“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

Gratitude Journal

Do Positive Interventions Ever Backfire?

A few weeks ago someone started an interesting discussion on the ‘Friends of Positive Psychology’ Listserv by asking if using a gratitude activity had ever backfired. The question may have been prompted by a recently published study by Susan Sergeant and Myriam Mongrain in which a gratitude exercise not only did not work with particularly needy personality types, but also appeared to result in lower self-esteem. You can read a review of the research on the British Psychological Society’s website here. (Note that, as usual, there are limitations to the study which you need to take into account.)

Establishing Fitness to Purpose: 3 Alternatives

This again raises the question of fit (which we have covered several times before on PPND, and which Jeremy McCarthy recently discussed here), that is, whether positive psychology techniques, such as expressing gratitude, are suitable for everyone or whether they must be tailored.

It seems from the previous articles and comments on PPND there are three broad approaches:

1. One size fits all: Anyone can benefit from doing any of the positive psychology techniques.

2. Personalized: It’s possible, given the science, to find a specific approach to suit every individual. On the one hand this makes sense because we need to know if there are any exceptions to the general rule. But on the other there is no middle way with this approach. What you could end up with is “This exercise will work for those with personality type A and experience of X but not for those with personality type B or C and experience of Y or Z.” As we are all unique (aren’t we?), the level of detail to which you’d need to drill down to get a definitive answer could go on. And on. And on.

3. The Half-way House: This is the way I describe Sonja Lyubomirsky’s best fit approach. In The How of Happiness she suggests choosing a happiness strategy according to whether there is a fit with your

*source of unhappiness
*your strengths
* your lifestyle

She then provides a handy diagnostic for person-activity fit to determine which four of the 12 empirically-based strategies in her book will be most valuable to you.

Reflections on Fitness to Purpose

I can see why option 1 (one size fits all) is attractive, especially if you’ve got slightly more knowledge about positive psychology than the person you’re talking to and you’re keen to broadcast it, but actually I only know one person who takes this approach – a colleague who insists on being the expert and that people should do the dozen or so empirically validated positive psychology exercises to the letter. I’m not advocating you should take this approach by the way, but as it happens, this person does seem to be pretty successful with it.

Cutting Your Cloth

Option 2 (completely personalized) is also logically appealing. The right positive psychology technique, in the right way, at the right time, for the right person does make sense, doesn’t it? After all if someone broke a leg you wouldn’t prescribe a dose of statins to fix it. But can we deal with unhappiness, mental ill-health, or other deficits in the same way? Whether you work as a coach, therapist, counselor or psychologist, can you ‘see’ the client’s problem with the same clarity that a doctor read an Xray? I simplify to make a point, of course physical illness isn’t always straightforward to diagnose!

So that leaves us with option 3, Lyubomirsky’s half-way house, the person-activity fit. She states that “…there is no one magic strategy that will help every person become happier” because “Each individual is unhappy for a unique constellation of reasons.” However, she appears to be sticking with her twelve broad categories of evidence-based activity and is confident that persisting with your four best matches will pay off and boost your happiness. If not, she suggests trying other complementary activities, again selected from her original 12.

What’s interesting about Lyubomirsky’s approach is that fit is based on what you think and feel about the activity (“Will I enjoy it? Will I value it?”) and your motivation to do it, not on your innate personality characteristics. Perhaps the person-activity fit criteria really are a good proxy, but there is no suggestion that doing the ‘wrong’ activity could actually be harmful to your well-being (as occurred in the Sergeant and Mongrain’s study of highly needy people mentioned above), merely that it won’t work and that you’ll become demotivated.

So what is right? Does fit matter, and if so, how much? Are positive psychology advocates that bothered if a small group of people reacts badly to one of their techniques under laboratory conditions?

I don’t think any positive psychologist has ever given a cast-iron guarantee (even my colleague fights shy of that) but they certainly have led many hundreds of thousands of people to believe that greater well-being is readily within their grasp based on doing a small selection of activities. It would seem that there is a huge amount of work to be done, not just in terms of research but also in the way we present positive psychology to the public. Until then (paraphrasing Richard Lazarus) should we be surprised if the ‘science’ of positive psychology is continually criticized for promising a lot and delivering little?

References

Lazarus, R. (2003). Does the positive psychology movement have legs? Psychological Inquiry, 14(2), 93-109.

Lyubomirsky, S. (2007). The how of happiness. London: Sphere. Quotations are on pages 69 & 71.

Lyubomirsky, S. (2008). The How of Happiness: A Scientific Approach to Getting the Life You Want. New York: Penguin Books.

Sergeant, S. & Mongrain, M. (2011). Are positive psychology exercises helpful for people with depressive personality styles? The Journal of Positive Psychology, 6 (4), 260-272

Images

Gratitude Journal courtesy of Limevelyn
Scissors courtesy of trakygraves

The latest quarterly edition of the open-access International Journal of Well-being has just been published.  No. 3 includes

• some new research by Nathaniel Lambert, A. Marlea Gwinn, Tyler Stillman and Frank Fincham on how sharing positive experiences can boost your vitality and help you overcome tiredness,
• An interview with Barbara Fredrickson (famous for the broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions), and
• A review of the film Happy, directed by Roko Belic

This edition is quite a lot shorter than the previous two – does this reflect a lack of material, or positive psychologists’ preference to be published in ‘traditional’ positive psychology journals? Whichever it is, let’s hope it isn’t a trend that will continue.

Hefferon & Boniwell's Book

Unusually for me, my posting for Positive Psychology News this month is a book review, Kate Hefferon and Ilona Boniwell’s Positive Psychology: Theory, Research and Applications. Don’t be put off by the fact that it’s a textbook, in short it’s a highly enjoyable, educational, and engaging read, well worth the £18-£20 it’s currently selling for online. It includes all the usual subjects such as positive emotions, subjective well-being and resilience, lots of new research, and topics you won’t find mentioned in other positive psychology textbooks, like the positive body, sex and positive death. I thoroughly recommend it whether you’re a student, lecturer, practitioner or positive psychology enthusiast. It’s so good it’s now at the top of our list of recommended reads on our Positive Psychology Masterclass!

For the full review, click here.

Word cloud from the national well-being debate

A few months ago (see here and here) I wrote about the British government’s intention to measure national well-being. This project came about because of the obvious failing of GDP (gross domestic product) to capture all the nuances of social and economic progress (and more recently, the lack of it).

I promised to update you on this project’s progress, and at the end of July 2011, a series of reports was issued by the Office for National Statistics. In August’s posting for Positive Psychology News, I review  the ONS interim findings and question whether we are really any better informed about the nation’s well-being than we were 8 months ago.

Read the full article here.