Does Savoring Beat Gratitude? What the Research Shows

Most mornings the first sip of coffee lasts about as long as it takes me to remember what is on the calendar. The good moment doesn't end, exactly. I just leave it. Lately I've wondered whether that habit of leaving is what some of the happiness research is about, and whether lingering in a pleasant moment has any more evidence behind it than the gratitude lists we are all told to keep.

I covered gratitude journaling in another article, so this one is about savoring. The short version, up front: there are promising trials on savoring, I found nothing focused on women in midlife, and nothing I found settles savoring versus gratitude.

What savoring means

The term comes from psychologists Fred Bryant and Joseph Veroff, whose 2007 book Savoring: A New Model of Positive Experience lays out a framework. It is a book of theory, not a study with participants. As I read it, savoring means paying deliberate attention to a good experience and staying with it, whether it is happening now, coming up, or being remembered. Gratitude, as I understand it, is noticing that something good came your way. Savoring is staying inside the good thing a little longer. The two overlap, and the studies below don't always keep them apart.

What researchers found

A 30-day experience-sampling study of 101 people (Jose, Lim, and Bryant, 2012, The Journal of Positive Psychology) asked volunteers to report on positive events, savoring, and mood as they went through ordinary days. Within a given day, more savoring went along with a happier mood in the moment, and the authors concluded that savoring helps explain how a good event turns into a good mood. This design shows two things traveling together. It can't show that savoring caused the mood.

Intervention studies are thinner on the ground. A pilot study of 111 adults aged 60 or older (Smith and Hanni, first published 2017, Journal of Applied Gerontology) tested a one-week savoring exercise and measured depressive symptoms, resilience, and happiness before, right after, and at one and three months. People who followed the exercise closely showed improvement on all three. The abstract mentions no comparison group, so the improvement can't be separated from time passing or from people feeling hopeful about taking part.

A randomized trial is sturdier. In a study of 303 adults with an average age of about 68 (Smith and Bryant, first published 2018, Aging & Mental Health), people were assigned to savor a valuable life lesson (95 people), to reflect on negative aspects of aging (129), or to a no-treatment control (79). The savoring group reported more positive views of aging and higher life satisfaction than the other two groups did. Anxiety and negative views of aging did not differ between groups.

The widest view is a 2026 systematic review and meta-analysis of randomized trials (Chen and colleagues, Applied Psychology: Health and Well-Being). It pooled 20 trials with 4,805 participants and reported an average effect of g = 0.51 (95% confidence interval 0.26 to 0.77), which is conventionally called moderate. Effects looked larger against do-nothing controls than against active ones, although that difference did not reach statistical significance. I could only read the abstract, which doesn't say who the participants were, so I treat this as preliminary context and not as a basis for saying what anyone should do.

Savoring or gratitude?

One small study I found puts them side by side. It involved 124 adults aged 60 to 89 (74 women, 50 men) who attend day centers in southern Spain, and compared training in gratitude, savoring, and optimism (Salces-Cubero and colleagues, first published 2018, Aging & Mental Health). After gratitude and savoring training, scores for life satisfaction, positive feelings, subjective happiness, and resilience were higher and negative feelings were lower. After optimism training they were not. Depression scores were lower after savoring and optimism training but not after gratitude training, which the authors had not expected. I'm reporting a measured score, not suggesting either practice does anything for depression. I couldn't find the group sizes. One study, one region, people in their sixties to eighties.

Where the data are contradictory or thin

First, age. Two of the three intervention studies confirm adults 60 or older (Smith and Hanni; Salces-Cubero); Smith and Bryant report a mean age of about 68. I couldn't confirm ages for the diary study, and the meta-analysis doesn't say. I found nothing focused on women in their forties or fifties, so it is not clear how any of this transfers to midlife. Second, almost every outcome is a questionnaire filled in by people who know what the exercise is supposed to do, which makes it hard to rule out that they simply report feeling better. Third, the exercises were short, and only one study I could confirm followed people for as long as three months.

The meta-analysis itself carries a caution. Part of its average effect may come from comparing savoring with doing nothing, and one of its category estimates for negative emotional states had a confidence interval that included zero (g = 0.33, 95% CI −0.01 to 0.68). Finally, the head-to-head evidence is a single study. I can't compare the average effect here with the effects reported for gratitude, because the two literatures measure different outcomes on different scales. My search was a careful read of abstracts, not an exhaustive review, so there may be studies I missed.

What I'd actually do with this

This is only what the research suggests, and none of the studies tested what I describe next. If savoring and gratitude were both followed by better scores on several measures in older adults, then maybe the better choice is the one that survives an ordinary Tuesday. For me that looks like choosing one ordinary moment a day, such as the coffee, and staying in it a minute longer, then writing one line about what I noticed. That is my own inference, not a tested method. The life-lesson study hints at a different version: sitting with something you have learned over the years rather than something that happened today.

What I wouldn't read into it

I wouldn't treat g = 0.51 as a forecast for any one woman, and I wouldn't say savoring beats gratitude, because the data don't say that. If low mood has been sticking around, a doctor or licensed therapist is the right person to talk to, and nothing in this article is guidance on treating it.

If a daily line about what you noticed appeals to you, I made the 21-Day Self-Care Workbook for Women 40+ on Etsy. It has 21 short daily prompts, each with room to write "what I noticed." Some are as plain as eating one meal sitting down without a screen, or spending 15 minutes outside without a goal. It wasn't built from savoring research, and I'm not claiming it does what those studies measured. It's a place to put the line.