Savoring: A Worksheet for Making a Good Moment Last

About this tool

Savoring is the act of attending to a positive experience and deliberately extending or deepening it. Fred Bryant and Joseph Veroff, who gave the idea its research footing in their 2007 book Savoring: A New Model of Positive Experience, defined it as the processes through which people attend to, appreciate and enhance their positive experiences. The important word is processes. A good thing happening to you is not savoring. Savoring is what you do with it: the noticing, the staying with it, the telling someone, the going back over it later. Most pleasant moments pass through a day without any of that happening.

The easiest way to see what savoring is for is to look at how much of psychology is built around the other half of experience. Coping, regulation, distress tolerance and reappraisal are all about reducing the impact of something bad. Savoring is the mirror of that: a set of skills for raising the impact of something good. Bryant and Veroff argued that the two are separate capacities, and that someone can be quite good at managing distress while getting very little out of their good days. That is a specific, fixable problem, and it is what this page is about.

Savoring has three time frames. Anticipating is the enjoyment of something before it arrives: planning the trip, looking at the menu, counting the days. Savoring the moment is enjoyment while the thing is happening. Reminiscing is enjoyment drawn from going back over it afterwards, alone or with someone who was there. Bryant built a 24-item measure around exactly these three, the Savoring Beliefs Inventory, which asks about people's beliefs in their own capacity to do each one. The three frames are worth knowing because most people are much better at one than at the other two, and the weakest one is usually where the gain is.

Within those frames, Bryant and Veroff described a set of concrete strategies. Sharing with others: telling someone, or being with someone while it happens. Memory building: deliberately laying down a marker you can return to, by taking a photograph or by noting one detail you want to keep. Self-congratulation: letting yourself register that you did something well, rather than moving straight to the next item. Sensory-perceptual sharpening: narrowing attention to one channel, the taste or the sound or the light, and shutting out the rest. Absorption: letting go of the commentary and simply being in it.

Three more are worth naming separately. Comparing means setting the moment against a worse alternative or an earlier time, which can raise its value, although it is one of two strategies, with kill-joy thinking, that Bryant and Veroff's own data linked to weaker savoring rather than stronger. Counting blessings means noticing explicitly how lucky this particular thing is, which is the point where savoring overlaps with gratitude. And then the negative one: Bryant and Veroff called it kill-joy thinking, the reflex that interrupts a good moment with a problem, a reminder that it will end, or a review of what could have been better. Removing kill-joy thinking is often worth more than adding any strategy. Bryant and Veroff's own checklist carries two more that this worksheet leaves out: behavioral expression, meaning letting the feeling show in your face and voice rather than holding it still, and temporal awareness, meaning registering that the moment is passing while you are in it.

Kill-joy thinking has an evidence trail of its own under the name dampening. Jordi Quoidbach and colleagues compared savoring and dampening strategies in a sample of 282 adults and found that the dampening habits tracked lower well-being: distraction was associated with less positive affect, and fault-finding and negative rumination with lower life satisfaction. They also found that using a varied set of strategies, rather than relying on one or two, was associated with greater happiness. These are correlations in a self-report study, so they describe a pattern rather than prove a direction, but they point the same way as the model does.

The intervention evidence is real but modest, and worth stating plainly. Savoring exercises have been tested in small trials, most of them without a control group. Jennifer Smith and Agnieszka Hanni, for instance, ran a one-week savoring program with 111 adults aged 60 and over and reported improvements in resilience, depressive symptoms and happiness over the following three months among the participants who followed it closely. It was an uncontrolled pilot, so it shows that the practice is doable and promising rather than that it works better than doing nothing. Several similar studies exist in student and community samples. What that body of work supports is that brief savoring practice can produce small to moderate short-term gains in self-reported well-being. What it does not support is savoring as a treatment for depression or anxiety, and anyone offering it as one is going beyond the research.

Savoring tends to suit people whose lives contain good things that are not landing: the week that was objectively fine but felt like nothing, the achievement that got four minutes of attention before the next task, the holiday remembered mainly as photographs. It suits anyone whose default is to move straight from a completed thing to the next thing. It is a poor fit in two situations. In the flat, pleasureless state that comes with depression, trying to savor can turn into evidence that something is wrong with you, and treatment for the depression comes first. And for some people after trauma, good feeling itself registers as unsafe, which is a reason to do this work with a therapist rather than alone.

The practice itself is smaller than people expect. Two minutes is enough, and a small recent moment works better than a large memorable one: the first mouthful of coffee, ten minutes of sun, a message from someone you like. Pick the moment, pick one strategy, and give it the full two minutes without checking anything. Then rate it. The before and after ratings are the useful part, because they tell you which strategy does something for you, and the answer varies a lot between people. Someone who gets nothing from sensory sharpening may get a great deal from telling one person about it.

What savoring is not: it is not forced positivity, and it does not involve deciding that something bad was good. Nothing here asks you to reframe a loss or look on a bright side. Savoring only ever operates on experience that was already positive. It is also not gratitude, though they touch at one point. Gratitude is about the source of a good thing, often another person, and the exercises at Gratitude Journal and Three Good Things Exercise work that way. Savoring is about the texture and duration of the experience itself. You can savor something nobody gave you.

One honest limitation of a worksheet like this one. Savoring is a skill of attention, and attention is exactly what most people have least of. The reason good moments pass unregistered is usually not a missing technique but a day structured so that nothing gets more than a few seconds. If that is the real situation, a savoring exercise will work on the Tuesday you do it and then stop, and the more useful change is structural: a protected ten minutes, a meal without a screen, a walk with nothing on. Use the worksheet to find which strategy pays, then protect the time to use it.

Reviewed by Michael Callans, MSW
Checked the three time frames and the strategy list against Bryant and Veroff's own account, and confirmed the evidence paragraph claims no more than the cited trials support.

References

1. Bryant FB, Veroff J. Savoring: A New Model of Positive Experience. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates; 2007.
2. Bryant FB. Savoring Beliefs Inventory (SBI): a scale for measuring beliefs about savouring. Journal of Mental Health. 2003;12(2):175-196. https://doi.org/10.1080/0963823031000103489
3. Quoidbach J, Berry EV, Hansenne M, Mikolajczak M. Positive emotion regulation and well-being: comparing the impact of eight savoring and dampening strategies. Personality and Individual Differences. 2010;49(5):368-373.
4. Smith JL, Hanni AA. Effects of a savoring intervention on resilience and well-being of older adults. Journal of Applied Gerontology. 2019;38(1):137-152.
5. Bryant FB, Chadwick ED, Kluwe K. Understanding the processes that regulate positive emotional experience: unsolved problems and future directions for theory and research on savoring. International Journal of Wellbeing. 2011;1(1):107-126.

Savoring FAQ