Hidden Brain - You 2.0: Slow Down!

Episode Date: August 21, 2023

It’s understandable that we sometimes dwell on things that upset us. But our negative emotions can keep us from savoring the good things in our lives. This week, we continue our You 2.0 series with psychologist Fred Bryant. We’ll discuss the many benefits of savoring, and how we can turn even the smallest of moments into an opportunity for pleasure.Do you know someone who would enjoy our You 2.0 series? Please tell them about this episode and last week's show about  how to set our "future selves" up for success.  And thanks for listening! 

This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam. In 1974, the singer Harry Chapin hit number one on the Billboard charts, with a song about loss and love. It told the story of a dad who missed his son's first steps. A child arrived just the other day. He came to the world and the usual way, but there were planes to catch and bills to pay. He learned to walk while I was away and he was talking for a new end and as he grew, he'd say, I'm

gonna be. The father misses other milestones. Games of catch get postponed and before he knows it, an entire childhood was his buy as work and other commitments keep the father from spending time with his son. The song Cats in the Cradle was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2011. In a few memorable verses, it told the story of a life where your choices come full circle. The enduring popularity of cats in the cradle reflects a sad truth. We often take the most meaningful parts of our lives for granted, only to realize what we have lost after it's too late.

Many philosophical and spiritual traditions counsel people to express gratitude for the good things in their lives and to engage fully with the present. So why do so many of us have trouble slowing down and savoring life? This week on Hidden Brain, we begin a two-part series about why it's so hard to stop and notice what is wonderful about our lives and powerful psychological techniques to help us master this art. Life is what happens when you're busy making other plants. It's a quote widely attributed to John Lennon by the origins of this idea predate the Beatles by centuries. At Loyola University Chicago, psychologists Fred

Bryant studies this universal human conundrum and what we can do about it. Fred Bryant, welcome to Hidden Brain. Thank you, Shankar. It's a pleasure to be here. I want to take you back Fred to the early days of your career. You had two small kids, but you were also really consumed with your research and teaching responsibilities. Did you ever feel like these were in conflict with each other? Yes, I did. I remember sitting in a school auditorium with lots of proud parents.

Seeing my daughter come on stage, his ex was a flute player. And the lights went down, the music began. It was fun to watch her. But I began to look at my watch, think about how many more songs would be played and how much more time. And thinking about the section that I might work on when I got back to my manuscripts. So I would not be fully present and I found it a sense of frustration because I could not be in two places at once. I understand your wife sometimes called you the ghost in the house? Yes. That was her term for me. The ghost in the house, I'd be like a ship passing in the night,

going down to the basement where my work would take place. I could be relatively isolated from noise and distraction. It wasn't a pleasant thought to realize that was her term for me. I wanted to be present in the house, but be more than a ghost. And yet I felt driven to be productive, to take advantage of opportunities whenever they arose. And I was multitasking constantly, working on multiple projects. And yet there was guilt.

And when I would be working on my work, I would often be thinking of what I might be doing with my daughters and with my wife. So eventually your daughters grew up and a few years ago your elder daughter got married. Tell me how you and your wife planned the wedding and what the wedding day was like. We enjoyed the time that we set aside to do that. So many loose ends that had to be taken care of. So many preparations, the catering, the flowers, the

music, DJ, the cast list, all of the planning for the venue, visiting different venues. And we thought, well, once this event arrives, the glorious wedding day, then we will be able to let go and just enjoy this. And I remember walking into the place, thinking this was gonna be this celebration and the time to relax and enjoy, but we had too many other loose ends, things that weren't where we thought they would be. The DJ was running late.

