How Nostalgia Went From a ‘Disease’ to a Therapy

In the 17th century, nostalgia was viewed as a disorder.

pisaphotography/Shutterstock

We all know that familiar feeling we get when looking through old photos, listening to songs from our past, or telling old stories. Memories come to mind, we start to reminisce and long for days gone by, and we’re left with a feeling of nostalgia.

But what’s really happening internally when we feel this way? And what does it mean?

Most of us welcome nostalgic feelings and find in them a brief respite from recent troubles. But thinkers in the past didn’t share the same rosy view.

Story continues below advertisement

Johannes Hofer, the 17th-century Swiss physician who coined the term, conceptualized this feeling as a disease, pointing to its tendency to evoke episodes of weeping, insomnia, and anxiety.

Even the word nostalgia—from the Greek words “nostos” (“homecoming”) and “algos” (“pain”)—alludes to something negative: the pain of a return home. However, modern people don’t view nostalgia so negatively, and more recent research has instead begun to illuminate its positive effect on our minds.

Nostalgia’s Positive Nature

Despite its past characterization as a disorder, nostalgia is actually quite a common experience. Surveying a group of undergraduates, researchers from the University of Southampton in the UK and the Archbridge Institute in Washington conducted a study and found that 79 percent of people experienced nostalgia at least once per week and an additional 17 percent at least once per month. When asked about the content of their experiences, participants overwhelmingly mentioned people close to them and highly social, positive, and meaningful life events.

Not only did participants describe nostalgic memories as emotionally positive, but they also described how even predominantly negative events from their past gained a redemptive value and became positive. The discrepancy between this recent research and past conceptions of nostalgia has led researchers to wonder: Might there be some therapeutic value in the experience of nostalgia?

What Makes Nostalgia Therapeutic?

Clay Routledge, an existential psychologist and one of the researchers from Archbridge Institute, said he thinks there might be. He’s spent his career investigating nostalgia, and his research team has found that feelings of meaninglessness, loneliness, and negative mood tend to predict feelings of nostalgia. In short, when we feel psychologically threatened, we’re more likely to experience feelings of nostalgia—but not the other way around.

These studies point to the idea that our feelings of nostalgia might be a mechanism that serves to protect us from psychological harm. “Nostalgia is a resource for psychological health ... [that] promotes adaptive psychological functioning among individuals at risk for poor mental health,” Routledge wrote in his paper. If we become nostalgic when threatened by negativity, loneliness, or meaninglessness, then our experience of nostalgia could be a safety rope that pulls us back to the surface.

Story continues below advertisement

Routledge and University of Southampton researchers further explored this idea in the study mentioned above, in which two groups of participants were asked to think about and write down either a “nostalgic event” or an “ordinary event” from their past. When given a battery of emotional tests afterward, those who recorded a nostalgic event scored significantly higher on measures of positive emotion, positive self-regard, and social connectedness than those who recorded an ordinary event.

These three measures are critical components of a sense of meaning in life, which is in and of itself an integral part of psychological health. Research has found that the feeling that life is meaningful helps us cope with stress, shun depression and anxiety, and reduce other problematic behaviors.

Why We Find Meaning in the Past

Routledge and his team found the correlation between nostalgia and high levels of meaning in life through a simple experiment. Participants wrote down songs they found nostalgic and then went home. One week later, they were called back into the lab and given some song lyrics to read. Those who read the lyrics from one of the songs they had listed as nostalgic reported that their life felt more meaningful afterward than those who read lyrics to the same song but without feeling any nostalgia toward it.

Furthermore, the research team found that much of this variation in feelings of life meaning could be attributed to social connection. In other words, those who felt greater meaning in life after experiencing nostalgia felt this way—at least in part—because of a deeper connection to others.

The relationship between social connection and well-being has been extensively documented and suggests that those with deeper social connections report improved well-being. In a paper published in 2021 in Emotion, Routledge and co-authors found that well-being increases with age for those prone to nostalgia but not for those not prone to it. Our memories, the researchers contend, are an “indispensable resource ... that can evoke nostalgia and remind [us] of [our] value, ability, and belonging.”

Considering more recent research, it appears Hofer got it backward: It’s not that nostalgia is the cause of psychological disturbances, but rather, it’s the disturbances that trigger nostalgia. Routledge and his co-authors claim as much in their statement that “nostalgia is a psychological resource—not a liability.”

If integrated correctly, this natural mechanism may become a versatile tool in our attempts to live a full, meaningful life.