The hedonic treadmill in the age of the endless scroll

Think back to that one thing you longed for, for months. A new phone. A house. A holiday. A job. A love. How long did the thrill last? A week? A month? And then it became… just normal.

Welcome to one of the oldest riddles of the human mind: we adapt to everything. To joy, to grief, to wealth, to hardship. And that same gift for adaptation — the very thing that made our brain so brilliant — is what keeps us quietly, chronically unsatisfied. Today, that dissatisfaction is trained daily. By something you hold in your hand: a scroll that never ends.

The 1971 discovery: the hedonic treadmill

In 1971, the American psychologists Philip Brickman and Donald Campbell published an idea that would change the psychology of happiness forever. Their theory: just as our eyes adjust to light and dark, our happiness adjusts to our circumstances. They called it the hedonic treadmill — we walk and walk, but never arrive anywhere.

In 1978, Brickman and colleagues put it to the test in a study that made history. They interviewed three groups: people who had won the lottery, people left paralysed by an accident, and a control group. The result, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, was startling: over time, both the winners and the paralysed participants drifted back toward their original level of happiness. Both groups had… gotten used to it.

One important nuance: later work (Diener, Lucas & Scollon, 2006) showed that adaptation isn’t equally complete, or equally fast, for everyone. Some events — long-term unemployment, the loss of a partner — do leave deeper marks. But the principle holds: our brain is built for adaptation, not for lasting joy.

Why is our brain wired this way?

It isn’t a design flaw. It’s the whole point. Picture an ancestor who finds a bush full of berries. Wonderful — but satisfied forever? Then he stays at that bush until winter comes. The brain that survived said: “Lovely. Now the next bush. And a better shelter.”

Dissatisfaction isn’t failure; it’s a survival function. The problem? That same mind now lives in a world of abundance it was never designed for. And around 2006, something arrived that turned our treadmill into a sprint.

The man who made the endless scroll famous — and came to regret it

His name is Aza Raskin. The infinite scroll is widely credited to him (around 2006), though others lay claim to the invention too. The problem he set out to solve: people wasted time clicking “next page” over and over. His solution: let the page flow on by itself. No end, no click, no moment left to decide.

Today almost every social app uses it: TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, X, LinkedIn. And Raskin himself has spoken publicly of his regret; he appeared in the Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma (2020). In interviews he estimates that infinite scroll costs the world some 200,000 human lifetimes a day — not in deaths, but in lost time.

The slot-machine effect

Why is scrolling so hard to stop? The answer lies in research from the 1950s. The psychologist B.F. Skinner found that animals and people get most hooked on rewards that are unpredictable. A rat that’s fed every single time presses now and then. A rat that might be fed presses endlessly.

That’s the principle of the slot machine — and of your timeline. You never know what the next scroll will give you: a funny clip, a shocking headline, a meme, or nothing at all. That uncertainty is what holds you.

And here comes the most surprising piece of neuroscience. The neuroscientist Wolfram Schultz showed in Science (1997) that dopamine — often loosely called “the happiness chemical” — is released mostly when we expect a reward, not when we finally get it. It’s the anticipation your brain finds addictive, not the satisfaction. That’s why your phone stays magnetic even when what you find is usually nothing special: it isn’t the content that holds you, it’s the hope of something good.

The paradox of abundance

• Our brain is built to adapt quickly to whatever we already have.
• Our screens are built to keep promising that the next thing will be better.

The result: a generation that has more than any generation before it, and feels less satisfied. Research by Gloria Mark (University of California, Irvine) found that our average attention span on a screen dropped from 2.5 minutes in 2004 to 47 seconds in recent years. That isn’t a small shift — it’s a fundamental change in how our mind works.

An important nuance: it isn’t your fault

Here’s where this piece parts ways with the kind that simply says, “Just put your phone away!” If you scroll endlessly at night while knowing full well you’d sleep better, you are not weak. You are up against an industry of thousands of engineers and psychologists hired specifically to hold you a little longer — a scientifically refined nudge aimed straight at your dopamine system.

