What If You've Been Chasing the Wrong Kind of Happy?
Welcome to April, dear friends. And Happy Easter to those of you celebrating today!
This month we are going deep into joy and positive energy. Not the permission to feel them, you already have that. But the understanding of how they actually work. Because once you understand that, you can access them on any day, in any body, regardless of what is happening around you.
Over the next four Sundays we will explore what joy actually is and why most of us are looking for it in the wrong place, where your personal version of it lives right now, how positive energy is something you can generate rather than wait for, and finally something that might surprise you: what happens to the people around you when you find it.
Each Sunday builds on the previous one. But if you miss a week, you will still find something worth your time.
Today we start with the foundation. And it begins with a moment I spent years not understanding.
The Morning I Hit the Number
Three years into building my first business, I hit a monthly sales figure I had been privately aiming for since the beginning. I will not tell you what it was. But I remember the exact moment I saw it. I had imagined this moment many times. I thought I knew how it would feel.
The feeling lasted about forty seconds.
Then my brain moved, almost without my noticing, to the next number. The next gap. The next thing that needed to be different before I could call this a real success.
I sat with that for a while. Then I did something I had not done before. I went back through the entire previous year and looked at every milestone along the way. The first month I covered my costs. The first time a client referred someone to me. The first piece of real evidence that what I was building was actually working.
The same pattern at every single one. A brief flutter of relief, then immediately, eyes forward to what was missing.
I had been living on layaway. Paying into a joy I was planning to collect later. And later kept getting postponed.
There Is a Name for This
It took me a while to discover that what I had been doing was not a personal failing or a lack of gratitude. It is a documented psychological mechanism with a name.
Psychologists call it the hedonic treadmill.
The term was coined in 1971 by researchers Philip Brickman and Donald Campbell, and it describes something our brains do automatically and relentlessly: no matter what happens to us, good or bad, we adapt. We return to our baseline level of happiness remarkably quickly, and then we need something new to feel the same lift again.
The most striking demonstration of this came from a famous study of lottery winners. Researchers expected to find that winning large sums of money produced lasting happiness. It did not. Within a year, lottery winners reported roughly the same level of happiness as people who had won nothing. They had adapted. The extraordinary had become ordinary. And they were already looking for the next thing.
This is not a character flaw. This is how human brains are built. The very mechanism that helped our ancestors survive by always striving for more is the same one that makes lasting happiness through external achievement essentially impossible.
You hit the number and feel nothing. You get the good health report and feel relief for a week. The family visit you waited months for passes and leaves you already anticipating the next one. You are not ungrateful. You are human. You are on the treadmill.
The problem is not that you have been trying hard enough. The problem is that you have been running on something that was never going to take you anywhere.
Three Kinds of Good Feeling
Understanding the hedonic treadmill is the first step. The second is understanding why joy is different from happiness in a way that matters enormously.
Most of us use pleasure, happiness, and joy as if they mean the same thing. They do not. They are three entirely different experiences, and two of them are subject to the treadmill while one is not.
Pleasure is immediate and physical. Warm sun on your skin. Coffee that tastes exactly right. A comfortable position after hours of discomfort. Pleasure is real and it matters. But it is brief, and it lives entirely in your physical circumstances. It arrives when conditions are right and leaves when they change. It is also heavily subject to adaptation. The coffee you love today will feel ordinary in a week if you have it every day without paying attention.
Happiness is the one most caught on the treadmill. It depends on your life going the way you want it to. Things working out. Plans succeeding. Circumstances aligning with your preferences. When life cooperates, happiness flows. When it does not, no amount of wanting it produces it. And when it does arrive, your brain adapts to it faster than you expect, and the goalpost quietly moves. Happiness is, at its core, a report on how your life is going. Which means it is only available when the report is good, and it never stays good for long without something new to chase.
Joy is something else entirely. Psychologists who study wellbeing describe it as a quality of genuine engagement with your life as it actually is. Not as you wish it were. Not once conditions improve. As it is, right now. Joy does not live in your circumstances. It lives in the quality of your attention. And crucially, it is not subject to the hedonic treadmill in the same way, because it is not dependent on external conditions changing. You cannot adapt away from something that was never about circumstances to begin with.
This is why joy coexists with difficulty in a way happiness never can. You can feel it while grieving, while in pain, on a gray Tuesday when nothing is going right. Because it does not require the report to be good. It requires only your presence.
The Trap, and What It Costs at This Stage
My sales milestone story is a mild version of something I hear from this community constantly, but with far higher stakes.
Maybe you have been telling yourself you will feel better once the test results come back and the uncertainty is gone. Maybe you have been waiting to feel settled since you moved to a smaller home three years ago. Maybe you remember the year you retired, expecting that once the pressure of work lifted, you would finally feel at ease, and then it did not quite happen that way. Maybe you are waiting for your relationship with an adult child to improve before you let yourself feel genuinely good about your life. Maybe, underneath everything, you have been waiting for your body to cooperate before you give yourself permission to feel okay.
These are not small wishes. They are completely reasonable responses to genuinely difficult circumstances. The trap is not wanting those things. The trap is believing that feeling good lives on the other side of them. Because even when those conditions are met, the treadmill moves. The brain adapts. The list regenerates.
At forty, you can afford to keep running. Life cooperates often enough that the strategy occasionally works, and the horizon feels far away. At seventy or eighty, the calculation changes. Some conditions will improve and some simply will not. The body becomes less predictable. Loss accumulates. And the time you spend waiting for the report to be good enough is time you are not actually spending on your life.
Joy does not require the report to change. It requires only your attention to what is already here. The warmth of a familiar voice. The satisfaction of a small task finished. Morning light through the kitchen window. The moment when something true is said in a conversation and the other person genuinely hears it. None of those require good conditions. None of them are subject to adaptation in the way happiness is, because each one, met with full presence, is genuinely new.
The treadmill only works if you keep running. Joy is what happens when you step off.
What You’ll Find Below
In the premium section this week:
✅ The Once Audit - Write down every condition you are waiting on before you allow yourself to feel good, and see clearly what that list is costing you
✅ Goal vs. Joy Blocker - How to tell the difference between a legitimate hope and a condition you have installed to indefinitely defer feeling good
✅ Three entry points to joy you can use today, in your actual circumstances, without waiting for anything to change
✅ Your April intention - one honest commitment for the month ahead