The Problem With Nostalgia

The Richard Nicholls Mental Health Podcast

Richard Nicholls

Counseling, Happiness, Anxiety, Health & Fitness, Counselling, Depression, Psychology, Mental Health, Psychotherapy, Alternative Health, Self Help, Wellbeing

4.7 • 685 Ratings

🗓️ 12 December 2025

⏱️ 5 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Send us a text Nostalgia can feel lovely, can’t it? But if we’re not careful, we start thinking the past was better than it really was. This episode’s about why we do that, and how we can stop missing out on today by staring too hard at yesterday. Support the show Join the Patreon community https://www.patreon.com/richardnicholls Social Media Links Bluesky https://bsky.app/profile/richardnicholls.net Threads https://www.threads.net/@richardnichollsreal Instagram https://www.instagram.co...

Transcript

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0:00.0	And hello to you! Welcome to Friday! Hope you've had a nice week! It was my birthday on Monday, so I've had a super time.
0:09.7	I took the day off work and I played PlayStation through most of the day, which was a lovely trip down memory lane to be nice and childish and play games.
0:17.7	But the real nostalgia boost was a gift from two of my best mates who bought me
0:22.5	a copy of the Bino from the week I was born. I hold in my hand a genuine copy of the Bino from
0:28.6	December 1975 and I'm absolutely chuffed with it. Thank you guys. And nostalgia is great. It takes
0:36.6	you back to a time that felt simpler. And most of the time nostalgia is great. It takes you back to a time that felt simpler.
0:39.8	And most of the time, nostalgia's harmless. A nice reminder of where we came from.
0:45.8	But sometimes it can trick us. Like I was saying, I was playing on a PS5 on my birthday.
0:51.9	If I wanted a real trip back to my youth. I should be playing on an old
0:56.1	ZX spectrum, shouldn't I, with games that take 10 minutes to load and are still, in all honesty,
1:02.9	a bit rubbish. Technology has moved on. But that's not what we want from a trip back in time, is it?
1:10.5	What we want is the feeling, how it feels to be the version of ourself that existed back then.
1:18.4	And that's nostalgia for you.
1:21.0	It's not the thing you're remembering.
1:24.2	It's the you that experienced it that we're nostalgic for. So it's really common to hear
1:30.6	people say things like, I wish we could go back to how things were or things were better back then.
1:37.0	But what they really mean is, I wish I felt the way I used to feel. And you know what? That's okay. That's human. But it can be a bit
1:47.7	of a trap because the past wasn't always better. Let's be honest, here in the UK, in the 80s
1:54.3	anyway, there was dog muck on every pavement. People smoked indoors, racism, sexism, homophobia, they were all way more accepted.
2:04.6	Teachers would hit you. Husbands would hit their wives and most of it got swept under the rug.
2:11.1	The past in many ways was actually quite grim. So why do we long for it?
2:17.0	Because if we start to believe the story we've made up
	...

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