A regular bucket list points forward: places to see, things to try, experiences still missing from a life in progress. A reverse bucket list flips the direction. Instead of listing what’s still out there, you write down what you’ve already done, survived, or been given, a trip taken, a friendship that held, a hard year gotten through. It’s a genuinely new label for an old idea, and it’s worth being upfront that “reverse bucket list” itself isn’t a term that shows up in peer-reviewed research. What does show up, in a fairly substantial body of psychology research going back two decades, is evidence that deliberately recalling positive memories, done a certain way, has measurable effects on mood and stress.
The clearest experimental support comes from psychologist Fred Bryant and colleagues at Loyola University Chicago, who published a two-part study in the Journal of Happiness Studies in 2005. In the first part, they found that people who more frequently engaged in positive reminiscing reported a greater overall ability to enjoy life. In the second part, they ran an actual experiment: college students were randomly assigned to spend ten minutes, twice a day for a week, either mentally reliving pleasant memories, looking through mementos tied to pleasant memories, or simply thinking about their current concerns as a control group. Both reminiscing groups reported a bigger increase in how much of the week they’d spent feeling happy than the control group did, and the group using pure mental imagery, actively picturing the memory rather than handling an object tied to it, improved more than the group using keepsakes.
A separate line of research helps explain why this might work at a physiological level, not just a self-reported one. In 2017, psychologists Nicole Speer and Mauricio Delgado published a study in Nature Human Behaviour in which participants completed a stressful task and were then asked to recall either a positive memory or a neutral one. Recalling a positive memory measurably dampened the rise in cortisol, the body’s primary stress hormone, compared with recalling a neutral one. The effect showed up in the body’s chemistry, not just in how people described feeling afterward, which is part of why this study gets cited often as evidence that positive reminiscence isn’t just a pleasant feeling but something with a physiological signature.
It would be tidy to stop there, but a more recent and, frankly, less flattering strand of research complicates the picture. In 2020, researchers Matthew Sachs, Arthur Stone and Norbert Schwarz at the University of Southern California, working with David Newman, tracked people’s moods and nostalgic feelings as they occurred naturally across ordinary days, rather than assigning people to reminisce on a schedule in a lab. On days when people reported feeling nostalgic, they also reported feeling more stressed, lonelier, and less satisfied with their lives, along with more regret and rumination, the opposite pattern from what the earlier lab studies found. A separate 2012 study led by Bas Verplanken.pdf) found that habitual worriers specifically, people with a strong dispositional tendency to worry, showed more anxiety and depression after a nostalgia exercise than habitual worriers in a control condition. Put together, these findings suggest the effect of dwelling on the past isn’t uniform. It seems to depend heavily on how the recall happens, deliberately and briefly versus something that arrives unbidden and gets picked at, and on who’s doing the recalling, since people prone to worry or rumination may turn a happy memory into a comparison that makes the present feel worse by contrast.
That distinction maps reasonably well onto what a reverse bucket list, done well, is actually asking someone to do: a short, deliberate, structured act of recording specific good things, closer to the format Bryant’s experiment tested than to the kind of unplanned, drifting nostalgia the USC researchers were measuring. It also overlaps with the “three good things” exercise from psychologist Martin Seligman and colleagues, in which participants wrote down three good things that had happened each day for a week and, in some cases, kept reporting less depression and more happiness up to six months later. None of this is proof that any specific reverse bucket list will work the same way for any specific person. The research is a patchwork of related but separate studies, on different exercises, different timeframes, and different populations, not a single trial of the exact practice as it’s marketed today.
What the research does support, cautiously, is a real distinction between two ways of looking backward. Briefly and deliberately recalling specific good things you’ve lived through, in a way that closes with acknowledgment rather than longing, shows up across multiple studies as something that can genuinely lift mood and buffer stress. Passively dwelling on the past, especially for someone already prone to worry, doesn’t show the same benefit and can move in the opposite direction. A reverse bucket list, in other words, seems to work when it functions less like nostalgia and more like a short, specific inventory: a list, not a mood.