Why are we nostalgic

Register or Log In. The Magazine Shop. Login Register Stay Curious Subscribe. Newsletter Sign up for our email newsletter for the latest science news.

Sign Up. Curl up in it like a warm blanket, covering all the cold unknowns and unexposed realities of tomorrow. Bury yourself in its warmth, the glowing days of pure joy and limited worries. The comfort of childhood and zero responsibility. Snuggling down into the abyss of better days and easy living? Those moments of childhood at the park. Those days of Pre-K with worries only of ice cream at snack time and after-school television.

Those perfect moments of carnival rides and Disney movies, absorbing only the purest and most joyous moments of life. Those perfect days followed by perfect nights when nothing went wrong and we were always happy.

The past is as elusive a dream as the future. Always distorted, always yearned for, and always seen as better days. It keeps us from the truth of the present and the pain of reality. However, like the unforeseeable future, the past itself is an idealized version of something we want it to be, not what we know as reality. The way we remember memories is constantly distorted. With this in mind, nostalgia is now regarded as a sort of in-built, psychological medicine, that people can take a dose of in order to conjure up the material they need.

Most often, nostalgia materialises memories of close relationships, or beloved places, making the person feel as though they are supported and strengthened by those dear to them.

Reflecting on past events can also aid mental states by serving as a reminder of the times difficult challenges or failures were overcome — the mind is simply serving a pep talk that states, if you did it then, then you can do it now.

For more exclusive access to what the city has to offer, engaging content, excellent imagery and thought provoking commentary on the life that surrounds you, subscribe to Denizen magazine now. Get the latest and greatest happenings in Auckland delivered straight to your inbox every Wednesday morning. Kindly share a little more insight into who you are below and one of our team will be in touch soon.

Physician J. Scheuchzer, who lived and worked around the same time as Hofer, had a similar view of nostalgia. However, he argued that it was not a result of an internal imbalance of the mind, but a condition influenced by external factors. For many centuries, doctors persisted in understanding nostalgia as a state of ill health that required treatment. However, views around its mechanisms and typology, as well as around which demographics it affected, kept shifting over the years.

In a paper from , Profs Wildschut, Sedikides, and their colleagues note that, throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, doctors thought nostalgia only affected the Swiss, since they mostly observed it in the Swiss mercenary soldiers that lent their services to foreign armies. In the early 19th century, however, physicians had begun to acknowledge it as a widespread condition that they saw as a form of melancholy or depression.

Throughout the 20th century, doctors kept changing their minds about the nature of nostalgia, though they mostly associated it with homesickness, an unhelpful psychological mechanism experienced by students and migrants unable to adapt to a new life away from home. Symptoms included anxiety, sadness, and insomnia. By the midth century, psychodynamic approaches considered nostalgia a subconscious desire to return to an earlier life stage, and it was labeled as a repressive compulsive disorder.

Soon thereafter, nostalgia was downgraded to a variant of depression, marked by loss and grief, though still equated with homesickness.

According to Profs Wildschut, Sedikides, and their colleagues, in the late 20th century, doctors and researchers started to differentiate between nostalgia and homesickness. They suggest homesickness became conflated with mental health issues, such as separation anxiety, whereas nostalgia began to be associated with idealized images of childhood or past happy times.