Awareness is the beginning, not the end. But it is a real beginning. When you understand how it works, you can recognise it; and the moment you recognise it, you win back a fraction of your freedom. Not all of it — but enough to start.

Top 10: from endless wanting to conscious living

1. Name the moment. Catch yourself scrolling again and say: “This is the treadmill. I’m looking for something this feed can’t give me.” Naming it calms the brain (Lieberman, UCLA, 2007).
2. Make your phone boring. Switch your screen to greyscale. Colour amplifies the dopamine response; a grey scroll is measurably less addictive.
3. Add friction. Take the addictive apps off your home screen. Those extra two seconds give your brain a chance to decide instead of react.
4. Give scrolling a time, not a feeling. Fifteen minutes a day, fixed time, done — just like the worry time from blog 2.
5. Replace one scroll session with something tangible. A walk, a chapter, drawing, tea without your phone. Not “instead of fun,” but “instead of empty.”
6. Practise gratitude as science, not cliché. Large-scale research (a meta-analysis of nearly 25,000 people) shows that regularly writing down what you’re grateful for measurably raises well-being — a real, if modest, effect. The well-known “three good things” exercise comes from the psychologist Martin Seligman; Sonja Lyubomirsky (UC Riverside) also studied how gratitude grows happiness. It forces your brain to look at what is there, not at what’s missing.
7. Savour, slowly. When something good happens, pause and name it instead of scrolling on. An experience only sticks once you give it conscious attention.
8. Choose meaning over a little pleasure. The Greeks distinguished hedonia (short-lived pleasure) from eudaimonia (meaning through worthwhile effort). People who work on something larger than themselves consistently report higher well-being.
9. Notice the hope, not the satisfaction. As you reach for your phone, ask: “What am I hoping to find?” That realisation is the first crack in the illusion.
10. Make an appointment with your future self. “After 10 PM my phone lives in the kitchen.” Implementation intentions (from blog 1) work here too: time, place, done.

In closing

Your brain isn’t broken. It works exactly as it once had to in order to keep your ancestors alive. The trouble is that it now lives in an environment it could never have foreseen — one that sets its oldest reflexes on edge, just to keep you looking at a screen a little longer.

The hedonic treadmill won’t disappear. The endless scroll won’t disappear. But you can learn to feel when you step onto it, and when to step off. Contentment isn’t a state you arrive at; it’s a skill you practise. Step by step, day by day, scroll by scroll that you consciously choose not to make.

Tonight, when you reach for your phone: what are you hoping to find?

Related reading

• Your Brain Is Not an Honest Witness
• A Mother Kisses Her Baby in an MRI
• Why Rest Has Become Unbearable

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Sources

• Brickman P, Campbell DT. Hedonic relativism and planning the good society. In: Appley MH, ed. Adaptation-Level Theory. Academic Press; 1971:287–305.
• Brickman P, Coates D, Janoff-Bulman R. Lottery winners and accident victims: Is happiness relative? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 1978;36(8):917–927. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.36.8.917
• Diener E, Lucas RE, Scollon CN. Beyond the hedonic treadmill: Revising the adaptation theory of well-being. American Psychologist. 2006;61(4):305–314. doi:10.1037/0003-066X.61.4.305
• Ferster CB, Skinner BF. Schedules of Reinforcement. Appleton-Century-Crofts; 1957.
• Schultz W, Dayan P, Montague PR. A neural substrate of prediction and reward. Science. 1997;275(5306):1593–1599. doi:10.1126/science.275.5306.1593
• Mark G. Attention Span: A Groundbreaking Way to Restore Balance, Happiness and Productivity. Hanover Square Press; 2023.
• Choi H, Cha Y, McCullough ME, Coles NA, Oishi S. A meta-analysis of the effectiveness of gratitude interventions on well-being across cultures. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 2025;122(28):e2425193122. doi:10.1073/pnas.2425193122