Savoring is the capacity to attend to, appreciate, and enhance the positive experiences in one’s life.
“It is like swishing the experience around … in your mind,” says Fred Bryant, a social psychologist at Loyola University Chicago.
The benefits of savoring include stronger relationships, improved mental and physical health, and finding more creative solutions to problems.
Dopamine is a chemical messenger and hormone that plays overall in many bodily functions including motivation, movement, and mood. We get a rush of dopamine when we experience pleasure. When dopamine levels drop, we feel depressed.
The more intense and short-lived the pleasure, the stronger the drive is to get it. That explains the positive hits we get from nicotine, drugs and alcohol, and other addictive behaviors.
Savoring is a more skillful way of handling dopamine. Rather than chasing after short-term highs, we can slow things down and experience long-lasting glows of pleasure.
Developing the skill of savoring
Bryant suggests you pick one thing in your daily life to savor. Stay with it. Enjoy it. Enhance it.
You can anticipate a pleasurable experience, experience and savor it as it’s happening, and then remember it later, getting a triple dose of dopamine.
“Savoring is the glue that bonds people together, and it is essential to prolonging relationships,” Bryant says. “People who savor together stay together.”
The folks at Greater Good have put together 10 ways to develop savoring as a skill:
- Share your good feelings with others. Describing positive experiences to someone else allows you to review them, find deeper ways of explaining them, and celebrate them.
- Take a mental photograph. Capture the moment in your memory. Pay attention to sights, sounds, smells, tastes, textures, and how you feel in your body.
- Congratulate yourself. When you remember to savor and experience, give yourself a pat on the back, do a happy dance, or shout hooray. Savor your savoring.
- Sharpen your sensory perceptions. What are you seeing, smelling, hearing, feeling, tasting?
- Shout it from the rooftops. Laugh out loud, jump up and down, shout for joy. People who outwardly express their good feelings tend to feel extra good
- Compare the outcome to something worse. Even when things don’t go your way, it might have been more of a disaster.
- Get absorbed in the moment. Put your thinking brain aside and enjoy!
- Count your blessings. Practice gratitude.
- Avoid killjoy thinking. No need to point out what didn’t go well or count the costs.
- Remind yourself that good moments pass quickly and should be relished.
In your journal: describe a recent positive experience. Include sensory details and describe how it felt in your body. Capture the experience.