This is Why You’re Not Happy

If something amazing happens in your life, something life changing happens in your life, you might be happier for a little while, but you will eventually end up to where you were before that happened. Today we're going to be talking about why you are not happy. And have you ever wanted something so bad and you eventually got it, and then two days later you were right back where you were at the exact same level of happiness as before. And it could be a big thing, it could be a small thing, it could be like a house, it could be a car, it could be a dream job, it could be a relationship. And what happens is. And I realized this within myself was I remember when I was younger thinking, like, when I get this, I'll be happy. When I buy this thing, I'll be happy. When I get this relationship, I'll be happy. When I get to this accomplishment, I'll be happy. When I get this amount of money in my bank account, I'll be happy. And I noticed that I started checking off all of the boxes of things that I thought were going to make me happy. And I wasn't unhappy, but I didn't feel any different than before I had any of those things. And I think back to myself when I was living in a one bedroom apartment and I was single and broke as hell. And I felt pretty much the same as I did back then, right then at that moment, after I had checked off all of these boxes. And so I researched this and I started going through and figuring out, like, is this normal? Like, is there something wrong with me? Or does everybody else feel this way as well? And what I discovered, there's this thing that's called a. It's a psychological phenomenon in psychology that's called the hedonic treadmill. And basically, this is what it means. It means that our happiness levels tend to remain the same despite significant positive or negative changes in our lives. So if something amazing happens in your life, something life changing happens in your life, you might be happier for a little while, but you will eventually end up to where you were before that happened. And the same is with negative things as well in your life. If you have something really negative happen in your life, you might be negative for a while, you might be sad for a while, but eventually, if you fast forward a few months, you're gonna find yourself right back at what is called baseline happiness. And everybody's baseline happiness is different. And we're gonna talk about how to raise your baseline happiness today. But the thing that you need to understand with the hedonic treadmill it's really important if you want to break free from this constant chase for happiness so that you can build a fulfilling life. And so when you look at the hedonic treadmill, just to dive into it. Cause you need to understand it deeply so that next time you find yourself in a situation, you, you can start to go, oh, I'm on the treadmill. I'm right back to where that podcaster was talking about. So the hedonic treadmill was coined by psychologists Donald Campbell and Philip brickman back in 1971. It refers to this human tendency to return back to our baseline level of happiness after experiencing significant emotional events, whether positive or negative, just in general. And you want to think of it like a legitimate, literal treadmill. No matter how fast you run or how much effort you put in you, you're actually not moving anywhere. You're in the exact same place. And in life, no matter how much external success you have, no matter how many things you achieve, how many things you check off of your box and say, oh, my gosh, this is what I thought was gonna make me happy. Your happiness levels will eventually stabilize every single time, which in turn usually makes us hungry for more. And so let's say you have a really positive event. They've actually found that winning the lottery, if you win the lottery, you, you might be ecstatic for a couple months. You might be ecstatic when that hits your. That, that money hits your bank account. But studies have shown that most lottery winners return to their baseline of happiness levels within one year of getting that check in their bank account. Now you can go the complete opposite direction, which is negative event. On the flip side of that, they were doing studies on people that found that major life setbacks, such as losing a job or suffering an injury after about a year, they actually found that those people who were in bad car accidents were not happier or sadder than they were after the accident. And so that shows you, no matter how big the event is or how, I guess you could say how big the event is in positive direction or how big the event is in negative direction, you will eventually find yourself most likely right back at where you are right now, listening to my voice. And psychologist Dan Gilbert actually found that most people tend to overestimate the long term emotional impact of positive events and negative events in their lives. And so when you look at the hedonic treadmill, there's many areas of our lives that this affects without us even realizing it. The first thing is material possessions. We live in a society that is very Material in buying a bunch of things. And so we, when we grow up as children, we think. A lot of us think, well, I want to be rich. I want to be successful. When I buy that thing, I'll be happy. Many people, even as adults, fall into the trap of thinking, oh, if I could just buy this thing, then I would be happy. And then you buy that thing and you're happy for a moment, but days later or weeks later, what do you want? You want the next thing? Just the way that it goes. So it might be something that you buy materially. It might be career aspirations. Some of you guys have a job right now that you wanted when you were younger. Like, if you would have known when you were a kid that you would have the job that you have now 20 years ago, you might be like, that's an awesome job. And you might think, like, a promotion or a salary increase, like your salary increased by $10,000, would make lasting fulfillment. But research shows the boost in happiness is temporary, and you'll go back to baseline. Over time, that new position that you were so excited about, it just becomes routine. And then now we develop a new desire for the next milestone. So it's always this treadmill of, I've got to go to the next thing, I got to get the next thing. I've got to get the next thing. Relationships are the same. Like, lots of people are like, I just need to get into a new relationship. I need to get a girlfriend, and then I'll be happy. And then you get a girlfriend and you're happy for a little while, and then six months later, you feel the same that you felt before you had a relationship. And then some people are like, well, we should just get married. And people get married. And