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This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Psychologist Fred Bryant studies a tragedy that affects millions of people around the world. Most of our lives are filled with ample examples of joy and sorrow, but many of us preferentially focus on what is wrong. In our last episode, we examined how many of us say we want to be happy, but spend much of our lives focused on things that make us unhappy.
We pay attention to aches and pains, but take our bodies for granted when we are healthy. We complain about unpleasant co-workers and nasty neighbors, but don't talk much about the kind souls we know at work and in our communities. When good things happen to us, we wonder how they could be better.
If you missed that episode, I strongly recommend you listen to it first. It has a number of important insights. We examined how sorrows have a way of finding us, no matter how hard we try to avoid them. Joys, on the other hand, don't come knocking. We have to find them. And when we do, we need to learn a number of mental skills to notice and savor them. Today on the show, part two of our mini-series on the science of savoring.
How you can deploy your mind to make yourself a happier person, this week on Hidden Brain. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Nintendo. Discover so many ways for the whole family to play with the Nintendo Switch system. With an awesome roster of games, there's something for everyone. Nintendo Switch has three different play modes, from handheld mode to tabletop mode to TV mode, so you can play at home or on the go.
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It's your journey. It all starts with a yes.
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You've heard the phrase, when life hands you lemons, make lemonade. The advice tells us, make the best of a bad situation. Look on the bright side. Fred Bryant's mother, Mary Lee, was an expert at looking on the bright side. And she was a master when it came to savoring the pleasure in joyful experiences.
She understood that savoring is a process that can begin long before the joyful thing happens. You can anticipate pleasures prospectively. And once something wonderful is over, you can remember pleasures retrospectively. Fred, who is now a psychologist at Loyola University Chicago, said his mother was the inspiration for his own interest in studying the science of savoring.
And her example turned out to be valuable when he suffered a serious medical setback in his 30s. Fred Bryant, welcome to Hidden Brain. Thank you, Shankar. It's a pleasure to be here. Some years ago, Fred, you suffered a very serious back injury. I understand that you were in your basement doing a renovation. Tell me the story of what happened. My father and mother had come to visit. My dad was a handyman of sorts.
He knew a lot about building and renovation. So I bought the lumber and the equipment, and we drew up a plan and began transforming the basement. We got to a point where we were nearly done. We had to put a door in a doorway between the basement and the laundry room. And I had ordered a fine door, very sturdy, heavy. I leaned it against the wall. The next day, we were going to install it.
I was in the basement, decided we're going to celebrate. And so I order a pizza. And my younger daughter came down the stairs into the basement. I guess she was three at the time.
and began saying, oh, is that the door? Is that the door? Is that the door? And I said, yeah, that's the door, but be careful, darling. It's heavy, and stay back from it. So I was on the other side of the room, and she said, I like the door. It's fun, and she was feeling the edges of the door. She said, be careful over there, and I was ordering the pizza. I hadn't heard anything for a
a second or two, and that's always a strange sensation when your child talks a lot. So I looked over, and she was walking away from the door, but she had pushed it. It had bounced off the wall and was very slowly going to fall forward onto her as she had turned her back and was walking from it. I realized there, I have a second to act. This is not going to end well. So I threw the phone down, and I dived down,
across the room, caught the door right before it hit her and landed. And when I landed, I twisted in a strange way and I felt a pop deep inside my lumbar and the spine and it was excruciating pain. I knew in an instant that I had done something profoundly wrong to my back, but I couldn't really get up. I slithered up the stairs and, uh,
got on the ice, and then began to realize, this is terrible, but maybe it'll go away. Well, it did not go away. It got worse, and it got worse, and I eventually saw a doctor who recommended an MRI. The MRI showed that this was not a bulging disc, not a herniation. It was a total, absolute blowout between the L5 and S1 vertebrae, and pieces of it were in the spinal canal.
The only recourse for me was going to be surgery. The positive was that it went very well, where I had been unable to walk more than 50 feet at a time, and my left leg beforehand had been shriveling, atrophying because the nerves were cut off and pressed. Afterwards, I had feeling in my foot and leg, and in the course of three months, I had gotten stronger, and I had been able to begin walking again.
