“The aim of life is appreciation.” ~ G. K. Chesterton

Christmas Lights

The holiday season and the New Year period can be a pretty stressful time. We’re inclined to think that everything must be perfect, and that includes the gifts we give, the food we prepare, the warmth of our welcome to guests, what we wear to the office party and so on. Often we also take on the responsibility for ensuring that everyone around us, our children, family, and friends, all have a good time – and that can be extremely hard work! So what’s the antidote to festive stress? Well, I think this time of year provides us with some ideal opportunities for savouring: noticing, appreciating, and enhancing the things which are already positive in our lives – and you’d be hard pressed to find anything easier to do. The rules of savouring are simple to follow, and you don’t need any special skills or equipment. In fact anyone, young or old, rich or poor, can learn how to savour and reap the benefits.

What is savouring?

Savouring is about slowing down and paying conscious attention to all your senses (touch, taste, sight, hearing and smell). You stretch out the experience, and concentrate on noticing what it is that you really enjoy, whether it’s sipping a glass of chilled vintage champagne at the New Year’s Eve party, looking forward to seeing your children’s faces as they open their Christmas presents, or recollecting the time you played one of the three wise men in the school nativity play. By learning to savour, you can increase your capacity to notice what is good about your life and thus appreciate it more fully. In doing so, you can maximize your positive emotions and overcome the built-in survival mechanism called the negativity bias.

The flavours of savouring

The great thing about savouring is that it’s such a flexible technique, coming in so many different flavors. For example, think of all the different things that you might luxuriate or bask in, relish, treasure, or cherish. You can choose something tangible (like a warm bubble bath) or something intangible (like a lifelong friendship) to notice, appreciate, and enhance. You can use some or all of your senses when savouring, and you can savour across time dimensions, focusing on things in the past, present, or future. This gives you enormous scope when looking for opportunities to savour in your everyday life.

Bubbles

How to savour in 5 easy steps:

The ‘rules’ of savouring are very straightforward and easy to remember:

1. Slow down.
2. Pay attention.
3. Use all your senses – touch, taste, sight, smell, hearing.
4. S-t-r-e-t-c-h out the experience for as long as you can.
5. Reflect on your enjoyment.

It’s important to remember that savouring is a process not an outcome – in other words it’s something we do, not something we get.

Over the next 12 days, try some of the following savouring suggestions:

Savouring the future

• Anticipate the excitement and delight on your children’s faces as they open their presents on Christmas morning.
• Look forward to welcoming friends into your home.
• Anticipate the strong community bonds created by attending local carol services or neighbourhood parties.
• Look forward to a fresh start in 2012, the chance to set new goals, and the green shoots of Spring.

Savouring the present

• Relish that box of dark chocolate pralines that you received from Auntie Joyce.
• Drink in the aroma of cloves, tangerines, and cinnamon of the mulled wine as it simmers on the stove.
• Luxuriate in a warm bath scented with the fragrance of neroli oil, jasmine, and rose petals.
• Turn off your mobile phone so that you can snuggle up with your kids on the sofa and laugh at the latest Disney movie.

Winter Frost

Savouring the past

• Reminisce, with others if you can, about remarkable holidays in the past, such as the time when you built a mammoth snowman on the front lawn, volunteered at a downtown soup kitchen, or glimpsed reindeer in Lapland.
• Ring a friend you haven’t spoken to in a while and talk about the good old days.
• Get out the photo album, and spend 15 minutes remembering all those special occasions.
• Pick a prominent accomplishment from 2011 – an exam passed, a promotion gained, or weight lost – and savour your memories of the achievement.

Remember to take your time, to imagine the small details of the positive experience using all your senses if you can, and to share it with others.

How not to savour!

It’s worth bearing in mind that there are several things which can completely spoil your experience of savouring, or fail to get it off the ground. These include:

• Killjoy thinking about how the experience might be improved
• Analyzing in the moment why an experience is positive
• Rushing

And finally….What will you savour?

There are so many different ways to savour that there will be at least one which suits you. But why not use every spare ten minutes this festive season to try them all, and let us hear about your experiences?

Happy Savouring!

