A shared universe › Blog › Savoring the good moments · Español
Savouring means noticing that you are living something good and pausing on it so it lasts a little longer: before, while it happens and when you remember it. Sometimes good things pass so quickly we barely notice them. The psychologists Fred Bryant and Joseph Veroff called “savouring” the ability to notice what is good and make it last a little longer.
Fred Bryant, of Loyola University Chicago, has been studying it for decades. In a review published in 2021 in Frontiers in Psychology he recalls the definition he gave with Veroff: the capacity to attend to, appreciate and enhance the positive experiences in your life. And he adds a nuance: to savour, as well as feeling pleasure, you need to be aware that you are feeling it, paying conscious attention to what you are living.
That is why you can be somewhere beautiful without savouring it, with your mind elsewhere, and yet savour a cup of coffee in your usual kitchen.
You can savour at three points in time. Before, looking forward to what is coming: a trip, a reunion, a meal with friends. During, by really paying attention to what is happening. And afterwards, by remembering it and telling others about it. All three count, and all three can be practised.
Perhaps one of the three comes more easily to you than the others, and someone else finds it the other way round. Noticing which one you find hardest is a good clue for where to start.
In one of the first experiments, described by the Greater Good Science Center at the University of California, Berkeley, Bryant and Veroff asked a group of people to go for a walk every day for a week, noticing everything pleasant they came across. By the end of the week their happiness had risen more than that of people who walked focusing on unpleasant things or with no instructions at all.
Many more have been carried out since. A 2026 meta-analysis brought together twenty trials with almost five thousand participants and found that savouring exercises have a moderate effect: they increase well-being and reduce negative emotional symptoms. The authors checked whether the result could be due to only successful studies being published, and concluded that this did not seem to be the case.
Sharing good things matters so much that psychology has studied it separately: you will find it in why joy grows when you tell it.
Thinking straight away about what is missing, about the fact that it will end or about the next thing you have to do. Also playing it down: “oh, it’s nothing special”. It is not about exaggerating, but about not passing it by.
Bryant calls “kill-joy thinking” the habit of snuffing out good feelings with what you tell yourself inside. It may sound like “this won’t last” or “I don’t deserve this”. Noticing it is a first step towards paying it less attention.
There is no need to wait for big occasions. Most of what can be savoured fits into an ordinary day, and those little joys are the subject of the small joys of the day.
If for some time nothing has excited you and you find it hard to enjoy what you used to like, it may be more than a bad patch, and it is worth telling your GP or a psychologist. In Spain you can talk to a person at the Teléfono de la Esperanza, 717 003 717, at any time. If you are thinking of ending your life, call 024: it is free, confidential and answered 24 hours a day. If there is immediate danger, call 112. In another country, call your local emergency number or a helpline there.
In A shared universe you can light a star with whatever has made you happy, however small, by choosing “What I’m grateful for”. Telling it is another way of savouring it, and others can be happy with you during the seven days it shines.