#8 Happiness and Life Circumstances

We learned about the impact that genetics have on our happiness set point - recall that it was 50% - and we talked about how its human nature to return to that set point even after experiencing significant positive or negative life changes. This is best understood by the concept of hedonic adaptation, which we explained briefly last time. Today we’ll expand on hedonic adaptation to better understand the impact that circumstances have on our happiness level. Remember that circumstances and deliberate activities were the other two significant factors found by Sonja Lubomirsky in her research.