Healthy Aging: Body, Mind & Spirit

The Positive Power of Nostalgia

CBS Sunday Morning had a great study of nostalgia yesterday!

They asked the question:  Is nostalgia good for you, or is it just another form of depression?

There are scientists who actually study our desire to re-live old memories, why we do it, and what it does for us.

By focusing on past experiences, we may re-connect with important people, shared feelings, and learning experiences.  We may also remember who we were back then, reflect on the good times, and realize our own power and resilience to survive in the worst of times.

Sometimes contemplating how we lived through past difficulties, reminds us of our amazing internal strength and then gives us the energy to move on to better times in our future.  Much like in that old movie “It’s a Wonderful Life,” we may realize what might have been, if we had never existed at all.

Smell is the sense which elicits some of our strongest experiences of nostalgia.  Scientists have found that smells bring back memories faster than any other sense.  According to Dr. Alan Hirsch, a neurologist, smells get to our brains faster than sounds or sights, due to odors’ direct path from our noses to our brains.  This also creates “a direct path to the emotional areas of the brain.”

“The quickest way to change somebody’s mood, state of behavior, quicker than with any other sense modality, is with smell,” says Hirsch.  “You smell, and you immediately decide, I like it, or, I don’t like it.”

And smell related memories are different depending on where you were raised in the U.S.  If you were raised on the East coast, the smell of flowers brings back strong childhood memories, in the Midwest it’s the smell of farm animals, and for those from the West, the smell of meat grilling elicits powerful childhood memories.

But beware!  Advertisers also study these natural body reactions.  They may use your childhood memories to lure you in!  Note the 1960′s music in some of your favorite commercials.

For most of us, nostalgia takes us back to a place where we ache to go again.  The sights and sounds of going to Grandma’s house for dinner or going camping with the family as a child.  Things that corrolate with fond memories of belonging and feeling a part of something bigger than ourselves.