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I finished by saying that it struck me that all the ethical systems I was discussing were after the fact.
That is, that people act as they are disposed to, but they like to feel afterwards that they were right and so they invent systems that approve of their dispositions.”
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Alexei Panshin
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“Christmas is like candy; it slowly melts in your mouth sweetening every taste bud, making you wish it could last forever.”
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Richelle E. Goodrich
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Delighting the customer. Creating ‘happy moments.’ In the grander discussion of creating positive experiences in business, usually part of some misguided customer centric thinking, we seem to gravitate toward “special moments” in which we elevate the appropriate people’s happiness to a level in which they can actually recognize whatever happened was good.
We forget happiness is actually a Life formula in that we tend to make Life a zero sum game in experiential moments over the long haul. In other words. We naturally temper our happiness highs and seek to do things to actively fill up any emptiness a ad moment may have created.
This formula leads me to the post-happiness event let down. Someone once called this “happiness hangovers.”
I imagine any of us in the business world have felt this after a big meeting or some big trade show or some big thing we have prepared for and had some element of ‘showtime.’
That’s the same kind of funk we fall into after a holiday.
There are a couple of reasons this happens. One scientific and one mental.
Science.
The dopamine let down. Scientifically we juice ourselves up with dopamine in order to ‘meet the moment.’ Think of this as the feeling you get every time the email notification on your phone goes off… but every 15 seconds for almost 12 hours straight. Each ‘email has arrived’ notification sends a quick dose of dopamine to the brain, we get jolted <love the high> and then immediately receive another. When we are focused on this specific goal we get the rush of dopamine flowing through our brain and once the goal is achieved your body naturally reduces the levels of dopamine.
The body re-balances itself.
The dopamine high goes from high then to low. Eventually it re-calibrates to something finally normal <assuming there is something normal>.
Bottom line result? We feel bummed. We feel drained. That is the happiness let down scientifically.
Mental.
The positive feelings let down. According to psychologist Gary Stollak, psychology professor, most people have a “happiness set point.” Let’s call that a “5” on the self happiness meter.
Therefore when we get up for something and it concludes satisfactorily we rise to a high. Our happiness meter goes to 10 <maybe 11 if you are a Spinal Tap fan>.
Unfortunately your happiness meter balances out. That is partially why your happiest highs are often followed by depressed lows. The worst part of this aspect is what we fill the empty space, where that happiness used to hang out in & has now exited <the 11 to 2 gap>, with. We fill it with doubts, questions, regrets, what ifs, whatever else we could add in that diminishes the true happiness and high. Mentally it’s almost like we cannot accept the happiness was so good, so high, so as soon a the high itself is over we begin to look for imperfections & flaws with which to suggest “well, maybe it wasn’t that high.”
Bottom line result? We go high, we go low and, hopefully, normalize. That is the mental happiness let down.
Regardless.
My point in business and creating positive experiences is that it is impossible to always be high therefore there will inevitably be a low and you should seek to reset, or resettle, as quickly as possible. Effective resetting maximizes the feelings of the high and minimizes the low experiences.
This is hard because highs are, well, high and the aftermath is so anti-climactic versus the moment itself we tend to try and fill the space with stuff associated with the event trying to drag it out for as long as we can in order to put off the bad stuff I already pointed out.
For example, Christmas?
Leave the tree up.
Leave the lights up.
Maybe still play the music.
For example, Business?
Retell the highlight moments.
Replay portions & parts of the high.
Gather similar experiences <and even people> to relive aspects (shared experience).
While this happiness extension may seem like you are going backwards the intent is 2 things:
- Its sole purpose is to alleviate happiness let down. Nothing more. Nothing less.
- It is a purposeful attempt to address the fact we continuously try to invent things that approve of their dispositions. We hate to let it go even though our body is telling us we should. This usually occurs with the last lasting experience, therefore, the letdown. And maybe that is what hurts us the most. Our bodies have left it behind and yet we continue to try and stuff our body with the trappings of what was.
Happiness let down. We all experience it. I imagine the question is – is it really bad for us to do it?
Well.
Research has linked the let-down of perceived stress with an increase in flare-ups of pain and other ailments. One study found that people experience more panic attacks on weekends, and a 2015 study from Taiwan found that holidays and Sundays have more emergency room admissions for peptic ulcers than weekdays do. A 2014 study showed migraine sufferers, in times of stress, didn’t impact migraine occurrence … but a decline in their perceived stress from one evening entry to the next entry was associated with increased migraine onset over the following six to 18 hours<they called this a “let-down headache”>
All that said. Once something is done it is never really completely gone and we deal with the ‘let down effect.’ And while we hang on relentlessly to the trappings even though the event is done and gone at least now you know there are real scientific and behind we are so silly.
Look.
While I have written about the fallacy behind “manufacturing happiness’ or the whole idea of ‘purposefully creating happiness’ I do tend to believe you can affect the degrees of happiness. It certainly helps if your happiness is more likely dependent upon some realistic expectations or maybe viewing the little moments within the larger grind that is known as Life instead of seeking some larger more grand utopian vision of happiness and big events to define happiness.
Let’s say that of now. This is where I end. Business has to manage the discrete moments of now in order to maximize happiness.
There is no code or formula for this. But I can almost guarantee if you acknowledge happiness hangover or happiness let down you will most likely end up doing something that helps.