Those Were the Days
by Women’s Brain Health Initiative:
NOSTALGIA & HEALTHY AGING.
Looking through old photographs, listening to songs from your youth, attending class reunions, indulging in comfort food after a stressful week, or simply sitting back and experiencing the first snowfall of the season, all these emotional experiences can stir up feelings of specific events of time, place, people, and happy moments that brought meaning, purpose, and social connection of some kind to our lives. In a word, the thoughts and memories offer nostalgia, or sentimentality for a happy past.
While reminiscing can bring us joy, there is scientific evidence that nostalgia can also improve our mental health and possibly even help with healthy aging. Read on to learn how this works and get tips on how to use nostalgia to keep you healthy and happy.
NOSTALGIA’S MENTAL HEALTH BENEFITS
Julie Fleury, Professor at Arizona State University and the Center for Innovation, Healthy and Resilient Aging, studies nostalgia’s
impact on healthy aging. She explained in a June 2022 interview on the PBS show Arizona Horizon “that there is a mechanism that links the heart and the brain, and the muscles in the face to the recalling and the retelling of these stories” shared when people are experiencing nostalgia – noting that this is theoretical.
“What we found is that given the links between the heart and the brain, and cues of safety, that this is a mechanism that can be exercised. And it can strengthen social, physiological, and emotional outcomes over time.” In terms of how this can help with aging, Fleury said in that interview:
Nostalgia engages safety cues, thereby cultivating feeling safe and contributing to regulatory capabilities to support healthy aging.… It can strengthen things like motivation, which can help promote social and physical functioning. And that’s essential for our well-being later on in our lives.
TAKE THE GOOD, LEAVE THE BAD
Researchers have identified that there are two distinct types of nostalgia, both of which align with negative and positive emotional states and how we perceive our past. They are: reflective and restorative nostalgia.
Restorative nostalgia evokes positive feelings about our past with a desire to recreate it, and as a result serves as a driver that motivates us to pursue similar new possibilities and experiences. Reflective nostalgia, however, recognizes and acknowledges that the past is the past and does not seek to recreate the experiences. This type of nostalgia can often leave us sad and regretful with less optimism for the positive experiences that can still be explored.
Examples of restorative nostalgia include getting together for the holidays, celebrating socially with friends and family, or travelling to a familiar destination. The energy we get from this type of reflective experience is often positive and exciting and motivates us to create more similarly fulfilling experiences.
Examples of reflective nostalgia include grieving the death of a loved one, a breakup or divorce, a personal or professional failure, or battling with mental health or depression and anxiety. This can be a heavy weighted form of reflection that makes us feel sad, disappointed, and resentful that the present does not compare with our recollection of memories.
AS A RESULT OF THE EMOTIONAL POWER BOTH TYPES OF NOSTALGIA CAN HAVE ON AN INDIVIDUAL, IT IS IMPORTANT TO ENSURE THAT WE TRY TO HAVE THE RIGHT BALANCE BETWEEN REFLECTIVE AND RESTORATIVE EXPERIENCES.
To help us do that we need to keep perspective, accept and harness our reality, and seek the necessary caution, healing, and help if required. For example, there are those that may have experienced significant trauma that might be triggered by nostalgia causing painful memories. It is important not to stay stuck in a state of reflective nostalgia, focused on the “what ifs” and making it difficult to push through and be open to what the future may hold.
On the flip side, when motivated by restorative nostalgia to recreate experiences and do something productive, it is just as important not to attempt to do the impossible and put pressure on ourselves to completely replicate past experiences.
We must learn to enjoy the memories and use them as motivation to create more, but also be a realist and try not to make decisions based on nostalgic memories alone. As the famous saying by Roy T. Bennett goes, “… the past is a place of learning, not a place of living.”
NOSTALGIA CAN HELP US LIVE FULFILLING LIVES
German psychoanalyst Erik Erikson famously created the Eight Stages of Psychosocial Development as the foundation for explaining how the positive and negative impacts of socialization are constructed in childhood, beginning with trust and then independence, all the way to the final stage of reflection, which revolves around looking back and assessing one’s life and its meaning and purpose.
In his paper, “Music, Nostalgia, and Wellness in the Care of Older Adults,” published in 2019 by the University of Chicago’s Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice, musician, composer, and educator John Moulder argued that “nostalgia can be effectively employed in the process of reviewing one’s life.”
Moulder cited University of Southampton psychology professors, Constantine Sedikides and Tim Wildschut, who he noted have conducted extensive research on nostalgia and the important association it has with older people’s sense of belonging, self-acceptance, and hope.
