Think of the last really good evening you had. Maybe it was dinner with someone you love, with the light going gold and a joke landing just right. Now try to remember what you actually felt while it was happening. For a lot of people the honest answer is: not much. They remember that it was nice. They remember deciding it was nice. The feeling itself went by, a train they watched from the platform.

This is one of the quieter losses of modern life. Most of us don't have too few good moments. We have plenty, and we are only partly there for them.

Having a good moment is not the same as receiving it

Psychologists have a word for the skill of receiving: savoring. The researcher most associated with it is Fred Bryant, a psychologist at Loyola University Chicago. With Joseph Veroff, he wrote Savoring: A New Model of Positive Experience (2007). Bryant defines savoring as the capacity to attend to, appreciate, and enhance positive experiences. The key word is capacity. Savoring is not something that simply happens to you when life is good. It's something you do with your attention, and so it can be done well, done badly, or skipped.

That reframes a common complaint. When someone says, "I have a good life and I don't feel it," the usual diagnosis is ingratitude or some personal flaw. Bryant's model suggests something more practical. Pleasure is a perishable resource, and it only becomes a lasting feeling if you stay with it long enough to take it in.

The three directions savoring can face

Bryant and Veroff describe savoring as pointing in three temporal directions:

  • Anticipation: enjoying something before it happens, such as the week-ahead glow of a planned trip.
  • Savoring the moment: absorbing the pleasure while it is happening.
  • Reminiscence: revisiting a good experience afterward, so it keeps paying out.

A good experience can be stretched across all three. Most of us only get the middle one, and often only a thin slice of it. Notice what a split attention does here. Distraction shrinks the present moment, and a thin present moment leaves less to remember later. The loss compounds.

Where the attention goes instead

In 2010, Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert published a well-known study in Science titled "A Wandering Mind Is an Unhappy Mind." They used a smartphone app to sample thousands of people's thoughts, feelings, and activities at random moments. Participants' minds were wandering in roughly 47 percent of the samples, and people reported being less happy when their minds were elsewhere than when they were focused on what they were doing. That held across activities, including pleasant ones.

Two cautions are worth stating. The study shows an association, and the authors argue for the direction of cause using time-lagged analyses, but it is not a controlled experiment. And it measured mind-wandering in general, not phones in particular. Still, it points at the same mechanism savoring research does: enjoyment depends on where your attention actually is, not just on what is happening around you.

A phone is a very efficient way of leaving. It doesn't only interrupt a good moment. It offers a thousand other moments, each a little novel, each a little easier than the one in front of you. Staying put is the harder choice.

Why good moments are especially easy to lose

There is a second reason savoring slips. Humans adapt to pleasure fast, a process researchers call hedonic adaptation. The first sip of coffee is wonderful, the fifth barely registers. Attention is partly how we fight it. Savoring techniques work, in large part, by keeping a pleasant experience feeling fresh and noticed for longer.

And there's a social trap. Many people believe, quietly, that dwelling on a good moment is somehow greedy or jinxing. Bryant's research on savoring beliefs finds that people differ in how much they think they can make positive feelings last, and those differences relate to well-being. If you assume good things can't be held, you won't try to hold them, and that assumption then confirms itself.

The techniques that actually come from the research

Bryant and Veroff catalogued a set of savoring strategies. The ones below are the most practical, and none requires a retreat or a meditation cushion.

Sensory-perceptual sharpening. Narrow your attention to specific details: the temperature of the air, the texture of the food, the sound of a particular voice. Specifics are what separate a lived moment from a summary of one.

Absorption. Let yourself be fully immersed rather than analyzing. This often means actively not evaluating ("is this as good as last time?") and not narrating it for an audience.

Sharing with others. Telling someone you're enjoying something, in the moment, tends to amplify it. Related work by Shelly Gable on "capitalization," sharing good news with an engaged listener, finds that it's linked to greater well-being and stronger relationships.

Memory building. Deliberately notice what you'd like to remember. Some people take a mental snapshot. Others say to themselves, "I want to keep this one."

Temporal awareness. Remind yourself that the moment is finite. Knowing a good thing will end can sharpen it rather than sour it.

There is also a reverse technique worth knowing: Bryant has found that certain thoughts dampen enjoyment, such as picking apart flaws, comparing the moment to a better imagined one, or worrying about what comes next. Savoring is partly about noticing when you're doing this.

Your next moves

Savoring is a skill, and skills respond to small, repeated practice. Here are five things to try today:

  • Pick one ordinary pleasure and give it ninety seconds. Your first coffee, a warm shower, the walk from the car. Put the phone out of reach and name three sensory details, out loud or silently.
  • Say the good thing out loud to someone. Tell a friend, partner, or colleague, "I'm really enjoying this." Say it in the moment, not in a message later.
  • Choose one phone-free meal this week. Decide in advance, put the phone in another room, and treat it as a savoring exercise rather than a punishment.
  • Do a two-minute reminiscence tonight. Before sleep, replay one good moment from today in as much detail as you can. This builds the third direction of savoring and trains you to notice good moments earlier the next day.
  • Catch one dampener. The next time you notice yourself critiquing or comparing during something pleasant, simply label it, "that's a dampener," and return to one sensory detail.

If you do only one, do the first. The point is not to feel more all day. It's to let a handful of good moments land fully, which tends to change what you notice the next time.

Where attention protection fits

Savoring needs one scarce thing, which is undivided attention for a few minutes at a time. That is exactly what a pocket full of notifications is built to take. We built Reclaim around the idea that guarding your focus isn't only about getting more work done. It's about being present for the parts of your day you'd least like to miss. If you'd like help making those few minutes more reliably yours, you can take a look at Reclaim. And if you never do, try the ninety seconds with the coffee. It's a small start.