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The trick to nostalgia is to enjoy it in moderation. Reminiscing about the past has plenty of upsides… so long as you don’t completely shut out the present.
It can lift your spirits, empower you, make you more resilient, and remind you of your roots as well as your values. It can also be a steady source of motivation, optimism, and creativity. Moreover, through nostalgia, you can find ways to connect with others socially, and it can even help you process traumatic events.
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However, if you overindulge in nostalgia, you may end up lowering the quality of your life. By shutting out what’s currently happening, you’re avoiding living in the present.
This, in turn, means that you’re missing out on various life opportunities, and your meaningful, positive relationships might suffer, too.
According to WebMD, you might find it difficult to appreciate what you currently have in life if you give in to nostalgia and focus too much on reliving your ‘glory days.’
Again, nostalgia has its upsides. But it’s also healthy to show gratitude for the present and develop a bit of optimism about the future.
Nostalgia can be either historical or personal. Personal nostalgia focuses on you revisiting moments from your life.
Meanwhile, historical nostalgia means that you’re so dissatisfied with the present that you’re yearning for a time in the past when society was different.
In some cases, you might yearn for a time that preceded your birth. This is called anemoia.
The issue here is that the past is often romanticized, and the incredibly aesthetic version of it you want to experience may not have existed. Or you might remember the past differently from how other people would.
As Yağmur Karakaya, PhD, assistant professor of sociology at Yale University, explained to WebMD, memory is very malleable. And so, groups of people can have different interpretive memories of the same events.
In some cases, nostalgia can help people process traumatic experiences and move on from them.
“Nostalgia, the personal kind, has been associated with very healthy aspects of well-being such as empathy, compassion, forgiveness, social connectedness, belonging … anxiety reduction, continuity of self, [and] optimism,” Krystine Batcho, PhD, a professor of psychology at Le Moyne College, told WebMD.
What’s more, nostalgia can help you maintain your emotional stability when things get tough or you get overwhelmed with negative feelings.
“Nostalgia is an excellent choice for that. Because, by definition, it is itself bittersweet. And so, it’s one of the few parts of the way our brain and our mind function that tries to blend, or put together, conflicting forces, in this case, emotions,” Batcho said.
