PERMA-V: Positive Emotions and Savoring the Best Parts of Life

Igor, Charles, and I have been working through the PERMA-V model of well-being, and this piece covers the first letter: P, for Positive Emotions. I've written before about gratitude, a simple but powerful practice that generates positive emotions. Savoring is the other half of that equation. Gratitude creates positive emotion; Savoring amplifies and extends the positive emotion that already exists in your life.

The Positive Psychology definition of Savoring is the use of thoughts and actions, to increase the intensity, duration, and appreciation of positive experiences and emotions. We do things intentionally to amplify and enhance our emotions.

Read that definition again. Nothing in it requires your life to get better first. No promotion, no vacation, no windfall. The raw material is already sitting there: the first coffee of the morning, a project that finally shipped, dinner with people you actually like. What's missing is the extraction. Most of us let good moments evaporate on contact. The experience happens, the emotion barely registers, and we're back in the inbox before any of it lands.

Savoring is the deliberate decision to extend those moments instead. Hold them a little longer. Turn them over. Wring out more of what's already in them. That sounds soft until you notice how much energy we spend chasing new positive experiences while wasting most of the ones we already have. Savoring isn't manufacturing happiness. It's refusing to leak it.

There are six components of Savoring that can help you enhance your Positive Emotions.

Duration – Making sure you have enough time to Savor the experience
Reducing Stress – Mitigating general stressors while you are experiencing the positive emotion
Complexity – Engaging all of your senses
Attentional Focus – Being aware of what’s happening around you
Balanced Self-Monitoring – Recognizing components that will take away from the ability to Savor
Social Connection – Increasing Savoring by sharing the experience with others

Notice how much of this list is subtractive. Duration means you don't wedge the celebration into the fifteen minutes before your next meeting. Reducing Stress means the phone stays in the other room. Attentional Focus and Complexity mean noticing what the moment actually looks, sounds, and tastes like instead of narrating it for later. Balanced Self-Monitoring is the tricky one: check in on the experience enough to appreciate it, but not so often that you turn the moment into a performance review. And Social Connection is the multiplier. A good moment shared gets savored twice — once in the experience and again in the retelling.

Try it this week. Pick one good moment you know is coming — a meal, a walk, a win at work — and run it through the list. Give it room on the calendar. Clear the interference. Pay attention with all of your senses. Tell someone about it afterward. None of this requires anything new to happen to you. It requires treating the good things that already happen as worth your full attention.

The best parts of your life are already happening. Savor them on purpose.

If you want to go deeper on Positive Psychology and the art of Savoring, these resources are a good place to start: