The Hedonic Treadmill and Unconscious Capitalism

WELCOME TO EPISODE 144

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Freddie Kimmel (00:00.974)
Welcome to the Beautifully Broken podcast. I'm your host, Freddie Kimmel, and on this show, we explore the survivor's journey, practitioners making a difference, and the therapeutic treatments and transformational technology that allow the body to heal itself. Witness the inspiration we gain by navigating the human experience with grace, humility, and a healthy dose of mistakes. Because part of being human is being beautifully broken.

Freddie Kimmel (00:34.863)
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the beautifully broken podcast. I have a very strong morning routine. I generally include two to three minutes of nice. I do some mobility work. I do red light therapy and then a quick meditation. And in my lived experience, what this allows me is to show up with a standard of excellence. I feel really good about. have my own bar that I said, however, this particular morning,

I'm prepping my body for the cold and I'm just filled with this sense of dissatisfaction. Very subtle. Almost a dis-ease and I can't put my finger on it. So I'm looking around at the area that I've got prepped for my ice, intentional cold exposure, that's trademarked, and thought about all the ways the morning could be better. I looked at the wood chips on the ground and I realized sometimes they work their way into the water.

thought I should put this thing on a concrete pad. I looked at the lighting surrounding the fence and I imagined how Edison bulbs would add more zest. I visioned how the ice barrel could be made of wood and complement the need for recycling on the planet. Maybe I'd even eventually add a Brown's gas system and bubble in hydrogen to the water and make it on and on and on. And so I just had to stop myself and I had to get in the ice.

And my brain is overwhelmed with these thoughts of creation and building a better mousetrap and self judgment and more. But when you hit the ice, it's like pow.

It's so powerful. It's so expansive. So the water is 38 degrees. The air temp is 50. It's cold as fuck. Cold! It's pouring rain. The skies are gray. There's not even one beam of sunshine to warm my face. So if you've ever been in a tub of ice, it feels like a volcano of energy skyrocketing up through your crown chakra.

Freddie Kimmel (02:43.715)
And the only thing you can do to calm the eruption is to breathe.

So in that breath, the body is dumping these levels of adrenaline and norepinephrine up to 530 % and dopamine up to 250%. I've got a great article on all the neurological benefits and the biological benefits of ice on beautifullybroken.world, but that's not what this is about. My body is being flooded with these neurotransmitters and I hit this brick wall of realization, like a literal brick. My brain...

wants more. My brain wants more. It will never stop wanting more. My brain will always want more. And I want us to examine on this episode is more better. I'm driven out of the ice bath. go in my house and I'm just jump on Mr. Google. And I'm just want to better understand this phenomenon of more, which drives us to be such brilliant little producers, sometimes unconscious capitalists.

and why we need to change it up to get better results or improvement or do we? That's the question. So I immediately stumble across this term hedonic adaptation or the hedonic wheel, the hedonic treadmill, some reference. So hedonic adaptation is an adaptation level phenomenon that describes how humans become insensitive to new stimuli and quickly readjust to an emotional baseline. Therefore,

The stimulus needed to create an emotion like happiness or excitement needs to be more intense than the last stimulus for someone to feel its effects. When we get used to wonderful things in our lives, we falsely assume they were going to last. So I want to do a real world example because I thought that was so profound. So let's just take a stationary bite.

Freddie Kimmel (04:45.825)
or a rower or a pulsed electromagnetic field device or a sauna, you can fill in the blank for you. You believe this thing is going to give you pleasure or provide value to yourselves. That's hedonic consumption. Let's use a bike as an example. The bike provides you with enjoyment, hedonic value, but over time you become accustomed to, air quotes, the bike.

one day you realize it no longer brings you any additional enjoyment at all. And you feel like you did before you even purchased the bike. This is a real world example of hedonic adaptation. The bike becomes a drying rack for your laundry. So allow that to settle in. And I invite you at home, everybody listening to this, to identify a single or maybe multiple real world examples of

the thing, that awesome thing at one time that now acts as a laundry rack.

And I also want you to examine, because this is where it hits for me, feel the hours you traded for dollars and the energy that left the closed system to get the thing.

