Winter is Coming, so What's the Best Way to Recall Our Warm Memories of Summer?

Nostalgia for good times in your past has lots of benefits, but don't let your unreliable memories prevent you being happy in the here and now.

Vacations are done. 

School’s back in session. 

Your email inbox may be starting to fill once more. 

It’s the end of summer – and a bittersweet time of year. 

As the evenings get darker, the heat dies down and the normal rhythms of our working lives resume, we may begin to wistfully remember summer days and - to quote the late Olivia Newton-John (RIP) in Grease -‘those summer nights’.

We may dredge up even older memories of hazy, lazy summer days from our distant pasts. Childhood memories of beach vacations. Water fights with our school friends. Backyard pool parties from our teens. 

Nearly 80% of us indulge in this kind of nostalgia at least once a week (according to work by Tim Wildschut of the University of Southampton and colleagues). Nearly half of us find ourselves in a nostalgic reverie two or three times a week. 

And this kind of nostalgia can be really fun. 

“It’s like going on a little mental vacation without leaving your home,” says Duke University’s Felipe de Brigard. 

Nostalgia can be an especially good psychological boost when we are feeling sad or alone, says Felipe. “We use our memories and imagination to make ourselves feel better.”

Our best memories also tend to be full of friends and loved ones – so fondly remembering the past is a way to simulate the social connection of being in their company once again. “During nostalgic reverie,” wrote the Israeli researcher Dan G Hertz. “The mind is peopled.”

Much of our nostalgia is positive… but that’s certainly not the whole picture. 

“Our memories are pretty fallible,” says Leigh Thompson, a professor at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. “Our memories are not necessarily like a video recorder.”

Research shows that we can’t help editing our past experiences – concentrating on the fun of the beach vacation, while downplaying the sunburns, the bug bites and the sand in our picnics. 

Leigh saw this in a study she did with a group of students embarking on a long cycling trip. Her participants were interviewed before, during and after the expedition. Before setting off, the cyclists expected their adventure to be 27 out 28 on a scale of enjoyment. After all the cycling, they scored the trip as 26 out of 28. It wasn’t quite as good as they were hoping it would be, but it was still pretty great!

However, during the trip, Leigh’s subjects weren’t having nearly so much fun. The tired legs, punctured tires and sore behinds prompted them to score it as 20 out of 28 while they were actually on the road - way lower than they anticipated and way lower than they later remembered it. 

This type of rosy retrospection - as Leigh calls it - can have implications for our happiness, causing us to repeat behaviors that might not be great for us. We might head out to party recalling how much fun we had drinking with friends last time – but edit out the hangover. 

Focusing on our rosy retrospection of a marriage or a job might also cause us to stay in relationships or work environments that aren’t good for us - where the bad times in reality outweigh the good. 

Nostalgia can also draw us into the sort of unhelpful rumination that isn’t good for our present happiness and prevents us enjoying our lives in the here and now. 

Memory expert Felipe says using our unreliable recollections as a guide to what makes us happy can leave us dissatisfied with our current lives and “hoping to go back to a kind of life that never occurred”.

Instead of living in an imagined past in our heads, Felipe suggests we ask ourselves why we are feeling nostalgia for a certain time and what that tells us about our present. 

Some of us look back very fondly to our youth, for example. “You might think that what you want is to go back to high school,” says Felipe. “But what is really going to satisfy that desire is to get new friends.”

If you're at work or school wistfully remembering your sunny vacation, sad about the end of summer and hating your current life – try examining those feelings a bit. 

What are the real parts of those fond memories that you can bring into your daily life? 

• Was it reading by the pool? Then try to carve out a little quiet time to pick up a book today. 

• Was it the great food? Then try really savouring your lunch, rather than guzzling down a sandwich over your laptop or in your car. 

• Did you revel in uninterrupted quality time spent with your kids? Then introduce a rule that you’ll get together more as a family, ideally without work emails, phones or screens. 

Remembering great memories can be a wonderful and joyful experience – but don’t let it stop you having fun right now and living fully in the present. 

Stay well and stay happy...

Laurie