By Brianna Patti, LMFT.
My Instagram feed lovingly (read: rudely) reminded me that July 23, 2025 was the 15-year anniversary of the formation of One Direction. Coincidentally, I had come across my collection of CDs a few months prior and noticed that I never purchased their final album, Made in the A.M. (2015), because the eight-month-old wound of Zayn’s departure was still too fresh at the time. I decided it was finally time to include this fifth album to my collection, sans our beloved fifth boy.
While I waited for the CD to arrive, I started playing their old albums again. I popped Up All Night into my Hello Kitty boombox (easily my best eBay purchase ever), and I nearly burst into tears when I heard the late Liam Payne sing the first line of the opening track. Suddenly, I was a teenager finding solace in the harmonies sung by other teenagers. This emotional time travel helped me return to a time when music, fandoms, and daydreams softened the edges of my reality.
I know I’m not alone when I say that my adolescence was rocky, and my favorite boy band offered me a temporary sense of safety. I’d describe their music as a kind of emotional scaffolding— something to hold onto when everything else felt unsteady. Their music didn’t fix anything, but it made me feel less alone, and sometimes that was enough. As a therapist, I’d like to share what I’m noticing about the benefits of diving into this kind of nostalgia.
Emotional Regulation and nostalgia
Emotional regulation might sound like another therapy buzzword, but when you’re really overwhelmed, regulating your emotions can feel almost impossible to achieve. Your body switches into survival mode. Your heart races, your thoughts get fuzzy, and the coping strategies you usually rely on disappear right when you need them most. In those moments, even well-meaning advice like “just breathe” can feel frustrating and unhelpful. The good news is, emotional regulation doesn’t have to be strict or clinical. That’s why I love teaching my clients skills that feel approachable and practical.
DBT Coping Skills for Disregulation
In DBT, we talk about the ACCEPTS skill: Seeking healthy distractions that help us ride out painful moments without making them worse. No major self-improvement necessary. Rewatching old concert videos, queuing up the soundtrack to your teenage years, or texting the person who once obsessed over it all with you can shift your emotional state in gentle, meaningful ways. It taps into Activities and Emotions (part of ACCEPTS) that remind you there’s more to feel than stress or sadness. And sometimes, simply feeling something familiar and safe is enough.
When you revisit media that invites a flood of memories with positive emotions, you’ll remember the version of yourself that clung to feelings of hope (that’s what happened for me). In other words, you can be transported back to a time when your feelings were intense and your coping tools were limited, but you still made it through. This simple reminder can help soothe your nervous system. This strategy connects to the Comparison skill in DBT’s ACCEPTS toolbox.
There’s something deeply regulating about revisiting joy on your own terms. It may not be logical or linear, but it works. When we reconnect with the things that once gave us meaning, we create a bridge between our past and present selves. That bridge is more than nostalgic—it’s healing.
So if you’re feeling overwhelmed, stuck, or disconnected from yourself, I invite you to find your version of Up All Night. Maybe it’s a song, a show, a book, or a group chat that used to light you up. Let yourself go back. Not to stay there, but to remember who you were before the world told you to tone it down. That version of you might still have something important to say.
For me, that voice sounded a lot like five British boys singing in unison—and I’m excited to rejoin their monthly listener demographic on Spotify (for the times when I’m away from my boombox, of course).
Read more about therapy with Brianna here.