Enjoying life: quality time and health

Enjoying life: quality time and health

If we invest in quality time, we will gain health. By practicing the art of enjoying life, we will appreciate every little detail, find magic and happiness in the little things, and nurture our hope.

Enjoying life: quality time and health

Written and verified by the psychologist GetPersonalGrowth.

Last update: February 19, 2022

Enjoy life, savor it slowly and embrace the present with intensity, with eyes wide open and hearts always ready to receive. In this way, our experiences will become vitamins for hope and the fuel of positive emotions even in difficult times. We must never forget that by investing in quality time, we will gain health.



This simple reasoning might seem obvious. We all know that if we were able to slow down a little and appreciate the simple things in everyday life, we would feel so much better. Nonetheless, as the philosopher, essayist and mathematician Nassim Nicholas Taleb points out, humans have misinterpreted what we call "common sense".

We have forgotten what it's like to enjoy life. We find ourselves trapped in many labyrinths, we are always under pressure, we have fears, anxieties and continuous goals to achieve. The absence of certainty diverts our attention from the present moment; so appreciating what we have today becomes more and more complicated.

On the other hand, we cannot forget that our brain is always on the alert for possible threats and risks we face. Our brain doesn't care if we're happy or not, it only cares if we survive. It is up to us, therefore, to focus our attention on the "here and now" and learn to appreciate life a little more.

Conscious control of attention also generates a cognitive and emotional reserve that directly affects our health. An important fact that must certainly be taken into consideration.



The art of enjoying life

At some point in life, we all do the following: at a time when we feel good, happy and complete, we take a kind of mental snapshot of that moment. We will tell ourselves that we will always remember that moment and the feelings we are experiencing.

An operation so simple (and at the same time wonderful) that it serves much more than fixing that exceptional experience in our memory. In reality, we perform a voluntary emotional and cognitive act on the present moment so that it may have a usefulness for the future. We hope, in some way, that today's happiness will continue to enlighten us in the future.

It is an awareness-based exercise performed by a conscious mind filled with positive emotions. The art of enjoying life is just that: being able to create moments of well-being to be stored in the memory so that they can be used as pills of happiness in the future.

The psychological exercise of enjoying life and positive nostalgia

Marios Biskas, of the University of Southampton in England, conducted a study on nostalgia in 2008. His work points us to a number of aspects that we should consider:

  • Savoring life is more than a clichĂ©, more than a positive message for personal growth. In fact, it is a very healthy psychological exercise for our brain.
  • According to this study, "savoring" is a profound activity. It is a deliberate mental act in which we capture the present experience and preserve it by shaping the so-called nostalgic memory.

Dr. Biskas and his team of researchers have shown that this type of memory helps us to retrieve positive memories to experience pleasant emotions again in the future. A nostalgia that enriches, like a window from which to look out from time to time to breathe and let yourself be enveloped by pleasant sensations.



Building an autobiographical memory based on moments of balance, inner peace and well-being, guarantees our psychological balance. Certainly an interesting aspect to consider.


Conscious control over memory

To enjoy life, the first thing to do is to create the right moment. We often say that happiness comes and goes, that moments of well-being are random and that they don't always depend on us. To think so is a grave mistake.

Will is needed. We must be the creators of the good times ourselves, and to get what we want we have to commit ourselves. We need to know when to slow down, carve out moments to rest, see the people we love most and be alone in order to connect with ourselves.

There is no need to organize big events or expensive trips. Life is best savored in its simplicity, maintaining an attentive and humble attitude and appreciating the simple things. Similarly, when we experience a moment of well-being, we must activate the conscious control of our memory and tell ourselves that we will remember it forever.


The greater the conscious control, the greater the will to keep moments of balance and happiness in our memory. The more we train our brain to achieve this goal, the better the “mental photographs” of well-being that we will carry in our autobiographical memory. It is an exercise that is worth performing and that allows us to generate a good cognitive and emotional reserve for the future.

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