The Practice of Savouring
Savouring - Photo by Melissa Askew on Unsplash
The long awaited, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it British summer time is entering it’s last month of the season. Summer is a time when the colours, tastes, smells and sounds of nature pop out at you (or peek blearily through the rain). And yet it is still very possible not to notice. There’s only so much we can pay attention to, and modern life seems to keep our brains at full capacity just juggling and ‘getting through it’.
And yet, if you can find time to savour what is good, it can be part of transforming you and your life.
In Positive Psychology, savouring is like a form of gratitude that happens in the moment of the experience. It is related to mindfulness and practices that help you to ‘be more in the moment’. Savouring means sinking into or drawing out any positive experience: basking, relishing, cherishing, treasuring, lingering. Whether it’s the taste of your food, the sound of music, the expression on your child’s face, the power in your muscles, the breeze on your skin – we can literally not notice these things that are right there to be enjoyed.
By pausing for a brief moment to really notice, appreciate and experience nice things, it can help you to deepen and extend the positive emotions you feel in that moment. More than this, with practice, it can result in you generally experiencing more positive emotions more often – including in the face of adversity. It’s like raising your baseline. Savouring has been shown to enhance resilience and coping skills; recovering from, and coping with, stress; and management of depressive symptoms.
Photo by Flávia Gava on Unsplash
Re-balancing your perspective
Part of what can be powerful about savouring is its ability to increase positive emotions. Whilst negative emotions are not ‘bad’, and have their use and function, between humans’ natural negativity bias and a world where most of us seem to face a lot of hassles, problems, stresses and worries every day, we can feel negative emotions without even trying. Positive emotions might need a little more effort to level the playing field.
It’s more than just about feeling nice. Positive emotions have a role in learning and memory, enabling more complex analysis, flexible and creative thinking, noticing opportunities. Primed to feel positive, people literally see and process more visual details, showing more activity in the visual parts of the brain and more eye movement. Doctors given sweets to make them happy (but not eating them to avoid a sugar boost affecting performance) were more creative and made the correct diagnosis more quickly compared to control groups. And there are many, many more examples.
These abilities that come with positive emotions, like flexible and creative thinking, are useful for performance, and would also be really useful in a stressful situation too. Research has also found that feeling positive emotions in the face of adversity helps you to recover from the stress more quickly afterwards too. But I am not going to tell you that you should be feeling happy and savouring all the positive during a crisis. Your attention and capacity are swamped, ‘threat-scanning’ is more automatic than savouring or appreciating, focussing on the problem makes more sense than looking for possibilities or opportunities. When you are in a pinch, your brain will opt for the convenience of the automatic, well-worn brain pathways – you’ll interpret things according to the ingrained and embodied beliefs you didn’t even know you had, you’ll respond with habitual behaviours. Telling you in the middle of all that, ‘Just think positive’ is unlikely to be helpful, and probably really annoying!
Re-set the default
BUT, practising savouring or gratitude outside of stressful experiences can make noticing positive things, and experiencing the good feelings that come with it, more familiar and normal. You are re-routing the pathways in the brain to make a new standard. This means it will gradually become more habitual and more accessible to your brain even when the heat is on. The first time you take a new route you might need to concentrate, stop and check the map a few times, get lost, take longer etc. By the time you’ve travelled that route enough for it become familiar, you arrive at your destination without having any conscious memory of the journey or at any point consciously thinking about the directions – with all that capacity freed up to think about something else. Similarly, the more you practice savouring the more it becomes natural, default and something you can do effortlessly. This means you can access positive feelings - with all the helpful creative and flexible thinking, increased visual capacity, and ability to spot opportunities - when you need it most – alongside the other feelings that might come in those situations like worry or frustration (we are humans don’t forget!).
It also gives you a more positive baseline, creating more of a balance of time spent with a positive mindset. This can help you to build your resource-based resilience: for example, you might spend more time able to learn and be curious (rather than feeling threatened or defensive), notice and act upon opportunities to thrive (rather than scanning for threats or narrowing your vision to need-to-know for survival), building reciprocal supportive relationships (rather than being overly preoccupied with your problems or needs), being more familiar with the resources that you already have available to you (rather than what you don’t have) and therefore more likely to actually make effective use of them.
The thing is, a lot of us live live with this constant hum of pressure and stress. When we are busy and burdened it’s very difficult to remember to savour, and first attempts to do it might feel clunky. So this week how about challenging yourself and practice, practice, practice until it becomes just something you do?
Savouring the rain
Savouring Challenge
Here is a challenge to help you practise savouring:
1. Set some random alarms on your phone, 3 times a day for the next week (not during sleep time!).
When the alarms go off:
2. Spend 10 seconds ‘savouring’.
If you’re dashing to the train station spend 10 seconds smelling the flowers you pass or watching the bees enjoy them.
If you’re working with really tight margins and 10 seconds could be a missed train, pay attention to the movement of your body and the feeling of the wind in your hair while you run!
Maybe you’re about to enter the supermarket – pause for 10 seconds to savour the feeling of the sun on your skin, the breeze or the rain (if you are in the UK like me then you could very likely experience all three during 10 seconds of summertime weather).
If you are eating or drinking, look at it, inhale the aroma and savour the taste with intention for 10 seconds.
If you are listening to someone notice how you are appreciating their company, their words, really look at the expression on their face, listen to emotion in their voice.
If the alarm comes at a bad time just snooze it for later and move on.
OR if you fancy trying out some advanced savouring – is there anything to savour here alongside the worry, irritation or confusion? Either separately from the situation (the sound of birdsong while your boss berates you) or even within it (the trust that your boss demonstrates in giving you honest feedback, or their passion for ‘getting it right’).
If the answer is no – snooze it 😊
Bonus steps if you’re really keen:
3. Notice how it makes you feel
After you’ve noticed lots of details to savour, notice how they make you feel and really try to connect to that emotion and name it if you can – is it peace, joy, curiosity, contentment, love?
4. Express it
This might be literally just smiling. It sounds odd but sometimes we are so busy with all the hassles and pressures of life we literally don’t remember to smile when we are experiencing something smileworthy. Smiling will help to anchor that feeling in the body and make it easier to access it another time.
5. Sharing it
Tell someone or write it down so you can relive it later.
Let me know if you try savouring, what difference it makes or what makes it difficult for you. Enjoy!
