Savoring positive experiences
Slow down and linger in a pleasant experience — letting it register fully rather than rushing through or narrating it away.
Why it works
Positive events often fail to produce the emotional benefit they could because attention moves on before the emotional encoding is complete. Savoring — deliberately slowing attention on a pleasant experience and prolonging engagement with it — gives positive emotional data time to register in memory and to activate the physiological states associated with wellbeing. It counteracts the habit of quickly consuming experiences and moving to the next.
How to do it
- Notice when something pleasant is happening and deliberately pause to give it full attention.
- Describe the sensations internally: what is this like, physically and emotionally, right now?
- Share it with someone, mentally replay it, or take a photo as a memory-anchor (not a performance).
- Practice anticipatory savoring too: spend a few minutes fully imagining a coming positive experience.
Evidence
Savoring has a small but growing research base. Bryant and Veroff’s work identifies savoring as a set of skills that enhance positive emotion through amplification and prolonged attention. Savoring interventions have shown wellbeing improvements in experimental studies. Jose, Lim, and Bryant (2012), using a daily diary design, found that people who savored positive events more on a given day reported greater same-day happiness, tracing the effect at the level of everyday moments. (observational)
Some people find savoring produces worry about losing the positive state, or guilt about enjoying while others suffer — these reactions limit its effectiveness for some individuals.
Sources
- Bryant & Veroff (2007), Savoring: A New Model of Positive Experience
- Jose, Lim & Bryant (2012), savoring and wellbeing, Motivation and Emotion
- Jose, P. E., Lim, B. T., & Bryant, F. B. (2012). Does savoring increase happiness? A daily diary study. The Journal of Positive Psychology, 7(3), 176-187.
- Bryant, F. B., & Veroff, J. (2007). Savoring: A New Model of Positive Experience. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Common mistake
Photographing or describing the experience to others in real time instead of experiencing it — narrating for an audience pulls attention out of the present moment and reduces the actual savoring.
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More practices for Building Positive Emotions, Made Practical
- Gratitude practice
Deliberately notice and name what is genuinely good — shifting the brain’s habitual negative scan.
- Loving-kindness (metta) practice
Deliberately generate warm, benevolent feelings toward yourself and others — expanding your emotional baseline.
- Create micro-moments of connection
Build positive emotion through brief, genuine moments of resonance with another person — not through sustained intimacy alone.
- Seek out awe
Regularly expose yourself to vast, complexity-expanding experiences — nature, art, music, ideas — that trigger awe.
- Acts of kindness
Do one deliberate kind thing for another person — the giver benefits as much as or more than the receiver.
- Meaningful engagement
Spend regular time doing something that generates both positive emotion and a sense of purpose.
Related concepts
- Positive Psychology, Made Practical
PERMA and the well-being exercises, graded honestly on the evidence
- Gratitude Journaling, Done Well
The mechanism, the honest evidence, and how to keep it from going stale
- Loving-Kindness (Metta) Meditation
The phrases, the widening circles, and the honest evidence on warmth practice