a titanium plate, but he was otherwise in good health.
The participants who had been mildly injured reported that the hot water became painful (pain threshold) after about 4.5 seconds, while those who had been severely injured started feeling pain after 10 seconds. More interestingly, those in the mildly injured group removed their hands from the hot water (pain tolerance) after about 27 seconds, while the severely injured individuals kept their hands in the hot water for about 58 seconds.
This difference particularly impressed us since, in order to make sure that no one really got burned, we did not allow participants to keep their hands in the hot water for more than sixty seconds. We did not tell them in advance about the sixty-second rule, but if they reached the sixty-second mark we asked them to take their hands out. We did not need to enforce this rule for any participant in the mildly injured group, but we had to tell all but one of the severely injured participants to take their hands out of the hot water.
The happy ending? Hanan and I discovered that we were not as odd as we thought, at least not in respect to our pain response. Moreover, we found that there seems to be generalized adaptation involved in the process of acclimating to pain. Even though the people in our study had endured their injuries many years before, their overall approach to pain and ability to tolerate it seemed to have changed, and this change lasted for a long time.
WHY DID THIS past experience with pain alter participants’ responses to such a degree? Two people in our study offered a hint. Unlike the rest of our participants, these individuals suffered not from traumatic injuries but rather from diseases. One had cancer; the other had a terrible intestinal disease. Sadly, both were terminal cases. On the signs we had posted requesting study participants, we’d neglected to state any prerequisites, so when these two people, who didn’t have the types of injuries we were looking for, offered to help, I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t want them to suffer more pain for no reason, nor did I want them to feel unappreciated or unwelcome. So I decided to be polite and let them participate in the study but not to use their data in the analysis.
After the study was complete, I looked at their data and found something quite intriguing. Not only was their pain tolerance lower than that of the severely injured people (meaning that they kept their hands in the hot water for a shorter time), but it was also lower than that of the mildly injured ones. Though it is impossible to conclude anything based on data from only two participants, I wondered if the contrast between their types of ailments and the types of injuries that the other participants (and I) had suffered could offer a clue as to why severe injuries would lead people to care less about pain.
WHEN I WAS in the hospital, much of the pain I endured was associated with getting better. The operations, physical therapy, and bath treatments were all agonizing. Yet I endured them, expecting that they would lead to improvement. Even when the treatments were frustrating or didn’t work, I understood that they were designed to aid my recovery.
For instance, one of the most difficult experiences I dealt with for the first few years after my injury was overstretching my skin. Every time I sat with my elbows or knees bent, even for an hour, the scars would shrink by just a bit and the tightening of my healing skin would eliminate my ability to completely straighten my arms or legs. To fight this, I would have to stretch my skin by myself and with the help of physical therapy—pushing hard against the taut skin, not quite tearing the scars, though it felt as if I were. If I didn’t stretch the shrinking scars many times a day, the tightening would worsen until I could no longer achieve a full range of motion. When this happened, the physicians would perform another skin-transplant operation to add skin to my shrinking scars, and the whole skin-stretching process would start again.
A particularly unpleasant fight with my tightening skin had to do with the scars on the front of my neck. Every time I looked down or relaxed my shoulders, the tightness in this skin would be reduced and the scars would start to shrink. To stretch the scars, the physical therapists made me spend the night lying flat on my back with my head dropping over the edge of the mattress. In that way, the front of my neck stretched to its limit (the neck pain I still endure is a daily reminder of that uncomfortable posture).
The point is that even those very unpleasant treatments were directed at improving my limitations and increasing my range of movement. I suspect that people with injuries like mine learn to associate pain with hope for a good outcome—and this link between suffering and hope eliminates some of the fear inherent in painful experiences. On the other hand, the two chronically ill individuals who took part in our pain study could not make any connection between their pain and a hope for improvement. They most likely associated pain with getting worse and the proximity of death. In the absence of any positive association, pain must have felt more frightening and more intense for them.
