I would really like to talk about reward circuitry just thematically. Listeners of this podcast, and even if they've never heard one of these podcasts before, probably familiar with the word dopamine. We've talked about it a bit. And as we were talking about earlier, everything about the dopamine reward circuitry, which of course includes other chemicals too, is based on prior experience relative to current experience relative to anticipated outcome.

What's sometimes referred to as reward prediction error. Think something great is going to happen, something great happens, great. Think something great is going to happen, something less than great happens, sucks way more than you would anticipate. Think that something not so great is going to happen, something so-so or great happens, huge reward.

Novelty surprise brings the... Relative novelty and surprise brings the biggest rewards. I would like to kind of paint as the backdrop, think about it as a conceptual mural behind us. As I asked the question, maybe, just maybe, we're not supposed to be happy all the time or maybe even all that often.

And when we're feeling not so great or even lousy, provided it's not dangerous levels of depression, maybe we should frame that as the backdrop for the greater happiness that will come when we start to emerge from that lousy state. Now, some people would say, "Well, now you're just kind of using neurobiology to twist around what would otherwise be a lousy experience and tell me that it's good for me." No, what I'm trying to say is people want to be happy, I think we'd all love to be happy all the time, but we're not wired to be happy all the time.

And maybe the feelings of happiness can't exist unless they have contrast with these neutral or negative emotion states that we call, I don't know, feeling lousy, feeling anxious, et cetera. And just, I realize I can pose long questions, but I just want to provide a little bit more context for the moment, which is that every circuit in the brain, our ability to see light, literally, depends on the contrast with the so-called off-circuitry, which is the circuitry in our visual system that perceives darkness.

We need contrast to be able to see light. Everything's push-pull, hunger, satiety, cold, heat, perception, go, no-go, it's all push-pull circuitry in there. Why wouldn't happiness have a push-pull relationship with unhappiness or at least neutral affect? Yeah. Well, I think it does. I mean, you're giving a neurobiological explanation for what psychologists in this field of positive psychology have referred to as what's called hedonic adaptation, which is a fancy way of saying we get used to stuff.

You know, you, like, grab the, you know, delicious ice cream cone or I don't know, or Cuban, we do a delicious salad, really healthy, but it's a tasty, healthy, tasty salad, right? Start eating it. First bite is like, this is awesome. I'm so into it. It's great. Bite number two, a little bit less awesome, a little bit less.

By the 10th bite, it's not because you're full or you're, like, you know, feeling disgusted. It's just like that sensory experience, you've gotten used to it, right? It's just no longer as interesting. Walk into a bakery. Yeah, exactly. Mmm, it smells amazing. Spend five minutes in the bakery, 10 minutes in the bakery, you attenuate, you habituate.

Yeah, which is great. I mean, you wouldn't maybe want to be firing your neurons when you get all exhausted and stuff, but it's in one way terrible for happiness, another way very good for happiness, but in a major way terrible for happiness, which is the following. Every good thing in life, if it sticks around, becomes kind of boring over time.

You're just kind of used to it. I use the example sometimes of, you know, the last time, the first time your partner said I love you or if you had a kid, the first time your kid said mommy or daddy, that feels amazing, right? But like, you know, last week my husband said I love you, it's like whatever, I'm just used to it, right?

You know, last week when your kid was like I love you, mommy, like, you don't care, right? The most amazing thing in life, if it gets repeated, just becomes boring. And that sucks because, you know, you like the most amazing things in life to kind of keep being awesome, it's pretty sad that we don't have it, right?

This has a flip side though, which is very good for happiness, hedonic adaptation, which is the most terrible thing in life can happen and over time you get used to that too, you know? So your partner breaks up with you, you find out you have a chronic disease, right?

Just something like really bad happens, day one when you find out that piece of information, it is awful. But day two, yeah, it's still awful, but that's just your life and then over time it kind of gets better. There's a very famous study in the field of happiness science that tried to look at this with people who experienced a really great event in theory, winning the lottery, and people who experienced really bad events, real events in life, becoming paraplegic.

So you used to be able to walk and now you've lost the use of your legs. You survey happiest in people who haven't had these experiences and you ask, predict how bad it would be to have this. And people say, you know, day one of winning the lottery would be really great and a year from now, a year from that point, winning the lottery would still be just as great, it'd be awesome.

Same thing with paraplegic, you know, moment you become paraplegic, that day is a really crappy Thursday, but a year from then it's still just as crappy. And what you find is people, you know, on the day you become paraplegic or the day you win your lottery, like that's a big shift in your contrast, right?

