Practice The Art Of Savoring Life To Improve Your Health

You must savor life, take things slowly, and fully embrace the present moment. Keep your eyes and your heart open to what’s around you. When you live in the present moment, your experiences help you stay positive when things get tough. Don’t forget that dedicating quality time to the things that matter most positively affects your physical and mental health.

At first glance, this seems obvious. You may already know that you would probably feel better if you could take it a little slower and enjoy the simpler things in your daily life. However, as writer and researcher Nassim Taleb points out, people’s common sense is failing .

We forget how to taste life. Many of us are trapped in these strange labyrinths of pressures, fears and anxieties. There are so many things to be achieved and so much uncertainty that fixing our gaze on the present and appreciating it is quite complicated.

Furthermore, there is the fact that the brain is always aware of possible threats and risks. He doesn’t care if you’re happy or not. Your main objective is to keep him alive. Therefore, you must make a conscious effort to learn to enjoy life.

Conscious control of attention also creates a kind of cognitive and emotional reserve that directly affects your health. This is an important thing to keep in mind.

The art of savoring life and autobiographical memory

We’ve all done it at some point in our lives. When you feel good, happy and fulfilled, you try to take a “mental picture”. You probably even said to yourself, “I will remember this moment forever.” This memory not only includes the things that were happening at the time, but also the things you were feeling and thinking.

Something as simple (and wonderful) as saving those memories is more than just assuring yourself that you’ll be able to remember the wonderful experience. This process is also a voluntary cognitive and emotional act that makes the present moment useful for the future. You hope to somehow feel the happiness of today in the future.

It is a mindfulness- based exercise . It takes place in a conscious mind full of positive emotions. The art of savoring life is precisely this: being able to create moments of well-being and integrate them into your memory. As a result, they become “happiness pills” for tomorrow.

The psychological exercise of savoring life and positive nostalgia

In 2018, Marios Biskas, from the University of Southampton, UK, conducted a study on nostalgia. He discovered a number of aspects that we should consider:

• “Savoring life” is more than just a phrase and a positive message for personal development. It’s actually a very healthy psychological exercise for the brain.
• According to this study, the art of “savoring life” is an exercise that involves paying close attention to your surroundings. It is a deliberate mental activity that allows you to capture the present experience and retain it. This activity, in turn, creates what scientists call “nostalgic memories”.

Dr. Biskas and his team showed that creating this kind of memory makes it possible to retrieve these fragments in the future and experience those positive emotions again. It’s a kind of enriching nostalgia. So it consists of having an open window that you can look through from time to time to breathe and engage in pleasant sensations.

Building this autobiographical memory based on moments of balance, inner peace and well-being positively affects your psychological balance.

The importance of having conscious control over your memory

To savor life, you must first create the moment. Many people think that happiness comes and goes and that moments of well-being are casual and not always up to us. This is a mistake.

You play a role in your own happiness. We all must promote these good times in our lives. This means knowing how to slow down, take time to rest, and spend quality time with the people we love, as well as quality time alone to connect with ourselves.

You don’t need big events or expensive travel for that. The best way to savor life is through simplicity. See life with an open and humble eye that allows you to appreciate the most basic things. When you experience these moments of well-being, try to activate conscious control of your memory and keep that moment in your mind.

The more willing you are and the more control you have to accumulate these moments of balance and happiness, the more your brain will cooperate. That way, it will be easier to keep those memories of well-being. It’s a worthwhile task that will help you build a cognitive and emotional reserve.