If you’re like me, you spend most waking hours pursuing things like (money, relationships, material possessions, ice cream) that you feel will maximize your personal happiness. You may view happiness as a step chart, each new conquest providing a new overall level of happiness.

As it turns out that there is a body of research based around this principal called “Adaptation Level Theory“. Adapted by Michael Eysenck, a British psychology researcher during the late nineties, the hedonic treadmill theory compares the pursuit of happiness to a person on a treadmill, who has to keep working just to stay in the same place.

Concise Definition:

“The tendency of a person to remain at a relatively stable level of happiness despite a change in fortune or the achievement of major goals. According to the hedonic treadmill, as a person makes more money, expectations and desires rise in tandem, which results in no permanent gain in happiness.”

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedonic_treadmill

Theory:

Humans rapidly adapt to their current situation, becoming habituated to the good or the bad. We are more sensitive to our relative status: both that which we recently have and that which we perceive others to enjoy.

Bottan and Perez Truglia in “Deconstructing the Hedonic Treadmill” (2008) propose a model to explain the emergence of adaptive stimuli. They also test their hypotheses running dynamic happiness regressions.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedonic_treadmill

Hacking the Treadmill:

So, how to apply this theory to maximize your happiness?  Break up long-term goals into a series of short-term goals that can be accomplished on a daily basis.  Not only does this have the benefit of increasing your incremental happiness gained from completing these “mini-goals” , but the process of breaking them up into smaller goals helps to clarify the path you need to take towards achieving the end goal. The types of people who are good at this are called “Autotelics” and include Gandhi, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs and Martin Luther King, Jr.

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autotelic