The day you win the lottery is an awesome Thursday, day you become paraplegic is terrible. But a year from then, it turns out your happiness is no different from baseline from the day before that event happened, right? Statistically. And that is shocking, right? Like I know these results, I can quote the paper, but like if you told me today, "Laura, you know, you walk out of the studio, you get by a car, you're paraplegic, how would you feel in 2026?" I'd be like, my life is still really crummy.

But statistically that's just not going to happen. What does that mean? That's kind of good news about hedonic adaptation for happiness. That means the worst thing possible could happen to you and you have all these processes that are just going to get used to it over time and it's going to be okay.

And I think this is an important aspect of our psychology that we forget. I think sometimes we have opportunities to do things in life that are a little risky, something we might try out that we might screw up or fail at, or that we'll be bad at at first.

And we don't do it because we're scared, we're making a prediction like, "Oh, well if I failed or if I screwed that up, you know, I'd just be unhappy." But actually all these mechanisms that we have of hedonic adaptation means those things aren't going to affect you for as long as you think.

So I think the contrast hypothesis about happiness is real. Good things don't stay good things over time, but the bad things don't either. But we still want the good things to stay good over time and so that raises a question of how we can do that. And Liz Dunn, whose work I've mentioned before, she likes to use this phrase that scarcity engineers happiness, right?

One thing we can do is space out the good things in life, you know, so if I was having that really delicious, healthy salad with the avocado and whatever, if I had that every day, it would stop being good. But if I had it very, very infrequently, it would still be good every time I come back to it.

And so sometimes, oddly, the way we make ourselves happier is to kind of remove positive experiences, especially extreme positive experiences, kind of space them out so we can kind of come back to them over time. I definitely agree with that. I also, and forgive me folks, but I think I understand why dogs are so awesome.

They don't attenuate to reward. You tell them they're going to get this little piece of amazing whatever beef jerky or something and they're like, "Yes." Then second trial, "Yes." Third trial, "Yes." I mean, presumably at some point they reach satiety or fatigue, but there's something about their reward pathway is that they don't seem to attenuate much.

And if there's feedback to us on that, it's like, "Okay, okay, it's great that they'll keep delighting in the simple little things." It seems like almost as much as the first time. We are not like that. It's interesting. To my knowledge, people haven't studied eudonic adaptation in dogs, but it's a really good question.

But we are not like that for most things. And this sucks, right? I mean, it's also the case that in addition to kind of getting used to stuff over time, it's also showing a different feature, which is the sort of more particular contrast feature you're talking about. So over time, we kind of habituate.

That's one sort of neural mechanism. But another is the one that you mentioned, which is about the contrast, right? And that's what you see kind of, you see both of them, say, in the light perception, right? If I show you the same light over time, you're going to habituate.

That's eudonic adaptation. Literally, for folks listening, it literally disappears. Yes. And if you set up the right experiment, Russ and Karen DeValloy at Berkeley years ago did these beautiful experiments. You look at like a grating of light projected onto a wall, and if you can stabilize the eyes so that they're not moving around, it literally will disappear.

Same thing with an odor, same thing with touch, right? Like I wasn't thinking about my contact with the chair. Same thing with happiness. My deliciousness. It's so sad. Habituation, attenuation, these are technical terms when you really get down into it. And the push-pull, antagonism between light and dark, the smell, yes/no, on/off, push, all of it, go/no-go.

Every single aspect of the nervous system functions this way. It's a flexor extensor in the musculoskeletal system. But that gets to maybe what I would think of as different. So eudonic adaptation is the same stimulus over time, like almost like habituation. There's a different thing that happens when you get what you might call a contrast.

And there's all kinds of visual illusions that sort of function on this. If you've ever seen the one where it's like, "Is it the same color over here, over here?" And we throw this on your show page to show people, and it's like, "Oh, it looks different." It's like, "No, no, no.

That's because of the kind of contrast between the two things." You see something that's really bright over here, it makes something else look a little darker, right? That's a different negative effect on our happiness a lot of the time. This is the comparison effect, right? This is like my $50 million seems kind of crappy because I hang out with people who have $100 million.

Objectively, I have a tremendous amount of money, but I feel bad because I'm kind of comparing against something else. And so oftentimes when we're evaluating different rewards, we're kind of comparing them against what other people had or what we've had in the past. And that means that being in an objectively good situation might feel really crappy if you just have somebody else that has a slightly better objectively good situation.

My favorite example of this actually comes from the sports world. So researchers asked this interesting question like, "How happy are you when you win an Olympic medal?" Right? You're on the stand, you won an Olympic medal. And also, who's happiest? So gold medalists is up there, best in the world.

You might assume they're the happiest, right? And they are. They're smiling. Researchers analyze this by looking at facial expressions and kind of code the muscles and so on. But it turns out they're not the happiest, right? Who's the happiest? Well, let's look at this silver medalist. Are they happiest?