The surgeon pronounced me well, intact, and ready to go forth and prosper. So I thought, wow, this is great. I cannot wait. I'm going to be able to go back to hiking and climbing. So tell me a little bit about that because you had this great passion for mountain climbing. And I'm imagining that when you first had the injury, besides the excruciating pain which must have occupied all of your mind, very soon after, you must have started wondering whether your climbing days were over.
Oh, yeah. I was heartbroken that this passion had been taken from me well before I imagined my time. And I thought, well, maybe I can do this. Maybe I can come back. The surgeon said, I'm good to go. So I thought, how about I'm going to plan this. We're going to go. The family is going to go back to West Virginia. My parents had a cabin deep in the woods in
near a big mountain. How about I go back and try to climb that mountain? Take the family and invited them. Two of my favorite climbing buddies, friends from college, they were bringing their families. This was going to be wonderful. It would be the first week in October. The leaves were at their absolute peak. And this was...
a dream come true, to be able to return to this activity. So the plan was, everyone arrives and goes to the cabin. The next day, my friends and I are going to go up this hike. It's about 1,500 feet. I had done it before several times and loved it. And at the end of the day, we were to have a major celebration where we were going to cook massive quantities of pasta. There would be great music.
It was going to be a savor fest, retelling the story of how it felt to go up the mountain and back down again finally after all this time. It would be a grand celebration, one for the ages. Yeah. So in some ways you were doing the prospective savoring that we've talked about earlier, the idea that you're sort of anticipating and building up your anticipation and enjoying in some ways even before the event has actually taken place. Very much so. Imagining it.
The joy of it, reminding myself how much I wanted this to happen, and it finally was going to be able to happen. I had all my loved ones and closest people to me there, and the chance to return to something that was a big part of my life. Fred arrived at the dream day with an intent to savor every moment. Getting up in the morning is always part of the ritual that's exciting, thrilling.
Waking up in the dark, getting coffee at the cabin, taking the maps, getting all our gear together we'd packed the night before. And then probably about 45 minutes driving through the dark on dirt gravel roads through this remote area, finally reaching beat-up two-lane highway and then on to the trailhead at the bottom of the ski lift.
with the 1500 foot hike ahead of us. There was dew all over the grass. It was glorious as the sun was rising. To me, it seemed like the dream I'd had over and over that I'd be able to do this. And I kept telling my friends what a delight it was to have them there. That this was once something I could never imagine, but something I wanted so much. And the crisp air, the spectacular view, it got better and better every minute as the sun got higher.
I remember thinking, what a blessing this is. Above us in the mist was this mountaintop that we could see. And then along the way, stopping for photos, documenting each step along the way, reminding myself of how much I wanted to be able to do this. And then getting to the summit, hooping and hollering.
hugging, jumping for joy, telling my friends how much I love them, tears streaming down my eyes. The stage was set and the ground was tilled and ready for this mega celebration that evening. One of the things I'm hearing, of course, is this is not just a happy day because you went mountain climbing, but in some ways it must have felt like you had been granted a reprieve. Oh, yes.
It's as if I've been granted clemency on the scaffold right before the guillotine came down. I just could not believe that this was happening. I kept saying, this doesn't seem real. It seems like I've been given a second chance and thinking that I'll always be careful with my back. I'll never take anything for granted again. I get a do-over. This is just more exquisite than I could have imagined. And tell me what happened as you started coming down. Going up was one thing.
Coming down was entirely another. There's quite a bit of pounding as you're coming down the equivalent of a tall skyscraper, 1,500 feet or so. And there was some slipping and catching yourself on loose sections of the trail, very steep in spots. And each one of these times, there'd be a kind of a pound on the back and some shock absorbing going on in the lower lumbar. At first, I didn't think much of it. Then it started to creep up on me.
