Why Happy Memories Feel So Good to Revisit

Some memories have a strange ability to make us smile before we even realize it.

Maybe it is a summer afternoon with friends, a family celebration, a journey you still think about, or a completely ordinary day that somehow became special.

Years can pass, yet remembering that moment can still bring back a little of how it felt. And that is not just a poetic idea.

Research on positive autobiographical memories, our own memories of positive experiences, suggests that recalling them can bring back positive emotion.

In one study, researchers asked people to remember positive events from their own lives. When participants revisited these memories, they reported more positive feelings. The researchers also found activity in brain regions associated with reward and value.[1]

Even more interestingly, participants sometimes chose to give up a small amount of money for the opportunity to recall a positive memory instead of a neutral one.

In other words, revisiting a happy memory could have value in itself.

A memory is more than the event

When we think back to a joyful experience, we rarely remember only a list of facts.

We remember pieces of it.
Someone’s laugh.
The weather that day.
A particular song.
The view from a window.
The street we were walking along.

Those small details can become part of the feeling attached to the memory.

Why keep joyful memories?

Not every happy memory needs to be important.

It does not have to be a graduation, wedding, birthday or once-in-a-lifetime trip.

Sometimes a memory is worth keeping simply because you would like to return to it someday.

That may be one of the nicest things about remembering. We cannot go back to the exact moment, but we can preserve pieces of it: where we were, who was there, what happened and how it made us feel.

A joyful moment may last only a few minutes.
A memory of it can stay with us much longer.

[1] Speer, M. E., Bhanji, J. P., & Delgado, M. R.014).Savoring the Past: Positive Memories Evoke Value Representations in the Striatum.Neuron, 84(4), 847–856.
DOI: 10.1016/j.neuron.2014.09.028