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How Your Brain Morphs Stressful Family Vacations Into Pleasant Memories
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/16/well/family/family-vacation-memories-brain.html
By Nicole Slaughter-Graham / The New York Times / August 16, 2018
There may be a lot of bickering, but your memory creates a nostalgia-inducing highlight reel that makes you want to plan the next trip.
“In 2015, my husband and I traveled to Washington, D.C., for our annual family vacation with our energetic son, who was then 8. There were no mishaps or disasters, but my husband and I spent most of our time bickering and stressed out.
Maybe it was the fact that we two born-and-raised Floridians were out of our element visiting 30-degree Washington in December. It could have been that we planned hours of walking, sightseeing and museum-hopping with no downtime. It went exactly as planned but it wasn’t exactly fun.
But as we sat in the airport awaiting our flight back to the Florida sunshine, all we could talk about was how we couldn’t wait to go on another vacation.
We somehow had transformed a stressful experience into a great memory. How do parents do this to ourselves?
We have two ‘selves,’” explained Dr. Omar Sultan Haque, a Harvard University psychiatrist and social scientist. “The experiencing self and the remembered self. In the midst of vacation stresses, we may be stressed and annoyed by family and children and the indignities of bureaucratic travel, but the remembered self easily turns nausea into nostalgia.”
Even though we think of vacation as a time to relax and recharge, traveling with children comes with a certain level of difficulty. It takes stamina, financial commitment and time.
The memories, however, are typically positive because of the value we infuse into the experience. “We tend to think of these kinds of experiences on the pleasure/pain level, but really, giving a child the gift of a vacation is more on the meaning/moral plane,” Dr. Haque said. The uninterrupted time together ideally allows for sharing new experiences, great conversations and laughter. These are the moments that have parents planning the next trip....”
Photo Credit: Spencer Platt/Getty Images
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/16/well/family/family-vacation-memories-brain.html
By Nicole Slaughter-Graham / The New York Times / August 16, 2018
There may be a lot of bickering, but your memory creates a nostalgia-inducing highlight reel that makes you want to plan the next trip.
“In 2015, my husband and I traveled to Washington, D.C., for our annual family vacation with our energetic son, who was then 8. There were no mishaps or disasters, but my husband and I spent most of our time bickering and stressed out.
Maybe it was the fact that we two born-and-raised Floridians were out of our element visiting 30-degree Washington in December. It could have been that we planned hours of walking, sightseeing and museum-hopping with no downtime. It went exactly as planned but it wasn’t exactly fun.
But as we sat in the airport awaiting our flight back to the Florida sunshine, all we could talk about was how we couldn’t wait to go on another vacation.
We somehow had transformed a stressful experience into a great memory. How do parents do this to ourselves?
We have two ‘selves,’” explained Dr. Omar Sultan Haque, a Harvard University psychiatrist and social scientist. “The experiencing self and the remembered self. In the midst of vacation stresses, we may be stressed and annoyed by family and children and the indignities of bureaucratic travel, but the remembered self easily turns nausea into nostalgia.”
Even though we think of vacation as a time to relax and recharge, traveling with children comes with a certain level of difficulty. It takes stamina, financial commitment and time.
The memories, however, are typically positive because of the value we infuse into the experience. “We tend to think of these kinds of experiences on the pleasure/pain level, but really, giving a child the gift of a vacation is more on the meaning/moral plane,” Dr. Haque said. The uninterrupted time together ideally allows for sharing new experiences, great conversations and laughter. These are the moments that have parents planning the next trip....”
Photo Credit: Spencer Platt/Getty Images