The food wasn't where we wanted it. There were too many ongoing dynamic parts. We found we were just waiting for the next problem to arise. And so we realized we could not let go. We could not really immerse ourselves in the moment and ended up being very frustrating for us. I'd like to ask you about one other personal story. I understand that you're a committed mountain climber who often goes on climbing expeditions with friends. Are

you more laid back when it comes to these recreation loudings? Are you still the planner? Always, once and always, the planner. My friends are more in the moment and they let me plan it because I look forward to imagining how it could be and trying to optimize the moment. Everything has to be planned down to the minute if we're going to, we would typically try to climb five or six of these 14,000 foot peaks in a single trip. We might have 10 days, might have a week. How to do that? And what order to do these things? I have a vast library of guidebooks and resources, maps, things that allow me to figure out what we're going to confront if the weather gets bad. Or if we lose something, or supplies run out, all of the equipment we'd need,

not only that, how we'd spend the mornings, the afternoons, the evenings, coordinating the flights, the hotel reservations, the rental car, it fell upon me to take that role and that responsibility. I'm wondering during these trips, was there ever a moment that you can recall when maybe you'd climb to the top of one of these peaks and it had been a hard and exhausting climb? And you didn't give yourself the time to actually enjoy what this achievement felt like. Yes, I feel like the school principal telling them to come in from the playground. It's time to get back to the hard work.

And I knew how much time we could afford to spend if we wanted to stay on schedule. They would want a linger, perhaps spend an hour and a half, two hours on the summit. I knew that that would not allow us enough time to get back down. The other problem was that the weather is the main danger and the main concern. Up that high, the higher up you are, the more rapidly the weather changes. I would always be worried about that. They call me the worry-wort because I did not want us to turn into human lightning rods. So I didn't really allow much time for that spontaneity to happen. My friends resented it, I think. They felt they should be allowed to be spontaneous.

Fred, you say your friends resented your efforts to keep them on schedule, but it occurs to me that you yourself missed out on some sublime moments on the mountain top. I'm certain that's the case. I don't think I'd stopped long enough to realize that fact. In a sense, I missed the opportunity to smell the roses when they were there. I think I was driven more by the intenery than I drove the intenery. our tenorory. All of us need to get things done and to stay on track. The more driven we are, the more we can be consumed by deadlines and goals. These can come to dominate our existence. When we come back, why the good things in our lives and the bad things in our lives operate

by different rules and the great mistake we make in dealing with them. You're listening to Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedanta. This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedanta. Most of us go through life, focused on the things that make us unhappy. We spend time thinking about relationships that are not going well. We stay up at night worrying about setbacks at school and at work. When we are sick, our minds are consumed with our own pain and discomfort. At Loyola University Chicago, psychologists Fred Bryant has explored a provocative question. If all of us say we want to be happy, why do we focus

so much time and energy on the things that make us unhappy? Fred, you've explored the difference between the way we attend to our positive and our negative feelings. Describe what we do. Well, we tend to spend more time counting our troubles than our blessings. It's almost an inevitable result of evolution, the negative aspects, the threats in the environment, in the world around us are dangerous, and they can take our lives if we're not cautious and don't avoid them. Whereas the pleasures are not going to take our lives if we don't attend to them. And the idea really is that the troubles are unavoidable, and they actually kick our

door in and come and find us, and we're forced then to deal with them, to handle them, whereas the pleasures and the joys, they don't hunt us down and force us to enjoy them. They wait, and they sometimes hide. They require us to go hunting for them, to find them and then spend time with them. This is such an interesting and profound idea, Fred, the idea that sorrows hunt for us, but we have to hunt for joys that they are not equally found in the wild, so to say. Yes, it's just that negative information is processed more rapidly. We tend to remember

it, retrieve it more readily, we're more influenced by it, we attend to it more. But the positive side is really underestimated. For so many years, the focus in psychology has been on the negative, so that the problem has been relative ignorance with respect to the positive side and managing positive feelings in our lives, taking a kind of active responsibility for them, prioritizing them, structuring time, allowing for that. It's too easy to let the negative swamp our attention and drive our agenda. You know, it's interesting both when it comes to ourselves as well as to our loved ones. We often coach ourselves and our loved ones on how to deal with

adversity. So, you know, parents might teach their children how to ride a bike and you're saying, you know, here's what you do and here's how you keep from falling. And, you know, if you fall, here's how you can brace your fall. And, you know, here's what you, and you're teaching your child to cope with bad things that could happen. And, of course, that's a good thing to do. But we assume that in some ways there is no coaching or teaching required when it's a good thing, no parent ever sits down, a child and says, let me teach you how to eat ice cream and to enjoy ice cream. It almost seems absurd to say that.