It's incredible. So for me in the morning with the ice and wanting to make a better, more profound experience, once I got in that cold, and this is the great thing about cold, it just blew everything out of the water and I was able to have a deepening of my awareness. It's like, what am going to do? Spend all this time and all this energy and all these things to make the same cold experience. There's nothing wrong with building a better mousetrap, but there's a trade-off.

Freddie Kimmel (06:31.949)
And I just want to go back to that idea that feel into the hours you traded for the dollars and the energy that left the system to get the thing and just have an awareness around what you're doing. I want to provide a fix. I want to provide a way for us to get off the hedonic hamster wheel. And I need to address this one more thing above that I said, there is a false assumption, right?

that we make. We get used to the wonderful things in our lives, whatever they are, and we falsely assume that they're going to last. It's gonna go. We're here for a finite amount of time. In the actual end, you and I will be left with the emotional lint ball of lived experience. And I personally, I want those to be full and exciting and as rich as possible.

I always think about this, if we're blessed enough to receive a moment of consciousness on the precipice of death, we might look back at this memory. I don't know what the memories will be. It could be this warm summer day, bare feet carelessly just dragging through the green grass. The sun is beaming down and it's kissing your sweet skin. I'll tell you my funny memory that comes up a lot. I have this memory of driving to chemotherapy to be treated for cancer. I'm safe in my dad's truck.

I'm double-fisting breakfast egg sandwiches with hash browns. I know the irony of fast food while going to get treated for cancer. And I felt loved. I felt safe. I had a plan. For the first time in a long time, somebody had made me breakfast and I wasn't worried about money living in New York City. I was with my family. It's a forever memory. Those beautiful memories. And how do we go back into that, those moments of deep, deep...

gratitude, right? I'm talking about gratitude. If you feel into those moments, all of sudden we're like, well, for me anyway, it's like heaven is the unrealized moment of now. Do you know, I often will look back at this list because I've seen so many blogs written about the top five regrets on one's deathbed and how they keep us living from living a happy life. Let's just go over these. I'm just going to read that again. Have you examined the top five regrets on one's deathbed?

Freddie Kimmel (08:57.97)
and how they keep us from living a happy life. These were from nurses and caretakers. Being witness to people transitioning. Number one was, I wish I had dared to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me. Number two, I wish I hadn't worked so hard. that hits me. Number three, I wish I dared to express my feelings. Number four, I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.

Number five, I wish I had let myself be happier.

That's what hits me. I wish I had let myself be happier. So if we're looking for that key, that key to that moment, especially to number five, the big aha moment for me was the simple, quick and easy way off that wheel. The way off this hedonic treadmill is gratitude.

The science says at this great study from 2008 that measures brain activity of people thinking and feeling gratitude. And what they found was that gratitude causes synchronized activation in multiple brain regions. It lights up parts of the brain, the brain's reward pathways known as the hypothalamus and more. And gratitude can boost the neurotransmitter serotonin. It can activate

the brainstem to produce more dopamine. Dopamine is our brains. It's like your curious chemical. keeps you driving. And the more we think positive, grateful thoughts, the happier and healthier we feel. Set aside your circumstance. It's like where you are. It just lifts, it elevates. And so this practice of gratitude, you know, the more the external and validation and happiness come from within,

Freddie Kimmel (10:57.926)
You don't need a lot. So I just want to go, and I know this sounds so basic, Freddy, aren't we going to get some like cool biohack now? Cause like, well, you are, it's like the ultimate one, but I'm reminded of the access to these powerful tools that we have. And because they're not new all the time and because we don't stick with them, they fall off. So number one for me is journaling. Just writing down a few things that you're grateful for.

It's one of the easiest, most popular exercises available. The purpose of the exercise is to reflect on a past day, few days, or a week. Remember three to five things you are especially grateful for. In this way, you're focusing on all the good things that happen to you in a given set of time.

So just the idea of, again, how do I make this part of my life? How many times do I really need to graduate U Journal? I personally download at the end of the day, I try to do five things I'm grateful for. A couple things I could have done better and somebody I want to send love to. Not gonna tell them, just gonna write it on the page and send them the frequency of love. Some people do it every day, some people once a week.

The argument against doing it every day is that it can become tedious or whatever feels like force. But if it becomes a practice you feel good about, you'll keep doing it. The other thing that I like is very simple is knowing a gratitude prompt. And I actually have these listed on my computer. These are things like, I'm grateful for three things I hear, for three things I see, I smell, I touch.