THESE IDEAS DOVETAIL with one of the most interesting studies ever conducted on pain. During World War II, a physician named Henry Beecher was stationed on Italy’s Anzio beachhead, where he treated 201 wounded soldiers. In recording his treatments, he observed that only three-quarters of the hurt soldiers requested pain medication, despite having suffered serious injuries ranging from penetrating wounds to extensive soft tissue wounds. Beecher compared these observations to treatments of his civilian patients who had been hurt in all kinds of accidents, and he found that people with civilian injuries requested more medication than the soldiers injured in battle did.
Beecher’s observations showed that the experience of pain is rather complex. The amount of pain we end up experiencing is not only a function of the intensity of the wound, he concluded, but it also depends on the context in which we experience the pain and the interpretation and meaning we ascribe to it. As Beecher would have predicted, I came away from my injury caring less about my own pain. I don’t enjoy pain or feel it less than other people. Rather, I’m suggesting that adaptation, and the positive associations I’ve made between hurt and healing, help me to mute some of the negative emotions that usually accompany pain.
Now that you, dear reader, have a general understanding of how physical adaptation works (as in your visual system) and how adaptation to pain operates, let’s examine more general cases of hedonic adaptation—the process of getting used to the places we live, our homes, our romantic partners, and almost everything else.
BURNS VERSUS CHILDBIRTH
Back at the university, Professor Ina Weiner, who taught a course on the psychology of learning, told us that women have a higher pain threshold and tolerance than men because they have to deal with childbirth. Though the theory sounded perfectly plausible, it did not fit with my personal experience in the burn department. There I had met Dalia, a woman of about fifty who had been hospitalized after fainting while cooking. She had landed on a hot stove and had an extensive burn on her left arm, requiring skin grafting on about 2 percent of her body (which was relatively minor compared to many of the other patients). Dalia hated the bath treatment and bandage removal as much as the rest of us and she told me that in her mind, the pain of childbirth was nothing compared to the pain of her burn and treatments.
I told Professor Weiner this, but she was unimpressed with the anecdote. So I set up my water-heating equipment in a computer lab where I had a part-time job programming experiments and conducted a little test. I invited passing students to put a hand into hot water and keep it there until they could not stand it any longer in order to measure their pain tolerance. I also recorded their gender. The results were very clear. The men kept their hands in the tub much longer than the women.
At the start of the next class I eagerly raised my hand and told Professor Weiner and the whole class about my results. Unfazed and without losing a beat, she told me that all I’d proven was that men were idiots. “Why would anybody,” she sneered, “keep their hand in hot water for your study? If there was a real goal to the pain, you would see what women are truly capable of.”
I learned some important lessons that day about science, and also about women. I also learned that if someone believes something strongly, it is very difficult to convince him or her otherwise.*
When we move into a new house, we may be delighted with the gleaming hardwood floors or upset about the garish lime green kitchen cabinets. After a few weeks, those factors fade into the background. A few months later we aren’t as annoyed by the color of the cabinets, but at the same time, we don’t derive as much pleasure from the handsome floors. This type of emotional leveling out—when initial positive and negative perceptions fade—is a process we call hedonic adaptation.
Just as our eyes adjust to changes in light and environment, we can adapt to changes in expectation and experience. For example, Andrew Clark showed that job satisfaction among British workers was strongly correlated with changes in workers’ pay rather than the level of pay itself. In other words, people generally grow accustomed to their current pay level, however low or high. A raise is great and a pay cut is very upsetting, regardless of the actual amount of the base salary.
In one of the earliest studies on hedonic adaptation, Philip Brickman, Dan Coates, and Ronnie Janoff-Bulman compared the overall life happiness among three groups: paraplegics, lottery winners, and normal people who were neither disabled nor particularly lucky. Had the data collection taken place immediately following the event that led to the disability or the day after the lottery win, one would expect the paraplegics to be far more miserable than the normal people and the lottery winners much happier. However, the data were collected a year after the event. It turned out that although there were differences in happiness levels among the groups, they were not as pronounced as you might expect. While the paraplegics were not as satisfied with life as the normal people and the lottery winners were more satisfied, both paraplegics and lottery winners were surprisingly close to normal levels of life satisfaction. In other words, though a life-altering event such as a bad injury or winning a lottery can have a huge initial impact on happiness, this effect can, to a large degree, wear off over time.
