Savoring
Activities that enhance savoring:
- Talking to others about how good you feel
- Looking for others to share it with
- Thinking about how lucky you are
- Thinking about sharing later with others
- Physical expressions of energy
- Laughing/giggling
- Thinking of how happy you are
- Being absorbed in the moment
Activities that hurt savoring:
- Focusing on the future
- Reminding it will be over soon
- Telling yourself it’s not as good as you hoped
- Reminding yourself that nothing lasts forever
- Thinking how it will never be this good again
- Thinking how it could be better
- Telling yourself you don’t deserve this thing
Taking photos of the experience can be good or bad. It is bad if you’re more focused on taking the photo (including how you’ll look, etc). It can be good if you’re using the photo to view it from a different lens (literally!)
Replaying happy memories for 8 minutes a day can enhance happiness.
Negative Visualization
Spend 15 minutes writing what life would be like had you not met your spouse. The control group just wrote about how they met their spouse. At the end, the people in the former group were happier.
Extend the concept to other experiences.
Making This Day Your Last
Suppose today is the last day you’ll have something positive (e.g. your last day at college, your pet).
It kicks you out of hedonic adaptation.
Gratitude
Spend a few minutes a week listing 5 things that happened that week that you are grateful for.
They did this study, with one group listing the grateful items, the other group listed the hassles, and the control just listed events that impacted them.
After some weeks of this, with a followup, the result was the gratitude group:
- Felt life as a whole was better
- Felt better about the upcoming week
- Were less bothered about negative physical symptoms they had
- Exercised more hours
Also, write a letter of gratitude to a person who has helped you or been especially kind to you, that you never properly thanked. Then deliver the letter in person. The effect on happiness from that one letter is great. It decays slowly, and is mostly gone by about 6 months (still noticeable after 3 months).
Effects of expressing gratitude on the likelihood of divorce:
