Pleasure with Purpose: What Science Says About Savoring, Rituals, and Happiness

Mindfulness really is the answer to so many questions

“Burn the candles, use the nice sheets, wear the fancy lingerie. Don't save it for a special occasion. Today is special.”

—Regina Brett, in her “50 Life Lessons” written during her 2006 battle with cancer

There are two words for happiness in Greek: hedonia and eudaimonia. Hedonia refers to temporary experiences of pleasure, whereas eudaimonia refers to the broader experience of meaning, purpose, and fulfillment.

In childhood, hedonistic pursuits come quite naturally. Pursing pleasure and avoiding pain is a basic psychological motive dating to the writing of Sigmund Freud. Kids love sweet snacks and snuggles. They don’t want to clean their rooms. They struggle with the “marshmallow test,” a classic test of our ability to delay immediate gratification in the service of greater future reward. But in adulthood, many of us learn to put off short-term experiences of pleasure in the pursuit of longer-term goals – a fulfilling career, say, or raising small children.

Sometimes we do have to sacrifice pleasure in the moment in order to have meaning in the long run. But I think pleasure gets a bad rap in our society. Hedonism connotes gluttony, addiction, or recklessness. Leisure connotes laziness. My outdoorsy friends (and I) brag about suffering through “Type 2 fun,” the kind that makes for good stories afterward. And research on the “hedonic treadmill” suggests that, no matter what positive or negative experiences come our way, we inevitably return to some baseline level of happiness, suggesting pleasure may be fleeting and therefore unimportant.

What if we’ve been thinking about pleasure all wrong?

What if we could increase our day-to-day, moment-to-moment enjoyment of life by increasing our experiences of pleasure? By elevating momentary experiences with presence and intention? And what if the way we amplify pleasure in our lives can also give way to greater meaning in life¹?

It turns out that intentional activities focused on deriving pleasure from ordinary events can have a profound effect on our happiness. I’m going to talk about two of these today: savoring and rituals.

Savoring

One route to increased pleasure in daily life is savoring — noticing, appreciating, and generally soaking up the good things in life.

We often fixate on the negative while glossing over the positive², which probably helped us survive as early humans (who can take the time to smell the flowers when we’re being chased by a bear?). However, in our modern lives, characterized by few life-or-death crises and many long-simmering stressors, this negativity bias often works to our detriment, undermining our joyful experiences while leaving us in a constant stew of anxiety and regret.

Research has found that we can counteract our built-in negativity bias by mindfully savoring positive experiences, which increases their positive emotional impact³.

Savoring can include amplifying each moment, like focusing our attention on physical sensations, outwardly expressing joy, or feeling gratitude, as well as behaviors that recognize the role these experiences will play in the story of our life, like noting the fleeting nature of the moment, creating reminders of the experience so we can remember it, and sharing our experience with others. Savoring can be focused on the past, present, or future: reminiscing about fond experiences, mindfully enjoying the moment, or anticipating positive events.

Some people seem to notice and appreciate positive things in life more than the average person⁴. Savoring seems to come easily to these people. For example, some research I did in grad school (💁🏻‍♀️) showed that the brains of happy people—specifically, a key region that notices goal-relevant information—are tuned to be just as attentive to positive and negative information, rather than showing the typical negativity bias⁵. They naturally just notice the positive more than others.

Other people can learn to savor with effort, and this comes with an emotional payoff. For example, in one study, people who practiced savoring significantly increased their life satisfaction and reduced depressive symptoms⁶. In another study, savoring increased older adults’ happiness and sense of meaning in life⁷.

Basically, any mindfulness practice, even something as mundane as paying attention while washing dishes⁸, can become an opportunity to savor.

One of my favorite musical artists, Above & Beyond, has a line that goes, “Life is made of small moments like these.” Simple yet profound.

I mostly savor in moments of calm, and I’m grateful that my brain has this tendency to notice and appreciate small sources of beauty in daily life. I wish I could reach for savoring via mindfulness as a coping strategy when I feel overwhelmed with strong negative emotions — anger, frustration, impatience, jealousy, resentment. I’m still learning to apply these strategies in hard moments. I’m proud that I have learned to take a break when I’d rather keep talking things out. This always helps me calm down and put things in perspective, and I now apologize, admit fault, and attempt to repair things more quickly than I used to. It helps that, as a parent, I get a lot of practice. 😉

Some experiences feel sweetest, and most deserving of savoring, simply because we know they’re rare. When we feel like something is scarce, we can treasure it more, like gold. For example, imagining one’s time as scarce increases savoring⁹, which leads to greater well-being¹⁰. Similarly, perceptions of abundance, specifically in rich life experiences such as travel, can undermine savoring and make it harder to appreciate simple pleasures¹¹; the authors call this the “price of abundance.” The most important takeaway from this research is that the objective or literal abundance or scarcity of one’s life experiences seems to matter less than people’s perceptions of those experiences: whether they feel abundant or scarce. Consistent with this, research has found that savoring is enhanced by a feeling of uncertainty—i.e., perceiving the world as random and unpredictable¹². When we think we already know everything, when we feel we’ve done and seen it all before, we undermine our capacity to savor the small things. But if we can move through life with curiosity, and examine our experiences with fresh eyes, we can find moments of awe and beauty all around us.

Savoring is a practice of presence, but also of values. It reminds us to not just rush through life collecting accomplishments, but to feel life as it’s happening. Savoring doesn’t erase the hard stuff, but it creates space for more joy to coexist alongside it.

Rituals

While savoring is about how we amplify our good feelings in life, rituals are about how we structure those experiences to make them more meaningful. Both ask us to slow down and bring intention to the present moment—but rituals add rhythm, repetition, and symbolism.