A SUBSTANTIAL AMOUNT of research over the past decade has reinforced the idea that although internal happiness can deviate from its “resting state” in reaction to life events, it usually returns toward its baseline over time. Though we don’t hedonically adapt to every new situation, we do adapt to many of them, and to a large degree—whether we’re getting used to a new home or car, new relationships, new injuries, new jobs, or even incarceration.
Overall, adaptation seems to be a rather handy human quality. But hedonic adaptation can be a problem for effective decision making because we often cannot accurately predict that we will adapt—at least not to the level that we actually do. Think again about the paraplegics and lottery winners. Neither they nor their families and friends could have predicted the extent to which they would adapt to their new situations. Of course, the same applies to many other variations in our circumstance, from romantic breakups to failure to get a promotion at work to having one’s favorite candidate lose an election. In all of these cases, we expect that we will be miserable for a long time if things do not work out the way we hope; we also think that we will be enduringly happy if things go our way. But in general, our predictions are off base.*
In the end, although we can accurately predict what will happen when we walk from a dark movie theater to a sunny parking lot, we do a relatively poor job anticipating either the extent or the speed of hedonic adaptation. We usually get it wrong on both counts. In the long term, we don’t end up being as happy as we thought we’d be when good things happen to us, and we are not as sad as we expect when bad things occur.
ONE REASON FOR our difficulty in predicting the extent of our hedonic adaptation is that when making predictions, we usually forget to take into account the fact that life goes on and that, in time, other events (both positive and negative) will influence our sense of well-being. Imagine, for example, that you are a professional cellist who lives to play Bach. Your music is both your livelihood and your joy. But a car accident crushes your left hand, forever taking away your ability to play cello. Right after your accident, you are likely to be extremely depressed and predict that you will remain miserable for the rest of your life. After all, music has been your life, and now it is gone. But in your unhappiness and grief, you don’t understand how extraordinarily flexible you really are.
BALM FOR BROKEN HEARTS
When Romeo suffered over his breakup with his first girlfriend, Rosaline, you would have thought it was the end of the world. He stayed up all night and shut himself in his room. His parents were worried. When his cousin asked how he was faring, Romeo sounded as if he would die of hopeless love for the girl who’d rejected him. “She hath forsworn to love,” he complained, “and in that vow / Do I live dead that live to tell it now.” That night he met Juliet and forgot all about Rosaline.
Though most of us aren’t as fickle as Romeo, we are much more resilient than we think we are when it comes to getting over a broken heart. In a study of college students that lasted thirty-eight weeks, Paul Eastwick, Eli Finkel, Tamar Krishnamurti, and George Loewenstein contrasted romantic intuitions and reality. The researchers first asked students who were in romantic relationships how they expected to feel after a breakup (they thought they’d feel like Romeo, post-Rosaline), and then they waited. Over the duration of the long study, some of the students inevitably experienced romantic breakups, which gave the researchers an opportunity to find out how they actually felt after having fallen off a romantic cliff. Then the researchers compared the participants’ predictions to their actual feelings.
It turned out that the breakups were not as earth-shattering as the students had expected and the emotional grieving was much shorter-lived than they had originally assumed. This is not to say that romantic breakups are not distressful, only that they are generally far less intense than we expect them to be.
Granted, college undergrads are pretty fickle (particularly when it comes to romance), but there is a good chance that these findings apply to people of all ages. In general, we’re not that good at predicting our own happiness. Ask a happily married couple how they might feel about divorcing, and they will forecast extreme devastation. And though such a dark prediction is largely accurate, a divorce is often less devastating to a married couple than either member might anticipate. I am not sure if acting on this conclusion would lead to a good social outcome, but it does mean that we should not worry as much about breaking up. We’ll end up adapting to some degree, and there is a good chance that we will go on to live and love another day.
