How to Make Your Post-Pandemic Happiness Last

This story is part of Mind Yourself, a series on mental health—why so many men struggle with it, how institutions are addressing it, and practical ways to improve your own.

The United States is hurtling toward the post-COVID world. The vaccines work. And while not as many people as we might like have gotten them so far, and the virus continues to rage around the world, the latest guidance from the government is that if you’re vaccinated, you can basically live your life without fear of infection or spreading the disease. It's something to celebrate. Of course, reopening is fraught in its own way, and countless people are still dealing with unemployment and grieving the loss of loved ones. But at a minimum, this summer looks to be much happier for most Americans than last year's. For me, simply spending time with friends and family and generally living life without fear of a deadly virus already feels great.

In an ideal world, this happiness would be durable. Perhaps after the past 14 months, we’ve learned and grown, and now that we’re once again free to do those previously mundane activities coronavirus took from us—hugging one another, crowding into concert venues, fighting a stranger for the armrest on airplanes—we’ll be so grateful to be back to our old ways. We’ll be walking around aglow in appreciation, utterly unwilling to go back to taking such basic everyday freedoms for granted. Doesn’t that sound nice?

Unfortunately, humans are great at adaptation. It can be a good thing: Just think back to how quickly we adapted to all of the stressful changes the pandemic brought on. But we adapt to positive life changes too, in a process called “hedonic adaptation.” (You may also have heard it referred to as the “hedonic treadmill.”) This is the force that helps explain why even lottery winners eventually return to the same level of happiness they were at prior to winning a gigantic pot of free money. (Same with getting a new car, a new house, or moving to a new city.)

But UC Riverside social psychology professor Sonja Lyubomirsky, Ph.D., who studies human happiness, says there are reasons to be hopeful about holding on to your post-pandemic buzz. “One thing to keep in mind is that adaptation is often incomplete,” she says. “Just because you adapt to something doesn’t mean you adapt 100%.” Which also means that there are things you can actively do to stay happy.

Let your baseline reset. Part of the underlying logic of hedonic adaptation involves something called a happiness “set point.” The idea is that each of us has a level of well-being, determined by some cocktail of genetics and circumstances, that stays relatively stable throughout our lives. Think of it as happiness homeostasis: According to set point theory, no matter what good or bad events happen in our lives, we ultimately end up at a relatively stable level of satisfaction.

Why is this a silver lining? Well, as Kennon Sheldon, Ph.D., a psychologist who has published several papers on hedonic adaptation with Lyubomirsky, points out, “the pandemic depressed people’s well-being levels, to below what their typical state had been.” Simply getting back to baseline might feel amazing. Whether or not you’ve known it, there’s probably been a ceiling on your joy lately. The pandemic's ending might help shatter that ceiling.

But you still have to work for it. In a paper titled, “Achieving Sustainable Gains in Happiness: Change Your Actions, Not Your Circumstances,” Drs. Lyubomirsky and Sheldon wrote that “the effects of positive circumstantial changes (such as securing a raise, buying a new car, or moving to a sunnier part of the country) tend to decay more quickly than the effects of positive activity changes (such as starting to exercise, changing one’s perspective, or initiating a new goal or project).”

The pandemic ending—and the resumption of all of our germy behaviors—is a change in circumstance, of course. So its resulting feelings of happiness will wane. But if you use this change in circumstance as an opportunity to kickstart a new activity, you might be able to give your happiness a longer tail. Plus, well-being often follows purposeful activity. In that same paper, Drs. Sheldon and Lyubomirsky write, “our data suggest that effort and hard work offer the most promising route to happiness.” Maybe it’s time to finally sign up for a 5K or take that ceramics class.

Establish new habits. The end of the pandemic might be the perfect time to establish fresh mental patterns. “Transitions are a way to reinvent yourself,” says Dr. Lyubomirsky. Read anything about habit formation and you’ll find that the evolution of habits follows the “cue/trigger → behaviors → reward/result” progression. Those cues can often be physical spaces. Maybe this is why you always found yourself gobbling handfuls of M&M’s post-lunch in the office but not at home. Well, in the case of something like the office (but also say the gym), it’s possible that you’ve been away for so long that triggers for previous patterns of behaviors have lost their power. Which gives you the chance to link those cues with new habits.

