The first time you look into your baby’s eyes is one of those moments.
Driving through the Haast Pass with the grandeur of those mountains, the river, the bush…more moments.
The icy plunge into a high country lake, even in summer – taking your breath away!
Lying spread-eagled (starfish!) on the smooth, cool sheets on a hot summer night….
Moments like these are woven into everyday life. They make up the fabric of each day, they’re part of our ordinary world. They’re fleeting and yet there in memory forever.
Savouring is defined as ‘the capacity to attend to, appreciate, and enhance the positive experiences in one’s life’ (Bryant & Veroff, 2007, p.xi), and to a certain extent we all do it – Bryant describes savouring as “the act of mindfully appreciating something that is personally pleasurable” (Bryan, 2021, p. 3).
Research into savouring started in the early 1980’s when Fred Bryant and Joseph Veroff were exploring the way people evaluate their own mental health. Bryant & Veroff found that coping ’embodies the cognitive and behavioural mechanisms through which people process negative events and regulate negative feelings in response to such events’ and hypothesised that ‘there must be a parallel set of cognitive and behavioural mechanisms through which people process positive events and regulate positive feelings in response to positive events’ (Bryant, 2021, p. 3).
Needless to say, since the mid-1980’s there’s been a whole explosion of research looking at positive psychology including savouring.
For people living with chronic or persistent pain, the very idea of ‘savouring’ seems weird. Pain can take up so much room in thinking and being, looking for the positive can feel a little patronising, dismissing the very real anguish that pain can create. Introducing savouring needs to be done carefully and only after validating and empathising with the person’s experience. Savouring can then be introduced as a way of enriching what is already there in a person’s life, without diminishing the effect pain has on almost everything.
There’s evidence that chronic pain reduces attentional resources, memory, and processing speed (Khera & Rangasamy, 2021), interfering with resources needed for other tasks, including those needed to savour. Savouring requires attentional engagement: deliberately appreciating something as positive or enjoyable requires us to focus on that experience, and this is hard to do when pain is grabbing those very same resources. Weigand, Moosmayer & Jacobsen (2021) found that people attending music and performing arts who also reported chronic pain were less likely to savour their experience. While this is a correlational study, it’s also one of the first studies to explore the relationship between chronic pain and savouring aesthetic experiences. These authors propose some implications from their study: perhaps people with chronic pain don’t experience as much from their exposure to aesthetic/positive experiences and given that chronic pain treatments aim to enhance quality of life, if having chronic pain leads to less savouring, it might start a downward spiral where positive experiences are less intense and feel less relevant for people who could really do with a lift.
How do you know if you savour things? Well, there’s a Savouring Beliefs Inventory (Bryant, 2003), or if you’d like one that’s scored online, try this: click.
Bryant and Veroff (2007) identified ten savouring strategies people engage in to savour experiences: sharing with others, memory building, self-congratulation, sensory-perceptual sharpening, comparing, absorption, behavioral expression, temporal awareness, counting blessings, and kill-joy thinking. In other words, these strategies can be used to enhance savouring – but before any of these can be employed, there’s one explicit component that must be present: deliberate attentional focus on ongoing positive feelings (Bryan, 2021, p. 7). This requires training the attention to notice the positive.
We need other skills such as not over-focusing on future positive events (kill-joy thinking) to protect from disappointment. Nevertheless, putting yourself into situations where you are more likely to have positive experiences (like doing things you love – mine is often gardening or silversmithing); remembering positive times through looking at old photographs or reminiscing with friends (one reason I love photography is that when I’m processing them I get to relive the experience of being there); being fully absorbed in an experience or ‘flow’ (fishing along the river is one of my favourites); reviewing the day and being grateful for what has gone on (gratitude journaling, or deliberately choosing to acknowledge what I have, even if I don’t have many things I’d like).
Bryant suggests avoiding activities where attention is divided – or where we’re inclined to switch from activity to activity (doom-scrolling or TikTok videos perhaps?); but concentrating your gaze on something in your environment you want to savour (perhaps the details of a flower or a sunset); and even closing your eyes while having a pleasurable physical experience like being hugged or having a massage (please don’t do this while driving ;-)).
One suggestion is to attend to various sensory aspects of a flower while also noticing your reactions to the flower – when you recognise good feelings, turn your attention inward and focus on your internal experience and emotions to fully be with what it feels like to feel good – then as the feelings fade, shifting attention away from the body and back to the flower (Garland, 2021).
Where does savouring come into mindfulness? As I noted above, directing your attention to where you want it to be is a prerequisite to savouring. Mindfulness is a process for training your attention, or ‘messing about with your attention’ so you can direct it where you want.
As someone living with ADHD (and fibromyalgia) I know that developing attention regulation is really difficult. The strategy that’s been most helpful for me, apart from the frequent dips in and out of paying attention throughout my day, has been to attend to the details of my sensory experience.
I don’t do lengthy mindfulness meditations very often, but I find that by being curious about the intricate details of my sensory experience, I’ve extended how long I can be fully present. I also know that mindfulness isn’t about feeling something different, it’s about being willing to allow what is to simply be there. The skill of paying attention underpins my savouring practice – with the skills I’ve developed to direct my attention to where I want it to be, I can direct my attention to the positive in my life. Noticing the positive experiences throughout my day gives me awareness beyond how sore my body is (and it’s sore right now!) because in this moment of ‘ow my hips are really sore’ I am also aware of ‘and my head is resting on the pillow at just the right angle, my breathing is slow and regular, and my hand is touching my partner’s back and it feels so good.’
I encourage you to take a moment when you have your next cup of coffee, or clean your teeth to notice and savour the flavours. To breathe and expand your attention to the goodness of these sensations. To make room for them to be as present as your pain.
Bryant, F. B., and Veroff, J. (2007). Savoring: A new model of positive experience. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Bryant, F. B. (2003). Savoring Beliefs Inventory (SBI): A scale for measuring beliefs about savouring. Journal of Mental Health 12, 175–196. doi: 10.1080/0963823 031000103489
Bryant, F. B. (2021). Current Progress and Future Directions for Theory and Research on Savoring. Frontiers in Psychology, 12, 771698. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.771698
Garland, E. L. (2021). Mindful positive emotion regulation as a treatment for addiction: From hedonic pleasure to self-transcendent meaning. Current Opinions in Behavioral Sciences. 39, 168–177. doi: 10.1016/j.cobeha.2021.03.019
Khera, T., & Rangasamy, V. (2021). Cognition and Pain: A Review. Frontiers in Psychology, 12, 673962. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.673962
Weigand, R., Moosmayer, A., & Jacobsen, T. (2021). Does self-reported chronic pain influence savoring of aesthetic experiences? PLoS ONE, 16(11), e0259198. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0259198