Consider the story of Andrew Potok, a blind writer who lives in Vermont. Potok was a gifted painter who gradually began losing his sight to an inherited eye disease, retinitis pigmentosa. Even as his sight failed, something else happened: he began to realize that he could paint with words just as well as he could paint with colors, and he wrote a book about his experience of going blind.16 He said, “I thought I’d go down and hit rock bottom and get stuck in the mud, but liberation came in a magical way. One night I had a dream where words came spewing out of my mouth, like those unfurling, whistling party favors that you blow on. The words were all beautiful colors. I awoke from the dream and realized something new was possible. I felt this lightness in my heart as pleasing words came out of me. To my surprise, they turned out to be pleasing to others. And when they were published, I saw myself as a newly empowered person.”
“One of the big problems with blindness is a slowing of everything,” Potok added. “You’re so busy figuring out where you are in your travels that you have to pay strict attention all the time. It seems that everyone is whizzing by you. And then, one day, you realize that slowness isn’t so bad, that paying more attention has its rewards, and you want to write a book called In Praise of Slowness.” Of course, Potok still regrets his blindness, which poses a thousand daily challenges. But it has been a passport to a new country that he could never previously have imagined visiting.
So imagine again that you are a cellist. Eventually, you would probably change your lifestyle and become involved with new things. You might form new relationships, spend more time with the people you love, pursue a profession in music history, or take a trip to Tahiti. Any of these things is likely to have a large influence on your state of mind and grab your emotional attention. You will always regret the accident—both physically and as a reminder of how life could have been—but its influence will not be as vivid or as incessant as you originally thought it would be. “Time heals all wounds” precisely because, over time, you will partially adapt to the state of your world.
The Hedonic Treadmill
By failing to anticipate the extent of our hedonic adaptation, as consumers we routinely escalate our purchases, hoping that new stuff will make us happier. Indeed, a new car feels wonderful, but sadly, the feeling lasts for only a few months. We get used to driving the car, and the buzz wears off. So we look for something else to make us happy: maybe new sunglasses, a computer, or another new car. This cycle, which is what drives us to keep up with the Joneses, is also known as the hedonic treadmill. We look forward to the things that will make us happy, but we don’t realize how short-lived this happiness will be, and when adaptation hits we look for the next new thing. “This time,” we tell ourselves, “this thing will really make me happy for a long time.” The folly of the hedonic treadmill is illustrated in the following cartoon. The woman in the cartoon may have a lovely car and she might get a new kitchen, but in the long run her level of happiness will not change much. As the saying goes, “Wherever you go, there you are.”
“Dan, when we got this car last year I was ecstatic, but now it no longer makes me happy. What do you think about renovating the kitchen?”
An illustrative study of this principle was conducted by David Schkade and Danny Kahneman. They decided to inspect the general belief that Californians are happier—after all, they live in California, where the weather is usually wonderful.* Somewhat unsurprisingly, they found that midwesterners think that fair-weather Californians are, overall, considerably more satisfied with their lives, while Californians think that midwesterners are considerably less satisfied overall with life because the latter have to suffer through long, subzero winters. Consequently, people from both states expect that a Chicagoan moving to sunny California will see a dramatic improvement in lifestyle, while the Angeleno moving to the Midwest will get a dramatic reduction in happiness.
How accurate are these predictions? It turns out that they are somewhat accurate. New transplants do indeed experience the expected boost or reduction in quality of life due to the weather. But, much like everything else, once adaptation hits and they get used to the new city, their quality of life drifts back toward its premoving level. The bottom line: even if you feel strongly about something in the short term, in the long term things will probably not leave you as ecstatic or as miserable as you expect.
Overcoming Hedonic Adaptation
Given that hedonic adaptation is clearly a mixed bag, how, you might wonder, can we use our understanding of it to get more out of life? When adaptation works in our favor (such as when we get used to living with an injury), we should clearly let this process take place. But what about instances when we wish not to adapt? Can we somehow extend the euphoric feeling of a new car, city, relationship, and so on?
