This Simple Trick Keeps All Your Favourite Experience Feeling Fresh and New

You know how great it feels to find a new favorite restaurant? Suddenly, you're finding any excuse to go to that cool spot with the sushi burritos. Friends coming into town? Sushi burritos. Need a snack on the way to a meeting? Sushi burritos, obviously. Woke up in the middle of the night with a singular hunger? 24-hour sushi burritos, baby. But eventually, all that seaweed, rice, and ginger starts to get to you. You can't imagine going back. Well, not all is lost. Next time you order a California-roll burrito, instead of grabbing it in two hands and going to town, try unwrapping it and eating it with utensils instead. You may gain a new appreciation for an old fave.

That feeling of diminishing returns as you continue to experience something that at one time gave you pleasure is called "hedonic adaptation," and it's a well-documented example of how the human brain just isn't wired to be happy all the time. In one of the best-known studies of the effect, researchers found that lottery-winners weren't substantially happier a year after their big take-home than they had been before. It's true: Even a million bucks gets old after a while.

So the fact that happiness fades over time has a name — great. But why does hedonic adaptation happen in the first place? According to one paper, the effect has two causes, working in tandem. While they sound like common sense, they also point toward a solution for more lasting bliss. First, when something is new, it often causes a flurry of happiness-causing events all at once. You get a new car, and you're delighted to discover each of its features one by one. Every drive brings new wonders (this thing came with French fry holders?!). But you can only discover new things for so long, and eventually, the stream of exciting features is going to trickle to a halt.

The other part of the equation is that even if something new provides a lasting benefit — say, if you had won a million dollars — after enough time, that new benefit just becomes the new normal. There's eventually a point where your brain just gets so accustomed to the new benefit that it doesn't consider it a benefit anymore.