Savor

"Savor. To appreciate fully; enjoy or relish: I want to savor this great moment of accomplishment.[From Latin sapere, to taste.]"

~ American Heritage Dictionary

Savoring. It’s the term psychologists use to describe the concept of being in the moment/being present/being mindful and truly enjoying an experience.

We’ve all savored different experiences at different times--whether it’s the time you enjoyed a wonderful meal or when you looked into a loved one’s eyes or read a beautiful love letter. If you believe the research (I do! :), learning to truly appreciate pleasure in our life by savoring the experience is an essential element to creating enduring happiness .

Let's take a quick look at how not to savor a positive experience, as well as how you can prolong and intensify pleasure. Then we’ll have a couple of homework assignments. Yah? Sweet.

It's a bit longer than other Big Ideas, but I trust you'll savor it!

How Not to Experience Pleasure

We’ll start with what not to do! Here are some sure-fire ways to make sure you don’t ever fully experience the pleasure of the moment.

1. Think like a “Kill-joy.” If you want to kill any sense of pleasure in an experience, make sure you think of all the other places you’d rather be and all the other things you should be doing. It works every time.

2. Worry about what other people think. If you have self-esteem issues and you’re constantly worrying about what other people are thinking about you, you’ll definitely not give yourself the chance to savor an experience.

3. Multi-task! Perhaps the best way to ensure you never savor anything (while significantly decreasing your productivity to boot!) is to multi-task. To avoid all opportunities to be fully present, make sure you’re always doing more than one thing at once! Loved one talking to you? Great! Read the newspaper or emails at the same time—that really gives both of you pleasure!

4. Be urgent. If you’re urgent and rushed, you’re going to have a tough time savoring.

5. Adapt to the pleasure. Too much of a good thing can actually dull the pleasure. We tend to “adapt” to pleasure, so there’s some power in a bit of deprivation.

How to Prolong & Intensify Pleasure

Here are some tips on how to both prolong and intensify positive experiences:

Prolonging:

1. Share it! Sharing a positive experience is a great way to prolong the enjoyment. As the old saying goes, “People who savor together stay together!”

2. Build memories. Consciously try to store away memories of the event (while it’s occurring) for future recall. Go out of your way to remember sights, smells, sounds, tastes, and feelings.

3. Congratulate yourself! Have a little pride! Tell yourself how proud you are of yourself for experiencing something wonderful. Psychologists like to call this “cognitive basking.” Whatever you call it, how about a little more?

4. Sharpen the experience. To heighten the intensity, use “effortful concentration” to focus on certain aspects of the experience, and try articulating the experience into words as well.

5. Compare the experience. This can either heighten or dampen the experience, depending on where the experience stacks up to others. Try to think of all the wonderfully unique attributes of this particular experience.

6. Be absorbed! Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls it being in “Flow!” (and he wrote a whole book on “The Psychology of Optimal Experience”) and others call it “being in the zone”—whatever you call it, get absorbed. It goes a long way to experiencing greater levels of pleasure.

Intensifying:

7. Block interference. Remember the quick-route to killing pleasure by multi-tasking? Well, don’t do it! Block out everything else competing for your attention and watch the pleasure grow.

8. Enhance your attention. Deliberately try to etch this memory into your memory banks.

Your Homework

1. Savor a beautiful day. The first assignment is to actually sit down and schedule a block of time for your own pleasures. Try to schedule a wonderful day (or 1⁄2 day or at least an hour!) where you engage in a series of activities that you really enjoy.

Whether it’s quiet time in nature, attending a concert, or quality time with yourself or your family , go over the do’s and don’ts of savoring pleasure and try to consciously create a wonderful experience this week.

2. Savor more moments throughout your day. Although the planned time is a great exercise , you don’t need something “big” to start savoring more. Try building little moments when you’re fully present. Instead of multi-tasking, look into your spouse’s or child’s eyes and actually give your full attention to them. The next time you go for a walk on a sunny day, feel the sun on your face and look around you, appreciating the fact that you’re alive!

(I got this from a class I took with Martin Seligman, the author of the brilliant book, “Authentic Happiness .”