One key to changing the adaptation process is to interrupt it. This is exactly what Leif Nelson and Tom Meyvis did. In a set of experiments, they measured how small interruptions—which they called hedonic disruptions—influence the overall enjoyment and irritation we get from pleasurable and painful experiences. In essence, they wanted to see if taking breaks in the middle of pleasurable experiences would enhance them and if disrupting a negative experience would make it worse.
Before I describe their experiments and the results, think about a chore you don’t particularly look forward to doing. Maybe it’s preparing your taxes, studying for an exam, cleaning all the windows in your house, or writing postholiday thank-you letters to your horrid Aunt Tess and everyone else in your very large family. You’ve set aside a significant block of time to knock out this annoying task in a single day, and now you face this question: is it better to complete the chore all at once or to take a break in the middle? Alternatively, let’s say you’re soaking in a hot tub with a cool glass of raspberry iced tea, eating a bowlful of fresh strawberries, or luxuriating in a hot-stone massage. Would you want to experience your pleasure all at once or take a break and do something different for a short while?
Leif and Tom found that, in general, when asked about their preferences for breaking up experiences, people want to disrupt annoying experiences but prefer to enjoy pleasurable experiences without any breaks. But following the basic principles of adaptation, Leif and Tom suspected that people’s intuitions are completely wrong. People will suffer less when they do not disrupt annoying experiences, and enjoy pleasurable experiences more when they break them up. Any interruption, they guessed, would keep people from adapting to the experience, which means that it would be bad to break up annoying experiences but useful to interrupt pleasurable ones.
To test the painful half of their hypothesis, Leif and Tom strapped headphones to the ears of a group of participants and played for them the melodic sounds of . . . a noisy vacuum cleaner. This was no Dustbuster hum; it was a five-second blast of a large machine. A second, more unfortunate group of participants had the same experience, but theirs lasted for forty annoying seconds. Just imagine these poor souls gripping their armrests and gritting their teeth.
A third group of people experienced the displeasure of the forty-second-long vacuum sound followed by a few seconds of silence and then an additional burst of five seconds of the same annoying sound. Objectively, this last group experienced a larger quantity of unpleasant noise than either of the other two groups. Were they more annoyed? (You can try this at home. Have a friend turn the vacuum on and off while you lie on the floor next to it—and consider how annoyed you are in the last five seconds of each of these conditions.)
After listening to the sound, the participants evaluated their irritation levels during the last five seconds of the experience. Leif and Tom found that the most pampered participants—those who had endured only five seconds of sound—were far more irritated than those who listened to the annoying sound for much longer. As you may have guessed, this result suggests that those who suffered through the vacuum whooom for forty seconds got used to it and found the last five seconds of their experience to be not so bad. But what happened to those who experienced the short break? As it turned out, the interruption made things worse. The adaptation went away, and the annoyance returned.
Evaluating an annoying experience with and without a break
Participants were exposed to a five-second vacuum cleaner sound (A), a forty-second vacuum cleaner sound (B), or a forty-second vacuum cleaner sound, followed by a few seconds’ break and then a five-second vacuum cleaner sound (C). In all cases the participants were asked to evaluate their annoyance during the final five seconds of the experience.
The moral of the story? You may think that taking a break during an irritating or boring experience will be good for you, but a break actually decreases your ability to adapt, making the experience seem worse when you have to return to it. When cleaning your house or doing your taxes, the trick is to stick with it until you are done.
And what about pleasurable experiences? Leif and Tom treated two other groups of participants to three-minute massages in one of those fabulous chairs that people are always standing in line for at Brookstone. The first group received an uninterrupted three-minute treatment. The second group received a massage for eighty seconds, followed by a twenty-second break, after which the massage resumed for another eighty seconds—making their massage time two minutes and forty seconds, twenty seconds less than the uninterrupted group. At the end of the massages all the participants were asked to evaluate how much they had enjoyed the entire treatment. As it turned out, those who underwent the shorter massages with the break not only enjoyed their experiences more but they also said they would pay twice as much for the same interrupted massage in the future.