Rituals are repeated, formalized, symbolic behaviors in which ordinary actions become imbued with meaning each time they’re performed. We can participate in rituals that belong to cultural or religious traditions, create personal rituals (e.g., around sports participation), and even turn everyday actions into rituals.

Rituals give predictability and order to our days, grounding us. They can symbolize transitions between selves or roles we play in life (e.g., work self vs. home self) or orient us to the value of what is occurring in the present moment.

“Rhythm is when we do it, but the ritual is what we do and how we do it. And those two things combined are the magic of having children move through the day feeling they can count on things. They can count on what is coming next.”

—Kim John Payne, author of Simplicity Parenting

During my childhood, my parents had a pre-meal ceremony in which everyone would hold hands in a circle and hum the same note together. It provided a point of focus to quiet everyone’s minds and symbolized the start of the meal and our time of togetherness. Now that I’m an adult with a tone-deaf partner (love you honey), I’ve subbed out the singing; we light a candle together with the kids instead. This practice—borrowed from the book Simplicity Parenting—provides a similar point of focus and symbolic start to our time together.

During dinnertime, we also love doing an activity we call “highs and lows,” in which every person recaps the best and worst parts of their day. My two-year-old’s highs and lows somehow always involve riding a purple bus. 🤔

It’s interesting that many rituals involve food, no?

Nicholas Hobson and his colleagues¹³ suggest that even simple rituals can transform experiences from mundane into meaningful, regulate emotions, and strengthen social ties—not because of what they accomplish functionally, but because of how they structure experience and carry symbolic meaning. Making coffee, getting dressed for the day, or folding laundry are all ordinary experiences we can elevate with presence and intention.

“Turn your shower into a spa, your breakfast into a tasting experience, and your bedtime into a retreat. The ordinary becomes extraordinary with intention.”

—Vex King, motivational speaker and author

The quote above highlights the simple idea that the ways in which we frame events in our lives can affect the way we experience them. It also shows the power of mindfulness in turning routines into rituals.

To turn an ordinary routine into a ritual, research by Joanna Wojtkowiak¹⁴ finds we need to do three things:

1. Create aesthetic distance: Step back from raw experience to notice, observe, and interpret the behavior with awareness of what it symbolizes. For example, commuting to work could be framed as the symbolic transition between your personal and professional selves.

2. Conduct a structured performance: Repeat the behavior with deliberate steps. Each time you do the behavior, do each step in a particular way, in a particular order. When behavior is intentionally organized rather than spontaneous, this provides predictability, frees up our attention to focus on what’s significant about the experience, and creates a sense of control. Repetition also makes the actions symbolically rich: the more we repeat something with intention, the more weight it carries.

3. Collaborate with others: Rituals are richest when shared. If possible, doing the behavior with others will help us emotionally sync up, affirm our group identity, and create a sense of shared meaning and belonging.

I think the key element here is the aesthetic distance, the mindful noticing. So many of my routines with my kids could turn into a ritual if we took a moment to pause and appreciate the symbolic significance of the moment before jumping into the predictable sequence.

At their core, rituals aren’t even about what we do—they’re about how we do it and who we do it with. They give us a chance to return to ourselves and to one another. Especially in a fast-moving, fragmented world, rituals offer moments of coherence, connection, and calm. They ground us in our values, our rhythms, and our relationships. They help remind us of what matters.

Turning intention into action

Implementing savoring and rituals in life doesn’t require big changes, just a shift in awareness and intention.

So, go make the bed up with clean sheets and stretch out on it. Compliment the barista when you place your next coffee order. Go for a walk. Enjoy a single bite of food. Plan a surprise for your child. Laugh and reminisce with a friend with no phones in sight.

Tuning into the inherent pleasure in small things in life, and ritualizing the ways we savor these pleasures, will create opportunities for greater joy and meaning in our lives. These tiny acts of intention can transform the ordinary into something sacred. Not because life is always beautiful, but because we choose to see the beauty that’s always there.

Bonus

Just for funsies, here’s a guided mindfulness practice I recorded last year. Feel free to try it out if you want. 😌

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2. Hanson, R. (2013). Hardwiring happiness: The new brain science of contentment, calm, and confidence. Harmony Books.

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7. Smith, J. L., & Hanni, A. A. (2019). Effects of a savoring intervention on resilience and well-being of older adults. Journal of Applied Gerontology, 38(1), 137–152. https://doi.org/10.1080/07448481.2018.1499653

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9. Kurtz, J. L. (2008). Looking to the future to appreciate the present: The benefits of perceived temporal scarcity. Psychological Science, 19(12), 1238–1241. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2008.02231.x

10. Layous, K., Kurtz, J. L., Chancellor, J., & Lyubomirsky, S. (2017). Reframing the ordinary: Imagining time as scarce increases appreciation for everyday events. The Journal of Positive Psychology, 12(3), 214–221. https://doi.org/10.1080/17439760.2017.1279210

11. Quoidbach, J., Dunn, E. W., Hansenne, M., & Bustin, G. M. (2015). The price of abundance: How a wealth of experiences impoverishes savoring. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 41(4), 393–404. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167214566189

12. Gregory, A. L., Quoidbach, J., Haase, C. M., & Piff, P. K. (2023). Be here now: Perceptions of uncertainty enhance savoring. Emotion, 23(1), 30–40. https://doi.org/10.1037/emo0000961

13. Hobson, N. M., Schroeder, J., Risen, J. L., Xygalatas, D., & Inzlicht, M. (2017). The psychology of rituals: An integrative review and process-based framework. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 22(3), 260–284. https://doi.org/10.1177/1088868317734944

14. Wojtkowiak, J. (2023). Meaningful rituals: Re-imagining everyday practices as sources of well-being. Amsterdam University Press.