326. Can Widows Change Their Happiness Set Point?
The Widowed Mom Podcast
Krista St-Germain
4.9 • 695 Ratings
🗓️ 25 August 2025
⏱️ 18 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The human brain has a remarkable ability to adapt to both positive and negative life changes, eventually returning us to a baseline level of happiness.
When your person dies, it can feel like your happiness baseline has been permanently lowered. Many widows worry they'll never experience the same level of joy or fulfillment they once knew. But here's what modern science tells us: your happiness is changeable through consistent, intentional practice.
Join me today to learn how hedonic adaptation works like an emotional thermostat that pulls you back to your normal happiness level, what keeps some people stuck at a lower happiness set point, and how savoring micro-joys interrupts hedonic adaptation and strengthens positive neural pathways.
Get full show notes, transcript, and more information here: https://www.coachingwithkrista.com/326
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the Widowed Mom Podcast, episode 326. Can Widows change their happiness set point? |
| 0:10.2 | Welcome to the Widowed Mom podcast, the only podcast that offers a proven process to help you work through your grief to grow, evolve, and create a future you can truly look forward to. |
| 0:24.2 | Here's your host, Master Certified Life Coach, Grief Expert, Widow, and Mom, Krista St. Germain. |
| 0:33.3 | Hey there, welcome to another episode of the podcast. |
| 0:37.1 | Ooh, here I am in the new house. Finally, |
| 0:40.9 | I've been thinking, I've got to get an episode recorded. I am mostly unpacked. |
| 0:45.2 | There are a few boxes left, but I'm mostly unpacked. I'm settling in nicely. The two TVs upstairs |
| 0:50.4 | were installed. That was a nice bit of progress to be made. Art has been put on the |
| 0:55.8 | walls and is starting to feel like a home to me. So if you're watching this on YouTube, |
| 1:01.0 | you can see my new background. It's a little sparse. I could probably use a lamp or some flowers |
| 1:05.6 | or something, but I'm getting there. So thank you to all of you have been cheering me on |
| 1:10.2 | and sending me kind |
| 1:12.4 | emails and just rooting for me these last few months. It's kind of been a wild ride. And so I just |
| 1:19.1 | really appreciate all the support. And I'm glad to be back with you in my new environment recording |
| 1:24.1 | an episode, which is very appropriate on happiness set point. And I'm not sure I've ever |
| 1:28.6 | explicitly talked about happiness set point today. So today I want to talk about what it is, |
| 1:34.2 | what it means for you, and how you can actually change it. Because I think if you're anything like |
| 1:38.8 | most of the widows that I work with, you don't want the average happiness set point. You don't want to settle for what you |
| 1:46.6 | are used to or were used to before your person died. You want to live life fully. You want to maximize. |
| 1:52.6 | You want to experience amazing things and not just womp-womp what you're used to. So, okay, |
| 1:59.5 | let's talk about the happiness set point. So the idea |
| 2:01.9 | of a happiness set point comes from something called hedonic adaptation. Maybe you've heard of it. |
... |
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