27 Nov 2022
Why Do We Feel Nostalgia?
It’s that time of year. Perhaps not for those of us in sunny Southern California where i’m recording this, but where the weather starts to turn and we start spending more and more time indoors and by ourselves. The sun starts setting before you’re home from work, and you find yourself thinking about the good old days to escape the dark and gloomy ones you feel you’re in now. That’s nostalgia…
And the warm glow you feel thinking back to those summer nights? That was investigated in southern China by Xinyue Zhou of Sun Yat-Sen University. Through tracking students over the course of a month, she and colleagues found (https://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/09/science/what-is-nostalgia-good-for-quite-a-bit-research-shows.html) that feelings of nostalgia were more common on cold days. The researchers also found that people in a cool room (68 degrees Fahrenheit) were more likely to nostalgize than people in warmer rooms.
While not everyone in the cool room turned nostalgic during the experiment, the ones who did reported feeling warmer. That mind-body link, Dr. Wildschut says, means that nostalgia might have had evolutionary value to our ancestors long before Odysseus.
In recent years, the science around nostalgia has done a complete 180* turn on an emotion which used to be thought of as a terrible affliction. Nostalgia had been considered a disorder ever since the term was coined by a 17th-century Swiss physician who attributed soldiers’ mental and physical maladies to their longing to return home — nostos in Greek, and the accompanying pain, algos.
Nostalgia seems to be triggered in moments of loneliness, or boredom. In times of feeling generally negative emotions, nostalgia may come to us as a sort of psychological safety net. Studies show nostalgia can increase feelings of social connectedness and enhance meaning in our lives.
This curious cause and effect has produced theories that nostalgia may serve as our mind’s way of affect regulation, or more simply put: making ourselves feel better. When we are feeling down, lonely, or bored, our minds may be drawn to times when life was full of adventure, love, and family. This can counteract our initial emotional state, and leave us feeling hopeful about our futures and ourselves. If it happened in the past, it can happen again.
However, nostalgia may not have this effect on everybody. Or rather, not everybody experiences nostalgia the same way. Not only do the initial mental states of people contribute to the effects nostalgia can have on them, but they can also contribute to how they “nostalgize.” For example, someone prone to worrying may have nostalgia, but experience it as simply comparing the rosy past to their current loneliness and coming to the conclusion that the past was better. Now say a non-worrier had nostalgia, but they see the rosy past in an existential way. Instead of thinking, “the past was better” like the worrier, the non-worrier might be thinking, “The past was full of great times. Look how far I’ve come, and how much I have to look forward to.” Apparently seeing the glass half-full or half-empty also applies to how we see and feel about our past, and not just what is going on in our present. The comparison will not benefit, say, the elderly in a nursing home who don’t see their future as bright. But if they focus on the past in an existential way — ‘What has my life meant?’ — then they can potentially benefit from nostalgia as well.
LINKS:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/25094961
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/09/science/what-is-nostalgia-good-for-quite-a-bit-research-shows.html
https://arraybc.com/exploring-nostalgia-does-it-have-positive-or-negative-effects-on-mental-health
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-nostalgia-is-good-for-you/
