I wrote last month about how objective raw pain and our subjective experience of suffering are not the same thing, and how mindfulness can help us to avoid the former turning into the latter. This month, I want to share how there is a similar difference between the simple physical reality of pleasure and our actual experience of fulfillment, satisfaction, nourishment, and happiness, and how mindful presence can help us increase the latter.
Enjoyable experiences don’t necessarily nourish us simply because they occur. True and deep pleasure isn’t just something that happens to us; paying attention and making quality contact with our positive experiences determine how fully we receive them.
Some of the anti-mindfulness factors that can make our pleasure more shallow and fleeting:
- Attachment and grabbing on to pleasant experiences – trying to hold on to them, extend them, or immediately repeat them
There is a difference between snarfing up pleasures and dining on them with dignity. If we treat our positive experiences like something to chase after and to devour quickly, we usually miss most of their flavor. As anyone who has experienced addictions knows, grabbed-at pleasure can be intense and engrossing, but it does not provide us with much actual satisfaction. - Aversion to, resistance to, and pushing away of pleasure – It may seem counterintuitive to consider that we might try to fight against pleasant feelings, since hypothetically they are what we all want. But there are various reasons why we might: because a pleasant experience is not exactly what we had hoped for, because we feel like we don’t deserve the pleasure, because we feel it is immoral to enjoy it, or because the pleasure is too strong of a physical experience for us to feel able to tolerate.
- Being spaced out, on auto-pilot, thinking about something else, or otherwise distracted – We enjoy life’s big and small pleasures less, and we feel less nourished and satisfied, if we’re mentally somewhere else while they happen.
What we do want instead is to increase the same factors that we want to cultivate for all of our mindfulness practice:
- Concentration, giving our full attention to the experience – People often close their eyes to focus on listening to their favorite song, eating something delicious, or having a deep long hug so as to be able to focus on them more
- Clarity – Having a vivid and high-resolution experience where we notice more of the specific details and texture of how a pleasure feels, sounds, tastes, etc.
- Equanimity – Being more spacious, welcoming, allowing, and friendly, where we accept our experience just as it is
The more present we are with our pleasant sensations, and the more we pause and make full contact with them, the more deeply they register and make an actual positive impact for us. Giving something we enjoy our full sensory attention – actually deeply feeling, touching, listening, tasting, and seeing it – can increase the pleasure of our enjoyable moments, and can even turn everyday small pleasures that we might otherwise overlook into sources of profound happiness. There is a concept in positive psychology called “savoring”, defined as the deliberate prolonging and deepening of positive experience through conscious attention, and research has found that it increases people’s reported sense of well-being.
Shifting from mindless consumption of enjoyable activities to mindful attention – letting an experience be enough while it is happening, and letting positive moments actually land in our bodies – can lessen a tendency towards addictive compulsion. When we’re more present, we often need less stimulation to experience more pleasure.
One case study for how deep attention can increase our satisfaction is eating food that we enjoy. On the one hand, imagine eating a snack while watching television or scrolling on the phone. We may be startled to find that we’ve finished eating what was in our hands, and in the end feel unsatisfied. Now imagine how rich it would be to eat that same snack with complete attention – fully experiencing its colors, smells, textures, temperatures, and flavors the whole time as we eat. The food itself hasn’t changed, but tuning in with our attention will probably the experience more satisfying.
Listening to music is another example in which deeper attention can make a positive difference. Instead of listening to a song in the background while we answer emails, giving it our full attention and making full contact with what we are hearing makes the music seem fresher, more vivid, and more emotionally moving. We might notice layers and rich subtleties that we would otherwise miss. And many of us have probably experienced that more complete presence and undistracted full attention can also make our connections with other humans feel more satisfying, deep, meaningful, loving, and generally pleasant too.
Many people spend much of their time, money, and energy restlessly chasing after greater quantity, intensity, and novelty of pleasurable experiences. But many of us might find that we feel more fulfilled and content by more mindfully making contact with and deeply experiencing the pleasures we already have. Genuine satisfaction can be found in something as simple as being deeply present for the taste of a strawberry or the feeling of a ray of sun on our face.