Can you increase your happiness "set point?"

The different methods to deepening levels of awareness, letting go of ego and increasing your baseline happiness

Hedonic adaptation 😄😔

Several studies suggest that we’re born with a baseline level of happiness. Lottery winners who win millions of dollars see a spike in happiness for a while, but then return to their baseline in a few weeks.

“We find that winning large sums of money strongly affects how content you are with your personal finances. But it does not affect how you feel about other aspects of life, such as your health, or your relationships with friends and family.” —Swedish study on lottery winners.

On the other side of the spectrum, when a person suffers an accident and loses a limb, their happiness levels drop for a few weeks or months. But even with tragedy and loss, they usually find a way to bounce back and then return to baseline.

“In a study of people with high-level tetraplegia by Gerhart and colleagues, 92% of participants reported that they were glad to be alive and 86% of the group reported that they enjoyed an average or better than average quality of life.” — Harvard study on post-traumatic growth.

This is also called hedonic adaptation. In both gain and loss, the pleasant and unpleasant, we return to our same old happiness level.

This can be a little bit disappointing at first. Normal goals like having a successful career, boatloads of money and even relationships, once achieved, don’t seem to give us the lasting satisfaction that we’re looking for. It’s the story of my business, which I thought would make me happy, but got me totally burnt out.

We are all on this hedonic treadmill, and many of us are aware that we are. We see the same patterns repeat; chasing a goal, reaching it, but then quickly looking for the next one. And yet we keep running on the treadmill, unable to see a way out to get off it. As my dad often says, “if something isn’t working one way, try it another way.”

Changing your baseline 🧘🌈

This then begs the question: is there a way to change your baseline? The answer is yes.

Meditation seems to provide one of the clearest, tried-and-true approaches to raise your baseline happiness. It does so by changing your mind’s operating system. This is backed by both science and the individual experiences of thousands of people.

How? Well, our happiness is simply a measure of how satisfied and content we are in the present moment. When we’re ruminating on the past or anxious about the future, this is impossible. 

The first way meditation does this is by quieting down these thoughts; it does this through quieting your Default Mode Network (DMN). The DMN is like a special network in your brain that becomes active when you're not doing anything in particular or when your mind wanders. When the default mode network is active, we often think about ourselves, our memories, or what might happen in the future. But sometimes, these thoughts can make us feel sad or worried a.k.a unhappy.

An example of an overactive DMN.

Imagine that you are at a party, telling a joke that gets met with an awkward silence. Initially, people might think “Oh no, that wasn’t so funny,” but they tend to quickly move on to the next leg of the conversation, forgetting about it entirely. However, you go home that evening, finding yourself completely unable to sleep because you are wrought with worry about the bad joke you told, what a fool you appeared to be, and how others might be judging you harshly for it. This is a classic example of DMN overactivity and the negative thought patterns which tend to be visible in people who suffer from depression, anxiety, and OCD.

Studies have shown that regular meditation practice can lead to structural and functional changes in the brain, including reduced activity in the Default Mode Network. There are many similar studies on psychedelics like magic mushrooms and DMT, which have been shown to quiet the DMN just as much as meditation. So you’ve got at least a couple of options.¹

Of course, meditating for 5 minutes for a couple of weeks won’t do the trick. It takes about 8 weeks of daily practice, 15-20 minutes a day, before you can decrease activation in your Default Mode Network. Or go find a place where psychedelics are legal. Check out my friend’s great video about DMN here.

I can confirm that once you meditate regularly for a while, you will simply have large chunks of time when you have less thoughts. One time when I was walking my dog I was suddenly awestruck with a realization: For the last 15 or 20 minutes, I was aware of my five senses, but my mind was totally free of wandering thoughts. Wow!

Levels of awareness 🪜

The second way meditation and psychedelics increase baseline happiness is by helping us let go of our ego.