As we came farther down, I started to feel tightness in the back, and I began to focus all of my attention inward on this unpleasant tension in the back. And before I knew it, I was starting to feel a little tingling in the backs of the legs. Oh, no. And this was identical to the sensations I had had before the surgery.
And I began to say, just forget about it. It'll be fine. Don't even think about it. But as I moved on, I began to feel more and more of it. I felt a little twinge in my toes, a bit of sciatica down the back of the leg into the heel. I'm starting to get scared, and I'm starting to sweat. So very quickly, it was going from the most beautiful reprieve, the second chance, to now I think I've blown it. I think I re-injured the disc.
And, I mean, the feeling here is that you had it so good, you got this miraculous reprieve, your back came back, and you basically got greedy and blew it. That's exactly right. I kicked myself over and over. Should never have done this. What was I thinking? That I couldn't go through another back surgery. I have to learn to live with the pain. Very scared. By the time we got back down to the car, I knew that something wasn't right.
We got in the car and drove back, but I let them drive the whole way. I'm just thinking about my back. It got progressively worse until it's time to cook dinner. I don't feel right. So I ended up saying, I can't do this. I have to get on the ice and lie down in the back bedroom.
and the celebration evaporated. There was dinner and all, but I could not be a part of it. I just was beside myself, and I was terrified. I just couldn't be around people. They wanted to celebrate and have a good time. I thought I could never be a part of it. I imagine you must have made an appointment to see your doctor as soon as you got back home. I did. Then he put me through some physical tests and different motions, and he said, okay.
You're fine. I said, what? He said, you're fine. You just strained it. It'll go away. I said, how do you know that? He said, I've seen this before. You should have called me. I would have told you to do a few things and then over the phone I'd have diagnosed it. Many of us have had an experience like Fred's. Everything is in place for us to savor a wonderful, memorable moment. And then anxiety, or some other unwelcome emotion, gets in the way of our enjoyment.
When we come back, practical strategies for savoring that will help us stay focused on what is good in our lives. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.
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I didn't need a psychologist to tell me to slow down and enjoy the view. But life does not always hand us opportunities on a platter to savor the good things in life. Sometimes, often in fact, we need to exercise a little effort. Fred, you talk about the difference between triggers and strategies when it comes to savoring. Can you explain the difference between those ideas? A trigger is something that happens to us, something to which we react.
say, a compliment from a stranger. It came out of the blue, so there's the joy of surprise that can evoke savoring if we allow it. If we just move on, for example, with the bald eagle, as you saw it, you could have said, well, I can't sit here and look at this. I've got someplace I need to be. I'll see this another time. On the other hand, the strategies are put in place on our own voluntarily where we actually plan things
a savoring opportunity. We set the stage for it. We set aside worries and cares. We begin to plan for it in a way that allow it to happen on our time and where we want it to and when we want it to. We can encounter these opportunities of either form, the unexpected trigger or the well-planned strategies.
Some people are more keen to wait. They might be very good when presented with an opportunity, invited to something, or meet someone unexpectedly and let it unfold. I have numerous friends who are very spontaneous, and they go with the flow. They're really good at that. They're fun to be with, but they don't put a lot of preparation and time into laying the groundwork. So the triggers are great, but how often are you going to see them?
You may miss them. Or you take a left and the trigger would have been on the right as you're walking. You might have ended your walk early and not seen the eagle. That's a kind of trigger. As opposed to saying, well, I'm going to go and spend the morning in that beautiful place and I'm going to see what I see, whatever it is, and I'm going to see how many things I can notice. That would have been a more strategized form of savoring that's proactive.
So there's a quote that's commonly attributed to the 19th century American novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne. Happiness is a butterfly which, when pursued, is always beyond our grasp, but which, if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you. What I'm hearing you say is that we need not passively wait for the butterfly of happiness to land on us. There are things we can actively do to cultivate that happiness. Exactly.
I would say Hawthorne didn't know what he was talking about. He got a little bit too much melancholy maybe, but maybe that's a product of his times. You don't have to sit passively and wait for it to alight on you. You can go to where they are. You can smear honey on yourself, what might attract them. You can sit amongst the flowers where they come. You can read about them in the time of day when you most easily could encounter them.
