Relishing life experiences – secrets to a happier life…
Even in the mud and scum of things, something always, always sings.-Ralph Waldo Emerson
Hello Reader! I hope you have been well. I want to start with a cliché quote that has been said about 7835 times, and I am going to say it yet again.. “Life is a rollercoaster.” Cause it’s true. The last 3 years have given us enough evidence to support this statement. We can’t always be experiencing happy times. Things are going to suck, sometimes more frequently than we would like. And it is also true that it gets hard to ‘see the light’ during such times.
Recently I came across something that Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh said that really hit me. It goes:
We are very good at preparing to live, but not very good at living. We know how to sacrifice ten years for a diploma, we are willing to work very hard to get a job, a car, a house and so on. But we have difficulty remembering that we are alive in the present moment, the only moment there is for us to be alive.
Thus, I am here to introduce something that is important for all of us, something that we should implement in our lives to make it at least a tad bit nicer.
Savoring is the capacity to attend to, appreciate and enhance the positive experiences in your life (Bryant & Veroff, 2007). It is the active realization that at this moment, I am happy and uplifted and I want to make this moment last. It is different from mindfulness in the way that it asks you to be more than just aware of the present, that is, to identify and retain the positive emotions and feelings you are experiencing.
For instance, I have this friend who is my ‘swinging buddy’. Whenever we meet, we swing together, laugh loudly and then end it by sky-gazing. We stare at the clouds and the blue sky in silence. Laughing with my friends on lame jokes, going to the beach and walking alongside the shore, discovering a song with touching lyrics & eating a filling meal after coming home… these are all moments where I realised that I am happy and looked after. I feel this immense gratitude & appreciation for the moment itself. This is what savoring looks like.
We can savor across time & experiences, from tangible & intangible things. Savoring the past, for instance through photo albums & school calendars, is called ‘reminiscing’. There also exists 2 types of savoring, namely, reactive savoring & proactive savoring. The former is an automatic response to positive events happening in your life whereas the latter is the deliberate act of creating/seeking positive experiences.
What does the research say? Let’s find out:
The positive emotions retained through savoring can enhance people’s creativity, social relationships, and resilience (Tugade & Fredrickson, 2007). Savoring thus, is linked to a number of things such as higher life satisfaction, higher perceived control, higher happiness levels, reduced anxiety & depression levels, increased resilience, enhanced work-life balance & overall higher subjective wellbeing. It counteracts the effects of unpleasant feelings & emotions experienced in stressful times, as per Fred Bryant, Ph.D. and author, also known as the father of savoring research.
Research has also revealed that we handle positive & negative information in different brain hemispheres and that experiencing negative emotions involves more thinking & resources. So, they naturally wear off slower than the nicer ones. Professor Amabile also analyzed over 12K diary entries to conclude that the negative effect of setbacks on happiness is two times stronger than the effect of progress. We tend to focus on what we lost more than on what we have gained. And it is a tendency of humans as well as animals. It is called the negativity bias or positive-negative asymmetry.
My point is: since we know that these negative emotions are likely to stay, we have to make a conscious effort to magnify the positive experiences and make those emotions last.
Some of the ‘savoring strategies’ are noted as follows:
- Journalling the positive experiences and the emotions you felt in that moment
- Clicking photographs and video clips of positive experiences however normal or usual they seem
- Not taking daily experiences, people, or activities that make you feel good for granted
- Purposefully focusing on the positive experiences through all senses (being truly in the moment) which is also called sensory-perceptual sharpening
- Re-telling positive experiences to people around you and encouraging them to share such experiences with you as well
- Checking memorabilia from time to time and really recalling the memory associated with it
- Noticing and writing three or five good things that happened during the week
- Reflecting on moments in the day when you were kind to others & when others were kind to you
- Avoid multitasking (it causes you to divide your focus and thus you cannot savor even one of the experiences)
- Make it a point to seek out a positive experience once a week. Be it a walk in the park or buying ice cream!
- Laugh, dance and be loud about what makes you feel good. Express it!
However, we should keep in mind a few things. It is tough for depressed individuals, people with mental illnesses, or simply those who are in negative circumstances to notice positive experiences and feelings. We can try to help them remember or notice the same.
All of this is surely easier said than done since savoring would require us to slow our own paces of living and consciously direct our focus to positive emotions. But it is guaranteed that savoring becomes easier with practice and that even though it is not a universal solution, there are innumerable benefits to magnifying our positive experiences.
After all, as Sir John Lubbock once said: Happiness is a thing to be practiced, like the violin.
References:
Davis, T. (2022). What Is Savoring? Definition, Meaning, and Examples. The Berkeley Well-Being Institute. https://www.berkeleywellbeing.com/what-is-savoring.html
Ramirez, D. P. C. (2022, February 4). Savoring in Psychology: 21 Exercises and Interventions to Appreciate Life. PositivePsychology.Com. https://positivepsychology.com/savoring/
Tugend, A. (2012, March 24). Why People Remember Negative Events More Than Positive Ones. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/24/your-money/why-people-remember-negative-events-more-than-positive-ones.html
What is savoring? (2016, September 28). The Positive Psychopedia. https://positivepsychlopedia.com/year-of-happy/what-is-savoring/