I am grateful for these three animals. The practice of expanding this emotional vocabulary of what you are grateful for, it raises the barometer on your internal joy. They're a great way to kick off a practice, especially if you feel stuck. They're also relatively simple. And it could just be one keyword, one prompt. So I keep these loaded on my computer.

Freddie Kimmel (13:07.56)
They also cover the senses, the colors, people, things. Again, it's expanding that emotional vocabulary. Okay. The last one you guys are going to laugh so hard. Carry a rock in your pocket. Carrying a gratitude rock. I know it's ridiculous. We've gotten to this. Everybody gets a free rock. Gratitude vibrates at 540 megahertz. This is pulled from a book that I cannot validate, but the vibration of gratitude.

it falls around the vibration of love, which is one of the highest vibrational frequencies you can be at. I understand that, yeah, how are you coming up with that number? And can you just go inside and feel that feeling of love, how good, how strong that emotion is? The more time you can spend in gratitude and love, the more your body's frequency raises and the healthier it will become. Carrying a rock in your pocket,

might be the time you turn this podcast off or switch over to Pornhub or The View, whatever you're into watching. But it could also be the moment that I win you over because this is a very low investment to change. doesn't cost you anything, but it changes your quality of life and the quality of time you have in this human body. I just want to mention because sometimes when we say frequency talk, we lose people or the law of vibration.

We're just talking about the concept that everything within our universe in its purest form, in its most basic B form, is a vibrating mass of atoms and sub particles. Think about the energy of light. So we're going to apply this to the law of attraction. The energy, the vibrations that you resonate, which you project based on your thoughts, your feelings and your emotion determines your individual projected frequency.

I am like the sum of the parts broadcasting out of field, is perceived as information by other people. Does that make sense? I'm broadcasting Freddie into the field. Literally. This attracts to it energy or vibrational frequencies that harmonize or resonate with it. That transmutes from waves of energy into smaller particles of matter, determining with a laser like precision, the events, the situations and circumstances.

Freddie Kimmel (15:31.666)
that you attract and you're gonna see experiences as they manifest into a tangible, measurable form of your life. Are you lost? That's great. Put a rock in your pocket and call it a day. Simply touch the rock, think of something you're grateful for. Do this for 30 days and write me on social media, tell me, Freddy, it didn't work. Things are worse. Things are worse from touching that rock. I'm gonna close it up. This was a, man, I'm just so aware of

the brain's ability to like be client ladder climbing. Where am I going? As opposed to the present moment. There's such great gifts. If we look around and I want to remind you of that, I want to reflect your perfection, your most unbelievable highest version of yourself. And I hope this podcast serves as that mirror as we build community together. I love you so much. Happy holidays. Bye.

Freddie Kimmel (16:33.694)
team. Thank you for creating a wave of momentum that is driving season five of the beautifully broken podcast. My heart thanks you for tuning in. And if you enjoy today's show, head over to Apple podcasts and now Spotify, Spotify is new and you can leave a review five stars if you loved it. And before you go, I have something really important I need to offer. There are two ways we can build this relationship. The first

is to join my membership program at buymeacoffee.com forward slash freddy set go. You get early access to all the podcasts, bonus episodes, discounted consults, and free webinars covering all the wellness technologies. The second is to support beautifullybroken.world. That's right, I have a brand new website and new store, beautifullybroken.world. Listed on here are all the wellness tools, supplements,

educational courses and products that I absolutely love. Most of them offer significant discounts by clicking the link or using the code. Please know that they don't cost you anything extra. And at the same time, they do support the podcast through affiliations. What? What's that? I just got a message from my lawyers, my internet team of lawyers. They wanted me to tell you that the information on this podcast is for educational purposes only. By listening

You agree not to use the information found here as medical advice. Do you agree? Yes, you agree to treat any medical condition in yourself or others. Always consult your own physician for any medical issues that you may be having. Finally, our closing. The world is changing. We need you at your very best. So always take the steps to be upgrading your energy, your mindset, and your heart. Remember, while life is pain,

Putting the fractured pieces back together is a beautiful process. I love ya. I'm your host, Freddie Kimmel.