But when we spend so much time coaching ourselves and other people to cope with adversity. Yes. We all catch ourselves in that conundrum. You want to help your children handle the struggles of life to be able to rise above adversity. But you naturally assume somehow that the joys will take care of themselves. That's what struck me initially in my work was that we spent so little time helping people learn how to manage that side of life. It was just taken for granted that the absence of pain and suffering would somehow guarantee the finding of joy. And that is just not the case. One of the great insights that my most influential mentor, Joseph Virov, taught me and was just because you're not down, doesn't mean you're up.

That was profound. I always had assumed, as most psychologists and earlier times, that if people were not pressed by adversity, we're not struggling suffering, that somehow then the natural state, the default status, would be happiness. The default is the absence of suffering. It's not happiness. Happiness is really something you have to be on the lookout for. Is there any evidence that teaching ourselves or teaching others to develop the capacity

to cope with adversity also somehow transmutes itself into a capacity to enjoy life? Very little evidence for that. The two are really separate sets of skills, the capacity to cope and the capacity to find the joy. Many of the things that we would do to help us cope with misfortune and accident and adversity involve muting, dampening, cutting short the emotional experience. We want the pain to go away.

We want the fear to dissipate. We want the fear to dissipate. We want the anxiety, the worry to vanish. We want to get beyond these things and pass them. We oftentimes tell ourselves not to think about it, not to dwell on it, that this will pass. If you do those kinds of coping strategies when a good thing happens. Tell yourself, this is not that good. Try not to think about it. Just figure that we'll be through it soon. It will be gone. Think of other things.

Try not to dwell on it. Well, what does that do to the joy? I mean, it more or less kills it. So if that's habitual, if that's our dominant approach, mentally and behaviorally, to bad things when they happen. Be very easy for us to apply those same rules to positive experiences and we're out of luck. We've actually undermined them. So you've devoted decades to studying the phenomenon of savoring, and I think we all understand

the term, but you say it involves an element of something that psychologists call meta-cognition. Explain what this means for it. As meta-cognition is thinking about our own mental states, thinking about our own feelings. Oh, this feels good. Or I'm liking this. I haven't felt this way in a while, you might say. It also involves an ability to be aware of one's attentional focus, what it is that one's looking at. Just sitting, for example, in a beautiful garden or strolling through

and looking for what comes our way. You'd be aware of every thought, every step. If you're looking at a beautiful flower, what kinds of feelings come to mind. You might smell the flower, what memories come to mind in the aroma. It involves a kind of mindful awareness of one's own positive experiences. And that is the essence of savoring. It is really the capacity to notice and to attend to and to appreciate a positive experience, whether it's coming from outside us or within us. So in previous episodes of Hidden Brain, we've talked about another important psychological concept,

the hedonic treadmill, something brings us joy and a new car, a new house, a new city. But over time, we get used to the thing that gave us joy and we might even, a new house, a new city, but over time we get used to the thing that gave us joy and we might even get bored with it. Researchers have shown that the hedonic treadmill shows up even as people are eating dessert in the course of a single meal. Can you explain what they found and how savoring can affect this process? Yes, that's a universal phenomenon that's underappreciated.

One way to think of it is the fact that the human system exquisite as it is in sensation, perception. It has its limits over time and that what initially strikes us as powerfully pleasant or powerfully unpleasant will over time fade, it will drain away, and it has adaptive value, certainly helpful to us to be able to handle unpleasant feelings, pain.

For example, you can get used to pain if it becomes chronic, you kind of live with it and don't think about it. And yet it has its drawbacks, this hedonic system, in the fact that we grow used to and accustomed to positive things. And it's inevitable from a physiological point of view that the system seems to be less sensitive over time to the pleasurable stimuli that at first was exquisite. Classic case in point, you go into a bakery and you are bombarded with aromas,

the smell of freshly baked bread, chocolate pastries, all of the smell is divine. It's just overwhelming. Within a few minutes, we might not even realize it. Someone else will come in the door a few minutes later and they'll say, the aroma, and you'll think, what aroma? The aroma is, oh, it's right. You realize that it would take you leaving, walking around the block, clearing the nasal passage, come back in. Hey, there's the aroma again. Where did it go? It was there all the time, but we get used to it. The trouble is we get used to anything when we're surrounded by it. We only really know what we've got when it's gone.

