I’ve had personal experience with this phenomenom, but never associated it with the hedonic treadmill.
I think this has also something to do with you current emotional state determining which episodic memories you recall. When you feel good, you remember all the good stuff, when you feel bad, all the bad things pile up. I’ve found it’s really difficult to remember what it was like being depressed when I’m well. That has lead to stupidly quitting medication a couple of times. Is there a name for this effect?
EDIT: In my case the improvement with medication was dramatic, so it wasn’t just a case of not noticing slow progress. My point was the anti-placebo effect probably consists of many different kinds of known cognitive failure modes, and it might be helpful to recognize them. In the problem that I describe, the difficulty is in retrieving memories that don’t fit the emotional context. The hedonic treadmill effect is another type of an effect that fits the category.
What you’re describing sounds like the results from the anti-placebo effect, although I didn’t go so far as naming that. Basically, you don’t realize its working (anti-placebo effect), and then you stop and regress (what you’re pointing to). Since you’ve figured this out, you should have a much easier time avoiding it with the next intervention you try, especially if you track the metrics you’re most interested in seeing changes in.
One place that things get tricky is that your negative reinforcement loops can get started while you’re still tracking metrics—as an example, perhaps you’re doing great, and then you have one bad day, and then you make the false assumption that the bad day means that you will continue having bad days and that none of the other progress is real. If you adopt that belief, then even your mood tracking will decline, so its important to be reality checking as much as possible along the way, and to remind yourself that one bad day is not as big a deal as weeks of good days, and that will help you stay on track. Here’s a video of me role playing the two attitudes that might be helpful.
Not quite on topic, but same principle—replace getting the work task done with having succeeded in improving on the metric you’ve been tracking for several consecutive weeks, and imagine how the optimistic person would respond to a down day, with that attitude, v.s. the overwhelmed/depressed role play person.
Edited the original to clarify. The video link didn’t work, it’s here, pretty descriptive of the basic attitudes. Changing attitudes to me feels like changing beliefs, you can’t simply choose them by tricks of imagination. Medication helped with that. These days my problem is more simple avolition than depression, any non pharma tips on that? (I’m a physician.)
It would be nice to know how much of imagined SSRI poop out doesn’t actually happen. Unfortunately there aren’t similar tracking tools in finnish to give to my patients. Maybe pen and paper should suffice.
Yes, a lot of it has do to with having the parts of your mind that are action oriented not in alignment with the ones that want to have fun. If you’re in that state for a long time, or in any way that ingrains the patterns hard, eventually you get to more extreme states like lack of interest in anything.
I use non-medication techniques to get people out of these states as my profession. You might find this audio helpful.
I’ve had personal experience with this phenomenom, but never associated it with the hedonic treadmill.
I think this has also something to do with you current emotional state determining which episodic memories you recall. When you feel good, you remember all the good stuff, when you feel bad, all the bad things pile up. I’ve found it’s really difficult to remember what it was like being depressed when I’m well. That has lead to stupidly quitting medication a couple of times. Is there a name for this effect?
EDIT: In my case the improvement with medication was dramatic, so it wasn’t just a case of not noticing slow progress. My point was the anti-placebo effect probably consists of many different kinds of known cognitive failure modes, and it might be helpful to recognize them. In the problem that I describe, the difficulty is in retrieving memories that don’t fit the emotional context. The hedonic treadmill effect is another type of an effect that fits the category.
What you’re describing sounds like the results from the anti-placebo effect, although I didn’t go so far as naming that. Basically, you don’t realize its working (anti-placebo effect), and then you stop and regress (what you’re pointing to). Since you’ve figured this out, you should have a much easier time avoiding it with the next intervention you try, especially if you track the metrics you’re most interested in seeing changes in.
One place that things get tricky is that your negative reinforcement loops can get started while you’re still tracking metrics—as an example, perhaps you’re doing great, and then you have one bad day, and then you make the false assumption that the bad day means that you will continue having bad days and that none of the other progress is real. If you adopt that belief, then even your mood tracking will decline, so its important to be reality checking as much as possible along the way, and to remind yourself that one bad day is not as big a deal as weeks of good days, and that will help you stay on track. Here’s a video of me role playing the two attitudes that might be helpful.
Not quite on topic, but same principle—replace getting the work task done with having succeeded in improving on the metric you’ve been tracking for several consecutive weeks, and imagine how the optimistic person would respond to a down day, with that attitude, v.s. the overwhelmed/depressed role play person.
Edited the original to clarify. The video link didn’t work, it’s here, pretty descriptive of the basic attitudes. Changing attitudes to me feels like changing beliefs, you can’t simply choose them by tricks of imagination. Medication helped with that. These days my problem is more simple avolition than depression, any non pharma tips on that? (I’m a physician.)
It would be nice to know how much of imagined SSRI poop out doesn’t actually happen. Unfortunately there aren’t similar tracking tools in finnish to give to my patients. Maybe pen and paper should suffice.
Yes, a lot of it has do to with having the parts of your mind that are action oriented not in alignment with the ones that want to have fun. If you’re in that state for a long time, or in any way that ingrains the patterns hard, eventually you get to more extreme states like lack of interest in anything.
I use non-medication techniques to get people out of these states as my profession. You might find this audio helpful.