Wednesday, March 21, 2012

Wednesday Wisdom: Savoring as a secret for making your $ last

This week's Wednesday Wisdom: Savoring as the secret to making your money last (from my favorite financial literacy source, LearnVest).

The Secret to Making Your Dollar Last


                                          Posted by LearnVest



Research psychologists have all the best tricks up their sleeves. Maybe it’s because they study humans like guinea pigs to figure out what really makes our complicated selves tick.
Feeling stressed? Reason yourself out of it (studies show this actually works). Rushed all the time? Slow down, and you’ll be a nicer person (a famous study we cite shows that this is true, no matter who you are).
Feeling broke? Or wish you could stretch your dollar more? We’d normally tell you to head straight to My Money Center and Budgeting Tool (you can’t have enough free tools at your fingertips) — but today, we’re going to give you a break. We’re going to let you in on an easy way to stretch your dollar and enhance your happiness, and it’s also totally free. It’s called savoring.

What Is Savoring?
Savoring is the ability to prolong and stretch enjoyment or positive emotional experiences. It’s the difference between wolfing down a meal vs. lingering over every bite. It relates to how much time you spend sitting in front of a sunset (if you even stop at all).

Scientists have consistently found that the ability to savor promotes happiness (see here or here). Which makes sense. The more you can prolong positive emotional experiences, the more positive emotions are filling up your day. In fact, the tendency to savor benefits individuals across the lifespan: studies show it predicts the subjective well-being for grade-school children, adolescents, college students, and the elderly.
Read on for more.
Savoring is also one of the best tricks for maximizing your finances, because you are getting more happiness for the buck — for the same experience, product, or expense. Which leads us to the ironic point . . .




Money Gets in the Way of Savoring
A study published in 2009 from a group of international psychologists hailing from Canada, England, and Belgium found that money actually impairs people’s ability to savor everyday positive experiences.
The researchers set out to understand why study after study shows that wealth doesn’t correspond with happiness. They conducted two studies, and both confirmed that wealth corresponds with lower savoring ability.
Participants with a higher income scored lower on a test of savoring. Oddly enough, even a prompting to think about money corresponded with lower savoring ability. The researchers found that participants who were shown pictures of foreign currency before they ate pieces of chocolate “spent significantly less time eating the chocolate and displayed significantly less enjoyment” than those who had seen another neutral image.
So wealth, money, and even reminders of money impair our ability to savor. We at LearnVest obviously believe in thinking about our money to the extent that we learn to manage it well, but it appears that obsessing about it 24/7 will impair our ability to just enjoy life.
Why does wealth impair our ability to savor? The researchers aren’t quite sure. They surmise that focusing on the grand experiences of life (visiting the pyramids of Egypt, taking a spa vacation) impacts our ability to appreciate all the smaller things in life, like the taste of our coffee or a fresh breeze. And let’s face it, our lives are filled with a lot more of the smaller things than anything else.
There’s another theory I have, which is that time and money are often related and triggering thoughts of money causes people to think about productivity, which causes them to move more quickly. The time spent on something is directly related to how much we savor it.

How to Savor
Luckily, savoring is a pretty easy concept to cultivate. After reading this study, I intentionally tried some of these techniques myself during a recent trip to Iceland, and I can honestly say they helped me maximize the happiness I derived from the trip.
These are the four common strategies for savoring, identified by researchers. They can be used alone or in combination:
1. Anticipate the thing/event: Typically I don’t dwell too much on a trip before I depart. I tend to focus on getting things taken care of before I leave, and exhale once I’m at the airport past security. But this time, I decided to build anticipation for the trip — I talked to friends about it, downloaded some Icelandic music, and had lunch with my group of travel-mates (actually, my LearnVest co-workers!) to plan activities. All of this went really far toward feeling excitement for the trip for weeks in advance, up until the day of departure. I have to admit, I usually don’t have as much fun before a trip!
2. Stay present and appreciate the current thing/event: When you’re traveling, it’s easy to get caught up in memorializing everything, from taking pictures to writing in a journal to posting updates to Twitter or Facebook. But you can spend more time trying to capture the moment than enjoying it. In Iceland, I tried to fully soak in whatever I was experiencing — feeling the misty spray from the Gullfoss waterfall on my face, savoring the taste of the famous Icelandic hot dogs, slathering on the mud from the Blue Lagoon — before I took out the camera. As a result, every moment seemed so much more vivid.
3. Reminisce about the past thing/event and relish the memory: When I got home, I kept the memories of Iceland alive and strong. It was fun to reminisce about all of our experiences, which we did for weeks. I also bought a cute Icelandic knotted pillow, which is now center stage on my couch and is a fond reminder of Iceland. I pinned up a postcard above my desk, changed the screen saver on my phone to a beautiful shot of Hallgrimskirkja Church, and even decided to dive into a book by Nobel Prize-winning Icelandic author Halldor Laxness.
4. Talk about it/share with others (at every stage): Sharing at every stage (anticipation, experience, reminiscence) helps enhance our enjoyment — this can mean talking to others, writing about it, or sharing on social media. My travel-mates and I enthused about the trip at every meal, sharing our favorite experiences. I tweeted about Iceland for weeks afterwards, and through social media found some Iceland-goers to share travel experiences with. Other friends posted their photos to Flickr. In fact, I raved about Iceland until I’m certain my friends were tired of hearing about it . . . but hey, I never felt happier savoring.
Keep in mind: I was only in Iceland for three full days. The flight was $499 and lodging (via an Airbnb apartment) was only $40 a night, but the amount of pleasure I derived from that trip was exponential — worth a trip many times that cost.
There’s plenty we can savor, big and small — from taking a trip to buying that supersoft cashmere sweater to eating that molten chocolate cake. Each small pleasure in life can be lingered over to produce more happiness for our buck. And let’s not forget all the free savoring, like smelling a flower or feeling that first Spring sunlight on our face.
And I’m going to add one more to this list: slow down. Slowing down will help us all savor the moments of life better. The study showed a direct correlation between the time someone spent eating a piece of chocolate and the satisfaction they derived from it.
So let’s make a commitment to linger, savor, and relish. Not only is this the most economical move we can make for our dollars, we’ll be enhancing all the small moments of our lives — which, really, is no small thing.

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