Clearly, these results are counterintuitive. What sweeter pleasure is there than that moment when you allow yourself to walk away from filing your taxes, if only for a few minutes? Why would you want to set down your spoon in the middle of eating a bowl of Ben & Jerry’s Cherry Garcia, especially when you’d been looking forward to it all day? Why get out of the warm hot tub and into the cold air to refresh your drink, rather than asking someone else to do it for you?
Evaluating a pleasurable experience with and without a break
Participants were exposed to either a three-minute massage (A) or an eighty-second massage, followed by a twenty-second break and another eighty-second massage (B). In all cases the participants were asked to evaluate their enjoyment of the whole experience.
Here is the trick: instead of thinking about taking a break as a relief from a chore, think about how much harder it will be to resume an activity you dislike. Similarly, if you don’t want to take the plunge and get out of the hot tub to refresh your (or your romantic partner’s) drink, consider the joy of returning to the hot water (not to mention that your friend will not realize that you are doing this to extend your own pleasure and consequently will highly appreciate your “sacrifice”).*
Adaptation: The Next Frontier
Adaptation is an incredibly general process that operates at deep physiological, psychological, and environmental levels, and it affects us in many aspects of our lives. Because of its generality and pervasiveness, there is also a lot that we don’t yet understand about it. For example, it is unclear whether we experience complete or just partial hedonic adaptation as we get used to new life circumstances. It is also unclear how hedonic adaptation works its magic on us or whether there are many paths to achieving it. Nevertheless, the following personal anecdotes might shed some light on this important topic. (And stay tuned, because more research on hedonic adaptation is on its way.)
TO ILLUSTRATE THE complexity of hedonic adaptation, I want to share some examples of ways in which I have not fully adapted to my circumstances. Because a large part of my injury is physically observable (I have scars on my neck, face, legs, arms, and hands), soon after my injury I started paying attention to the ways people looked at me. My awareness of how I appeared to them has given me a substantial amount of misery over the years. These days, I don’t meet that many new people in my day-to-day life, so I am not as sensitive about the way I look to others. But when I’m at large gatherings, and particularly when I’m with people whom I don’t know or have just met, I find myself highly aware of, and sensitive to, the way people look at me. When I am introduced to someone, for example, I automatically take mental notes of how that person looks at me and whether and how he or she shakes my injured right hand.
You might expect that over the years I would have adapted to my self-image, but the truth is that time has not made a serious dent in my sensitivity. I certainly look better than I used to (scars do improve over time, and I’ve had many operations), but my overall concern about others’ response to my looks has not decreased much. Why has adaptation failed me in this particular case? Perhaps it’s like the vacuum cleaner experiment. Intermittent exposure to others’ reactions to my looks may be the influence that prevents me from adapting.
A second personal anecdote of failed adaptation concerns my dreams. Immediately after the accident, I appeared in my dreams with the same young, healthy, physically unscarred body I’d had before the injury. Clearly, I was either denying or ignoring the alteration of my appearance. A few months later, some adaptation took place; I began to dream about treatments, procedures, life in the hospital, and the medical apparatuses surrounding me. In all of these dreams, my image of myself was still unscathed; I still appeared healthy, except that I was weighed down by different kinds of medical devices. Finally, about a year after the accident, I ceased to have any self-image in my dreams—I became a distant observer in them. I no longer woke to the emotional torment of realizing all over again the extent of my injuries (which was good), but I never did get used to the new reality of my injured self (which wasn’t good). Disassociating from myself in my own dreams was therefore somewhat useful, but, Freudian dream analysis notwithstanding, it seems that my adaptation to my altered situation partially failed.
A third example of my personal adaptation has to do with my ability to find happiness in my professional life as an academic. In general, I’ve managed to find a job that allows me to work more hours when I feel good and work less when I am in more pain. In my choice of a professional career, I suspect that my ability to live with my limitations has a lot to do with what I call active adaptation. This type of adaptation is not physical or hedonic; instead, a bit like natural selection in evolutionary theory, it is based on making many small changes over a long sequence of decisions, so that the final outcome fits one’s circumstances and limitations.
