What is nostalgia?

Nostalgia is our reflection of cherished memories. Nostalgic memories typically involve family members, close friends, or loving partners. Smell, touch and music have all proven to evoke nostalgia and researchers at the University of Southampton have discovered that nostalgia is linked to the physical feeling of warmth. In a study, researchers found that nostalgia can help combat feelings of loneliness.

Nostalgia refers to those wistful, sentimental feelings that surface when you recall significant experiences, relationships, places, and other bits of the past. It often inspires positive emotions -- a sense of meaningfulness or life purpose, social connection, and optimism. It can affect our decision-making. Participants tend to have pleasant emotions when it is evoked in them by making them do things like write down a nostalgic incident. In stressful times, we crave for a return to the comfortable situation, and nostalgia gives us that.

Nostalgia can be used to improve resilience. It can also be used to boost creativity. There is a kind of cooperative activity between memory and reward systems in our brain that plays a very specific role in how we experience nostalgia. Nostalgia stimulates metabolic activity and blood flow in several regions and rewards centre of the brain.

Dr. Muhammad Sayed Inam,

Assistant Professor of Psychiatry,

Sylhet MAG Osmani Medical College, Sylhet