Welcome to Joy Lab!: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Joy Lab podcast, where we help you uncover and foster your most joyful self. Your hosts, Dr. Henry Emmons and Dr. Aimee Prasek, bring you the ideal mix of soulful and scientifically sound tools to spark your joy, even when it feels dark. When you're ready to experiment with more joy, combine this podcast with the full Joy Lab program over at JoyLab.coach.
Henry: Hello, I'm Henry Emmons and welcome to Joy Lab.
Aimee: And I'm Aimee Prasek. So here at Joy Lab, we infuse science with soul to uncover joy. To do that we focus on building the elements of joy, the positive emotions and inner states that become the building blocks for a joyful life. The element for this episode is savoring. So to recap, we savored the past two episodes ago,
present in last episode, and now we've got the time circuits on, the flux [00:01:00] capacitor is fluxing, and the engine running. We're ready to savor the future, which again is a Back to the Future reference if you weren't here for last episode.
Henry: This is really gonna be your thing, it, Aimee? This is
Aimee: I am
Henry: The future is.
Aimee: I'm excited. Yes, I thrive here.
Henry: This is where you're gonna shine
Aimee: In a time that does not yet exist, I do really well! Um, yes, savoring the future. You might also know it as anticipation. It's really tuning into the sensations, soaking in the good feelings as you visualize something positive that you have planned in the future, or something that is a likely positive event in the future.
Like if you're planning on going on a trip or seeing a loved one, or imagining a delicious meal that you plan on cooking for a friend. I mean, it can be whatever, really, but kind of realistic. So before [00:02:00] we dive in, a reminder that these three types of savoring that we've covered past, present, future, are all great.
You don't have to be good at all of them. Even one is great. You can keep practicing as I am doing. As we're all doing. Uh, there really isn't a universal better or more powerful one. You know, practicing, savoring in any of these ways can be really helpful for mood, um, and have more lasting beneficial effects as well.
And, it changes the ones that you might resonate at a certain time in your life. So, choose, and then practice the ones that might not be coming so quickly for you when you're ready. But choose, I guess, is the point. Savoring is a powerful practice that helps us get up in the morning. Some motivation that comes along with it can move through our day in a better mood.
And I think it actually also helps us fall asleep better at night as long as you're not maybe savoring the future right away before bed. We've talked about that, like yeah, too much bubbly energy.
Henry: [00:03:00] Well, I have to admit, I am surprised when you say that the health benefits are about the same, roughly the same for past, present, and future savoring. I just would've guessed that you know what's best for your health is savoring the present moment,
Aimee: Because better at that, right?
Henry: Well, maybe! That's what I wanted it to be.
You're right.
Aimee: kidding.
Henry: But I think this is great because it gives us so many more options and it's not like, you know, we're always doing something in this moment that's enjoyable that we wanna savor.
I think too that this, this future orientation might be a really good option if you're struggling, or especially if you're feeling kind of down or depressed.
Research shows that when someone is depressed, for example, it is harder to notice positive events as they're happening or even to remember them from the [00:04:00] past. But it is possible to tap into your imagination and think about the future, even when you're down. And it can do a couple of good things. It can take your focus off what's happening now,
that might be hard. And you can shift it onto something that you're actually looking forward to. So I don't see this as denial. I don't see this as avoidance. I think you can intentionally choose to imagine a positive event in the future and try bring it to life. Athletes other performers do this a lot when they spend some time imagining themselves doing their thing,
with some upcoming event and, and imagining that they're really being successful at it. And that mental rehearsal does make it more likely that when the time [00:05:00] comes, they actually will perform better. So I think for our purposes, we're really getting two for the price of one. We can enjoy anticipating a future event, and we can make it more likely that when it comes,
it will be even more enjoyable then.
Aimee: Yeah. You hit on that, that element of it being a really conscious practice. We talked a lot about that in the last two episodes. But it is also interesting how common that practice is in sports and performance roles, this kind of savoring the future, but it works for all of us.
You know, you don't have to be a pro athlete to do the same thing. And I was surprised too that there was no really clear winner on past, present, or future savoring. So there's some other neuroscience research here as well on, um, chronesthesia or mental time travel. I think is so fun. Um,
Henry: Of course you do!
Aimee: I know! It fits into this conversation a little bit on [00:06:00] savoring, um, some of the research there has found that brain activity for non-present thinking, like past future stuff, is really similar, those two.
