Nostalgia: A Blessing or a Curse?
Image Courtesy: The New York Times
Do you remember your childhood house? Your childhood pet? What about your favorite song when you were a child? Or the TV show you used to watch all day? You let out a long sigh of sadness. “I miss the good old days,” you say to yourself. This is nostalgia. Defined as “a sentimental longing or wistful affection for the past, typically for a period or place with happy personal associations,” nostalgia, simply put, is the burning desire to go back to the past, when life was simple and not so complicated like it is now—before the innocence of the past had been shattered by reality. And it’s not just you who experiences it; every one of us experiences it at some point in life.
Humans experienced nostalgia throughout the past. During the Thirty Years’ War in the 17th century, Swiss soldiers were extremely wistful of their home just by the sounds of cowbells—which reminded them of the Alps—and the falling of leaves. In 1688, Swiss physician Johannes Hofer coined the term “nostalgia”—from the Greek nostos, or homecoming, and algos, or pain—to describe this phenomenon. Some of the victims of nostalgia had mild symptoms—melancholy, regret, loss of appetite, etc. Others, however, experienced what reached the extremities, like malnutrition, brain inflammation, and even suicide.
The method to treat these sufferers was uncertain and not agreed upon. French doctor Jourdan Le Cointe believed that nostalgia is best treated by “inciting pain and terror,” and indeed, some colonels threatened their soldiers that they would be buried alive if they felt nostalgia. During the United States Civil War, American military doctor Theodore Calhoun considered nostalgia as something to be ashamed of—that those who suffered from it were unmasculine and weak-willed. Hence, he proposed curing nostalgia with public ridicule and bullying. Other equivocal cures tried over the years include leeches, purging the stomach, and “warm hypnotic emulsions,” whatever unspeakable horrors those might’ve been. This was the way that nostalgia was perceived throughout history. People were repressed from “suffering” from early memories of their lives and were expected to toughen up and move on. But this would all change with two students’ lunch in 1999.
It was 1999, and Constantine Sedekides had just moved to the University of Southhampton. One day during lunch, he said to his colleague that he was feeling nostalgic about his home at the University of North Carolina—his old friends, the Tar Heel basketball games, and the sweet smells of autumn in Chapel Hill. His colleague, a clinical psychologist, immediately diagnosed Dr. Sedikedes as depressed. Even then, nostalgia had been associated with disease and disorder and was socially repressed. But Dr. Sedekides denied being depressed and insisted that he was in no pain. “I told him I did live my life forward, but sometimes I couldn’t help thinking about the past, and it was rewarding,” he later said. “Nostalgia made me feel that my life had roots and continuity. It made me feel good about myself and my relationships. It provided a texture to my life and gave me strength to move forward.” The colleague remained very skeptical but in the end, he was convinced. And Dr. Sedekides was so inspired by this experience that he decided to venture into a field—that today has become a prevalent field of neuroscience and psychology—to dive deeper into nostalgia, and even developed the Southampton Nostalgia Scale. And after a decade of study, nostalgia isn’t seen the same as it used to be—it’s viewed quite differently now.
Recent studies on nostalgia have shown uniformly that nostalgia helps counteract loneliness, anxiety, and other negative feelings. Moreover, it induces generosity among strangers and tolerance among outsiders. Couples feel closer and look happier when sharing nostalgic memories, and when cold, nostalgia literally makes people feel warmer. Now, nostalgia does have its painful side—its bittersweet, stinging emotion—but its overall effect on life is to make it more meaningful and death less frightening. Nostalgia is what promotes optimism about and hope for the future. It’s what reestablishes sensible, acute order within the hectic chaos of the present by which our lives are governed—what provides us with a new lens through which life can be seen.
So let me ask you again. Do you remember your old neighborhood? Your childhood friends? Or the scent of your favorite cotton candy as a child? What comes to mind? Grief? Homesickness? Regret? Or meaning? How you feel isn’t what’s significant. What is, however, is that you embrace the past. Let it be your companion in the present and the future. And as you live past moment by moment, add the special ones to your collection. Let your nostalgia guide you, rather than stop you, because it is, as Dr. Sedikides said, what “makes us a bit more human.”