But the idea is that if you know what you're doing, this is a skill. It's like saying you'll never be able to play the violin. If you're lucky, you might draw the bow across the string and you might make a sound.
That's the best you could hope for. Come on, you could get lessons. You could practice it. Some people are so experienced, so talented at exavering that they go straight to the experience in the best possible way. Like a seasoned traveler goes to the best seat on a scenic train ride. They know exactly where to go, how to make it happen.
You talked about how you missed out on savoring a potentially very enjoyable experience during your West Virginia expedition. A few years after that incident, you did manage to fully savor a personal achievement that was meaningful to you. You climbed to the top of Snowmass Mountain in the Elk Range of the Colorado Rockies.
a peak that rises more than 14,000 feet. You wrote about the experience in your diary shortly after returning to base camp. I'm wondering if you might read part of that diary entry to us. Oh, yes. I wrote, I have a strong sense of the fleetingness of the moment, and I make special efforts to capture it. I want to remember this moment for the rest of my life, so I build the memory of it actively and deliberately.
I slowly turn in a circle and let my eyes seek out what they find attractive. I notice tiny details in the overwhelming expanse beneath me. A wrinkled quilt, emerald and olive patches, is a forest of aspen and spruce. A thin silver ribbon zigzagging through the shadows is a river. A handful of silver coins strewn randomly on the floor.
is a group of lakes near our camp. All these things and more I notice as I make a mental movie of what surrounds me. So I'm wondering, Fred, if you can unpack what you were doing here. You call this active memory building. Can you tell us what you did? I wanted to be able to remember what was so wonderful about the moment. So I began looking for it, hunting for it.
I thought, what would I want to remember? If I just close my eyes and open them, what is it out there that is so beautiful, so powerful, that really is the essence of this moment? The open expanse was overwhelming. It was a mountain I had longed to climb for years and once before been turned back on. I was with my favorite climbing companions. We knew we only had a few minutes up there.
The summit rock, I'll never forget, it's an obelisk. Unlike any other summit I've been on, I've been on hundreds of high peaks. This summit rock was astonishing, realizing it had been struck by lightning thousands of times probably over the millions of years. And we were here for a moment. The wind, the openness, if I closed my eyes, I could feel the expanse all around us. We were in an open place above the clouds.
I remember thinking, I want to remember that. The rocks had an odor about them. So I began building a memory of the odor, of what it felt like. Each of us went off to separate parts of the top of the mountain. It's very small at the top, but enough for us to spread out. One of my friends was praying. He was thinking of his loved ones. Another was hooping and hollering. In a few minutes, we'd leave, and there'd be no trace that we were ever there. And I just...
I said, I wish I could hold on to this moment. The best way to do it is to try to build this memory. You also talk about this idea called heightened temporal awareness, which is to remind yourself that what you're experiencing is transient and fleeting. Tell me about that strategy. That's something you discovered long ago in asking people what strategies, if any, they used in happy moments to try to make the most of them.
And this is the idea that you become aware of the fleetingness of the moment. In interviewing adults, young adults about this, some people reported that it gave them the momentum, the energy, the motivation to seize the moment. No moment comes twice. Each moment savored more precious than a span of jade. And so the awareness of this moment
Time-boundedness, the fact that it's here and gone, makes it all the more beautiful and special, like a flower in the desert. Maybe it blooms only briefly after a rainfall. It's a strategy that can heighten the appreciation of the moment to realize that it's here shortly. This is your chance to grab it.
So a related idea is that even when we're not experiencing something spectacular, we're not standing at the top of a mountaintop or watching a bald eagle or seeing a beautiful sunset, there are things about our daily lives as well that we can appreciate, especially if we draw a contrast that you call a downward hedonic comparison. And I understand that you sometimes do this as you're contemplating whether you want to exercise. Explain to me what the savoring strategy is, Fred.