As a child, I never dreamed about being an academic (who does?), and the manner by which I chose my career path was a slow, one-step-at-a-time process that stretched over years. In high school, I was one of the quiet kids in the class, raising my voice to tell an occasional joke but rarely to participate in any academic discussion. During my first year in college I was still undergoing treatments and wearing a Jobst suit,* which meant that many of the activities that occupied the other students were beyond my abilities. So what did I do? I engaged in an activity that I could take part in: studying (something that none of my previous schoolteachers would have believed).
Over time I began engaging in more and more academic pursuits. I started to enjoy learning and found considerable satisfaction in my ability to prove to myself and others that at least one part of me had not changed: my mind, ideas, and way of thinking.* The way I spent my time and the activities I enjoyed slowly changed, until at some point it became very clear that there was a good fit among my limitations, my abilities, and an academic life. My decision wasn’t sudden; rather, it was made up of a long series of small steps, each of which moved me closer and closer to a life that now fits me well and to which I’ve become gratefully accustomed. And thankfully, it’s one that I happen to enjoy a great deal.
OVERALL, WHEN I look at my injury—powerful, painful, and prolonged as it was—it surprises me how well my life has turned out. I’ve found a great deal of happiness in both my personal life and my professional life. Moreover, the pain I experience seems less difficult to bear as time progresses; not only have I learned how to deal with it, but I’ve also discovered things I can do to limit it. Have I fully adapted to my current circumstances? No. But I have adapted far beyond what I would have expected when I was twenty. And I am thankful for the amazing power of adaptation.
Getting Adaptation to Work for Us
Now that we have a better understanding of adaptation, can we use its principles to help us better manage our lives?
Let’s consider the case of Ann, a university student who is about to graduate. During the past four years, Ann has lived in a small dorm room with no air conditioner and old, stained, ugly furniture that she shares with two messy individuals. During this time Ann has slept on the top level of a bunk bed, and she hasn’t had much space for her clothes, her books, or even her miniature-book collection.
A month before graduation, Ann lands an exciting job in Boston. As she looks forward to moving into her first apartment and being paid her first real salary, she makes a list of all the things she would like to purchase. How can she make her purchase decisions in a way that will maximize her long-term happiness?
One possibility is for Ann to take her paycheck (after paying her rent and other bills, of course) and go on a spending spree. She can throw away the hand-me-downs and buy a beautiful new couch, an astronaut-foam bed, the biggest plasma television possible, and even those Celtics season tickets she’s always wanted. After putting up with uncomfortable surroundings for so long, she might say to herself, “It’s time to indulge!” Another option is to approach her purchasing very gradually. She might start with a comfortable new bed. Maybe in six months she can spring for a television and next year for a sofa.
Although most people in Ann’s position would think about how nice it would be to dress up their apartment and so would go on a shopping spree, by now it should be clear that, given the human tendency for adaptation, she would actually be happier with the intermittent scenario. She can get more “happiness buying power” out of her money if she limits her purchases, takes breaks, and slows down the adaptation process.
The lesson here is to slow down pleasure. A new couch may please you for a couple of months, but don’t buy your new television until after the thrill of the couch has worn off. The opposite holds if you are struggling with economic cutbacks. When reducing consumption, you should move to a smaller apartment, give up cable television, and cut back on expensive coffee all at once—sure, the initial pain will be larger, but the total amount of agony over time will be lower.
How to space purchases to increase happiness
The graph below illustrates Ann’s two possible approaches for spending her money. The area under the dashed line shows her happiness with the shopping spree strategy. After the shopping spree Ann will be very happy, but her happiness will soon wear off as her purchases lose their novelty. The area under the solid line shows her happiness with the intermittent approach strategy. In this case, she will not reach the same level of initial happiness, but her happiness will be continually revitalized because of the repeated changes. And the winner? Using the intermittent approach, Ann can create a higher overall happiness level for herself.
