An expensive hotel bed can stop being remarkable and still be comfortable. Imagine sleeping there for a month. Losing the excitement of arriving wouldn't put the traffic noise back through the window. The pleasure of buying and the advantage of having are separate things.
Do we get used to everything? If that means repetition must keep making every feeling weaker, no. Some measured feelings grow stronger during repetition. A weaker feeling can also return after a break. The larger claim, that every feeling must weaken eventually, hasn't been established. Automatic weakening is false. Eventual weakening remains unproved.
I think the phrase needs more information. Familiar can mean I know what happens next. Less intense means the feeling has weakened. Easier means I can do the task with less effort. Recognizing the room, enjoying it less, and sleeping well in it aren't interchangeable. Knowing one answer doesn't give me the others.
Pain gives the most direct exception to automatic weakening. In a heat-pulse experiment, the peaks reached the same temperature, three seconds apart. Some people rated the delayed pain after later pulses as stronger. Others reported little change or less pain. The sequence lasted seconds. The measurement was felt pain, not a bodily injury being used as a stand-in for it.
For those people, that part of the pain grew stronger during the sequence. That defeats automatic weakening over those repetitions. It leaves the later course of their pain unmeasured.
There are shrinking responses too. A repeated sound can produce less startle. A response weakened by repetition can recover after a pause. Fading needn't mean the ability to respond has been erased.
Pleasure can return too. In a short massage experiment, people enjoyed an interrupted massage more than an uninterrupted one. A break could renew enjoyment in that setting. Less pleasure, no pleasure now, and never enjoying it again are increasingly large claims. The first doesn't establish the last. Renewal in this experiment doesn't guarantee renewal everywhere.
Drugs feeling like decaf is a picture of a weakened effect. It becomes misleading as a claim about the whole drug. Tolerance means a particular effect gets smaller at the same dose. With opioids, drugs such as morphine, tolerance can develop more for pain relief than for the effect on breathing. Noticing less of one effect doesn't tell a person how much the other has changed. A smaller felt effect doesn't make the drug inactive.
Even pleasure needn't steadily decline. Researchers tested selected young adult drinkers with alcohol and a comparison drink, then tested them again after five and ten years. Among those who developed a diagnosed drinking problem, alcohol made them feel more stimulated, or energized, and increased their desire for more. Liking stayed high. Drinking histories weren't randomly assigned. Three testing visits don't describe every intervening drink, but the result doesn't fit a rule that repeated drinking must gradually wear out its pleasant effects.
Returning for another drink doesn't prove that the last drink was better or worse. Wanting and liking have their own measurements. A growing urge can coexist with substantial pleasure.
Sleep shows why a feeling and a consequence need separate tests. In a laboratory experiment, people limited to four or six hours in bed nightly kept performing worse on attention tests over two weeks. Their sleepiness reports rose at first, then changed relatively little. They could remain sleepy while their reports stopped climbing. Meanwhile, the attention lapses kept accumulating.
Short nights with children are the everyday version of the question, though the experiment didn't study parents. Time in bed is sleep opportunity. The finding doesn't establish that parents learn to need less sleep, or what years of interrupted nights feel like.
Exercise brings in a different change. In a twelve-week cycling study, younger and older men increased the maximum oxygen they could use. Their capacity had changed. The training workload increased too, so a difficult later session wasn't necessarily a repeat of the earlier demand. Imagine carrying the same box up the same stairs after becoming fitter. Adding weight to the box would change the comparison again.
Expertise is my second claim. Practice can teach someone to notice useful differences they previously missed. Research on perceptual learning, learning to distinguish things more accurately, supports improvements tied to the task practiced. I picture a roaster distinguishing shades of brown that look alike to a beginner. That's an illustration of a learned distinction. It isn't a measurement of roasters' accuracy or a promise of perfect judgment.
The same comparison works for a chef judging texture or a driver recognizing a turn. Noticing more is a different result from feeling less. A practiced mistake is still a mistake. I would want accuracy checked against the result, and checked again when the conditions change.
Food can become more appealing through repetition. A two-week program of repeated tastes, with stickers for trying a disliked vegetable, increased parents' reports of young children's liking and intake. The rewards were part of the program. I would count less dislike as ordinary getting used to the food. More liking isn't an exception to fading if the original feeling was dislike.
Whether a familiar diet is healthy or shitty is a separate question. A taste rating doesn't measure nutrition. The vegetable result concerns acceptance of one food, with rewards attached. It doesn't establish that every diet becomes enjoyable or that healthy eating becomes effortless.
Abuse is where I can't supply a universal emotional course. Recognizing what's coming, feeling less distress, and continuing to live through it are different claims. Seeing someone continue tells me too little about what it feels like inside. Apparent calm doesn't establish approval. I can't call a persistent reaction a failure to get used to it, either.
There is evidence about later consequences. A study following people from childhood associated maltreatment with higher adult blood markers of inflammation, activity related to the body's immune response. That association doesn't establish causation or measure how ordinary or painful the abuse felt. The emotional course remains unmeasured here. Reduced distress, if it occurred, wouldn't by itself establish safety.
Money provides evidence for a lasting benefit, with another distinction attached. In Sweden, randomly assigned larger lottery prizes left people rating their lives more favorably in a survey five to twenty-two years later. Life satisfaction means judging your life as a whole. The first excitement of winning wasn't measured. A lasting advantage allows earlier fading. It challenges complete disappearance over that period.
I use happiness for satisfaction from doing what I think is right, and pleasure for satisfaction from getting what I want. Someone can want to feed a hungry neighbor and think doing so is right. The categories overlap. I think an act can remain worth doing after its good feeling fades. That is a reason to return to it; it doesn't prove that the same feeling will return every time.
The closest repeated-giving experiments lasted five days and ten rounds. Giving generally produced happiness that faded more slowly than getting. Some giving measures faded too. These were short tests of small gifts, with years of service still unmeasured. The recipient's benefit remains separate from the helper's feeling. A good act can help someone without reproducing the first day's satisfaction.
There is no counted total behind "almost everything." And calling growing pain another form of getting used to pain would change the meaning to rescue the claim. The exceptions need to remain exceptions to fading.
The strongest remaining objection is "eventually." Perhaps every feeling will weaken at least a little if we wait long enough. Growing pain over seconds doesn't disprove that, and a remaining benefit doesn't rule out partial fading. But an unspecified future supplies no measurement in its favor either. For a test, I need to know which feeling, how it's repeated, and how long we're waiting.
I'd revise the pain example if its apparent increase proved to come from differing peak temperatures or a measurement error. A later decline would establish a later decline; it wouldn't erase the earlier increase. For the larger claim, "this feeling will weaken within a year" can meet an unfavorable result. "Everything weakens eventually" can always ask for another year.