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

Ice-cold beer - one of life's small pleasures

Another new study (Quoidbach et al, 2010 – see details below) has been published on the topic of money and well-being, specifically, whether being wealthy enough to access the best things in life affects your ability to savour small pleasures.

The research suggests that wealthier individuals report lower savoring ability, and even being reminded of wealth produces the same negative impact on savoring as actual wealth. In fact, you don’t actually need to enjoy any peak experiences (such as spending time on a tropical beach holiday) for your savoring ability to be impaired – simply knowing that these peak experiences are readily available may increase your tendency to take life’s small pleasures for granted.

For a full review of the research and its implications, see Positive Psychology News Daily.

Reference:

Quoidbach, J., Dunn, E.W., Petrides, K.V. & Mikolajczak, M. (2010). Money giveth, money taketh away: The dual effect if wealth on happiness. Psychological Science 21 (6), 759-763.

Image:

Cold beer courtesy of niel schubert

Slow No Wake

Here’s a link to my article on Positive Psychology News Daily this month, on the subject of savouring, the Slow Movement and the physical and psychological benefits associated with taking your time.

Image: Thanks to Ellievanhoutte

Family Meal

Here’s a link to my article on Positive Psychology News Daily this month, about  the benefits associated with eating together.

If you’d like to comment, feel free to do that here or on the PPND website.

Thanks!

Image: courtesy of sunface13

Image: wadem

In my recent posting on Positive Psychology and Coaching I referred to Sonja Lyubomirsky’s new book, “The How of Happiness”.

The video clip from 20/20 is a great intro to the science behind the book. The case of the identical twins is fascinating isn’t it?

On Tuesday I was fortunate enough to take part in a telephone seminar with Professor Lyubomirsky, in which she outlined the key messages from the book. The things which I found most interesting were:

1) that happiness takes effort – i.e. you need to be prepared to work at it; it may not come naturally

2) according to Lyubomirsky, you need to ensure that you choose the strategies which you’re comfortable with. Some may not be your cup of tea. She readily admits to finding the Gratitude exercise difficult. If that’s the case try something else.

3) whatever strategies you find work for you need to become habits – things that you do on a regular basis without thinking about it, like cleaning your teeth twice a day. How will you get the happiness habit?

4) some of the strategies which have been empirically validated, like gratitude, savouring and acts of kindness, may sound corny and trivial, but they do work. Plus, you have nothing to lose by trying them for a few weeks.



Let us know how you get on with her ‘Person/Activity Fit’ diagnostic tool (p73) and the various strategies you choose as a result.

Thanks to Christine Duvivier for the links.