So it takes the losing of the thing to fully appreciate what having it is about. And the same thing holds true from a psychological point of view, with all of the good things in our lives. Fred, have people figured out how to halt, or at least, slow down the hedonic treadmill? Yes, I mean, we've learned over time, but the idea of, say, wholping down a pizza that is going to taste better if we can get more of it rapidly. That's counterproductive. If we get a windfall of gifts all at once, don't owe them all immediately. Spread them over time, the research show. Far better for us to slow

down and to stretch the time and the experience out. That is the number one savering strategy people adopt when instructed to try to enjoy and experience the most they possibly can. And I've done this work across culture. This is a universal strategy people adopt is to slow down. They'll spend some time just looking at the bite of chocolate, A universal strategy people adopt is to slow down.

They'll spend some time just looking at the bite of chocolate, let's say, or the strawberry. They'll spend time sniffing it, setting it down, maybe licking it, but they're not going to consume it all rapidly, actually swishing the food around on the palate, closing the eyes to try to intensify the sensations, the taste on the tongue. And that's a very mindful, deliberate process aimed at maintaining the positive experience and prolonging it. Now, you could say if you want more intensity, you would do it as a dog might eat a piece of steak on a plate on the floor, and it's gone before you can sit down. They go for oomph and intensity, whereas human beings say, okay, that would work, but it'd be over, and then where would I be? If you want to smell the roses, you have to slow down, or if you're going to drive by and roll the windows down and

try to smell the roses, that's not going to work. So speed and impatience is really the enemy of enjoyment. The lingering is the secret. So you've conducted a number of studies looking at the practical effects of engaging and savoring. One of these experiments examined whether savoring makes us happier in our day-to-day lives. Can you describe the study for us, please? Well, we've done several of such studies to go after research on how people saver on their own when told to go forth and saver. So we had technology that allowed

us to contact people randomly between eight in the morning, eight at night on their device, their phone, they could write down what they were doing, what they were feeling. And then answer questions about whether they had just been savoring or not, which kinds of savoring were they engaging in, and how their feelings were. So we followed people a large sample once a day for 30 days, randomly beeping them and keeping track of their data. What we found was, as we'd expected,

when people engaged in savoring in response to a positive event that resulted in significantly stronger positive emotions, immediately afterwards, and then throughout the day, we found that these savoring experiences seemed to magnify and grow over time, and that they, at the end of the month, people's trajectory was uplifted. The more savoring they'd engaged in, in the moment, in real life circumstances, the more joy they were feeling, the more positive emotion they were feeling. We also found that savoring had its strongest effects when people had fewer positive events. It was a bit counterintuitive. In

other words, that savoring matters most in squeezing the joy from positive moments when you have fewer positive moments to work with. So it's a really important thing to keep in mind. There are many people's circumstances that don't allow them the luxury, the time to save or the opportunities. That doesn't mean that they can't get full joy from that. It means that that's where savoring matters most.

You've also found that savoring can help with symptoms related to depression or with people suffering from poor health. Walk me through these findings, right? Yes. With respect to depression, the tendency to experience negative emotion, negative affectivity actually dampens the ability to savor the moment. It really puts a damper on the capacity to find joy in the moment,

and that tends to increase the intensity depression over time. The one strategy to battle depression is to teach people to find more joy in the moment, not as easy as it sounds, but it's really one of the goals of cognitive behavioral therapy. The people are actually developing savoring interventions now and working with depressed clients, and it seems to reduce the symptomology. With respect to ill health, we're finding that in chronic disease, life-threatening illnesses, the capacity to savor protect one from depression, the better and stronger one's skills are in savoring. The less likely one is to get depressed over time and the lower the levels of depression and dealing with chronic life-threatening illness.

So, despite these many benefits of savoring, we often fail to savor the good things in life, and I'd like to explore some of the reasons for this. The first, as you've indicated, is that we're simply too rushed, in some ways, as you were when your children were growing up. I mean, that seems to be one of the principal drivers that keeps us from savoring the good things in our lives. Yes, not only this feeling of being rushed in the time is short, but also the tendency to compare our experience to what we thought it would be, or what we hoped it would be, or what we think it should have been. We also compare many times what we're experiencing to what others in the same situation seem to be feeling.