Be grateful. I know. At this point, the chorus of people talking about gratitude has reached a level of annoyance previously attained only by people who meditate, run marathons, or eat vegan. But there’s a reason why: over and over, it’s shown to be extremely effective in improving your sense of subjective well-being.

“Psychological research has shown that translating thoughts into concrete language (i.e. words, whether oral or written) has advantages over just thinking the thoughts,” says Dr. Robert Emmons, a professor of psychology at UC Davis, whose work has a particular focus on gratitude. “It makes them more real, more concrete, helps elaborate on them. It helps us not take benefits for granted. It shifts our consciousness to those gifts all around us that we ignore because our minds are chronically poised to notice the negative.”

But don’t worry, this doesn’t mean you have to start a gratitude journal. Take it from Lyubomirsky, who says the theme of her book, The How of Happiness, is all about finding practices of happiness that fit your personality and feel good to you.

“I don't count my blessings, I don't keep a gratitude journal,” she says. “I think those are things that are incredibly hokey and trite—even though lots of people swear by them. But that doesn't mean I don't practice gratitude.”

Dr. Lyubomirsky suggests simply noting, verbally, anytime you’re in a social setting, how great it is that you’re able to be with people again—whether at work, or inside a restaurant. Is it a bit corny? Sure. But so is anything earnest, and the point here is to trick yourself into being aware of the novelty of the situation, instead of letting it just become normal again. Says Dr. Lyubomirsky: “That’s basically what appreciation is, it’s an awareness of gratitude.”

Don’t take life for granted. Dr. Emmons says that one of the reasons we struggle with feeling grateful is because “we reduce it to feeling good after something good happens. It’s contingent upon a success, victory, or benefit.” Emmons wants your gratitude to be proactive instead of reactive, unconditional rather than conditional. How? By affirming and recognizing things in our life that we’re taking for granted.

One technique called the “George Bailey Effect”—after the It’s A Wonderful Life protagonist, who is suicidal until a guardian angel shows him all the blessings in his life—involves considering the person, circumstances, and routine pleasures you’re overlooking. Ask yourself what it would be like if you didn’t have your partner, your job, or your health—or what it would be like if you had to go back to a full-scale lockdown?

The point here is to reverse the direction of your appreciation, so that instead of longing for something you don’t yet have, you find renewed joy in the things you do have that are overlooked. “It requires that we look outside of ourselves to those forces that are sustaining us,” says Emmons.

Mind what you say—to yourself. Dr. Emmons says he’s careful to monitor his interior monologue. “Grateful people have a particular linguistic style that uses the language of gifts, givers, blessings, blessed, fortune, fortunate, and abundance,” he says. “Less grateful people are preoccupied with burdens, curses, deprivations, and complaints and their words reflect this negative focus.”

That means being aware of non-grateful thoughts—things like ”other people are better off; life is boring, that I am entitled to this, that things have not turned out the way you wanted”—and reframing them by asking things like “What is the gift in this situation?” or, “What is the opportunity here?”

But it’s not just changing how you characterize experiences that helps—expanding your emotional vocabulary does too. That’s because the more words and concepts you have to label your experience, the more rich that emotional experience will be. Dr. Tim Lomas is a positive psychologist who has put together an extensive index of “untranslatable” words that describe different ways of expressing well-being, appreciation, gratitude, and happiness across world languages. You might be able to deepen your reservoir of good feeling by having access to more terms for it. Like mono no aware, a Japanese term that is partly about an appreciation for ephemeral beauty, or mudita, a Sanskrit expression that describes sympathetic happiness, or feeling good for someone else feeling good—the positive version of schadenfreude.

Routine is good—but so is novelty. Though people adapt to their new homes over time, they don’t adapt to the views in their new homes. Why? Because the house is static and unchanging. But views are dynamic. They always look different.

“Whenever things are not constant—when there’s variety, when there’s novelty, when there’s surprise—we tend not to adapt,” Dr. Lyubomirsky says.

What’s the lesson in there for our post-pandemic life? By all means, find a routine, but find ways to inject variety into it. Take a different route to work, move around your weekly movie night, and switch up your Tuesday morning coffee shop and your Thursday night trivia.

But definitely keep that trivia night, or figure out something else social, says Lyubomirsky. One thing she hopes we’ll keep from the pandemic is the understanding of just how important social connection is. It’s vital to good health and happiness, and something we came to appreciate much more deeply when it went away. Hopefully it’s an appreciation we can make last.