From time to time, each person mentally returns to the past, is sad and remembers the old times. This is especially true for older people who understand that life has passed, that it is too late to start anything, and it remains only to rethink what was done. What is nostalgia - in this article.
Nostalgia - what is it?
This word is of Latin origin and it is translated as "melancholy for the Motherland". Those who are interested in what nostalgia means, it must be answered that this feeling has long been considered a disease, because the cases of death from longing from home are not uncommon. At one time she was studied by a doctor from Switzerland I. Hofer. He watched sick soldiers and students forced to stay outside the country, and noticed that on returning home they quickly recovered. To date, this term is applied to the feeling experienced for any experiences in life.
Is nostalgia good or bad?
This term can not be given either a positive or a negative coloration. The yearning can be combined with a feeling of hopelessness and bitter unbearability, and can act sweet and captivating. Nostalgia is good, and many psychologists who study attitudes toward this feeling in different cultures and religions, philosophical currents agree. Yearning, a person affirms the identity of his "I", the connection with the early stages of life strengthens, the continuity of generations and high moral ideals and values come to the fore.
How does nostalgia affect health?
At a time when she was considered a mental disorder, characteristic only of emigrants, her influence on the person's condition was assessed as negative. The problem of nostalgia was that it was manifested by depression, anxiety and insomnia. Among the soldiers of the Napoleonic army, this feeling was akin to an epidemic. In the modern world, its impact on the human psyche is assessed as positive.
It is believed that nostalgia for the past times strengthens health, raises self-esteem. Remembering about close people, important events or places a person feels loved and protected, confident in the future. He is not in danger and is optimistic about the future. Yearning for the past helps to survive loneliness and this is especially important for older people who, at the end of life, often suffer from attention deficit , remain alone.
Nostalgia and depression
However, longing for the past times, it is very easy to fall into despondency and sadness, because wanting to know what nostalgia is, it is necessary to remember that this feeling is very insidious. Remembering, a person reconstructs his previous experience, reproducing not the course of past events, but his own subjective assessment of what happened. This is the main paradox: people are bored and sad even at the most terrible events of their past.
Feel the nostalgia can be a divorce or parting with a loved one, cramped living conditions, lack of money. No matter how good it is in the present, the longing will seem that it is better than before, it will not be any more and it falls into such depression, from which it is not easy to get out without the help of a psychologist.
Nostalgia - what happens?
- Disease. If you die from anguish, then this feeling is exactly the category of fatal ailments. In times gone by the Swiss soldiers in foreign campaigns were forbidden to play their native songs, so as not to provoke attacks of sadness.
- Feeling of nostalgia as a longing for the unfulfilled. This type is more typical for men who would like to correct mistakes of the past, while women simply recall the times when they were happy.
- The phenomenon of integrativity. American psychologist E. Erikson believes that each person passes for his life 8 stages and nostalgia is the last. At this stage, the time for reflection and reflection of the past begins.
Nostalgia for the past
If there is a longing for native places, then in a new house it is worthwhile to hang a photo of your relatives and friends, dear to the heart of the earth. You can always stay in touch with them and call, write letters, talk on skype. Asking how to cope with nostalgia for the past, you can advise not to limp, do not give yourself time to yearn, and with your head to go to work. In my spare time, have fun, meet with friends, have fun. After all, what nostalgia means is despondency and boredom, so you need to do everything that dispels them.
Nostalgia for childhood
This feeling is familiar to everyone and it is connected with the expensive house, the warmth of my mother's hands, the instructions of my father and the smells of culinary masterpieces. It is clear that with age it goes irrevocably, parents grow old, and the one who until recently was a child, is forced to take responsibility and independently solve their problems. To fall into nostalgia is not terrible. It is much more dangerous to consign to oblivion everything that parents put into their child, for what they lived, because a person is alive, while they remember him. The genealogical trees have become very popular and it's good.
What is nostalgia for a person?
It happens that you are strongly attached to someone who plays a vital role in life. Favorite husband or wife, mother or mentor supports and helps, gives advice, but for some reason this connection is broken. It is clear that to continue life without such support is very difficult and there is nostalgia for the relationship. Each person experiences this period in his own way, but there is someone or something that inspires, gives strength and the desire to move forward, even in the name of the memory of the one who was near.
How to deal with nostalgia?
If this light and warm feeling, then do not resist these memories. It is necessary to tell the fate of thanks for this experience and go further. If a strong sense of nostalgia brings only anguish, pain and sorrow, then you need to find an incentive - something for which it is worth continuing to live. The best way is to help those who are worse, who is in a difficult situation. You can turn to God for help and receive the advice of a priest. Any servant of the church will say that dejection is a sin and indulge in it means to please the devil.
Life is given only once and if you always live in the past, you can not even see the present. Because nostalgia is - it's sad about the past times, but sometime the current moment will also become the past and the person will start to regret it too. And when, then, live? And one must live here and now, rejoice in every new day and thank the destiny and God for what he gives.