The strategy is to imagine a way in which it hadn't unfolded the way it did. Counterfactual thinking is what it's sometimes called. So to imagine before I'll exercise, for example, it might be a hot day and you can think, well, I don't think I'll exercise. I can always do it again. I said, well, maybe I can't always do it again. In fact, remember a time when I couldn't run, when I had the back injury.
And I'd have given anything to be able to run. I mean, literally, I would have given a fortune away. Here it is, and I'm saying I'm not going to do it? Come on, this is my chance. That's looking back at the past to create a kind of contrast, hedonic or feeling contrast,
I also have a trick I've learned to use of going into the future to a time when I will no longer be able to run, when my body is too old to do that.
Where I'm in a nursing home, perhaps, I'm in a wheelchair, and I would give anything to go back to being where I am right now. So I imagine, I close my eyes and say, that's what's happening. I'm in the nursing home, and I'm allowed to go back once.
I'm going to open my eyes and I'm going to be young. And I'm going to be able to run. And I open my eyes, I'm here. Oh, this is incredible. And sure, that's hypothetical. And some people would say it's morbid to think that way. But for me, it's a trick. But it helps to remind me that the here and now has so much to offer. It's so easy to lose track of it. And it really keeps me in my place not to take things for granted.
You know, it's interesting. I feel like so often in our lives, we do the exact opposite. Many of us, I think, make upward hedonic comparisons, you know, to better times we've had in the past or to other people who seem better off than we are. And we sort of then, obviously, in contrast, our present circumstances look impoverished or unhappy. And in some ways, it's a conscious choice that we can make. Are we choosing to compare ourselves to better times so we feel worse in the present or
Or are we choosing to compare ourselves to worse times, even hypothetically worse times, in order to feel better in the present? Exactly. We have a choice. The issue, though, is often automatic. We play these scripts in our minds in certain situations. And when there's achievement to be had and there's a comparison to be made,
We're often taught to compare ourselves to someone better than we so that we can improve, enhance our abilities and get better. You get better at the game of golf by playing with golfers who are better than you are and comparing how they do with what you're doing, learning from them. I think that has its place, the upward comparison, as you noted. But this downward comparison, it really helps to magnify the positivity of the moment we're in.
Saving isn't an outcome. Saving is a process. And so you have to lose yourself in the process. You can't be so focused on how well you're doing or whether someone's doing better or you might have done better. You lose sight of what actually is and you've missed the chance.
One of the really interesting ideas you and others have suggested is that by giving up some things from time to time, we can sharpen our appetite and appreciation for them. So, you know, Christians do this during Lent or Muslims fast during the month of Ramadan. And they're both sort of ways of making ourselves more keenly aware of the things that we have in our lives and not taking them for granted. Can you talk
about this idea that in some ways voluntarily giving up things from time to time can sharpen our ability to savor them. Yes. Abstaining from something pleasant before consuming it has been shown in research studies to increase our enjoyment of the experience when we do consume it. So the abstinence idea has got something to it. It's something that was discovered long ago. There's research showing that people eating chocolate
Third of them are told just to go about their business, eat the chocolate in the lab.
wait a week or two and come back, and then they're given a chance to eat chocolate again. Second group is told, eat the chocolate in the lab. A week goes by and we're giving you an unlimited supply of chocolate to eat as much as you'd like for a week or two. Come back and then they eat chocolate in the lab. The third group is given the chance to eat the chocolate and then they're told no chocolate for a week or two. You must abstain from it. Come back to the lab, eat the chocolate with the other two groups again.
They find that the group that passed on the chocolate, had none of it during the one to two week span, ends up enjoying that final session eating chocolate much more than the other groups. In a way, you're lowering your baseline. You've cleansed the palate and created this stark contrast. The taste of the chocolate, having had none for a week or two, is so much stronger and savorable.
than if you've been doing it constantly, eating your fill for a long time. The idea can be used in any setting. I often engage in a short-term abstinence kind of thing during a party or an event where I really want to enjoy it. We're all together. It's so much fun. I look forward to it. Periodically, I will say, I'll be right back, and I leave. I'll walk out of the house. I'll go to a quiet place, and I'll just sit.