And that's short circuits, Many of the positive feelings, because we're more interested in analyzing and comparing how we're actually feeling relative to some standard. And that's hardly being in the moment. That's not being here. That's being somewhere else. And hard to be here if you're there. I understand that your brother, George, had an interesting relationship with Christmas each year. But some of his strategy didn't quite work when it came to maximizing his own savoring. Tell me that story, Fred. Yes, he always relished Christmas.

Before it occurred, he would start a month or two ahead building it up. He would think it would be the best Christmas we've ever had in all our lives. And I thought the one before was pretty good. Oh, no, this is going to be far better than anything we could ever imagine. And I said, really, this sounds great. What are some of the things you think will happen? So we're going to get the biggest best gifts ever. The meal is going to be incredible.

There'll be snow. It's going to be magical. Can't wait. And then the night before, there was this huge excitement. But then, Christmas morning would come, and we'd rush into the living room to see all this array of gifts, and they never lived up to what he had imagined they'd be. But there was always next Christmas, so he was very good at building up the anticipation

and enjoying it beforehand, but in the moment it inevitably fell far short of what he had hoped for, and he would be grumpy, he would be disappointed and have to leave the room. So, some of this is about the road of expectations. The higher our expectations, the harder it becomes to save or what it is that we have, to enjoy what it is that we have, because the contrast is a downward contrast. But it's also an example of perhaps killjoy thinking. You know, something wonderful is happening, you're getting something great. But rather than focusing on what's great, your mind is occupied by the ways it falls short.

Yes, you're thinking to yourself, this should have happened sooner, it could have been better in these ways, or you're thinking, I should be doing something else. You know, I've got other things to do, or I don't deserve this. So the Killjoy thoughts really short circuit the enjoyment of the moment, and they can become an automatic script that we play in our heads in response to positive events. I want to play your clip of music, Fred, that was part of a study conducted by the psychologist Jonathan Schuhler and his colleagues. Here's a clip from a very

famous piece of music. So Jonathan Schuhler played this work right of spring written by the composer Igor Stravinsky for volunteers and he had different groups listen to the music differently. Explain what he did and what he found for it. He asked one group simply to listen to the passage, the musical passage. And the second group was asked to reflect upon how they felt while they were listening to this passage. They were to turn a dial to the right if their feelings

became increasingly positive, or they were to turn the dial back if the feelings were decreasing. And during this time people were instructed to really keep track of how they were feeling, to evaluate their feelings. Now he found that the group that listened to the passage, while evaluating their feelings, that group ended up at a lower level of enjoyment than a group that simply was asked how they felt after listening to the song with no self-evaluation. So the very act of continually and real-time monitoring the positive feelings ended up undermining the final level of enjoyment.

It's almost as if you pay a price for too much self-reflection. I'm wondering, Fred, if this is at odds with what you told me earlier, when we talked about the role of Medi-Cognition, and that savoring is not just simply enjoying something, but being aware that you're enjoying something, taking note of it, is that idea at odds with the idea in this study, which is that the more you pay attention to the things that you are enjoying, the less you enjoy it? Very good, Sean Carr. That is one of the paradoxes of savoring.

The irony is that in order to savour, you have to be aware of the positive feelings. You have to tell yourself, I like this, I'm feeling good, this is wonderful. The trouble is in the school or study, people stayed in that evaluative frame of mind. They kept asking themselves, how much am I enjoying it? Am I still enjoying it?

Am I happy yet? Am I still happy? Maybe not. You can see that takes you away from the very positive stimulus that you started with. So the idea is to dance back and forth. It's to waltz, to tango with the positive feelings. You do need to be aware of them.

