What is adaptation or habituation?
Campbell and Brickman hypothesized that we live on a “hedonic treadmill” – that we react strongly to good events, but then come back to neutral. They called this a treadmill because one can never stay happy for long; one works for good things, but adapts to them once they are attained. In a sense, they contended that life is like an addiction — that one gets pleasure from things at first, but after addiction one must obtain the thing just to avoid pain. Solomon’s opponent process theory and Heady and Wearings’ dynamic equilibrium model are based on similar assumptions.
