Why can your family always PUSH YOUR BUTTONS?

What is it about that trip ‘home’? You might have spent the past 12 months negotiating pay rises, planning projects, balancing family calendars. Yet within minutes of stepping over your parents’ threshold, you're back to teenage you — cringing at your brother's annoying jokes, bristling at your dad's questions, eating crisps before dinner.

- ANNE FLETCHER

You feel yourself shrinking – fuming at an offhand comment, craving approval, or falling into a familiar role you thought you’d long outgrown. Why do families have this power to affect us so much?

Clinical psychologist Dr Sophie Mort, mental health expert at Headspace, calls it emotional time travel. ‘The smells, songs, foods, and rooms where we first learned who we were act like keys that open old emotional programmes,’ she explains.

‘Even if you now have a high-powered job and pay a mortgage, a single whiff of your family’s tree or the sound of a parent’s footsteps can cue a younger state – seeking approval, bristling at rules, or slipping into the family role you once held.’

It’s as if our adult selves step quietly aside, while our childhood patterns take the wheel, and all-too frequently steer us right off course.

The science of emotional time travel

But having a strong reaction to returning to your family home isn’t just nostalgic sentimentality – it’s a neurological chain reaction. ‘Place is a powerful context cue,’ explains Dr Mort. ‘The hippocampus links memories to locations, and the amygdala tags those memories with emotion.’

That’s why the scent of your mum’s laundry detergent can trigger a rush of feeling before you even form a thought. The nervous system doesn’t wait for permission; it simply recognises where you are and loads the old settings. In other words, your body knows it’s home before your mind catches up. All these sensory cues tug at the deep wiring that formed long before your adult identity did.

Not always a bad thing

There’s a tendency to talk about this regression as something shameful — as if reverting to our younger selves means we’ve failed at adulthood. Dr Mort disagrees.