My sole complaint about this post is that I feel the idea, as applied to psychology, is a couple orders of magnitude more amazing than the post suggests. My initial reaction on seeing this post was "Huh, neat. Upvote." Now that it's had more time to stew in my brain, I'm starting to imagine lots and lots of potential implications this theory has for improving the productivity and happiness of my daily life.
Go on please, the website only says a couple of potential applications.
To the fun theory, hedonic treadmill sequences.
http://gettingstronger.org/hormesis/
TL;DR stoicism with science.
Key idea: OPT, Opponent Process Theory: http://gettingstronger.org/2010/05/opponent-process-theory/
Research, PDF: http://gettingstronger.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/Solomon-Opponent-Process-1980.pdf
From the article:
"In hedonic reversal, a stimulus that initially causes a pleasant or unpleasant response does not just dissipate or fade away, as Irvine describes, but rather the initial feeling leads to an opposite secondary emotion or sensation. Remarkably, the secondary reaction is often deeper or longer lasting than the initial reaction. And what is more, when the stimulus is repeated many times, the initial response becomes weaker and the secondary response becomes stronger and lasts longer."