No. In fact, actually, if you code their facial muscles, they're showing expressions like contempt, deep sadness. It's the same expression you'd make like if your parent died or like, you know, a real terrible grief moment. This is the, I don't want to adhere to this, but this is the "second place is first loser" kind of mindset.

Because the idea is like, you know, who's your major comparison point if you're in silver? You know, 0.2 seconds or something and you would have gotten gold. And you're not feeling objectively like you're the second best on the planet. You beat, you know, all but one of billions of people on the planet.

No, you just feel terrible. So that's silver medalist. What's going on with the bronze medalist, right? There's another person on the stand. What's their comparison point? It's not gold. They were multiple people, multiple seconds away. Their salient comparison is like, by the grace of God, like I'm up here at all.

I almost like, you know, two seconds the other direction, I would have never gotten up here. And when you analyze the bronze medalist facial expressions, they're sometimes even happier than the gold medalist. Definitely happier than the silver, who's objectively better, but sometimes even happier than the gold medalist because they're like, "Oh, relative to my comparison point, I'm doing amazing." And the gold medalist is expected to get gold the next year or else it's pure reward prediction error.

Yes. Especially if they internalize the expectations of the audience, the spectators, excuse me, because if they come back the next year and they're second or third on the podium or not on the podium, it's seen as falling from a higher place. Exactly. This is a point that I make with my Ivy League students who've been perfect in their grades and perfect at everything to get into a place like Yale, which is like, turns out that's a terrible recipe for happiness.

The only way forward is stay there, down, or create a new opportunity. Stay there, you don't notice, right? Because you're habituated to it, just like the pattern. Down feels really bad. Like, that's a terrible comparison. I often play my students that DJ Khaled song, "All I do is win, all I do is win, win, win." And I was like, all you do is win, win, win would be a terrible way to experience success in life because you just stop noticing it over time if you won.

And that's messed up because it means when you get, when you finally hit the success that you were striving for, if you just stay at that level, it just stops being good, which sucks. And so that raises a different question, which is like, what is a hack that we can do to get away from that?

One is to not look for the silver lining, but to look for the bronze lining, ba-dum-bum, which is, you know, you kind of think of reference points that are lower than you. I love a good conceptual pun, especially when it's framed in an experiment, so thank you for that.

Yeah, it's like a big science experiment. No, that's especially gratifying to me. So look for the bronze lining, which means find a reference point that's not as good. And for most of the things you're comparing, whether that's your looks, your fitness level, your finances, you can look and find somebody that's doing worse than you.

Another great hack for this, and this is more one that's a kind of a hack for hedonic adaptation, getting used to stuff, actually comes from the ancient traditions. I know you talk a lot about, you know, smart, you know, folks back in the day who came up with this stuff, right?

This is one from the Stoic tradition, a practice called negative visualization. So Stoics like Marcus Aurelius thought, when you wake up in the morning, you should have the following thought pattern. You should think, "Today, I will lose my success. I will be exiled. I'll lose my partner. I will lose my health.

I won't be able to walk." And he doesn't say ruminate on that for forever, but just like a little, and then stop and say, "Ha, I'm not exiled. I still have my success. I still have my partner," and so on. This is a technique called negative visualization, where you just imagine, you don't have to live it in real life, you just imagine you lose something.

If you've ever lost something you're hedonically adapted to, you know how quickly you recognize the value of it. This happens to me with my phone all the time. I'm a chronic phone loser, and I'm like, you know, and I'm like, "Oh my God, my phone is gone. I left it in the airport.

All my contacts are there," and then I'm like, "Oh, it's in the car," and he goes, "I love my phone. Like, it's so valuable to me." There's that line in Pulp Fiction where he says like, what is it? It's like it's finding – at some point, I think it was Travolta says something, someone will know it, where finding it almost made losing it worth it.

Exactly. Because you appreciate it in a way that you didn't before because it was taken away from you. Yeah, and that sucks to really lose your phone. Sometimes, in my case, you really lost the phone, right? Sure. But negative visualization, you don't have to do that. You just use your imagination, right?

And so if you're listening right now and you have a kid, let's do this negative visualization. The last time you saw your kid was the last time you ever saw them. Oh, goodness. Never going to see them again. No, it didn't happen. So I'm a little intimidated about it.

But my guess is the next time you hug your kid, you'll hug – just that two seconds of thinking about what things would be like without it can break through hedonic adaptation. So one of my favorite hacks for hedonic adaptation, you can use scarcity, really space things out. But for the things you can't space out, you can't like have a kid and get rid of a kid for two weeks and come back to your kid, right?

You can use your imagination, and it doesn't take much to start to realize what you have and appreciate it more.