And it's like cleansing the palate. I'm going to go back in there. I'm going to start over, come back in and re-experience the power of it. So we can do that in miniature ways. In any positive moment that's got some time to it, vacations are very conducive to this strategy of time spent alone in a quiet place before going back to the hustle and the bustle and the excitement and the energy of the gathering.
So you've also talked about the idea that it's important to sometimes keep some things a mystery, that trying to understand them very completely can actually rob us of the capacity to savor. And again, here it seems like this is intention. So if savoring involves intensifying our experience of something, why is keeping some things a mystery helpful in enhancing our savoring?
Well, it turns out that once we explain something and how it's happening or going on, what's going to happen next, why something happened, those things put a sense of closure to it. And we kind of stop processing in an open way. It's been found that if people are shown the ending of a mystery before they read the mystery, there goes the allure of it. A mystery novel only has its power if you don't know the ending.
So having that uncertainty keeps us focused and guessing. It also allows for the joy of surprise. But for most of us, we love a mystery that's a mystery to the very end. We don't want to read the ending of it and then go back and start over and read the book. We know what's going to happen.
Savoring can be intensely personal. It can heighten your senses and within the confines of your own mind, turn up the volume on things that bring you joy. But one of the most potent forms of savoring is not about what happens in our own minds. It's about what happens when we share joys with others and celebrate together. That's when we come back. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.
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Just visit simplisafe.com slash brain. That's simplisafe.com slash brain. There's no safe like SimpliSafe. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Psychologist Fred Bryant works at Loyola University, Chicago. Along with Joseph Viroff, he is the co-author of the book Savoring, A New Model of Positive Experience.
On the day you reached the peak of Snowmass Mountain, Fred, you were with a group of close friends with whom you'd been climbing for years. And when you reached the peak, you also took a moment to celebrate together. You were whooping and hollering and shouting. Talk a moment about how expressing our savoring to others can in fact heighten our own savoring. It's a really important observation. It's why it's more fun to enjoy something with others than it is to do it alone.
I remember a photograph or a cartoon of a climber sitting on the edge of a peak looking off at this incredible horizon with the sunset. And he's thinking to himself, this would really be beautiful if there was someone here to share it with.
And the idea is that in sharing it with others, we magnify the joy. They tell us things that they're feeling. They put into words their feelings, and we note that those are in many ways our own, or even if they're not our own, we can appreciate those feelings in our own way. Other people or we might point out what it is about the moment that we cherish, that we savor. And in doing that, we name it, we speak it,
and give it life in describing it. And we have to understand our feelings. We have to be able to identify, label them, and share them. So it helps us to actually understand better, identify what it is that is worth remembering in the moment. My friends would often point out things that I would never have thought of. They might have said, come over here and touch this rock right here on the edge of the summit.
I said, I'm touching it. It's a pretty big boulder. He said, that's the one we were looking at last night. What? Yeah, from our camp. You see it down there? Oh, yeah, you're right. There it is. And I see it's just a flash of yellow and it's 3,000 feet below us. I never would have noticed that. And I would never have been able to remember it as a memory worth savoring if my buddy, who's since passed away, didn't share it with me.
Of course, many people only do that about complaints, where they'll give free reign. You know, tell me what you hate about this. Oh, yeah, this is horrible. Oh, this too, this too. You could say that savoring is kind of the opposite of complaining. It's flipping and inverting the negativity of complaining into the positive things. And that becomes habitual either way.