that's why they have a thing called, literally, the hedonic treadmill. There's a thing called the honeymoon phase, which is where people are all excited for a little while, and then they go back to baseline of the way that they felt before. And this is why many marriages don't last for people, is because they're constantly thinking, well, I'm not as happy as I. I thought this marriage was going to make me happier. I don't feel any different than before we got married. There must be something wrong with the marriage. And so the people are like, well, it must be because I was supposed to be with somebody else. It must be because this marriage isn't what I wanted. And people are always kind of searching for the next thing. And it's many other areas of life there's personal goals that you have. There's fitness goals, there's achievements. As soon as you get them, you'll feel maybe happy for a little while, excited. It could be for a little while, but you're going to find yourself back at baseline. And, you know, there's many reasons why we have this. There's a ton of different things. There's social comparison, there's keeping up with the Joneses. You know, you get a new Toyota and you're all excited about it, and you got this car that you're all excited about, and then, you know, a week later, you find that your favorite influencer just bought a Porsche and now your Toyota is not good enough. You know, then there's also cultural pressures from what type of society you come in, your parents and what they think and what they think you should be doing. There's societal pressures. And one of the biggest things as well is us really misjudging what actually brings us happiness. And so the real question that I hope all of you guys are asking yourself as I'm going through all this is, okay, if this is a psychological thing that pretty much everybody goes through and everybody's got a different baseline level of happiness, how do I increase my baseline happiness? That's what we should all be focused on, right? If material possessions, if achievements, if relationships, none of those things really change our baseline happiness over time, what should I be focusing on then in order to increase my happiness? Or am I just going to feel the same forever? Well, there's one really big thing that I want you to focus on, and I'll give you a couple different tips that will help you out. The biggest shift to help you be happier is to stop focusing on external achievements and start focusing on internal fulfillment, like what fulfillment means to you. Out of every single person that's listening this podcast, fulfillment means something different to every single person. Do you know what fulfillment means to you? Because if you don't, if you haven't written it down, if you haven't gotten clear, you're probably not going to get it. But if we're saying, okay, I want to solve for X, well, what is X? It's like, if I want to solve for happiness, if I want to solve for fulfillment, what does that mean to me? And so I'm going to give you a few tips to kind of just help you that are actually proven to help you increase your baseline happiness. The first one, which is very expected, you won't be surprised when I say this one, is to practice gratitude. Gratitude has Actually been found to counteract what's called hedonic adaptation. The hedonic treadmill is where that came from. Right. And so encouraging you, basically what it encourages you to do is encourages you to focus on what you already have rather than what you lack. And so if you take time to regularly reflect on positive things in your life, you can increase your overall sense of contentment because you're focusing on what you have versus what is that you don't have. If you focus on what is it you don't have and what you want, you're going to basically be unhappy. Like, there's a really great quote, I think it's by a guy named Naval, and it says, desire is a contract that you sign with yourself to be unhappy until you get what it is that you want. And so when you think about that, if you're like, oh, I have this desire for something, and I'm not saying you can't want to achieve and want to get better and improve and all of that stuff, you can do all of those things, but desire and to think to yourself that I won't be happy until I get it. Desire is a contract that you sign with yourself to be unhappy until you get whatever it is that you want. And so if you look at what you have and you take a step back and you get yourself out of your go, go, go mindset, you'll notice every single person has something to be grateful for that's listening to me right now. Now you might be sitting and being like, well, I have a shitty one bedroom apartment and my family doesn't talk to me and you can whatever it is that it might be. Well, I want you to understand your heart is still beating. If you're listening to this podcast, unless you're a ghost, your heart's still beating. And 150,000 people did not wake up today that were awake yesterday. 150,000 people die a day and you woke up and you're listening to this podcast. Well, that means that you have something to be grateful for. You might have nothing, but you might have your health. It's like that phrase, a healthy man wants a million things and an unhealthy man wants one thing. And so if you have your health, that's something to be grateful for. If you have family, that's healthy, that's something to be grateful for. It doesn't have to be material possessions or how much money is you're paying count or any of those things. Find the little things to be grateful for. It could be that the sun is out. You took your dog on a walk, and it was an amazing thing. And you're grateful that your dog is healthy. You want an amazing walk with your dog. That's something to be grateful for. So those first things. Find things. Actively look for things to be grateful for. Okay? The next thing is to focus on your goals. You can have external goals, and those are fine, but start to focus on intrinsic goals as well, like your own personal growth, your wanting to improve yourself. Because those little things of when you feel like you're getting better, you start to become happier. It's like Tony Robbins always says, progress equals happiness. When we feel like we're personally progressing, we're getting better, we're evolving, we're becoming a better version of ourself, we start to become happier from it. And so I would recommend that you start to find little goals within yourself that you want to work towards. Okay, that's the second thing. Third thing, and these are all little tiny things. It's not huge things that I'm gonna give you is to focus on being present more. Like, try to actually, like, fully experience the moment that you're in. Too often, we're rushing from thing to thing, to go to this thing to go to that