Remember your favorite meal? Remember your favorite memory? Aware of humanity’s fall out into the abyss of anxiety and depression? Struggling with them yourself? If you are at least minimally worried about these questions, then you are in the right place. Grab your coffee, tea, or can of coke, and get ready to savor these words.
In an era of fast food, espresso, and express lanes life has become a trifle fast-paced task of humanity. Banality took over the command of our daily tasks and being on automatic pilot has become the normality for everyone, while spending nights awake fearful of whether we are living to the fullest of our potential, to our happiness, and even if what we said to the bartender that handled us our coffee today was correct. But even with these questions and caffeinated behaviors, humans are far from being banal. However, humanity’s banality has one of its high impacts when humans decide to not be nice to themselves and each other. The article “New Research Explains How To Savor Life’s Happiest Moments” by Dr. Mark Travers explores research surrounding the topic of human self-compassion and its implications on well-being and emotional outcomes. The biggest outcome of the article is finding that it is “really important to be nice to yourself” according to Dr. Schellenberg.
Before I go to the aim of my writing today, I will bring to you why it is so important to be nice to yourself and to others. Current research points to being nice to oneself and to others as a predictor and essential factor in positive emotions, better mental health, increased optimism, increased well-being, and numerous benefits for physical health. The research paper “The neuroscience of positive emotions and affect: Implications for cultivating happiness and wellbeing” by Dr. Rebecca Alexander and colleagues reviews several papers on the implications of positive emotions and neuroscience. The overarching conclusions of the paper are that the implications of savoring life and harnessing the power of all the positive emotions are much more than just benefiting psychological and physical well-being, they act upon the higher structures of society such as GDP, social support, and freedom to make life choices.
Now we get to the true point of this text, savoring our experiences, valuing all of our experiences, and appreciating every possible aspect of our life. Newer trends of savoring can be seen across every aspect of life, especially social media, such as the trend Hope Core more remarkably on TikTok, a trend that showed the value of being nice to oneself and others and keeping an optimistic perspective. Therefore, I come here to tell every single one of you reading this, go savor your life, savor every single moment, and for you to do that I will give you a couple of tips from psychologists. The first one is a reiteration, be nice to yourself, it is your first time living after all. The second one is to be mindful, keep a balanced perspective on life, and take time for yourself. Last, but not least, try to be empathetic, and understand that everyone goes through a rough time in their lives, and you never know what anyone is going through, so be nice to them!
The main aim of this blog is to achieve the goal of simply telling you, be nice to everyone, including yourself! Everyone struggles in life, but kindness is the secret to helping us in those struggles, so go ahead and tell that person who goes you through the hardest times of your life how much they mean to you, tell that person you love that you love them, show kindness to everyone, we are all deserving of it. However, even if you do not follow anything I just said, please do this one thing, be kind for even science shows that it is better for everyone.
So, go back to your coffee, to your music, to your job, to your family, to yourself, and savor everything, for at the end of the day, life should not be on autopilot, and savoring will help us understand and value it all again, bringing color back to our lives!
References:
2. Kiken, L. G., Lundberg, K. B., & Fredrickson, B. L. (2017). Being present and enjoying it: Dispositional mindfulness and savoring the moment are distinct, interactive predictors of positive emotions and psychological health. Mindfulness, 8(5), 1280–1290. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12671-017-0704-3
3. Wilson, K. A., & MacNamara, A. (2021). Savor the moment: Willful increase in positive emotion and the persistence of this effect across time. Psychophysiology, 58(3), e13754. https://doi.org/10.1111/psyp.13754
4. Alexander, R., Aragón, O. R., Bookwala, J., Cherbuin, N., Gatt, J. M., Kahrilas, I. J., Kästner, N., Lawrence, A., Lowe, L., Morrison, R. G., Mueller, S. C., Nusslock, R., Papadelis, C., Polnaszek, K. L., Helene Richter, S., Silton, R. L., & Styliadis, C. (2021). The neuroscience of positive emotions and affect: Implications for cultivating happiness and wellbeing. Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews, 121, 220–249. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neubiorev.2020.12.002
5. https://therapytips.org/interviews/heres-how-to-make-your-happy-moments-last-longer
6. https://www.thenewhappy.com/blog/how-to-savor-the-moment
7. Borelli, Jessica L., et al. “Savoring Interventions for Mothers of Young Children: Mechanisms Linking Relational Savoring and Personal Savoring to Reflective Functioning.” Infant Mental Health Journal, vol. 44, no. 2, 2023, pp. 200–17, https://doi.org/10.1002/imhj.22038.
No comments:
Post a Comment