When Nostalgia Backfires
By: Stav Dimitropoulos
Tags: Nostalgia, Health, Mental Health, Life, Psychology

When Nostalgia Backfires

Does reminiscing help us or hold us back?

Photo: Constance Bannister Corp/Getty Images

The sight of her husband baking bread has become all too familiar over the past six months to Sophia Yen, a California-based MD. He’ll spend hours in the kitchen doing what has now become a family event, as their youngest daughter loves to join to pat and push the dough together. Meanwhile, the couple has taken a renewed interest in music they listened to when they were high school sweethearts, circa the mid-’80s. “Depeche Mode, Take on Me by a-ha, and Michael Jackson! We also just recently watched live readings of The Princess Bride and Fast Times at Ridgemont High. It’s so stressful right now and these activities [give us some relief],” says Yen, who is the co-founder of a birth control delivery startup called Pandia Health. They harken back to the “good ol’ days,” she says.

Yen and her family aren’t the only ones looking to the past for comfort right now. A study from KU Leuven, a university in Belgium, found a significant increase in nostalgic consumption of music on Spotify during shutdowns. Another study, from the University of Central Lancashire in the U.K., categorized the feeling of nostalgia as one of the wellness benefits of viewing nature via a webcam during a shutdown. A June 2020 paper from Clemson University strongly recommended people adopt nostalgia as a coping mechanism amidst the shutdown. The Clemson study went on to offer an array of nostalgia-based tips (or “paths”) to battle the corona blues, such as replaying famous sporting events, classic films, and notable concerts from the past; playing traditional board games with friends and family; or baking bread and making fresh pasta together.

“[Nostalgia is] a reflection of a fairly stable, fairly knowable, and usually positive past, and that for a lot of people can help calm anxieties during the pandemic.”

The modern definition of nostalgia is “a sentimental longing or wistful affection for the past, typically for a period or place with happy personal associations.” “Nostalgia has a palliative impact,” says Gregory Ramshaw, PhD, associate professor at Clemson and co-author of the June paper. “It’s a reflection of a fairly stable, fairly knowable, and usually positive past, and that for a lot of people can help calm anxieties during the pandemic, when we are kind of looking at a fairly bleak future economically and socially.” Even long before the pandemic, science had already labeled nostalgia “a deeply social emotion,” something perhaps best experienced alongside others. “Many of the family nostalgic paths, for example watching old films together, or collective nostalgic paths, like seeing the Queen come out to carry out her duties in Great Britain, encourage getting together — ‘nostalgizing’ together,” says Ramshaw.

But the original meaning of nostalgia may be a bit less warm and fuzzy: The word comes from Greek words “nostos,” meaning return to one’s homeland, and “algos,” meaning pain. Between the 17th and 19th centuries, nostalgia was actually considered a psychopathological disorder, with its sufferers being sent to the countryside to “heal.”

In modern times, too, dwelling on the past can hurt. In her practice, Noel Hunter, PsyD, clinical psychologist and author of Trauma and Madness in Mental Health Services, has observed that the majority of people struggling with the ongoing shutdown are people who are clinging to the past, wishing things would go back to normal and weren’t what they are.

They try to cheer themselves up by remembering happier times of the past, which, Hunter says, can backfire. “Reminiscing turns to ruminating and generally just creates more misery as they blame themselves for setbacks and are not able to accept limitations. In doing so, they become angry, anxious, and depressed, with their brains literally fighting the present reality by trying to wish away what is,” she says.

The antidote, Hunter says, is staying present: letting go of what we can’t change and finding ways to bring joy, pleasure, meaning, and purpose to the here and now. This, of course, is the idea behind mindfulness, the act of being focused on the present moment. “Buddhists have been telling us for millennia that focusing on the past or future too much can bring about great suffering,” says Hunter.

But why are people like the ones Hunter is seeing in her practice experiencing negative effects that seem so counter to the body of research about nostalgia’s benefits? It may be that they’re not approaching the reminiscing with the right mindset.

“An important component of nostalgia is that it doesn’t just encourage individuals to reflect and remember a particular event, but that it also reminds them how they felt at the time, so tapping into how they felt when younger helps to remind them how to perceive the future more positively,” says Sean Gammon, PhD, reader at the University of Central Lancashire and co-author of the June nostalgia study.

Finding great pleasure in reminiscing and remembering fond times, but in balance, is not something Hunter is opposed to. “There is a reason why we keep pictures, videos, and mementos of past joys, and nostalgia in balance can be fruitful,” she says.

The majority of people struggling with the ongoing shutdown are people who are clinging to the past, wishing things would go back to normal and weren’t what they are.

And remember, Hunter suggests, that we’re creating memories now. “Ramshaw and Gammon’s paper says we should consider whether we are now creating our own future nostalgia,” she points out. That means we could eventually be grateful that we stayed present as best we could, and appreciated the best of what we have now, she says. “Humans have lived for tens of thousands of years through much, much worse, and have survived,” Hunter says.

Back in California, Yen is juggling family life and career at home — it’s stressful, she says, but her company is doing well. The shutdown has strained her, nonetheless. “I may need to pitch an investor and all of a sudden my Zoom volume goes down or my video’s not working, professionally embarrassing me and endangering my ability to get money for my company. And then a child may be screaming in the background,” she says. Yet she isn’t overly wistful about pre-pandemic times, either: “I definitely wouldn’t want us to return to the time when we had to pull an all nighter every single week at MIT with my husband; we do not want to do that! If anything, we want to go forward,” she says.

Still, experiencing nostalgia together with her family has proved to be a coping mechanism. They haven’t turned back the clock; they have just flushed bleakness out of their life by selectively picking out the memories they associate with happiness. Her husband will continue baking bread, and the whole family will go on enjoying her favorite childhood movies. “There is no black and white. Just gray,” Yen says while listening to a Cyndi Lauper song. “I think I’ll be nostalgic forever.”