I mean, it's also the case sometimes, you know, let's say you're sitting and watching a sunset with a few other people. You know, maybe everyone's watching the sunset, so it's not as if each person is seeing something new and can draw your attention to something different than what you're seeing. But I would think that even in that circumstance, you know, talking aloud about what you're seeing allows the experience to go from becoming a solitary experience to a shared experience. It does. Some of the most powerful moments
and the mountains were shared, entirely shared, after a nine-day backpacking trip deep in the Sierra, coming down off Mount Whitney, the last night spent sleeping out under the stars at 12,000 feet, watching these shooting stars
over and over coming in realizing this moment we're on the edge of this this great escarpment the high sierra the edge of it drops 10 000 feet back down to the valley below us in the morning we're to get up and and hike back down carrying all our stuff but for now we are here we were there in this stony expanse well above the timber lying there under the stars
watching and waiting and wishing, talking about the sky and how ageless and timeless it is. And then my friend said, well, we've got to go to bed soon. But you know what? Let's just wait for one more shooting star. This will be the last one we'll have of this trip, and we can all hope and pray that it'll be a wonderful event. Let's sit here and wait for it. We waited maybe 10 seconds, and the most vivid moment
shooting star I've ever seen in my life just streaked across the sky. It was, the width of it was huge. Usually they're just a track. This thing was like a paintbrush going across the sky from east to west and it just rushed. It took our breath away. We started laughing uncontrollably at this beautiful moment.
the power of it. And we didn't want to leave, but we realized this was the capstone. This was the accent point, the exclamation mark on the whole trip in a way. I'll never forget that. We still talk about that. And we remind ourselves of that again and again and again. The magic of that night and of that moment lives forever.
You know, in a similar vein, I think you've noted that each of us can provide models of savoring for other people. I want to play you a clip from the 1989 movie Dead Poets Society. In the film, Robin Williams plays an English teacher at a boys' boarding school. We don't read and write poetry because it's cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion, beauty,
romance, love. These are what we stay alive for. Can you talk a moment, Fred, about how when we are able to savor things and we're able to model savoring for other people, it becomes easier for other people to notice the wonderful things around them too? Yes. It almost gives them permission to do so. It gives people the space and time to allow those feelings out.
to more fully experiencing them. The trust too and the intimacy in sharing the joys we find. You get back so much more than you could ever give when you share the savoring. You told me that your mother was instrumental in your life in helping you learn how to savor and modeling for you how savoring works.
I understand that you've tried to teach your own daughters the same thing, to stop and notice the wonderful things that happen to them at the end of the day. There have been entire summers where you end each summer's day by saying, let's catalog all the wonderful things that happen. Walk me through what you've done to be a model for savoring for your own children. Yes, I started that when they were very young.
And I began to look for opportunities, and the best opportunity was part of the bedtime routine. And you could talk with them about the adventures they'd had in the day and the adventures that they could have tomorrow, the things they could do and explore, particularly in the summers.
So we would say, what can we do tomorrow? Let's plan a big adventure. That's what we would call this savoring expedition. And my older one would just, she'd light up and she'd, this is going to be fun. What are we going to do tomorrow? What can we do? So we would begin brainstorming. So we might plan a trip typically, say, to the beach or there's a rose garden nearby. So we'd say, tomorrow we're going to do a big adventure to the rose garden.
Really? What could we see there? Well, there's going to be rosebuds. Yeah, there'll be rosebuds. Maybe there'll be petals. Where would we find rose petals? Maybe on the ground. Yes, if they've opened up. They were once petals. Do you think we'll find some? Maybe what we could do is collect some. So we would perhaps take a little baggie and we'd collect little treasures, things that we would find that were interesting. They became mementos of this magical adventure. So
So we would look forward to it. We would plan it out, a reminder that we're going to go tomorrow. Just sharing the story brings back the sense of wonder in seeing the world through their eyes.
That's one of the great delights of parenthood, particularly that first child where it's all so new and you're beginning to see the world as you once did. We seem to lose that sense of wonder too easily. But then seeing it through her eyes, you know, you re-experience it. And then going to the garden and seeing there are petals and we're going to save them. And then look for the unexpected, the joys of surprise. Find a snail.
Wow, that's cool. It's pretty small. I wonder what its life is like. Does it have a life like we do? Does it have snail friends and a snail family? Where could it live? Could we go looking for another snail? I mean, it's just...
