Sick at college and sick of college, I called her a little over two years ago and told her through dramatic sobs, “I want to go home, I want to go home—but not to LA or to our house, I want to go to some home I can’t picture or explain, a home that’s already gone.” I had thought it was in her job description to indulge her 19-year-old daughter’s bewildering heartbreak over absolutely nothing, but she responded, “That doesn’t make sense.” Before hanging up, she also said, “You’re fine.” I was and I wasn’t, and maybe I did need to hear that, but in either case I was not alone in that experience of nostalgia. I’m also not alone in thinking that, though its reputation is all about suffering, the emotion has its upsides.
Nostalgia was initially introduced as a disease that befell Swiss mercenaries in the 17th century, when the mercenaries were banned from singing the traditional song of Swiss herdsmen because it caused too much “mal du pays” (homesickness). In the Civil War, American army bands were similarly banned from playing “Home, Sweet Home” and some 5,000 soldiers were diagnosed with nostalgia—74 deaths were attributed to it.
It continued to be considered a pathological maladaptation until the late-70s, when researchers in psychology and neuroscience started gathering more and more evidence of the emotion’s benefits. Contrary to the advice I’ve collected over the years as a highly nostalgic child and adolescent—variations of “let it go,” “live in the moment,”—recent findings about this “sentimental longing for the past” are ultimately hopeful. The pain of returning home, even a home that no longer exists, and maybe never existed, turns out to be healing.
On a very basic level, nostalgia builds what researchers like to call self-continuity—the idea we need to have of ourselves as a cohesive whole, as beings that make some kind of sense. We tiny humans can’t viscerally understand time and space without our self-narratives, and we create those stories from revisiting all the ones we’ve lived.
Because returning to the past is how we find existential meaning in our lives (or fabricate it, if you’re feeling cynical), people who tend toward nostalgia have a greater sense of meaning in their lives than those who don’t. The nostalgic among us also have lower anxiety levels, and lesser fears of death—both in and outside the lab. Going backward in memory to the past makes us more hopeful about the future, and happier in the present. And aside from helping to keep us psychologically well, nostalgia also literally makes us feel more physically comfortable, a University of Southampton paper found. We respond to the cold the same way we respond to emotional cold; we get nostalgic, which makes us feel warmer, physiologically and psychologically.
The implications of this understanding of nostalgia as beneficial are boundless. Even being aware of the fact that nostalgia effectively and systematically combats loneliness is helpful on an individual level. Once I understood my strange and compulsive longing for some conception of home as a stretch back toward childhood, and for safer-feeling high school years, I could recognize that familiar longing as a heartening sign that I had felt whole, and fulfilled, that I would again when what I called my “sophomore slump” passed. Nostalgia protects and can even boost mental health in this way because as much as nostalgia is always about longing, it’s also always about belonging. Emily Dickinson’s catchy first line, “Where Thou art—that—is Home—” truly is the case for our psyches.
We can give ourselves self-worth and our lives meaning whenever we want thanks to the sometimes unbearable and sometimes relieving weight of our memories. Yearning for an unidentifiable home does “make sense,” but my mom was still right about what we are in the moments when we are overcome with nostalgia: fine—finer, in fact, than we were before it came along.