A Little Nostalgia Can Provide a Big Boost to Your Happiness

New research shows the importance of putting autobiographical memory to work.

The ending of one year and the beginning of the next is a natural time to reflect on everything that happened to you in the preceding months. Even without trying, some of the reminders of those months gone by make their appearance in a variety of forms. You have to get your finances in shape to begin doing your taxes. Some of your photos from the previous year pop up on your screen without any prompting on your part. Your favorite music streaming app tells you which songs and artists you listened to the most often (e.g., “Spotify Wrapped”). Online subscriptions expire, and you have to decide whether you’ve used them enough to continue.

All of these reminders of the past year can become touching-off points for you to engage in a little bit of nostalgia. However, nostalgic recall obviously can go back over not just a past year but also past decades. You might wonder whether it’s good to think back on a relationship that didn’t end so well or a period in which you experienced economic hardship. What about your youth? Should you let your mind stray back to your teens and 20s?

Autobiographical Memory and the Value of Nostalgia

According to Peking University’s Tonglin Jiang and colleagues (2023), nostalgia is a common experience, but the key feature is that this form of recall “features the self as a protagonist in momentous events.” Autobiographical memory is very closely related to nostalgia because, through this type of recall, you formulate a coherent story of your life.

The link between autobiographical memory and nostalgia is made concrete, the researchers propose, by the desire to document your life in some written format. Another function of nostalgia is that it stimulates you to preserve “biographical objects.” As you look around your home, do you spot some of those objects, such as a tawdry little snow globe you bought on a vacation with your partner? It’s not worth much monetarily, and it’s not even very attractive. However, it’s a constant reminder that every once in a while will bring you back to that earlier time and remind you of the people and places around you, if not your own physical and mental state.

Jiang et al. point out that, even without trying, you’re creating an online “story” of your life whenever you share a photo or event on social media. This process can be beneficial in stimulating the narrative you create of your life. Previous research the authors cite found that “nostalgia encouraged [participants] to document the places they have been on social media because they felt warm in their fond memories when looking back at these posts.”

All of thisAll of this can contribute to a sense of “global self-continuity” where you connect your past, present, and future self. This sense, in turn, helps to bring order to life, which, ultimately, according to the authors, helps people feel better overall. Making sense of your past helps steer you through the present and into the future, all the while feeding into greater self-understanding.

Does Nostalgia Really Work?

Across two studies using Chinese undergraduates, Jiang and colleagues tested a model in which frequency of nostalgic thinking was used to predict online documenting, which they expected would further predict global self-continuity. The outcome measure in the model was psychological well-being.

First, the authors did a simple correlational study, asking participants to complete a set of measures that would tap into each component of the model. Nostalgia items included “How valuable is nostalgia to you?” Global self-continuity was tested with items such as “I feel my past self, present self, and future self flow seamlessly together.” Psychological well-being items included “I feel good most of the time.”

In this first study, participants reported on their attitudes toward online posting. The second, more behavioral, study involved actual tracking of social media by collecting the posts each participant made over the past year on “Weibo” (a popular social media platform in China).

The Weibo posts were coded (by trained research assistants) into personal life posts (e.g., “I ate fried pork in scoop for the first time!”) and not personally relevant (“Taylor Swift is so charming!”). Because participants clearly would have no idea at the time they created the posts that they would be used in research, this approach had strong “ecological validity.”

In both studies, the findings supported the proposed theoretical model, in which nostalgia predicted online documenting, which predicted global self-continuity, and which then predicted well-being. As the authors concluded, in addition to social media as an opportunity for amusement and gaining information, “people also use social media to document life online, a critical process by which people make sense of themselves and construct the autobiographical self.”

With these findings in mind, you may now gain a greater understanding of the positive, growth-enhancing functions that autobiographical social media posts can serve. In addition to the role these posts have in fostering communication with people who are part of your social support network, the reflections help stitch together your life events in a way that makes sense.

In the past, people kept journals and diaries, and perhaps you still do so. There are even apps that will do that for you. The good news about the Chinese study is that you don’t have to go through much effort to gain the same benefits in terms of narrating your sense of self and continuity.

Nostalgic objects, such as the snow globe, can further prompt this type of reflection. They serve as literal documentation of your past life. Some of these can even have a great deal more significance, such as mementos from people who are no longer alive. They may not even have to take the form of a physical object. Listening to a song from your past (maybe from that “Spotify Wrapped”) can take you back momentarily to a nostalgic recollection of where you were when you first heard it.

To sum up, recording those times of your life can help you connect your sense of personal continuity from the past and into the future.

References

Dai, Y., Li, Q., Zhou, H., & Jiang, T. (2023). Nostalgia and online autobiography: Implications for global self-continuity and psychological well-being. Journal of Happiness Studies: An Interdisciplinary Forum on Subjective Well-Being. doi: 10.1007/s10902-023-00701-y