You need to name them, to wallow in them. Ah, here it is. Listen to the strings in this musical passage. Listen to the counterpoint from the brass section. They must have worked for hours on this. How many people are playing? How amazing humans are to have created these things and then lose yourself in the moment, let go of the evaluations and the judgments. And you can't spend too much time in either one of those reflective or absorption frames of mind. Savoring can bring us happiness, shield us from depression, and make us more resilient

in the face of adversity. But a variety of hidden barriers keep us from doing it. One of the most important of those barriers is that we fail to see the many different shades of savoring that are available to all of us in daily life. That's when we come back. You're listening to Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedanta. This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedanta. Fred Bryan is a psychologist at Loyola University Chicago. He is the co-author with Joseph Vieroff of the book Savoring, a new model of positive experience. Fred, you say that there are many opportunities for savoring in everyday

life that many of us overlook and becoming aware of all the many Types and shades of savoring maybe the first step to living a richer and more satisfying life When you were in the third grade you got an assignment to get some mushrooms from the forest And you had a chat with someone in your household who was a master at savoring tell me what happened oh Thank you so Sean Carver, reminding me of this cherished memory. That was a very early savoring adventure with my mother, Mary Lee. And the assignment was to go out into the forest, living in the hills of West Virginia, there were forests all around us and collect mushrooms. We were defined as many as we could mount them in some form, make a presentation and exhibit

out of them. The task was straight forward, but I wasn't sure even how to approach it. It just sounded like a drudgery and stress to me, So I mentioned it to my mom and it was a Saturday morning. She said, let's figure out how we'll do this. These things are waiting for us. They're hiding. Where do you think we'll find them? I said, I don't know.

Where might we go? I should have seen steered us to a creek that flowed up into the hills behind the end of the street. And I'd not spent a lot of time way back in there. So we decided she said, let's go up in there. What will we need to take with us? Well, I don't know. Well, we'll need something to carry them and what we want.

So, well, maybe a paper bag. Great idea. Let's take several because we don't know how many we'll need. We don't want to crush them. Maybe we'll find a lot more than we could imagine. Oh, and we want to keep track of where we find them, where are they hiding? And she had a small smile notebook with a pencil. Maybe we would take a snack with us. This started to sound fun. This sounded like we were going into some place unknown started to sound fun. It sounded like we were going to someplace unknown that we were exploring.

And I remember making our way there and the finding the first one under a fern. Way off the path where we'd been. And she came running over and I was thrilled to be able to show what I found. We made a few notes about it. We pulled it out of the ground and we smelled it. We were really drinking in the all of the experience. I couldn't wait to see the next one.

This must have gone on for, I don't know, an hour or two, finding all sorts of things, wondering how many hundreds and hundreds of mushrooms were there were surrounding us that we'd never known, never seen, trying to guess how old they were and She said, look how many we have. Can you believe it? Remember we had none and how much we'd look forward to what we'd find? Here we are. We're here now. Then she talked, oh, let's go home. What are we going to do? We get home Let's look forward to it and and then tonight we're going to look back on this. She showed me this mental time machine that Savory can involve.

When one uses the mind in that way, the ability to travel back and forth in time, she was showing me how to do this, teaching me, how to go about doing this. All of these tricks ended up being one of my favorite things I ever did in grade school. You know, I love the idea of mental time travel because you call this both prospective and retrospective savoring. And in the little example you gave me about going mushroom hunting with your mom, there's ample evidence of both those things, right?

So you're anticipating what you're going to find. You're trying to imagine how wonderful it's going to be, you're trying to think about where you will find these things, and then you find them, and then you celebrate when you find them, and then you look back at the end of the day, and you say, do I remember where I found them? And so in some ways, you're trying to extract every last ounce of joy juice, so to say, from the search for mushrooms.

That's it. of joy juice, so to say, from the search for mushrooms. That's it. She was able to find joy ahead of time, and then when we were in the moment, remind me, remind herself that some of the things we'd look forward to, building memories to be recalled later. We got home, we looked over the whole adventure from start to finish, remembered it, and shared it. Part of it was sharing it with her, magnified, the savoring, because she would point out to

me things she found beautiful. I would also then be encouraged to find little things that I found pleasurable and fun. Things she did not see, and it was delight to see her laugh at what I discovered. I realized later on in my life that that was what drove my career studying savoring, 40 years of studying savoring. She certainly understood it, not from research, but from having learned it from her father and then passing it along to me. Notice that Fred's mother was not doing what Fred's brother did ahead of Christmas. His brother had built up anticipation of Christmas by imagining more presents, better presents, and picture perfect snowy weather.

