Breaking free of the hedonic treadmill with gratitude journaling
“If you are not grateful for what you have right now, why do you want more?“ We are on a hedonic treadmill, associating happiness with material things or achieving goals. Gratitude can help us break free from the trap.
Modern societies, through advertising and media lead us to think this way:
- “When I get xxx car I’ll be happy“
- “When I can move to a bigger house I’ll achieve happiness“
- “When I finish studying I’ll finally be happy”
- “When I marry and have kids, I will be the happiest person on earth”
It’s obviously a trap. Once we get what we desire, we experience a brief period of happiness/joy time and it’s a matter of days or weeks until there is a new desire that will make us savor everything that we already have. Or as Naval Ravikant says:
In his interview with Shane Parrish of Farnam Street, Naval also said:
“We bought a new car. Now I’m waiting for the new car to arrive. Of course, every night, I’m on the forums reading about the car. Why am I doing that? It’s a silly object. It’s a silly car. It’s not going to change my life that much or at all. I know that the instant the car arrives I won’t care about it anymore. What it is, I’m addicted to the desiring. I’m addicted to the idea that this external thing is going to bring me some kind of happiness and joy and this is completely delusional”
“The idea you’re going to change something in the outside world, and that is going to bring you the peace, everlasting joy, and happiness you deserve, is a fundamental delusion we all suffer from, including me. The mistake over and over and over is to say, “Oh, I’ll be happy when I get that thing,” whatever it is. That is the fundamental mistake we all make, 24/7, all day long.”
Well, I think this is true and we can break free from this fundamental delusion by working in our habits. After all, happiness is a skill than can be mastered!
Gratitude can help us exit the hedonic treadmill
Gratitude for what you have, or what someone has done for you — is a powerful and underrated tool: it can make you feel so good that your blood pressure goes down, it can lower stress hormones and give you a stronger immune system and generally make you happier. Appreciated workers give that bit more. Lack of gratitude, however, can make you feel locked in a never ending cycle of dissatisfaction. You are constantly looking out for what you lack.
The good news is that appreciation can be taught/learned. If children are shown how to deal with difficulties by flipping a situation round (looking for the silver lining) they can become more resilient adults — the idea is you can’t control what happens, but you can control how you look at a situation and deal with it. Unappreciative adults can learn too. It’s simply a question of practice, of flexing a different mind muscle.
Reframing de mind
However, it doesn’t work just by being told you should be grateful for what you have. That doesn’t make you appreciative, it just makes you defensive. And to be appreciative you need to be reflective. What works is what therapists call “reframing” or what you and I would call looking at things differently and of course — some common sense here — it doesn’t work for everything.
The short version is: stop complaining so much, look around you, keep a gratitude diary (which, luckily, can be kept in your head). Instead of looking at what you haven’t got, look at what you have got. It’s all about refocusing. By doing this and really practicing looking at what’s good in your life — every day! — you can retrain your brain to work differently and you too could stop being a moaner and become an appreciator.
The benefits of journaling
There is robust research supporting gratitude’s benefits. Here are a few of them:
- It can reduce your anxiety. Journaling about your feelings is linked to decreased mental distress. In a study, researchers found that those with various medical conditions and anxiety who wrote online for 15 minutes three days a week over a 12-week period had increased feelings of well-being and fewer depressive symptoms after one month. Their mental well-being continued to improve during the 12 weeks of journaling.
- It helps with brooding. Writing about an emotional event can help you break away from the nonstop cycle of obsessively thinking and brooding over what happened — but the timing matters. Some studies show that writing about a traumatic event immediately after it happens may actually make you feel worse.
- It creates awareness. Writing down your feelings about a difficult situation can help you understand it better. The act of putting an experience into words and structure allows you to form new perceptions about events.
- It regulates emotions. Brain scans of people who wrote about their feelings showed that they were able to control their emotions better than those who wrote about a neutral experience. This study also found that writing about feelings in an abstract way was more calming than writing vividly.
- It encourages opening up. Writing privately about a stressful event could encourage some to reach out for social support. This can help with emotional healing.
- It can speed up physical healing. Journaling may also have an impact on physical health. A study on 49 adults in New Zealand found that those who wrote for 20 minutes about their feelings on upsetting events healed faster after a biopsy than those who wrote about daily activities. Similarly, college students who wrote about stressful events were less likely to get sick compared to those who wrote about neutral topics like their room.
Tips to form the new habit
As with other new behaviors that a person wants to develop, the habit rules apply. I wrote another article describing how to create a “habit system”.
I’m currently using the 5 minute journal App, a gratitude journal that can be integrated to Apple Health. I really like that it keeps track of my streak, which I don’t want to lose and start from zero again.
Don’t set your expectations too high
A journal isn’t going to solve all your problems. It isn’t a therapist or counselor. But it can help you learn more about yourself.
This article is part of a series
This is part of a series of articles about building a “Continuous Improvement System”: a dedication to making small changes and improvements every day, with the expectation that those small improvements will add up to something significant.
