Savoring Worksheet: Slow Down and Fully Take in Your Good Moments

About this tool

Savoring is the practice of noticing, appreciating, and extending positive experiences, the deliberate counterpart to coping. Researchers Fred Bryant and Joseph Veroff, who developed the concept, describe it as the capacity to attend to, appreciate, and enhance the positive moments in life. Where most of us are fairly skilled at managing the bad, far fewer of us actively make the most of the good, which often passes by half-noticed.

Bryant and Veroff outlined savoring across three time frames. Anticipatory savoring is looking forward to something good and letting yourself enjoy the wait. In-the-moment savoring is being fully present while a good thing is happening, through your senses and attention. Reminiscent savoring is revisiting a positive memory deliberately to relive and prolong its warmth. Each can be practiced and strengthened.

Several concrete strategies help. Sharing a good experience with others, taking a mental photograph, slowing down to use all your senses, expressing your enjoyment outwardly, and consciously comparing the moment to harder times all amplify positive feeling. A common savoring-killer is rushing on to the next task or letting your mind run ahead. This worksheet helps you pick a moment and a strategy, so savoring becomes intentional rather than accidental.

A 2010 study by Quoidbach and colleagues compared eight savoring and dampening strategies in a sample of adults and found that strategies like sharing the moment with others and being fully present were linked to higher positive emotion and life satisfaction, while dampening strategies such as finding reasons to feel less good about a positive event were linked to lower wellbeing. The strategies in this worksheet come directly from that research.

A common mistake is treating savoring as something that should happen automatically once you decide to be more positive. In practice it is closer to a skill: it takes a specific moment, a chosen strategy, and often some deliberate effort to resist the pull of multitasking or rushing ahead. People who are used to problem-solving mode sometimes find in-the-moment savoring the hardest of the three types, since it means pausing rather than doing.

There is no score here, only a reflection. Use step four to notice what actually happened: did slowing down change how the experience felt, and which strategy fit best. If a strategy felt forced or fell flat, that is useful information too. Try a different one next time rather than concluding that savoring does not work for you.

Savoring is a wellbeing skill, not a treatment for depression or anxiety, and it works best alongside other supports rather than in place of them. If low mood or anhedonia is making it hard to feel pleasure even when you try to notice it, that is worth discussing with a therapist. You can search our therapist directory to find one.

Reviewed by Michael Callans, MSW
Reviewed the worksheet for fidelity to Bryant and Veroff's savoring framework.

References

1. Bryant FB, Veroff J. Savoring: A New Model of Positive Experience. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates; 2007.
2. Quoidbach J, Berry EV, Hansenne M, Mikolajczak M. Positive emotion regulation and well-being: comparing the impact of eight savoring and dampening strategies. Pers Individ Dif. 2010;49(5):368-373.

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