Happy memories have a uniquely protective power against a sad present.

Psychologists have defined nostalgia as a self-conscious, social emotion, bittersweet but predominantly positive. It develops out of happy memories mixed with a yearning for the past and the close relationships we had back then. Often, nostalgia involves sensory stimuli. For example, the smell of autumn leaves might provoke an intense longing for your childhood home. Neuroscientists have found that it is a complex cognitive phenomenon involving many parts of the brain, including some that are implicated in self-reflection, autobiographical memory, emotional regulation, and reward processing.

Almost everyone experiences nostalgia, although its object tends to vary throughout life. One survey conducted by the psychologist Krystine Irene Batcho found that younger people felt more nostalgia for pets, toys, and holidays than did older people, who felt it more strongly for music. I came of age in the 1980s, and even songs I found hopelessly annoying back then—say, the torturous 1982 hit “Maneater,” by Hall & Oates—can fill me with nostalgic sentiment.

As my colleague Julie Beck has written, nostalgia was originally viewed as an emotional malady when it was first defined in the late 17th century. And, crucially, it often occurs when people are experiencing negative moods or having bad experiences. Loneliness can be a trigger, as researchers found in 2008. Another is bad weather. Or Hall & Oates.

However, despite its association with negative emotions, nostalgia does not cause or exacerbate unhappiness. Rather, nostalgia is a defense response to unhappiness, one that brings relief from a negative mood. Psychologists writing in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 2006 found that provoking nostalgia in experiments strengthened people’s social bonds, boosted their positive feelings about themselves, and improved their mood. Similar research has shown that when people feel nostalgia, it can bolster their sense of life’s meaning, lower an existential reaction to the idea of death, increase spirituality, and raise optimism.

Scholars aren’t sure exactly why nostalgia works; some have speculated that reminiscing about happy memories affirms “valued aspects of the self” in situations when we might otherwise feel lonely or unworthy. Either way, its emotional intensity allows the joy of the past to overpower the unpleasantness of the present, a little nugget of escapism that helps get us through the bad times.

No matter how nostalgia works, the science to date finds more than enough evidence to conclude that it is good for us. Given its benefits, we could all gain from nurturing it consciously so we’re better prepared to counteract bad moods when they arise. 

Build traditions.

A researcher writing in the Harvard Business Review in 2021 made the case that nostalgia can help build strong bonds in groups. I’ve seen this happen myself: At Harvard, I regularly speak to alumni gatherings, including to retirees who graduated from business school 60 and even 70 years ago. The participants get intense joy from seeing their classmates and reminiscing about their old times together. They laugh at memories that are objectively mundane and tear up at simple stories of ordinary things they saw and did together.

We can forge more of these strong bonds in our families, friend groups, and workplaces by creating traditions and rituals and recalling them as the years go by. Create “holidays” around events you experienced with others in the past, such as sports you played as kids or the formation of a friend group in a big city after college. Mark the occasion regularly, so people have something to look forward to. The occasion you’re celebrating doesn’t even have to be purely wonderful; for what it’s worth, alumni seem to be just as nostalgic about terrible classes as they are about the good ones.

Perhaps because it is so powerful and complex, nostalgia has received magical treatment from poets and writers. “The past is hidden somewhere outside the realm, beyond the reach of intellect,” Marcel Proust wrote. On a fourth-century-B.C. Greek tablet we find the anonymous inscription “‘I am parched with thirst and I perish. Give me quickly / the cool water flowing from the Lake of Memory.’ / And of their own accord they will give you to drink from the holy spring.” ■

By Arthur C. Brooks

MARCH 9, 2023 | 690 words