1: Imagine two groups of bike riders that are getting ready to ride through the countryside.
“The first group,” Rachel Barr writes in How to Make Your Brain Your Best Friend, “are instructed to take notice of the delightful things they experience along the way, to savor each sensation, like a brush of warm sun, or the pastoral charm of cows eyeing them with mild suspicion.”
The second group is told to finish the race as quickly as possible.
No dawdling. No distractions.
“Which group do you expect will enjoy the experience more?” Rachel asks.
The great psychologist William James once said, “My experience is what I agree to attend to. Only those items which I notice shape my mind.”
Today, however, there is a war for our attention.
“Being truly present has become a rare gift,” Rachel writes. “We exist in an era that demands our undivided attention, where the incessant pings of notifications keep us perpetually tethered to the next task.”
The result?
“Our minds are constantly elsewhere,” Rachel observes. “This continuous pull away from the here and now means that we often sleepwalk through life, ignoring its infinite potential to delight us.”
We often trade delight for distraction.
“We make these kinds of trade-offs all the time,” she notes, “where the highest bidder for attention brings the least value.”
Picture two people sitting side-by-side on a sunlit bench in the park. “Where one might be lost in dapples of sunlight,” she writes, “the other could be mentally replying to a passive-aggressive Slack message that has long since passed the comeback window.”
We know we should be more present. Doing so is another thing altogether.
“Consider the paradox of thinking of a red balloon precisely because we’ve been told NOT to think about a red balloon,” Rachel observes, “or as is often the case in the real world, the string of emails we vowed to ignore on our days off.”
2: Just wanting to be more present isn’t enough. We “need a tangible method,” she writes, that “we can use to anchor us in the here and now.”
The answer? Savoring.
Which offers up a “practical way to occupy our mind with constructive, delight-friendly thoughts,” Rachel writes.
“In psychology, savoring means making a deliberate effort to notice and appreciate the details and pleasures of our current experience,” Rachel observes. “It means we pause, look around, and say, ‘This is nice’. . .
“Instead of engaging in a futile tug-of-war with our wandering minds, savoring can gently guide your focus toward the richness of our experience.”
We begin by staying alert and pausing to notice what’s going on around us.
“Is the heater behind your chair shedding its lovely warmth onto you?” Rachel asks.
“Is there a puppy nearby, taking clumsy steps toward a smiling stranger?
“Is the room echoing with the chuckles of two old lovers, exchanging a gaze more fit for mischievous teenagers than an elderly couple?
“To borrow from the 2003 Christmas classic, Love Actually, delight ‘really is all around,'” she notes.
3: Shifting our perspective doesn’t solve the problems we face, but doing so “does introduce a touch of buoyancy to help us stay afloat,” she notes.
Savoring the moment is not “a toxic-positive strategy of invalidating our emotions, or an attempt to push unrealistic, constant optimism,” Rachel writes.
“We can still acknowledge our full range of emotions,” she observes, “while also cultivating moments where we get a break from them.”
The research shows that when we learn to savor, we may be less susceptible to the clench of depression.
“Just two weeks of deliberate savoring was found to reduce depressive symptoms and sadness,” Rachel writes.
“While mindful delight-searching likely won’t rid us of all mental health ails, it can provide us with some sense of relief while we’re under their grasp.”
More next week!
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Reflection: Am I getting swept up in distraction and busyness, or do I take time to deliberately notice and savor the small delights around me each day?
Action: Spend five minutes today intentionally savoring a sound, sight, or feeling—pausing to appreciate its richness without letting distractions pull me away
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