thing. So when you practice journaling and meditation and just simply pausing and reflecting, you can find that a boring moment can be a beautiful moment. But you have to get yourself out of your head. That's thinking about what's right or what's wrong or what's happened in the past, what's happened in the future, and just be here for a second and just be present. Because your happiness is not in the future. It's not in the past. Your happiness is in this moment. So can you try to savor the moment a little bit more? Can you try to be more present, to be more here the moment? The more that you're out of your head. Cause your head is always in the future or the past, almost always. And the more that you can get into your body, because your body is always in this moment, usually you'll start to find more happiness. Okay? Next thing is to start focusing on experiences over possessions. This is something that I've really made a big shift over the past few years because, you know, I bought a bunch of cool shit and I had like, everything's been good and I've enjoyed it and it's cool to have things. But then you realize, like, it doesn't really make me happy. What does make me happy? Experiences. Taking my wife somewhere and my kids somewhere and being able to see things and be able to be in the moment and be able to go places I've never done before and to go to events that I've never gone before. It could be many different things that could be at a concert that you want to go to, it could be a place that you've wanted to travel to. It could be all of those things. And so really what it comes down to is how can we actually start to focus on those things? How can we be more grateful? How can we have more experiences? Another thing that really helps as well is to build strong relationships. Harvard did an 80 year study on happiness, 80 year study on happiness. And they found out that strong relationships are the biggest predictor of happiness, health and longevity. Strong relationships. And what they found was it was the quality of the relationships that matter more than the quantity of the relationships. And so meaningful connections with your family, with your friends, with your partners. Loneliness is just as harmful to health as smoking or alcoholism, they found in the study. And toxic relationships will actually start to kill you faster. So that's another thing that you can work on. And so there's all these little teeny tiny things we could start to think about, right? What about if we just decide, instead of focusing on ourselves so much, what if we work on acts of kindness? I remember years ago, I did this thing that was 30 days of giving back. And it was me and then a group of people that were following me on Facebook and it was inside of a group. And one of the things, one of the challenges that we had was that every single day for 30 days, we have to do something for somebody else. And that would be, you know, it could be something small, it could be something big. It could be, hey, I'm going to go and give a dollar to a homeless person that's, you know, asking for it on the side of the road. It could be something like, oh, you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to go get sandwiches. And like, one of the things I remember doing is I went to, I think it was like Wendy's and I bought like 20 hamburgers and I was giving them out to the homeless people that were down in, in Austin. And then there were other things that were, that other people were doing as far as, like, donating their time and going and volunteering and stuff. And there was all these different ways where it was like, it was interesting because I was actively. And everybody that was in this challenge actively trying to find Ways to give back. And one of the things I kept hearing from people is how much more grateful people were for their own lives and how much happier they were because they weren't focusing on themselves and they were focusing on trying to help other people as much as they possibly could. And so that's another thing that will really help you and another thing that will really help you as well. Two more things that will really help you with being happier. Number one, is to limit social media and screen time. Try, and I don't know how many times I've said it on this damn podcast, try to be off your phone already. Like, life is not here 2 inches in front of your face. Life is everything that's happening outside of it. And so if you're constantly on social media, you're constantly switching from TikTok to Instagram to Facebook, then you're on YouTube and you're seeing everything else that everybody else is doing. You're not even really, fully, fully experiencing your life. You're starting to experience other people's lives. And so it's like, why don't you actually just focus on what you can do to experience your life? Limit your social media time. That alone will increase your happiness massively. And then another thing is focus on becoming a lifelong learner. As I said, progress equals happiness. If it makes you feel like you're heading in the right direction, then it's something that you want to try to pursue. Is it, you know, reading 10 pages a day? Is it making sure that you're trying to learn a new language? Or maybe you wanted to become a pilot, so you're pursuing this license to be a private pilot. All of these little teeny tiny things will start to make you happier. It's not about, how can I amass the most amount of money into my bank account, how can I buy the most shit, and how can I get the most amount of achievements to prove that I'm better than everybody else? It's these little things, these moments where it's like, okay, I know that the hedonic treadmill exists. I know that I'll go back to baseline, but how can I start to focus on these little teeny tiny things to raise my baseline of happiness? And if you do these little things, I promise you I've been doing for the past few years, you'll start to be sitting outside when there's nothing happening and there's no moments that are just, like, mind blowing. And you'll be like, damn, I'm really happy right now. I'm really peaceful. There's nothing that's making me this way. It's just I'm noticing that my baseline of happiness is raised, and that is really what I want for everybody that's listening. So that's what I got for you for today's episode. If you love this episode, please share it on your Instagram stories. Tag me obdialjr. R O B D I A L J R and once again, if you want to dominate your 2025 goals, go ahead and download my free ebook that I just made for you. It is goals2025.com once again, goals with an S2025com. And with that, I'm going to leave you the same way I leave you every single episode. Make it your mission. Make somebody else's day better. I appreciate you and I hope that you have an amazing day.