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How to make good experiences even more pleasurable (and bad ones even worse):

No, the answer isn't copious amounts of drugs and alcohol. Believe it or not, it's interruption:

Six studies demonstrate that interrupting a consumption experience can make pleasant experiences more enjoyable and unpleasant experiences more irritating, even though consumers avoid breaks in pleasant experiences and choose breaks in unpleasant experiences. Across a variety of hedonic experiences (e.g., listening to noises or songs, sitting in a massage chair), the authors observe that breaks disrupt hedonic adaptation and, as a result, intensify the subsequent experience.

Source: "Interrupted Consumption: Disrupting Adaptation to Hedonic Experiences" from the Journal of Marketing Research

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Posted by Eric Barker 

Comments (4)

Feb 08, 2010
erika said...
totally makes sense. bad stuff lingers, good stuff will inevitably end.
Feb 08, 2010
Peter said...
One implication of this might be why it is so hard to break an addiction. Drinking or shooting up may be more pleasurable after trying to quit than if you had been doing it the whole time
Feb 09, 2010
sven said...
Peter - good call. When I've given up smoking pot in the past, the main temptation is "I've had a week off, so a joint right now would reeeeeaaaaally work".
Feb 10, 2010
JG said...
Pretty simple really. Everything in the nervous system is about contrasts in time and space, and not absolute levels of anything. The nervous system filters out and discards anything that doesn't show contrast. The *only* way to assure continuous stimulus from the "outside" to the "inside" is to constantly create contrasts preferably in mildly unpredictable ways. This is also the definition of "information" in the formal Shannon sense.

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