One piece of nonsense I'm always encountering in self-help books is the claim that the human mind "can't tell the difference" between a real experience and a vividly imagined one. This usually crops up in the context of visualisation techniques. Imagine coming first in a race, the argument goes, or being good at public speaking, or charming on dates, and your brain will marshal your inner resources towards that goal, as if you were already a winner. There's some evidence that visualisation works. But think what it would be like if your mind really couldn't tell the difference between reality and imagination: you'd have far more problems than a pop-psychology book could help you with. You'd be forever forgetting to eat, because you'd feel full up from having daydreamed about a juicy steak. Or getting fired, because you'd only imagined turning up to work.
Yet there is a morsel of truth here: we do have profound responses to purely mental narratives. That's what worry is, and anxiety, and also pleasurable anticipation; frequently, of course, the real experience we're worried or excited about isn't half as unpleasant or enjoyable as the fantasy. It also helps explain a component of happiness that isn't, I think it's fair to say, fashionable at the moment: nostalgia.
The word alone induces shudders, conjuring images of commemorative Queen Mother tea-towels or sepia-toned supplements in the Daily Mail called Memories Of Yesteryear. Contemporary books on happiness, influenced by Buddhism, are all about living in the present: absorption in the past is seen as an obstacle. Equally, nostalgia is disdained by the more goal-oriented, go-get-'em brand of self-help, because it feels like giving up on the future.
The evidence from psychological research, though, is that a healthy degree of reminiscence can be a very good thing indeed. In one representative study at Loyola University, New Orleans, people who reflected on pleasant memories for 20 minutes a day reported significant improvements in overall mood. Writing about happy memories helps, too, though not as much as mere thinking. The positivity resulting from reminiscence seeps into the rest of life: for example, experimental subjects felt better about their relationships.
In truth, none of this really contradicts the exhortation to live in the moment. The best writers on that topic make clear that the point isn't to eliminate thoughts of the past or the future, but rather just to avoid making them the lens through which you see your life - if you do, you'll always imagine happiness to belong "back then", or "one day soon", never now. Anyway, reminiscence can be a "now" activity: elderly people swapping stories about the Blitz or twentysomethings swapping memories of children's TV shows are strengthening present-moment social bonds. Mind you, I still can't bear those Memories Of Yesteryear supplements. Although I do own a Queen Mother tea-towel. (It's a long story.)
oliver.burkeman@theguardian.com
