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My late mother was an artist of some renown in the Pacific Northwest. Over her many-decades career, her paintings evolved from highly representational watercolors into mixed-media abstracts. One constant in her work, however, was excellent technique: If she decided to paint a naked guy holding a guitar, much to the mortification of her adolescent son, that’s exactly what it looked like.
Growing up, I could draw a little myself and enjoyed doing so, but I never had her talent. Once, I asked her how I could improve. I suppose I expected her to say something like “Practice 10,000 hours.” Instead, she told me to look at what I wanted to draw. This baffled me because that’s obviously what I thought I had been doing, as I said to her.
“You probably aren’t,” she explained. “People almost never actually look carefully at anything; they glance at it and then rely on their brain to fill in the details—which it doesn’t, leading to crummy drawing.” So I did as I was told, and looked long and hard at what I wanted to draw at that moment: a tree. I found that I noticed much more about its contours, colors, and shadows. I drew each detail, meticulously—and sure enough, it turned out to be a pretty well-drawn tree.
More than that, I loved the experience of really looking: It was both creative and immersive. What my mom was telling me to do, I came to understand, was savor the encounter of seeing something deeply and drawing it carefully. And this kind of savoring, it turns out, can be applied to many areas of life in ways that help us become more adept at living and much happier.
Savoring has been defined by the psychologists Fred Bryant and Joseph Veroff as “the capacity to attend to, appreciate, and enhance the positive experiences in one’s life.” This can mean focusing on a current, future, or past experience with particular attention to the positive parts: for example, being fully present and attentive to a gorgeous sunset or a fascinating conversation, reminiscing in detail with a friend about a great time you had together in the old days, or eagerly anticipating a fun party.
Savoring has been shown in research to stimulate the brain’s striatum, a region involved in processing reward, and is effective in lowering symptoms of depression. The result, correspondingly, is a higher level of reported happiness. In one 2012 study in The Journal of Positive Psychology, researchers asked human subjects to record the frequency and intensity of their daily positive experiences. When some were asked to savor the pleasant events, the scholars found that these subjects were significantly happier after the experiment than those who had not been asked to do any savoring. This finding was especially clear for people who experienced fewer positive events, suggesting that good times are like delicious meals: If they occur too frequently, they become ordinary and are thus harder to savor.
Savoring positive experiences in the moment also leads to happier memories later on. Researchers in 2024 arrived at this conclusion in an experiment that required participants to write down any positive events that had happened to them. The researchers found that when they instructed people to savor these experiences more fully as they recorded them, their subsequent memories were more vivid, and in effect they enjoyed the experiences more.
Taken together, the research points us toward making a habit of savoring good times, past, present, and future. Easier said than done, unfortunately: We are evolved less to savor the good things in life than to take note of what we dislike and harbor resentments. Humans typically exhibit a “negativity bias,” meaning that adverse events arrest our attention more than positive ones. This phenomenon has been observed in a great deal of research, including even on infants, who consistently pay closest attention to what they do not like.
This makes sense in an evolutionary sense: Your suspicious, nervous troglodyte ancestors survived to pass on their genes while their blissfully unaware friends became a saber-toothed tiger’s lunch. But in our modern world, largely free of prowling super-predators, our negativity bias tends to be maladaptive. Many scientists have pointed out that a negative disposition makes us error-prone in our predictions, and this anachronistic bias simply lowers our quality of life.
Savoring is a secret to greater happiness, but it does not come naturally. So we need to cultivate it consciously and not just leave that good savor to chance. On this, the psychological research provides two useful principles.
1. Savor your life in all three dimensions.
Fred Bryant has created what he calls the Savoring Beliefs Inventory, which enables one to measure one’s tendency to seek and enjoy positive experiences and memories. He advises making an assessment in each case on a scale of richness of reminiscence (past), degree of conscious enjoyment (present), and keenness of anticipation (future). The higher you score on all three temporal counts, the better off you are.
But this doesn’t have to be only a diagnostic test; it can also be a prescriptive guide. Try to savor your experience more across all three time dimensions and pay special attention to the one that’s hardest for you. For example, you may be good at happy memories and eager anticipation but bad at enjoying the moment. This is an indicator that, to realize greater happiness, you need to work on your mindful enjoyment of the present.
2. Expand your repertoire of savoring techniques.
In 2010, four psychologists writing in the journal Personality and Individual Differences tested a number of distinct savoring techniques and found four that were especially effective. These were behavioral display (expressing positive emotion with nonverbal behaviors, such as smiling on purpose), being present (mindfully focusing on the pleasant experience), capitalizing (talking about and celebrating positive experiences with others), and positive mental time travel (vivid reminiscence or anticipation of positive events). The scholars found that the more people employed these techniques, the happier they became.
One way to use all of this research that works well for me is to start my morning with a quick reflection on two or three things I’m looking forward to. For me today, for example, it was my morning workout, writing this column, and having dinner with my wife and our daughter, who is home from college. I imagined each of these events vividly for a few seconds, and made an effort to smile as I did so. Then, when each occurs, I try to be fully present and conscious that I’m doing something I like. Finally, tonight before bed, I will think back vividly on each experience with a sense of gratitude—and I’ll express that gratitude to at least one of the people involved. This same protocol works over any time frame, whether it’s weeks, months, even years.
Of course, I sometimes fail to carry out this protocol when my caveman limbic system wants to hijack the process because it wants me to worry about someone looting my cave and making off with my animal skins and buffalo jerky. Then I get dragged down to my negative self. But the more I work at savoring the good, the easier it gets, and the less my negativity bias interferes.
One last note on savoring. The research literature focuses entirely on savoring pleasant events and experiences. But you can also savor many of the difficult parts of your life—done right, with great benefit.
One example of how to achieve this is keeping a “failure journal.” When something disappoints or otherwise bothers you—say, you have a disagreement with a friend—note it down. Leave a couple of lines of white space between each entry. Then, after a month or so, go back to the first blank line and write down what you learned in the intervening period thanks to that particular bad experience. So you might write: “I thought the argument would bother me for a long time, but I stopped thinking about it almost immediately.”
After another couple of months, go back to the second blank line you left after the entry about the argument, and record something good that happened as a result of the experience. You might write: “We ended up making amends, and our friendship is stronger as a result.” Trust me, if you give it a bit of thought, you will have something worthwhile to say about almost any negative event.
This, too, involves savoring—and shows how you can use the practice to transform even unwelcome experiences into positive opportunities for growth and perspective. You might think of this as an act of careful looking that will enable you to draw a picture of something ugly yet find its hidden beauty. That is the true art of life.
The post My Mom’s Guide to the Art of Living appeared first on The Atlantic.
