When Treats Stop Working
he satisfaction from buying yourself something nice keeps shrinking. Here's the science behind why rewards lose their glow, and what that means for how you spend.
Remember the first time you bought yourself something really nice? Think about the anticipation leading up to it, the unboxing, and that warm glow that lasted for days afterward. Now think about the last time you bought yourself something in that same category, maybe something even more expensive. How long did the glow last that time? A few hours? Until the next want pops up on your feed?
There’s a name for this vanishing satisfaction. Understanding it might be one of the most valuable financial insights you ever gain.
The Treadmill You Can’t See
In 1978, a psychologist named Philip Brickman did something nobody expected. He studied lottery winners and found that within a year or two, their reported happiness levels returned to where they’d been before the win. Even more surprisingly, people who had experienced serious accidents also returned to roughly their baseline happiness over time.
Brickman had stumbled upon something fundamental about how people work. We adapt to almost everything, for better or worse. Researchers started calling it the hedonic treadmill: no matter what happens, we keep walking, yet our happiness essentially stays the same.
For spending, this plays out in a quietly devastating way. Every reward you give yourself eventually becomes the new normal. The treat becomes expected. The thing that thrilled you last month becomes background noise this month. And then you need something a little bigger, a little more expensive, to feel that same lift you used to get so easily. The treadmill doesn’t slow down. It speeds up.
Your Brain Already Got What It Wanted
According to neuroscience, dopamine, the brain chemical most associated with reward and pleasure, doesn’t actually spike when you get the thing. It spikes during the anticipation of getting it.
The wanting is the reward. The having is the comedown. This is why scrolling through an online store at 10pm feels exciting and engaging. Still, the package sitting on your doorstep three days later feels surprisingly flat. Research suggests that 76% of shoppers feel more excited about a package in transit than about the item once it’s in their hands.
Your brain received the dopamine hit before the purchase even arrived. The item itself is a receipt for a transaction that has already occurred in your neural circuits. You paid money for something your brain already consumed for free.
The Quiet Cost of Upgrading
When hedonic adaptation meets reward spending, the result is something financial planners call lifestyle inflation. The pattern goes like this: you earn more, so you reward yourself with an upgrade. You adapt to the upgrade. What used to feel comfortable now feels like going without. You need to earn more to afford the next round of rewards that will make you feel the way the previous rewards did.
Studies suggest that lifestyle inflation accounts for between 50% and 70% of income growth over two years. That raise you worked so hard for? Most of it is quietly absorbed into a new baseline that feels exactly like the old one, but is more expensive to maintain.
Adaptation doesn’t just take the pleasure away. It creates new discomfort. The person who treats themselves to business class on one trip will feel cramped in economy on the next. The person who never flew business class feels fine in economy. Same seat, completely different experience, all because of what came before it.
You’re not buying happiness by upgrading. You’re raising the price of contentment. And that price only goes in one direction.
Knowing Doesn’t Fix It
Understanding hedonic adaptation doesn’t make you immune to it. You can know the treadmill exists and still find yourself running on it. Awareness is necessary, but on its own, it’s not enough.
What actually helps is designing reward systems that work with adaptation rather than against it. Research by Van Boven and Gilovich consistently shows that experiences resist adaptation more than material purchases. Novel and sporadic rewards hold up better than predictable ones. And, interestingly, anticipation that you don’t immediately resolve, like planning something to look forward to without rushing to buy it right now, can deliver the dopamine your brain is after without the financial hangover.
We’ll dig much deeper into building those kinds of reward systems in Post 5 of this series. For now, the understanding itself is worth holding.
Something to Try This Week
Think of a purchase that felt amazing at the time. Something worth every penny in the moment. Now ask yourself: where is that item right now? How often do you notice it and feel that same pleasure? And what would you feel if it just disappeared one day?
Most adapted purchases become invisible. They’re present but unfelt, like furniture you walk past without seeing.
This week, walk through your space and pay attention to the things you no longer notice. The once exciting things are now just there. What does that tell you about the things you want today?
Next in this series, we’ll look at when celebration crosses into sabotage, and how to tell the difference while you’re in the middle of it.
This content is for educational purposes only and should not be construed as financial or therapeutic advice. Consider speaking with qualified professionals for personalized guidance.