Dancing About Science - Chapter 3 - What is Hedonic Adaptation?

Like most dancers, the journey to the stage (or the virtual stage) is full of ups and downs. You go through rehearsals that can create feelings of imposter syndrome, tension, and hopefully joy. You put a lot of pressure on yourself to hit the moves just as the choreographer intended. And when it comes to a group performance, you have to navigate the trials of formation and rapid scene changes.

The BIG Moment

But once you hit the day of the show, all the nerves build up to a point of excitement. Hopefully, you've come this far wanting to perform and now you can't wait to put it all out there for the world to see! You stick the first section of the routine, you killed the second, and the ending felt seamless. WOO! ...but fast forward a few hours...and back to reality.

What is Hedonic Adaptation?

Whether good or bad, big events in your life lead to big feelings. However, you don't retain those feelings for long. Sometimes, within minutes, you're back to baseline. In the case of a performance, maybe it takes a few hours, but you're likely to return to your stable state pretty soon thereafter. This phenomenon is known as hedonic adaptation - basically it's the reason that eternal happiness (or sadness) is not possible. Humans have a tendency to always return to their natural state.

The Dance Video Project

BaM puts together at least 1 video dance project every year with our group of volunteer adult dancers. It's a time where we get incredibly pumped to piece together a song, set choreography, and then perform in front of a professional videographer. The lead-up can be intense, but typically the day of the shoot is unforgettable. It almost feels like a runner's high - can't stop thinking about all of the amazing dancers and moments from the day.

And then, just like that, 8 weeks of rehearsals are over. The shoot is over. The feeling of intense happiness goes away. It's almost like it never even happened.

Sustaining The High

One of the things we've realized over the course of the last 10 years is to always be thinking of the next project. This forward thinking helps us to create motivation and momentum to eventually, if even for a few weeks, reach that high again. It also makes the intense crash not so intense when we all know that something else is in the works. While the powerful feeling of the shoot day may not be captured daily, future planning is resetting our baseline to at least be in the more positive zone.