You’ve probably had some version of this thought:

“Once I fix my sleep, everything will be better. I’ll feel like myself again. I’ll finally be happy.”

It makes sense. Sleep feels like the one thing standing between you and the life you want. But this belief, as natural as it is, contains a trap.

And understanding the trap is one of the most freeing things you can do while working through insomnia.

The hedonic treadmill

Psychology has a well-researched concept called hedonic adaptation. Here’s how it works.

You have a baseline level of happiness. You believe that reaching some future goal will permanently raise that baseline.

But when you actually achieve the goal, you experience a temporary spike in happiness, and then you return to roughly where you started.

The new thing becomes normal. You adapt. And then you look for the next thing.

A famous 1978 study found that lottery winners weren’t happier than a control group just a few months after winning.

People who became paralyzed from accidents weren’t substantially less happy than non-disabled people once they adjusted to the change. Good or bad, we adapt.

Think about your own life. There was probably a time when you thought,

“Once I get this job, this relationship, this house, then I’ll really be happy.”

And maybe you got it. And maybe it was great for a while. But eventually, it just became your life, and you were back to baseline.

This doesn’t mean goals don’t matter. They do.

But building your entire sense of purpose around a future outcome, such as overcoming insomnia, sets you up for a cycle of chasing and disappointment.

What actually moves the needle

Research from positive psychologist Sonja Lyubomirsky suggests that three factors drive happiness: your genetic set point, your life circumstances, and the intentional activities you choose to engage in.

Because of hedonic adaptation, our circumstances have less lasting impact than we think. The third factor, what we actually do each day and the mindset we bring to it, is where we have the most leverage.

This is where values come in.

Values are different from goals. Goals are outcomes you can check off: get promoted, run a marathon, fix your sleep.

Values are qualities you live out through your actions, every day, regardless of what you’ve achieved or what’s going wrong. Things like honesty, courage, kindness, curiosity, love, humor, and determination.

You can complete a goal. You can never complete a value. Values are always available to you, even on your worst day, even after your worst night. That’s what makes them so powerful.

When you act in alignment with your values, the action itself is meaningful. Not because it leads to a specific result, but because it reflects the person you want to be. That kind of meaning doesn’t wear off the way goal achievement does.

A quick exercise

Ask yourself three questions and write down whatever comes to mind:

What do I want my life to stand for? How do I want to show up in the world on a daily basis? At my funeral someday, what would I want someone who knows me well to say about how I lived?

From your answers, pick three to five values that resonate most. Not values you think you should have. Values that genuinely matter to you.

Then, for each one, write a simple action definition.

For example, if your value is courage, your action definition might be “choosing to face my fears in order to do what’s important to me.”

If it’s kindness, it might be “choosing to be kind toward others and myself on a daily basis.”

Why this matters for sleep

When your sense of purpose depends on a future outcome like sleeping well, every bad night feels like a threat to everything.

But when your sense of purpose comes from how you live each day, a bad night is just a bad night. It’s uncomfortable, but it doesn’t rob your life of meaning.

That shift in stakes is quietly one of the most powerful things you can do for your sleep.

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To peaceful sleep,

Ivo at End Insomnia