I was rereading one of my blog posts the other day…
And I feel the need to write a follow-up post. I’ll start by saying that I love the post How Am I So Okay? I wrote it in March of 2025, and it’s one of my favorites. It does a nice job of outlining my grief process and also describes the spiritual connection that Stephen and I continue to share. I agree wholeheartedly with everything I wrote.
However, there was a key attribute of human psychology that I did not know about when I wrote that post. In my obsessive following of The Happiness Lab podcast this year, I’ve learned a lot about psychological resilience. And I now know that the concept of hedonic adaptation is surely a significant part of the reason I am “so okay.”
What is hedonic adaptation?
- It’s the psychological tendency to quickly return to a stable baseline level of happiness after experiencing a major positive or negative life event or change in circumstance.
- This is why the novelty of a promotion, a new car, or a new relationship wears off and you don’t gain a permanent happiness boost from them.
- On the flip side, this is why many people bounce back from tragedies such as serious illness, the death of a loved one, or losing their home in a natural disaster.
As you’ve probably gathered, hedonic adaptation is a double-edged sword. It is the reason so many people spend their lives chasing after the next major life milestone, thinking it will bring them everlasting joy, when it usually doesn’t.
But it is also what allows us to recover from life’s worst moments. I’ve been deeply grateful for this feature of my brain over the last two years, as I’ve been through more than my fair share of negative life events. Each time shit hits the fan, I can calmly say to myself, “This too shall pass.” There is something profoundly comforting in knowing that whatever disaster may befall me, I’ve proven to myself that I can return to my baseline level of happiness.
(I would like to briefly note that not everyone returns to their baseline level of happiness after great tragedy. Some people’s baselines do permanently shift downward. I don’t know why some people bounce back and others don’t. But I didn’t want this post to imply that you are guaranteed to return to “normal” if you’ve suffered great loss. It is a common experience, but not universal.)
Hedonic adaptation is a wonderful gift when recovering from hardship. When we try to anticipate or imagine negative life events like losing a job or watching your house burn down, you might think “Oh, that would be end of the world. It would destroy me.” But the reality is, it usually isn’t as bad as you imagine it to be.
For example, when I started avoiding gluten 10 years ago, I thought it would be much more difficult than it actually was. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard someone say, “Oh, I could never be gluten-free! I couldn’t live without bread!” And my response is always, “Sure you could. It’s really not that bad!” In fact, I had a permanent upgrade to my baseline level of happiness when I cut gluten out of my diet, because it resolved all the chronic health issues that were causing me stress and discomfort! (That’s another key feature of our psychological immune systems: finding silver linings.)
Before Stephen died, I would occasionally try to imagine what life would be like without him. We both knew that I would outlive him because, to put it bluntly, I have good genes and he had bad genes. We had very honest conversations back in 2020 about where he wanted his ashes to be scattered and what he wanted his funeral to be like. So I did attempt to be prepared for the day I would lose him.
Was it as bad as I imagined it would be? Well, I must be honest, the first six months were far worse than I imagined. One thing I did not know about romantic partnership is that your nervous system becomes bonded to the other person’s presence. When that is ripped away from you, you will probably have some really intense feelings in your body that come in waves for months. Your nervous system has to recalibrate, and it does not happen quickly. I wish I could write a blog post about how those first six months felt, but I really have no idea how to describe the physical sensations in words. It’s one of those things you just have to go through to understand it.
But after my nervous system recalibrated, then I would say that adjusting to life without Stephen was not as bad as I imagined. From a bird’s eye view, there were many things that I thought would be very difficult that really weren’t so challenging. Hedonic adaptation did its job.
So how am I so okay? I feel my feelings. I do the grief work. I accept reality. Stephen is caring for my spirit. AND I have hedonic adaptation in my corner. (Aren’t our brains an incredible, mysterious, magical organ? I think so.)