There is a certain kind of person who keeps a journal filled with pressed flowers, who replays old voicemails just to hear a familiar voice, who treats a quiet Sunday morning like it belongs in a film. The world tends to call these people dreamers, sometimes fondly, sometimes not. But what if all that romanticising isn't escapism at all? What if it's one of the most psychologically sophisticated things a person can do?

Science, it turns out, is starting to agree.

The problem with calling it "Living in the past"

We have a cultural habit of treating nostalgia and romanticisation with suspicion. The conventional wisdom goes something like this: if you're always looking backward, you're not moving forward. If you're soft-focusing the present into something beautiful, you're lying to yourself.

But that framing misses something crucial about how human beings actually work. Nostalgia, that bittersweet ache for a cherished past, is not a sign of weakness or avoidance. It is, according to a growing body of research, a genuine psychological resource (Routledge et al., 2013). And the people who draw on it most readily may be doing something far more adaptive than those who dismiss the impulse entirely.

What romanticising actually does to the brain

When someone pauses to linger on a good memory, a holiday with their grandmother, or a summer that felt endless – the version of themselves that existed before everything got complicated – they are not simply indulging in pleasant distraction. They are activating a set of psychological mechanisms that have measurable effects on mood, identity, and motivation.

Research has consistently shown that nostalgia increases positive affect, elevates self-esteem, and strengthens a person's sense of social connectedness (Routledge et al., 2013). These are not trivial outcomes. Self-esteem and social belonging are among the most robust predictors of mental health, and the fact that simply reflecting on a meaningful memory can nudge both upward says something important about how memory and emotion are intertwined.

Perhaps more surprisingly, romanticising the past appears to make people more optimistic about the future. Studies using both written nostalgic narratives and experimentally induced nostalgia found that when people engaged with cherished memories, they reported higher levels of hope and forward-looking confidence (Cheung et al., 2013, as cited in Hepper & Dennis, 2023). The mechanism seems to work through self-esteem: remembering yourself at your best, surrounded by people who loved you, reminds you that good things are possible and that you are someone capable of experiencing them.

This is not a small finding. It means that romanticising the past is not pulling someone away from their future. It is, functionally, a launchpad toward it.

The identity thread: knowing who you are

One of the quieter gifts of romanticising life is what it does for a person's sense of self. Psychologists call this 'self-continuity', the feeling that the person you were at seven years old, at seventeen, at thirty-two, and today are all somehow the same continuous being. That thread of sameness is not just philosophically interesting; it is psychologically essential.

When self-continuity breaks down, as it can during major life transitions, loss, or trauma, people often report a destabilising sense of not knowing who they are anymore. Nostalgia, and the broader habit of romanticising one's own story, helps restore that thread. Research by Cheung and colleagues (2021) found that nostalgic reflection fosters self-continuity by deepening the sense of social connectedness and that this restored continuity in turn promotes eudaimonic well-being, the kind of deep, purposeful flourishing that goes beyond simply feeling good in the moment.

What this means in practice is that the person who keeps photographs on their walls, who makes a ritual of revisiting certain places or songs or smells, is doing something genuinely useful. They are weaving together the chapters of their life into something coherent. They are reminding themselves that their story makes sense.

Romanticising as a coping strategy, and a real one

It is easy to dismiss romanticisation as a luxury of the comfortable, something people do when they don't have real problems to deal with. The research tells a different story. Nostalgia tends to be triggered precisely when people are struggling, when they feel lonely, bored, anxious, or stripped of meaning (Routledge et al., 2013). The emotional memory is not an escape hatch from difficulty; it is a response to it.

And it appears to work. A comprehensive review published in Current Opinion in Psychology found that nostalgic reflection supports well-being partly by increasing the perception that one's life is meaningful and that this sense of meaning acts as a mediator, linking nostalgic thinking to genuine improvements in how people feel (Hepper & Dennis, 2023). In other words, when the present feels hollow, looking back at a time when things felt full can restore a person's sense that fullness is still possible.

