Are You Coping or Savoring?

During and post-COVID, I did some online coaching related to resiliency. Very often we ended up talking about coping skills, actions that were a response to stress or change. Coping skills are basically damage control, helping us to get back to a baseline of “okay.”

I was recently introduced to the positive psychology term of “savoring”—attending to and embracing the positive experiences of our lives. Basically, coping and savoring are two sides of the same coin—both are emotional regulation strategies, but they operate in entirely different "climates." You might think of them as the tools you use for different weather--coping is your umbrella for the rain, while savoring is your sunglasses for the sunshine.

In coping, we are trying to manage the negative in order to reduce distress, solve problems, or minimize the impact of an unexpected event. Some examples would be seeking social support after a loss, practicing deep breathing during a panic attack, or breaking a large project into smaller tasks to reduce overwhelm.

In savoring, we pursue a set of processes through which we attend to, appreciate, and enhance the positive experiences in our lives. This might be taking the time to enjoy a beautiful sunset, sharing good news with a friend to relive the excitement of a new experience, dwelling on the complex flavors of a meal, or just experiencing the joy of a relationship. While coping helps you survive the bad, savoring helps embrace flourishing during the good.

The outcome of coping is resilience and recovery, resolving the past or future threats. The outcome of savoring is flourishing and life satisfaction, living in the moment. One is reactive to relieve stress or pain, the other is proactive toward joy and pleasure.

A common misconception is that if you stop "struggling" (coping), you will automatically be happy. However, positive psychology suggests that the absence of misery is not the presence of happiness. If you only focus on coping, you might become very good at surviving, but you may still feel empty. Savoring is the skill that fills that void by teaching you how to "ingest" the good things that happen to you rather than letting them pass by unnoticed. The difference is in seeing the thorny roses and stopping to “smell the roses.”

Perhaps if we found ways to savor the gifts of the day, we would not think so much about the potential of scarcity.

“Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they?” (Matthew 6:26, NIV)

(Gemini 3 AI used in research.)

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