He explained they have found through their research over nearly 20 years that, “the act of nostalgizing… is indicative of those who find meaning in their lives and a sense of value in the key episodes of their existence. This active cultivation of nostalgia generates a memory form that ‘pertains to momentous or cultural-lifescript occurrences.’” He then noted they said that,
BY INCREASING SOCIAL CONNECTEDNESS AND SELF-CONTINUITY, AND THAT BY ‘ENRICHING PEOPLE’S LIVES WITH MEANING, NOSTALGIA CONTRIBUTES TO MOTIVATED GOAL PURSUIT, PSYCHOLOGICAL EQUANIMITY, AND PSYCHOLOGICAL OR EVEN PHYSICAL HEALTH.
Nostalgia is also thought to help our aging health because as cited in a 2016 study by Dr. Kentaro Oba and colleagues in Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, it can play a key role in psychological resilience. Dr. Abo and co-authors also noted that researchers have used neuroimaging to show that when people are experiencing nostalgia there is a relationship between memory and reward systems.
The bottom line is that science and our experience tell us that we must not let nostalgia get us “stuck” in the past and undermine growth and progress for our future, but we certainly can use nostalgia to our advantage and relish in the positive feelings of self-esteem and social connectedness that it can offer, which can help us avoid possible feelings of loneliness and despondency.
So, consider adding activities that boost nostalgia to your regular routines; it is a relatively simple and easy practice to create and maintain.
NOSTALGIA AND YOUTHFULNESS
Want to feel a bit younger and healthier? Nostalgia may help. Research from a 2016 study by Drs. Andrew Abeyta and Clay Routledge found that nostalgic memories, as opposed to ordinary autobiographical memories, made people feel more youthful. And they also found that “nostalgia-induced youthfulness in turn predicted the extent to which participants felt healthy, confident about their physical abilities, and optimistic about their future health.”
HOW TO EXPERIENCE NOSTALGIA
In an effort to increase your mood and health, even when social opportunities are limited, try the following activities to bring about the positive uplifting feelings of nostalgia.
Flip through photos
Whether your photos are in scrapbooks (a multimillion-dollar industry built on people capturing memories and creating nostalgia), or you are flipping through photos on your phone, the experience is guaranteed to bring joy and smiles to your heart and mind.
Call or visit an old friend
Conversations with a friend can trigger nostalgia by reminding oneself of events of the past, resulting in engaging social connection, happiness, and gratitude.
Listen to music
Music has a significant way of bringing back memories. A wedding song or even a top 40 tune can trigger a feeling of nostalgia. In fact, we can often associate a specific song or genre of music with a particular period of our life and that is because science has proven that songs stimulate our visual cortex, which links the audio of a song with what we were experiencing at a moment in time. If you played the same song over and over again while getting ready with your friends when you were young, then you are likely to be brought back to that time when you hear it.
Watch a favourite movie
Whether it is an old classic, a funny family favourite, or a traditional holiday movie, the experience and visual stimulation of watching and reminiscing over movies is a definite nostalgia trigger.
Go for a drive
Revisiting old neighbourhoods and seeing the growth and changes (or not) while out for a drive is a great stimulus for reflection. Discussion about development in the area, the houses and locations of old friends and neighbours, and the route to schools, for instance, can bring up nostalgic memories.
Go through your closet
A simple quick fix for some nostalgia that does not require going anywhere or preparation logistics, is to look through your old clothes. The sense of touch is a powerful trigger for nostalgia, as that tactile sensation – say by holding a glittery dress you wore to a fancy party – triggers brain activity.
Try some favourite recipes
Food has long been linked to emotion, and the nostalgia one can get from a familiar meal, drink, or simple taste is undeniable. To trigger some nostalgia, it is a nice idea to make a favourite recipe from your childhood, or one that is usually saved for special occasions and holidays, to lift your spirits and your health.
Explore your sense of smell
Take the time to smell some flowers, particular spices, old perfumes, or generate your own smells by enjoying a scented candle or diffuser and reflect on any memories the aromas might stimulate. Scents have a way of flooding our brain with memories of a particular experience.
According to the article “Why Smells Bring Back Such Vivid Memories,” by Ana Sandoiu and published in July 2018 on MedicalNewsToday.com, there is a pathway between a part of your brain called the anterior olfactory nucleus, which receives information about things you smell, and the area of your brain where memory and emotions are processed. In fact, noted Sandoiu, researchers have labelled the ability of smell to trigger memories as the “Proust effect” due to how close the olfactory processing system is to the memory hub in the brain.