You begin to see the world as they do in trying to show them these savourable things. We would then eventually have to leave. All good things must come to an end, but we get to come back. So trying to turn the ending of something into a golden opportunity to repeat it. We'd come home and then we'd share what we found.
with my wife and then at night going to bed. Remember last night we were here? It's come full circle. Now it's a memory and we remember some of the wonderful parts of what are the feelings that we had and it really bonded us very intimately in showing her that this is a very important part of life.
It prioritizes it, not just relegated to a trigger that might happen every once in a while, but something that you can manage. Every bit as important as managing the negative side of life.
So Fred, we've talked a lot about savoring the sweet moments of life, but there are also some sweet moments that are intertwined with sadness. They're what we call bittersweet moments. I understand that you had a very powerful moment of savoring with your mother toward the end of her life. Can you tell me that story? Yes, I can. That's a very dear and precious memory. She contracted ovarian cancer and the chemo was hard.
It worked for a while, then it compromised the blood vessels in her brain. She had a small mini-stroke and lost some functioning and memory, and she fought valiantly. As it got harder, I realized that there was only a limited amount of time that we would be able to spend time together. I lived far away and would have to drive back, and so I came in the summer. We had wonderful time together, but there was something missing.
that she had been unable to experience, and that was time and nature. She was very much an outdoor person. So I got this, just a whim, this wild hair. As a friend from West Virginia says, I got a wild hair, this idea that we should just, I'm going to get her in the car, we're going to go drive down into this state forest. This was a place we had been before and cherished. So I floated the idea to her, and her eyes lit up.
I knew they would. She had never been able to get out and do these kinds of things, being bound to the treatments. And she was weak. So I said, I'm driving. You sit here. I'm going to pamper your queen for the day. And she sat in the seat next to me. And we took this drive. And it was glorious. This was the heart of the summer.
Gorgeous weather. The trees were just verdant and everything was so fertile and beautiful, so rich. And it's a very remote area. And I put the windows down on the car, turned off the engine, and we just sat and drank in the silence. It was a mountaintop moment in a valley. And it was a dark time and a dark period, but we were together in it. And I reached over and held her hand.
And we began to look around in the blue sky. There was a cloud come across and iridescent in the sunlight. Little twinges of rainbow from the light trickling through the cloud. And there was a wind that came across this flower-studded meadow. And you could see the wind coming toward us, a wave of wind. And I came through the car and I turned and looked at her and she looked at me. She saw the same wave of wind coming toward us.
She laughed and we looked around. There was a brook, a stream next to us, and it was gurgling. It was like a dream. Such a fairytale place and an unlikely moment carved out of this really hard adversity. So we held hands and I would look over and she would just wink at me. She had a tear in her eye. I had it coming down my cheek. I do now in remembering this. But those things, those tears and the pain,
It was the price of the joy of that moment. And I would have paid it a hundred times over because we both knew in the backs of our minds that this might well be the last time we would be there. And it turned out that it was.
But we just closed our eyes for a moment and let it come flowing into us. And I remembered I never want to forget this moment as long as I live. Because only shortly after that, you know, she left this world. But neither one of us would have given that up. The sadness was the price of admission. ♪
Fred Bryant is a psychologist at Loyola University, Chicago. He is the co-author, with Joseph Viroff, of the book Savoring, A New Model of Positive Experience. Fred, thank you so much for joining me today on Hidden Brain. Thank you. Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media. Our audio production team includes Bridget McCarthy, Annie Murphy-Paul, Kristen Wong, Laura Querell, Ryan Katz, Autumn Barnes, and Andrew Chadwick.
Tara Boyle is our executive producer. I'm Hidden Brain's executive editor. Our unsung heroes this week are Bob Boylan and Suraya Mohamed. Bob and Suraya both work at NPR, and they graciously hosted the Hidden Brain team for a tiny desk concert earlier this summer. It was wonderful to spend time together savoring live music, and we're so grateful to Bob and Suraya for making it happen.
We hope you've enjoyed this year's You 2.0 series. If you have, please take a moment to share these episodes with one or two people in your life. Word of mouth recommendations are the most important way that new listeners discover our work. I'm Shankar Vedantham. See you soon.