Bryant, F. & Veroff, J. (2007) Savoring: A new model of positive experience. Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Quoidbach, J., Berry, E. V., Hansenne, M. & Mikolajczak, M. (2010). Positive emotion regulation and well-being: Comparing the impact of eight savoring and dampening strategies. Personality and Individual Differences, 49(5), 368-373. From the abstract:

“The present study examines the relative impact of the main positive emotion regulation strategies on two components of well-being: positive affect (PA) and life satisfaction (LS). A total of 282 participants completed measures of PA, LS, overall happiness, and the savoring and dampening strategies they typically used. Results show that when experiencing positive events, focusing attention on the present moment and engaging in positive rumination promoted PA, whereas telling others promoted LS. In contrast, being distracted diminished PA, while focusing on negative details and engaging in negative rumination reduced LS. … our results further show that … typically using various strategies rather than a few specific ones … was beneficial to overall happiness. Our findings suggest that there are several independent ways to make the best (or the worst) out of our positive emotions, and that the cultivation of multiple savoring strategies might be required to achieve lasting happiness.”

Images

Christmas Lights by Sirenz Lorraine:
Bubbles by ion-bogdan dumitrescu
Winter Frost by tlindenbaum

Here’s a great animated video supporting Daniel Pink’s presentation on intrinsic motivation and why profit-related pay (PRP) doesn’t actually motivate people to work harder.

According to Pink, psychology research shows that economists have got it all wrong. If you want to motivate and engage people, and get them work harder, they need to experience the following 3 things at work:

1) AUTONOMY (i.e. being able to choose what you do and how you do it)
2) MASTERY (i.e. being able to get better at whatever you do – so there needs to be some challenge in the job), and
3) PURPOSE (i.e. being able to make a meaningful contribution. A profit motive is OK as long as it’s linked to a ‘purpose motive’).

Organisations which fit the bill include Skype (now owned by private investment company Silver Lake, and Ebay) and Apple.

Pink’s theory is that if we treat people like people, we can make organisations better off and make the world a better place.

Read the rest of this entry »

The 5^th European Positive Psychology Conference took place June 23-26 in Copenhagen, Denmark. I’ve written three separate reviews, covering eleven Keynotes, invited speakers, and opening and closing presentations. To read the full reviews, take a look at Positive Psychology News Daily:  part 1, part 2 and part 3.

Part 1:

Keynote 1: Stopping the Insanity: Promoting Positive Mental Health is Sanity in a World Needing Better Mental Health - Corey Keyes, Associate Professor, Department of Sociology at Emory University, USA

Corey Keyes

Keynote 2: How Positive Emotions Work, and Why – Barbara Fredrickson, Distinguished Professor of Psychology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA.

Part 2

Keynote 1: Occupational Health Psychology: A European Perspective – Wilmar Schaufeli, Professor of Work and Organizational Psychology at Utrecht University in The Netherlands.

Some of you might be wondering what the connection is between social media (aka social networking), business and positive psychology. The answer (or at least one of them) as far as I am concerned is performance. Both individiual and organisational performance depend on employee engagement and well-being, both of which can be increased through social networking.

As Will McInnes points out in this slide show (presented as part of Social Media Week), technological changes are unstoppable, so we’d be better off working out how we can use them effectively. Huge organisations like IBM have shown that it can be done – as this great blog from Casey Hibbard at the Social Media Examiner shows.

Of course there are headlines every day reporting the dark side of social networking, or about how many hours employees are wasting as they update their Facebook profiles. But technology can be used to change people’s behaviour for the better – McInnes gives the example of Toyota Prius drivers competing to better their MPG  ’score’ on the dashboard. You may remember that I touched on this subject with my posting on the so-called “Fun Theory” last year.

So if you want to engage your staff and take advantage of the social connections that people naturally make, think seriously about how social networking is being used in your organisation.

Here’s a link to my posting to Positive Psychology News Daily this month, in which I discuss ways of applying Fredrickson’s “Broaden and Build” theory of positive emotions in ways that organisations will find acceptable, as well as useful.

Your comments and thoughts are welcome here, and on the PPND website.

Image: Thanks to Joe Shlabotnik