Another way of getting adaptation to work for us is by placing limits on our consumption—or at least our alcohol consumption. One of my graduate school advisers, Tom Wallsten, used to say that he wanted to become an expert on wines that cost $15 or less. Tom’s idea was that if he started buying fancy $50-a-bottle wines, he would get used to that level of quality and would no longer be able to derive any pleasure from cheaper wines.* Moreover, he reasoned that if he started consuming $50 bottles, over time he would have to escalate his spending to $80, $90, and $100 bottles, simply because his palate would have adapted to a higher level of finesse. Finally, he thought that if he never tried $50 bottles in the first place, his palate would be most sensitive to changes in wine quality of varieties in his preferred price range, further increasing his satisfaction. With those arguments in mind, he avoided the hedonic treadmill, kept his spending under control, became an expert in $15 wine, and lives very happily that way.
IN A SIMILAR vein, we can harness adaptation to maximize our overall satisfaction in life by shifting our investments away from products and services that give us a constant stream of experiences and toward ones that are more temporary and fleeting. For example, stereo equipment and furniture generally provide a constant experience, so it’s very easy to adapt to them. On the other hand, transient experiences (a four-day getaway, a scuba diving adventure, or a concert) are fleeting, so you can’t adapt to them as readily. I am not recommending that you sell your sofa and go scuba diving, but it is important to understand what types of experiences are more and less susceptible to adaptation. Thus, if you are considering whether to invest in a transient (scuba diving) or a constant (new sofa) experience and you predict that the two will have a similar impact on your overall happiness, select the transient one. The long-term effect of the sofa on your happiness is probably going to be much lower than you expect, while the long-term enjoyment of and memories from the scuba diving will probably last much longer than you predict.
TO HEIGHTEN YOUR level of enjoyment, you can also think about ways to inject serendipity and unpredictability into your life. Here’s a little demonstration of this point. Have you ever noticed how hard it is to tickle yourself? Why? Because when we try to tickle ourselves, we know exactly how our fingers will move and this perfect predictability kills the joy of tickling. Interestingly, when we use our right hand to tickle our right side, we don’t feel any tickling sensation; but when we use our right hands to tickle our left sides, the slight difference in timing between the nerve system on the right and left side of the body can create a low-level unpredictability, and hence we can feel a slight tickling sensation.
The benefits of randomness range from the personal to the romantic to our work life. As the economist Tibor Scitovsky argued in The Joyless Economy, we have a tendency to take the safe and predictable path at work, and by extension in our personal life, and do the things that provide steady and reliable progress. But, Scitovsky argues, real progress—as well as real pleasure—comes from taking risks and trying very different things. So the next time you have to make a presentation, work with a team, or pick a project to work on, try doing something new. Your attempt at humor or cross-corporate collaboration may fail, but on balance it might make a positive difference.
ANOTHER LESSON IN adaptation has to do with the situations of the people around us. When other people have things that we don’t, the comparison can be very apparent and, as a consequence, we can be slower to adapt. For me, being in the hospital for three years was relatively easy because everyone around me was injured and my abilities and inabilities were within the range of the people around me. Only when I left the hospital did I understand the full extent of my limitations and difficulties—a realization that was very difficult and depressing.
On a more practical level, let’s say you want a particular laptop but decide that it’s too expensive. If you settle for a cheaper one, you’ll most likely get used to it over time. That is, unless the person in the cubicle next to you has the laptop that you originally wanted. In the latter case, the daily comparison between your laptop and your neighbor’s will slow down your adaptation and make you less happy. More generally, this principle means that when we consider the process of adaptation, we should think about the various factors in our environment and how they may influence our ability to adapt. The sad news is that our happiness does depend to some degree on our ability to keep up with the Joneses. The good news is that since we have some control over what environment we put ourselves into—as long as we pick Joneses to whom we don’t feel bad in comparison, we can be much happier.
THE FINAL LESSON is that not all experiences lead to the same level of adaptation and not all people respond to adaptation in the same way. So my advice is to explore your individual patterns and learn what pushes your adaptation button and what doesn’t.
In the end, we are all like the metaphorical frogs in hot water. Our task is to figure out how we respond to adaptation in order to take advantage of the good and avoid the bad. To do so, we must take the temperature of the water. When it begins to feel hot, we need to jump out, find a cool pond, and identify and enjoy the pleasures of life.