A shared universe › Blog › Nostalgia, better than it seems · Español
For almost two centuries, nostalgia was a medical diagnosis. Today it is an emotion that almost everyone recognises: a smell, a song or an old photo and, suddenly, you are back in another time with a mixture of sweetness and sadness.
The word was coined in 1688 by Johannes Hofer, a young Swiss medical student, in his thesis in Basel. He joined two Greek words, return and pain, as an equivalent of the German word Heimweh, something like “home pain”, to name the suffering of someone forcibly separated from their family and their homeland.
For a long time it was treated as a disease. Doctors on Napoleon’s campaigns described it in soldiers recruited far from home, and in 1909 the psychiatrist Karl Jaspers devoted his doctoral thesis to it, according to the historians of psychiatry Filiberto Fuentenebro and Carmen Valiente, of the Complutense University of Madrid. Little by little it stopped being seen as an ailment and became what we understand today: an ordinary, bittersweet emotion.
And quite a universal one. In 2014, a study of 1,704 students from 18 countries found that people’s idea of nostalgia was very similar in all of them.
The psychologists Constantine Sedikides and Tim Wildschut, of the University of Southampton in England, have been studying it for some twenty years. In 2006 they published, with Jamie Arndt and Clay Routledge, seven studies on what nostalgia is, what awakens it and what it is for.
When they analysed nostalgic accounts, they saw that the person almost always appeared surrounded by others, by friends or family, or at important moments such as a wedding. There was more joy than sadness in what was told. And often the memory followed a curious path: it began with something difficult and ended well, as if memory fondly kept the times when things worked out.
Those same studies showed that nostalgia comes more when your mood is low or when you miss company. It also comes with cold: in 2012, a team led by Xinyue Zhou, of Sun Yat-sen University in China, together with Sedikides and Wildschut, saw that people felt more nostalgia on cold days and in a cold room. The curious part came afterwards: those who recalled something nostalgic found the room warmer and put up better with intense cold.
At other times it is set off by a song, a smell or a gathering with the usual people. With the shorter days and the first cold evenings of autumn, it may appear more often.
The most interesting thing is what it seems to be for. In the 2006 studies, remembering something with nostalgia improved mood, the way people saw themselves and the feeling of being connected to others.
In 2008, Zhou, Sedikides, Wildschut and Ding-Guo Gao studied its relationship with loneliness. Loneliness made people feel less supported by others, but it also awakened nostalgia, and nostalgia partly restored that feeling of support. It is as if memory goes looking for those who loved us just when we most need them. The effect was clearer in people who usually recover better from setbacks. If loneliness is what leads you to remember, it may help to read about unwanted loneliness.
In 2011, Clay Routledge and his colleagues found that nostalgia increases the feeling that life has meaning, precisely because it reminds us that we have been connected to others. And a study published in 2024, with 2,606 people from 28 countries, found that these effects were repeated in very different cultures, though with differences from one country to another.
It is not all good news. In 2020, David Newman and his colleagues, of the University of Southern California, measured nostalgia in daily life, asking people at different times of the day. Outside the laboratory, spells of nostalgia went with a worse mood, and the next day the effect was still rather negative. Their conclusion is that nostalgia is a mixed emotion: it tends to be sweet when you remember something on purpose and more bitter when it arrives on its own, perhaps because it tends to appear when something is wrong.
For some people it sits worse. Bas Verplanken, of the University of Bath, saw in 2012 that in those who tend to worry a lot, remembering with nostalgia improved mood at first, but afterwards more signs of anxiety and sadness appeared. His explanation is that the contrast between a peaceful past and an uneasy present made them brood more over everything.
And the psychologist Krystine Batcho has described an anticipatory nostalgia: missing the present before it is over. Unlike nostalgia for the past, it is associated with difficulty enjoying the moment and with more sadness and worry. When the memory becomes a circle you cannot get out of, it is closer to rumination than to nostalgia.
With what is known, there are ways to keep the good part:
If the sadness does not go away and begins to weigh on your day-to-day life, talk to your doctor.
Perhaps, as you read this, someone has come to mind. Write in a few words what they gave you, on a “For someone” or a “For someone who is gone” star. Remembering is also a way of giving thanks.