［健康］Why embracing nostalgia could be good for your future

D11

怀旧：是变老的征兆还是有益健康？

卫报

Nostalgia. It’s the enemy of progress. After all, how can you move forward with your life if all you’re doing is looking back, living in the past and uttering melancholic sighs of: “Ah, those were the days” as your eyes slowly glaze over?

Back in the 17th and 18th centuries, nostalgia was viewed as a medical disease that manifested itself through irregular heartbeats and full-on bouts of weeping among other maladies. Today, while we associate nostalgia with warm, fuzzy feelings related to our childhoods, or other times in our past that were especially happy, it still carries negative connotations in our live-in-the-moment culture. But, we may be looking at this all wrong.

“People in a nostalgic mood are more optimistic about their future, and are more inspired to pursue their most important goals,” says Wildschut, professor of social and personality psychology. “Rather than freezing them in place, nostalgia is very motivational – the past provides a template for what you’d like your future to look like. Maybe you went fishing with your dad, or cycling with your mum. You may develop the goal of having a family yourself and doing those things with your own children.”

There are many things that can trigger nostalgia. But perhaps one of the most potent is music. “Music is a very strong trigger of nostalgia,” says Wildschut. The songs we listen to can be markers of significant events in our lives.

When heard old songs, the sense of happiness brought by the local community nearly 10 years ago rushes right back. The nostalgia doesn’t make me feel anxious, or sad. Instead, I feel encouraged to seek out that local community – whether it’s based on music or not – with more vigour, and more verve, because I want that feeling again.