This is distinct from rumination, which is also a form of looking backward but tends to reinforce distress rather than relieve it. The difference lies in the emotional colouring: nostalgic memories are characterised by warmth, connection, and a kind of bittersweetness that remains net positive. Research comparing nostalgia to reflection and brooding found that nostalgia uniquely outperformed both on measures of self-esteem, meaning in life, social connectedness, and optimism (Jiang et al., 2021, as cited in Hepper & Dennis, 2023). Brooding, by contrast, showed the weakest psychological profile of the three. The act of romanticising, then, is not the same as dwelling; it is nearly the opposite.

The social dimension: you're never really alone in a good memory

There is something else worth noting about romanticised memories: they are almost never solitary. When people recall the moments they find most meaningful, those moments are populated by other people: friends, family, lovers, and strangers who became significant. Nostalgia is, at its core, a social emotion.

This matters because one of the mechanisms through which romanticising life improves well-being is precisely this sense of connection. Even when a person is physically alone, replaying a memory that features loved ones activates the felt sense of being loved and belonging to something larger than oneself (Routledge et al., 2013). In an era where loneliness has become a public health concern, the ability to summon social warmth from one's own memory is not a trivial skill. It is a form of psychological self-sufficiency.

Some people are better at this than others, which may explain why the benefits of romanticising life are more pronounced in certain individuals. Those who have a natural inclination toward nostalgia, who are, as researchers describe it, high in "nostalgia proneness", tend to use it more readily as a regulatory tool when distressed and tend to report higher baseline levels of meaning and social connectedness (Routledge et al., 2013). Far from being a personality flaw, this sensitivity to the beauty of one's own past appears to be a genuine psychological asset.

When does it stop helping?

To be fair to the sceptics: romanticising life is not universally beneficial, and the research does not claim otherwise. The positive effects of nostalgia on well-being appear to be moderated by the degree to which a person feels connected to their past self (Cheung et al., 2021). When there is a significant rupture between who someone was and who they are now, when the remembered self feels like a stranger, the nostalgic comparison can become painful rather than soothing.

Similarly, if romanticisation becomes a substitute for engagement with the present rather than a supplement to it, its benefits erode. The goal is not to live in the past but to draw from it. The person who romanticises their life while still showing up for it, who finds their Sunday morning beautiful and still gets out of bed, is doing something psychologically healthy. The person who uses memory as a reason not to try anything new is engaged in something closer to avoidance.

The distinction is subtle, but it matters.

What this means for the rest of us

If you have ever been told that you're "too sentimental", that you need to "live in the present", or that your rose-tinted view of things is a problem to be fixed, the research offers a gentle but evidence-based rebuttal.

Romanticising life, done well, is not self-deception. It is a sophisticated form of emotional regulation. It repairs identity, generates optimism, counters loneliness, restores meaning, and, perhaps most counterintuitively, orients people toward the future rather than trapping them in the past (Hepper & Dennis, 2023; Cheung et al., 2021; Routledge et al., 2013).

The people who linger over old photographs, who save letters, who notice the particular quality of afternoon light in autumn and feel something about it – they may simply be doing unconsciously what therapists sometimes have to teach explicitly: that a life can be a source of sustenance, not just a series of events to get through.

There is a reason certain memories feel worth keeping. Perhaps the real question is not whether romanticising is useful – it clearly is – but whether we are doing it wisely enough.

References

Cheung, W.-Y., & Lau, H. (2021). Nostalgia fosters self-continuity: uncovering the mechanism (social connectedness) and consequence (eudaimonic well-being). University of Reading.
Hepper, E. G., & Dennis, A. (2023). Nostalgia: A potential pathway to greater well-being. Current Opinion in Psychology, 49, Article 101547.
Routledge, C., Wildschut, T., Sedikides, C., & Juhl, J. (2013). Nostalgia as a resource for psychological health and well-being. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 7(11), 808–818.