Happy Lutheran

“Hidden Brain” is one of my favorite podcasts–I highly recommend it. I just listened to a fabulous episode today on savoring good experiences: you can find it here (along with some suggestions for further reading): https://hiddenbrain.org/podcast/you-2-0-slow-down/

I wanted to pull out a couple points that I thought were especially helpful.

The title of this post comes from something that the host, Shankar Vedantam, said: he talked about how we teach children how to deal with disappointment and negative experiences, but we just assume that everyone knows how to deal with and process good experiences. He said, for example, we don’t teach children how to enjoy eating ice cream. This sounds a little silly–who needs to learn how to enjoy ice cream?

However, the reality is that not everyone does know how to eat ice cream: how to slow down and savor pleasurable experiences. As we all know, there are so many ways that we sabotage our own experiences of joy and pleasure. Here are three; I’m sure you can think of a few more.

Guilt. Sometimes we don’t feel like we deserve good experiences, whether that is the love and admiration of others, good fortune, awards, whatever. So, when we experience something good, we downplay it or explain it away, because we are embarrassed, or ashamed even, as if we are not worthy of good things.

Envy. This is when, instead of savoring the wonderful things that come to us, we minimize and disparage them, comparing them with the gifts of others and finding them unworthy and unsatisfying. And in its worst form, we end up hating what we have received, and hating ourselves for not getting something better.

Impatience. This is where we can’t slow down long enough to really enjoy anything: one look, one taste, and we are off to the next thing; and we let the good experience slip right out of our minds in favor of the next task on our to-do list. This was really the focus of the podcast, learning how to slow down and savor experiences of happiness and joy–big and small.

All of this resonated with The Book of Joy, which I have talked about before, and the “practices of joy” the book recommends as a way to anchor our lifestyle in gratitude, appreciation and joy [obviously]. Similarly, this podcast emphasized ways in which we can cultivate the practice of savoring pleasurable experiences, including using anticipation and memory, and really being present in the moment.

Maybe we do need to think a little bit more about how we eat ice cream.