But thinking about the present moment seems to be a little different, in that mental time travel research. My sort of clunky hypothesis here though is that maybe when we add this element of savoring to past or future events, this type of focused positive mental time travel, it kind of takes us out of the container of time. I don't know if this is true!
Henry: I like your hypothesis far, but, but I, we haven't heard the end of it yet!
Aimee: Oh yeah, here's the second half. Um, but we're, you know, we're, so we're focusing on these positive experiences that rise up and not so much the event, which we've also also talked about last episode particularly. So we're focusing on those feel good sensations that are happening in the present moment.
So I, I [00:07:00] feel like it kind of collapses time, and that's possibly why we have kind of the same brain activity for past, present, future saving, savoring the same sort of benefits. Um, okay. But I think one of the points we're hopefully making here is that we can engage in proactive savoring, like, you know, we can pick an event past, present, or future to savor.
The alternative is often called reactive savoring, which is great as well, but it has to wait for something fantastic to come our way to savor or an environmental cue, that reminds us of a wonderful past event. Which is really kind of our MO at Joy Lab with all of our elements. We're proactively, we're self-generating this stuff to benefit, in the moment,
and also increasing the likelihood that these elements will pop up spontaneously more often.
The twofer that you [00:08:00] noted, Henry. um, Amy Kraus, Rosenthal , she describes a proactive savoring practice in her book, "Encyclopedia of An Ordinary Life," which is a wonderful book, she writes, "When I am feeling dreary, annoyed, and generally unimpressed by life, I imagine what it would be like to come back to this world for just a day after having being dead.
I imagine how sentimental I would feel about the very things I once found stupid, hateful, or mundane. Oh, there's a light switch. I haven't seen a light switch in so long. I didn't realize how much I missed light switches oh,
and look, the stairs up to our front porch are still completely cracked. Hello cracks.
Let me get a good look at you. And there's my neighbor standing there fantastically alive. Just the same, still punctuating her sentences with, 'you know what I'm saying?' Why did that bother me? [00:09:00] It's so endearing."
Henry: Ah, that is so great. It's such a good example I think of of how mental exercise can help us appreciate what we already have. And I think too that there is a subtle message in that quote that, kind of points us to what it is that keeps us from savoring things like those cracks on the porch stairs or, or a slightly quirky neighbor.
And it's judgment. It's looking for what's wrong. Comparing. You know, these things that we all do, our minds are built to do it. But can't you feel the difference as she describes her thought experiment, when she started to love those things, instead of judging them. It was like her day-to-day world became a completely different place. I [00:10:00] don't think we, we really get how powerful our imagination is when it comes to creating our personal day-to-day world. We act as if we're just reacting to the world around us, but what if the world is actually reacting to us? Think of a time, for example, when you went to a social event and you were just kind of dreading it, didn't want to go resisting all the way, but you went.
How did the conversations go? What was the quality of them? What did the food taste like? How would you rate your experience? and then just think of another time when you were so excited and just happy to have been asked, you could hardly wait for this thing to come. How different was that experience?
[00:11:00] So I want to try this for myself with my next social event, cuz I've noticed that, the way I show up makes a difference in my quality of that experience. So gonna take 10 minutes to myself and I'm just gonna imagine myself having a great time. You know, having genuine conversations, savoring the food, noticing little things, relishing, anything that I might think of as a flaw even, you know, like the cracks in the stairs or the quirkiness of, of someone at the event. I'm just gonna imagine that I don't judge it, I love it instead. I'll just do this as an experiment and then see what happens.
My theory is that I'm going to have a better experience [00:12:00] just with this simple thing, but I'll, I'll do it as an experiment and see if that actually holds up as being true.
Aimee: I love that experiment. Uh, and to think of the world reacting to us versus us reacting to the world... just makes me wanna soften my defenses a little bit. So I'll add to that experiment with another evidence-based strategy, um, for savoring the future. I think you can actually merge it with yours, Henry. So this practice comes from a study called "Back to the Future: the effect of daily practice of mental time travel into the future on happiness and anxiety."
It's linked in the show notes. I just love the title. A movie referenced mashed with an academic title. Of course with a good colon in as every good academic title needs. Um, anyway, participants in this study engaged in, uh, deliberate mental time [00:13:00] travel, so I touched on that at the top of this episode and one of the study groups engaged in something called positive deliberate mental time travel, but they weren't given the cue to like really soak in the goodness of savoring. So there's probably some differences, but, we'll, we'll kind of use 'em interchangeably here.
Here's some results from the study. Participants in I'll say savoring the future group saw a significant increase in happiness after two weeks, and folks in the study who did neutral deliberate time travel, so like wasn't anything special, just wasn't a negative deliberate time travel or positive deliberate ti time travel,
they reported a significant reduction in stress after two weeks. Fascinating. So I like this study because for me it suggests that even if you don't feel like you're really good at savoring, just practicing it, just setting [00:14:00] out to look for something pretty good, in your past, present, or future, can have positive effects. Cuz with this study it wasn't so focused on like savoring those experiences and sort of amplifying that, that response. But it really emphasizes the practicing, um, of this and how it can increase that skill. I also think it's evidence that attending to pretty mundane things can be healthy.
Anyway, so we're going to suggest a bit of a spin on the intervention that was used in this study. It's something I think we can all do and that can offer a mood boost or at least some stress reduction. You wanna describe it, Henry?
Henry: Sure. So this exercise goes by a lot of different names, but we're gonna stick with mental time travel because Aimee loves it so much.
Aimee: Yes, please! Love it! Back to the future, here we go.
Henry: So in the research, they asked participants to do this for [00:15:00] 15 straight days. We're gonna suggest you try it just for a week. Probably more doable. Uh, they also had to fill out pre and post questionnaires about happiness and anxiety levels, and we're gonna simplify that too. Just suggest that maybe you give yourself a really quick and easy rating of your mood, say from, for, for that day, maybe from one to 10 or one to five, whatever you want.
Or even more simply, you could just say, good, bad, or neutral. And we're gonna stick with just positive events. So here's how to do it. And I'm gonna you the exact instructions that they used in the study. " Please try to imagine in the most precise way, four positive events that could reasonably happen to you tomorrow. You can imagine all kinds of positive events from simple, [00:16:00] everyday pleasures to very important positive events."
So that's it. It only takes a few minutes. And actually if four things feel like too much, just imagine one or two. And try to do what they suggest by making your imagination as detailed as you can. So see yourself really clearly even down to what you're wearing and who you're with and what it is you're doing. The positive thing that you're imagining can be as simple as just enjoying a meal by yourself or with a friend, or listening to music that you like, maybe doing some something for work and you just nail it.
Or having a really good conversation with your partner. Whatever you come up with. You choose it. It could be anything that could plausibly [00:17:00] happen to you. And in your mind, make this as positive an experience as you can. To make it even more real and more likely to be savored, it's a good idea to write these things down.
Just write 'em down in your journal.
Aimee: Yeah. Um, I think writing it down is really helpful too. And I love that little mood assessment. I have done a little mood assessment before I write it down, and then after every time. And I notice just a little shift every time and then, throughout the week or weeks, you notice that little bit higher every week possibly, or every day.
There's a little bit of a boost that might, um, sort of sustain. Uh, so maybe you can find a, a pattern of assessment, um, that works for you. and then I guess the other cue is to really soak in it. To really feel what rises up and attend to that as [00:18:00] well as we do in savoring. But the study itself really just focused on the visualization piece of it.
So there's power there. And in the Joy Lab program, we do something kind of like this for our infusion practices. This savoring. In our am uh, we do this intention setting, kind of that visualization, we savor the future. And then in our PM infusions, we savor the day. We look back and savor the past, just as we described a few episodes ago.
So do join us in the Joy Lab program if you're not already. So we've spent a lot of time traveling and savoring over these last three episodes. And I hope you've found, um, something that you resonated with, uh, at least maybe one of the strategies that we've offered.
Maybe with savoring on your mind as well, throughout these last three episodes, you've even found yourself just spontaneously savoring more in your day. Those little moments add up in [00:19:00] really big ways as well. So before we close, I want to go back to a bit more wisdom from the magnificent Amy Krouse Rosenthal. I think she was a sage for savoring. Um, and I note as well to read her essay called "You may Want to Marry My Husband."
It will make you laugh, and ugly cry and feel hopeful, maybe sad, and then ready for some more savoring. It was published just, um, I think 10 days before she passed or 10 days after. It's a beautiful story. Um, but I'll, I'll quote her from um, her Ted Talk "Seven Notes on Life." Cuz if I quote the essay I'll ugly cry with y'all, we don't need that right now.
So here it is:
" When our eyes are open, there is a subtle shifting of awareness. I tend to believe.... whatever you decide to look for, you'll find. Whatever you beckon [00:20:00] will eventually beckon you."
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