He then felt disappointed when reality felt short of his expectations. Fred's mother focused on enjoying the ordinary. It was just a school project to find some mushrooms. But by slowing down, Fred's mom showed him that there was wonder to be extracted from the ordinary. At every stage, she preferentially focused on the version of the story that would make them happiest. Before they went out, she asked Fred to imagine finding lots and lots of mushrooms.

After they had found a couple, she told him, remember how we thought we might find none? And after they got home, she helped Fred focus on the best parts of the day. In some ways, she was taking advantage of errors in the way the mind works, to combat the propensity of the mind to focus on the negative. Fred says research has backed up his mother's insight. There are some researchers, Mitchell and Thompson, very well-known in the happiness literature, studied vacations, European trips, bicycle trips, asking them to how good I thought it would be beforehand,

that prospection. And in the moment, they asked them to rate how they're feeling and describe the pleasures of the experience. And then afterwards, to look back, rating how good it was, what they found was, as you described, this tendency to look back on things and remember them as having been more pleasant than they were at the time. People are idealizing it. They term that rosy retro-spection.

The same thing actually held true for the prospection. A thing before it occurs when you're imagining it, it seems much better than it actually was at the time. Much as my brother would idealize Christmas before it happened, they called that rosy prospection. It's just a human tendency. They analyze why that would happen. And they found that in the moment there are all sorts of distractions, there are things that are unpleasant. We don't encode those as memories afterwards. So when you look back, you don't remember that your knee was sore, or you don't remember that the weather was cold, the uncertainties,

the little things that were unpleasant or fell short are sloughed off, leaving the gist of it, that we can polish, like the facets of a diamond. What we're doing is we're savoring the way it makes us feel to remember. It's a subtle distinction, and that's an important one. The savoring isn't just rekindling the exact feelings you had when you look back. It is relishing the way it feels to look back. Again, the savoring is always in the here and now. The feeling now when you look back, the feeling now when you look forward. You've noticed gender differences between men and women and their capacity to save our

things, both in the present and when they're looking retrospectively. What do you find, Fred? Women report that they're more fully capable of enjoying the moment, of getting as much joy as they think they can from a happy moment. Compared to what men say, that men themselves are capable of, they seem to be more in touch with the feelings when they're happening. Men sometimes have a harder time identifying the positive feelings in the first place, and then lingering with them.

It's just a cultural difference, maybe because they're dominant coping strategies, involve suppressing feelings and denying and avoiding more than women. Women traditionally, far more expressive of their positive feelings. Men have traditionally kept their feelings more to themselves, but the price is that you miss the opportunity to augment, to intensify, amplify those feelings. And women tend to spend more time building memories of a positive thing. So they're very skilled at these things, probably because of the richer inner life and association with feelings. Typically men have a harder time with that.

They'll talk about feelings that they're often not encouraged to do, so women do a lot more of that than men do. So you talk about two kinds of savoring, one that is outward focused, and one that is more inward focused. The outward focused savoring you call world focused savoring. Can you give me some examples of how this would work? The world-focused savoring is when we notice something outside us, that's pleasurable, like the mushrooms I hunted with my mom.

It is an exquisite rainbow or a grand canyon, some kind of magical sunset that's just out of a movie. In other words, it comes from the outside, it hits us hard to create feelings inside. And the savoring process is one of marveling. Luxureating is another form of savoring that's outward-focused. Coming from the outside, you're feeling the warm hot tub on one's body, focusing on the ways those things affect us. But those outer world experiences, world-focused saving, very different from self-focused savoring, where we're savoring the

feelings inside us as opposed to the stimulus outside us. Something like pride and accomplishment, than having finished a task that we've worked hard on or something that means a lot to us. We might relish a feeling of fatigue after a hard day's labor or a great workout. In reality, most savoring experiences are blends of the two. Even a world-focused savoring experience has to get in us with the feelings, and we have to focus on those feelings. So happiness is not in things, it's in us.

