How We Can Live Out Our Values

If you’ve ever chewed on something that you did, or that someone did to you, over and over again, then you’ve experienced rumination, which is our tendency to keep thinking about bad experiences.

This “passive comparison of one’s current situation with some unachiev...

Dissatisfaction is responsible for our species’ advancements, and if you never felt it, you’d be at a serious disadvantage. Discontent is not a reason to give up on success. Rather, it’s a reason to introduce the opportunity for frequent and meaningful victories into our lives.

There’s a simple reason for that: as expressed by researchers for the Review of General Psychology, “If satisfaction and pleasure were permanent, there might be little incentive to continue seeking further benefits or advances.”

In other words,

Hedonic adaptation is the tendency to quickly return to a baseline level of satisfaction no matter what happens to us in life and may be the cruelest of all 4 factors.

Hedonic adaptation is Mother Nature’s bait-and-switch. All sorts of life events we think...

Or, the 4 psychological factors that make satisfaction temporary.

1. Boredom
2. Negativity Bias
3. Rumination
4. Hedonic Adaptation

Taken together, these 4 components ...

It’s been defined as “a phenomenon in which negative events are more salient and demand attention more powerfully than neutral or positive events.”

Such pessimism begins very early in life. Babies begin to show signs of negativity bias starting at just 7 mo...