Nostalgia (from the Greek nostos, meaning homecoming and algos, meaning pain), is defined most often as “a wistful or excessively sentimental yearning for return to some past period or irrecoverable experience.” Sometimes that yearning feels pleasant. Other times, it brings up questions of “what if” or anxiety about something left unsaid or undone. Needless to say, it is a multi-faceted and complex emotion, often described using the oxymoronic term bittersweet. This blog seeks to provide insight into the benefits and potential consequences of engaging with nostalgic feelings alongside strategies to help that engagement feel more sweet than bitter. 

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Nostalgia Was Once Classified as a Mental Illness 

The term nostalgia was coined by the Swiss physician Johannes Hofer in the 17th century. At the time, it was viewed as a neurological disease that mainly affected soldiers and included such symptoms as obsessive thoughts of home, weeping spells, anorexia, and insomnia. Nostalgia evolved to be seen as a form of melancholy or depression by the early 19th century, and remained closely tied to homesickness until the 1900s, when the definition began to broaden from simply the experience of longing for a distant place to a distant time. It has also slowly taken on a more positive connotation, as something that is often linked with happy memories and a feeling of connection with our past. 

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What Triggers Nostalgic Feelings? 

The most common culprits are sensory stimuli (think sounds, sights, and scents).  Social interactions with long-time friends or life transitions can also activate nostalgia. From a neurological science perspective, research has shown that nostalgia activates the brain regions associated with self-reflection, autobiographical memory (our ability to store and retrieve facts, ideas, and events), regulation processing, and reward. By regulating brain activity in these regions, nostalgia can act as protection against various threats, both physical and psychological. 

Other Potential Benefits

1. It Can Produce A Natural High: When we revisit happy memories, our brains release dopamine, which can help reduce feelings of stress and/or anxiety.
2. It Can Enhance A Sense of Meaning: When we are experiencing feelings of sadness, loneliness, and meaninglessness, nostalgia can serve as a reminder that despite current challenges, life is much bigger as a whole and full of meaning-providing experiences, which can inspire a more hopeful mindset. 
3. It Can Affirm Social Belonging: Nostalgia can act as a motivator to prioritize important relationships. It can also encourage us to reconnect with the world around us or resolve interpersonal conflicts.
4. It Can Boost Creativity: Studies show that reflecting on the past, and the sense of safety provided by positive memories, can promote openness to new ideas or offer access to more experiences to mine from. 

Potential Consequences

1. It Can Paint an Idealized Version of the Past: Nostalgia has been described as a “form of self-deception” in which we tend to erase the pieces that were boring or difficult in favor of a more romanticized view 
2. It Can Cause Stagnation: Too much time thinking about or “stuck in” the past hinders our reception to new experiences and progress
3. It Can Serve as a Negative Coping Strategy: If we engage with the past in a ruminative way, we run the risk of using the comfort of memories as a tactic to escape the present and avoid current challenges. 
4. It Can Exacerbate Symptoms of Anxiety and/or Depression: Guilt, loneliness, sadness, and worry can increase when we engage with nostalgia in an unhealthy way.

A Bittersweet Symphony 

In her 2001 book The Future of Nostalgia, artist, novelist and cultural theorist Svetlana Boym described two kinds of nostalgia: Restorative and Reflective. 

She argued that when we engage with restorative nostalgia, we are (impossibly) looking to rebuild what we have lost, or relive the past. It is aligned more closely with Hofer’s original (pathological) description of the term. Reflective nostalgia, on the other hand, is a practice of focusing on the feelings of longing and loss and the “imperfect process of remembrance.” It is a practice of acceptance that the past is gone, while recognizing the mix of imperfect memories and emotions evoked. 

With that in mind, here are some tips to engaging with nostalgia more reflectively:

• Check In With Yourself: This one seems simple but when nostalgia strikes, try to stay in tune with the additional feelings that the memory and your thoughts around it are bringing to the forefront. Are you ruminating or trending towards sadness? This is evidence that it may not be the most productive exercise at the moment. 
• Engage With It In More Social Settings: Going through photo albums or watching an old TV show can feel comforting, but can also promote loneliness if done alone. If you participate with others, it can lead to deeper conversations and the creation of new memories alongside revisiting the past.
• Remember That Your Brain Plays Tricks On You: Famous French novelist and literary critic Marcel Proust stated that the “remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were.” When you slip into a state of reminiscence, it is important to keep in mind that you are often participating in selective memory, which can lead to a tendency to compare the present to a past that never really existed. 
• Use It To Practice Gratitude: If you are finding yourself wishing that something from the past was still present or true, try reframing the wish to foster gratitude for the experience and its contribution to your present self. 

Evolutionarily, our brains are wired to think in black or white and, as such, it can be a struggle to engage in the dialectical thinking necessitated with nostalgia. But if we can learn to integrate both the bitter and the sweet aspects of our memories without placing too much emphasis on trying to recreate or relive past experiences, we can learn to use this complex emotion in beneficial ways.

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References

• Feeling Nostalgic? Your Brain is Hardwired to Crave It
• Nostalgia in America
• Patterns of Brain Activity Associated with Nostalgia: A Social-Cognitive Neuroscience Perspective
• The Two Faces of Nostalgia
• Those Happy Golden Years: Coping with Memories That Bring More Pain Than Peace
• When Nostalgia Was a Disease