At one point in history nostalgia was thought to be a rather negative effect that could make people anxious, jittery, and even sick in many ways. It wasn’t fully understood until the correlation between fond memories of the past were seen to cause notable changes in mood and even productivity that nostalgia stopped being seen as negative. At some point in our lives we’ve all been a little nostalgic, no matter what the stimulus was. To some extent every person feels this a time or two in their lives as it becomes necessary now and again to elevate one’s mood or perhaps take the burden off of their present state.
Nostalgia is more or less the feeling one gets when they recall a particular memory that stems from their childhood or younger years. This memory is typically neutral to positive and evokes some sort of emotional response in the individual as they recall the moment with at least some fondness upon seeing or experiencing a stimulus that reminds them of that long ago time. It could be a smell, a sound, or the sight of something they’ve not seen in a long, long time. Whatever it is the stimulus will awake in the individual a memory of a time when they were younger and perhaps saw, heard, felt, or even tasted something for the first time. They might remember the very day it happened and the circumstances surrounding it, or they could perhaps just remember the moment in a vague way that still brings back positive feelings.
The opposite end of this, those memories dealing the negative feelings, is usually labeled as some form of PTSD, in which the memories are so inherently negative that the individual wants to block them and will actively forget them. Nostalgia however occurs when a person might have forgotten the memory that’s been triggered by the stimulus but is pleasantly reminded when they experience it. Human beings are nostalgic for many reasons, but it has become less of a negative in the past as scientists have discovered that nostalgia can actually increase brain activity and help to make people more sympathetic and even in some cases more productive. Stress tends to break people down in a very big way and as a result the mind doesn’t always function at the most optimal capacity.
However, nostalgia can help a great deal with stress since it brings the individual back to a moment in time when there was no need to stress or worry about anything, and all that mattered was the stimulus in front of them and the good times it brought. In short, nostalgia is a means by which people can relieve stress by reliving a moment in time when they were happy and content. In this manner the human mind seeks to remind the individual of the good times while modulating the person’s mood so as to allow them to relax. So really, nostalgia is kind of a built-in stress reliever that’s there as a last line of defense against stress.
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