It's the feelings that these things create inside us. That's the fuel for the savoring. It's the fuel for the savoring. You talk about gratitude as being one of the engines for savoring. What does gratitude have to do with savoring? Gratitude is the ability to pinpoint a gift from an external gift giver. The benefactor could be a friend. It could be a stranger. It could be a stranger, it could be a deity,

it could be a loved one. But this is something outside us, which is blessed us, given us something positive, unless those realizations hit us, and we reflect on that cognitively, there is no gratitude. You hand a very young child a gift and the parent says, what do you say to their child? And child says, this is really good. You say, no, no, no, you don't say, say thank you. The child hasn't really developed the capacity to recognize that this is something for which to give thanks.

It's something learned over time. So you and others have argued that it's more important to have many experiences of savoring as compared to very intense experiences of savoring. Why would this be the case, Fred? The intensity is fine and good, but that will wear off over time. It's almost as if there's a part of the mind,

a hidden part that keeps score. And there's a part of the mind, a hidden part, that keeps score. And there's a tally sheet in some fashion that we haven't many positive experiences. They accrue. They build. They accumulate. This was a finding by Ed Deener, University of Illinois, a ground breaker in the research on well-being and happiness. It may seem counterintuitive, but the data speak.

Again, the small things, the little things in life, it's very encouraging to know that they are the ones that seem to count more than one big celebration could, as if you could savor a huge celebration intensely and you're done for the year. It doesn't work that way. You cannot, like, a camel take a lot of it and hold onto it. We fade over time.

We need to be replenished, resupply it. So your co-author, Joe Verov, had a strategy to extract the most pleasure from reading letters from his grown children. And in many ways, his strategy speaks to some of the themes we've been discussing in the last few minutes. Can you paint me a picture of what he did? Joe and I both in writing this book

wrote down our favorite kinds of savoring experiences. And for many years, he and his children used to write what they called a chain letter. He would often start it. He would write a letter to one of his kids. And the kids then would be writing their own letter. He would often start it. He would write a letter to one of his kids, and the kids then would be writing their own letter. He would enclose his letter with their own and send the letter to another sibling. He had five children. And so this would take a period of time. The second child would have Joe's original letter and the second siblings

letter, and then in their own time write a letter. This would just be anything that came to mind. Their thoughts, their insights, their fears, their dreams, things that were happening to them. There's a way for them to share, but across a long period of time. Until finally, the last letter would come back to him, and he would get five letters in addition to his original letter. These chain letters came around about two or three times a year.

And finally, reading them all together, Joe said, was he just loved reading them when they came. He didn't always read them instantly. He would find a quiet moment where he could read each one very slowly and deliberately. It's a beautifully creative way of savoring life together. He could feel, he said, his family gathered in the room around him as he read the letter. It's so much more lasting than a phone call or an email. The emails get buried. This was something he held onto and cherished. I suspect he passed it along to his children.

Probably they found the letters after he died. It's a wonderful idea, though, to be able to see the sum of the parts is so much bigger when seen across time like this. In the second part of our mini-series on savoring, coming up in our next episode, we dive into more techniques to extract the greatest pleasure from life. I could give you some examples of what it will contain, but really, why don't you take a minute and imagine the pleasures that await you.

Fred Bryant is a psychologist at Loyola University Chicago. He is the author with Joseph Veroth of the book Savaring, a new model of positive experience. Fred, thank you for joining me today on Hidden Brain. Thank you, son Carrot. It's pleasure. Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media. Our audio production team includes Bridget McCarthy, Annie Murphy-Paul, Kristen Wong, Laura Quarelle, Ryan Katz, Autumn Barnes, and Andrew Chadwick. Tara Boyle is our executive producer. I'm Hidden Brain's executive editor.

Our unsung hero this week is Annie Swanson. Annie is an account manager at HWP Insurance, a company that helps us with health insurance for our staff. We recently needed to send some healthcare data to the federal government, and the process for submitting that data was confusing and a bit daunting. Luckily for us, Annie hopped on a call and shared some troubleshooting documents that helped us to quickly check the staff off our two-do list. Thank you, Annie, for your support, so we could get back to doing the work we like to do,

making more episodes of Hidden Brain. If you're enjoying, or perhaps savoring our YouTube.os series, we'd love for you to share these episodes with two or three people who you think would enjoy them. Word of mouth recommendations make a huge difference in introducing new listeners to Hidden Brain? I'm Shankar Vedantam. See you soon.

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