Nostalgia Helps You Learn: Why the 00s Can Make a Comeback!

You might want to use it to escape to better days, but did you know that nostalgia can also help you learn?

Close your eyes and picture a scene when you felt carefree. Maybe a time when everything just felt like it made sense.

For most of us, that would mean revisiting a period when our days weren't fuelled by stress. Living felt simple and pure. Our parents’ car phones were bulky. Our dial-up modems were slow. If you weren’t parked on the couch every Friday night to catch TGIF right when it started, were you even there? What a time to be alive.

Of course, spending too much time stuck in the past isn’t always a good thing. There’s a reason why butterfly clips, teal iMacs, and Walkmans didn’t last. But did you know that spending a few moments lost in nostalgia can actually stimulate your brain?

In fact, researchers have discovered that nostalgia helps you learn too.

So pull out your Trapper Keeper, sharpen that Lisa Frank pencil, and let’s take some notes.

What Is Nostalgia?

Until recently, researchers assigned negative connotations to the word. In ancient Greece, the word was actually the composite of two root words…

Nostos (returning home) + algos (pain) = Nostalgia (pain to return home)

Early 17th-century Swiss physician Johannes Hofer defined it as a disease of the mind. He even assigned it certain symptoms. These ranged from bouts of weeping and anxiety to irregular heartbeat, and insomnia.

Doctors described and diagnosed nostalgia as a health condition. Leeches and opium were common treatments. For Swiss soldiers who seemed particularly afflicted, doctors prescribed hikes through the Alps. The Germans even named it heimweh” which translates to acute homesickness.”

The evolution of this word into what it is today has its roots in colonialism and the slave trade. By some accounts of the American Civil War, many soldiers died of the affliction. The transition to its modern usage — a yearning for better days” — could be attributed to slaves mourning their freedom and homeland.

This definition rose in popularity in the 1920s, when American artists in Paris began to use nostalgia to describe a time pre-WW1. Quickly, the definition was popularized in French literature, and the rest is history.

Your Brain on Nostalgia

With nostalgia, we can create a narrative from meaningful events in our past. Any time you look back, you’re essentially retelling a story, and casting yourself as the main character. Analysts believe that we’re more prone to become nostalgic when we’re experiencing bad things. Usually uncertainties or difficulties in our present-day lives.

This is because nostalgia momentarily alters your brain. Nostalgia lights up your hippocampus and your amygdala like a Christmas tree. With external sensory cues — especially smells — we can access memories that we've stored away. The correlation between memory and nostalgia can't be ignored. Even Alzheimer's patients remember past experiences with more vivid images when nostalgic.

Nostalgia is scientifically proven to increase positive emotions. That memory of your mom making cookies when you got home from school? It might seem poignant if your aging parents are facing health problems. But that feeling — while we don't know what causes it exactly — helps you process the negative. It actually helps you cope with big uncertainties like death, illness, and even job loss.

In this study, two professors and their colleagues from the University of Southampton explained that the perceived benefits of nostalgia include its capacity to…

1. Generate positive emotions
2. Strengthen social bonds
3. Increase self-esteem

Those sentiments were echoed by a later academic paper, in which the same professors labeled nostalgia as a social emotion that fosters a sense of connectedness. Most recently, a 2020 study found that nostalgia can even be strong enough to counteract feelings of loneliness and improve social confidence.

And you thought you were daydreaming...

How Nostalgia Helps You Learn

Nostalgia helps you learn by making you a stronger and more focused learner.

But let's step back for a second.

To understand this phenomenon better, we need to delve into some other things first. Let's recognize why individuals stray away from lifelong learning in the first place.

Learning barriers can be physical, mental, emotional, social, or cultural in nature. This term — barrier — encompasses anything that stands between you and your learning goals. You can categorize them as external — things outside of ourselves — and internal.

External barriers — like discrimination, and financial setbacks — are among the most common. These are complex, intertwined, and often beyond your control. But emotional barriers are among the most difficult to identify. They're also the most difficult to overcome because they originate from within.

You may fear failure or dread the idea of change. Or, you might be holding on to past insecurities, and worrying that they’ll happen again. There's a rising phenomenon that psychologists have named a fear of success.” This can seem like a lack of motivation, laziness, or even avoidance of joy. In reality, it's often tied to childhood memories. All those feelings can keep your learning goals out of reach.

The good news? Nostalgia can actually help rewrite those memories as you process what in your childhood led to these fears and mental roadblocks.

Encourages Self-Confidence

As we learned, engaging with nostalgic memories can help you counteract negative feelings. In healthy doses, it can improve your sense of self-worth. It might even change the way you regard yourself permanently.

Nostalgia helps you remember the positive times in your life. Often it's tied to moments when you felt peaceful and fulfilled. What you're doing when you yearn for simpler times is unleashing your inner kid.

Leverage those feelings to push through the internal barriers that you are experiencing. As your confidence improves, those mountains in front of you will start to appear a lot smaller!

Studies show that confidence helps you…

1. Respond better under pressure
2. Rebound from tough situations faster than your peers
3. Step out of their comfort zone and take risks

This resiliency can give you a major boost as you learn new skills. It’s also a cycle that only improves with time and practice. The more confident you feel, the better you can perform. The better you perform, the more confident you feel.

Use nostalgia as that initial spark. Journal about times in your life when you felt successful. Reflect on those times. What about them felt good?

When you reflect on positive experiences in your past, describe yourself.

• "I was glowing."
• "I deserved happiness."
• And lastly, "I found fulfillment."

Then flip them on their heads and describe yourself now.

• "I am glowing."
• "I deserve happiness."
• And lastly, "I am fulfilled / I am finding fulfillment."

Allow these affirmations to fuel you. This doesn't only apply to your self-esteem either. It can help you redirect yourself to what's important to you. Finding your "raison d'etre" or your "why" is crucial for your Career Success and to fuel your learning too. Affirmations and journaling can help you pinpoint that and ultimately lead a more fulfilling life. One of the many ways nostalgia helps you learn.

Counteracts Boredom

Most of us know what it's like to feel uninspired. Too often, we get on the hamster wheel of our lives and go through the motions. This can make it impossible to get excited. Especially if it requires effort — such as learning a new skill.

Nostalgia conjures up emotions and sentiments that we pushed far out of reach years ago and brings them up to the surface. Put on your favorite childhood song, even if it’s cheesy or cringe-worthy. Allow your feet and head to move with the beat. Reminisce a little. You’ll probably discover that you’re not quite as bored as you thought you were.

Apathy can be the first step toward depression. It can also be a sign that you're unhappy in your career or life. When you begin to feel apathetic towards work or your education, take that sign seriously. An excellent way to combat these unwanted feelings — or lack thereof — is through opposite action.

This is a common practice in Dialectical Behavioural Therapy (DBT). We know that every emotion is our body’s way of telling us to take action. For example, when we're hungry, we need to eat. Or when we're sleepy, we need to rest. For more complex emotions — anger, shame, sadness — the same is true. For early humans, anger taught us it was time to fight. Disgust told us to leave the situation.

Now, these feelings don't need to protect us anymore. Often they're actually counterintuitive. If you're feeling apathetic, or bored, taking action and getting up and out can be the BEST thing for you.

This includes reflecting on your past and reveling in those happy memories. The opposite of boredom is interest. The more you pursue fulfilling and inspiring things, the less you’ll be bored. Reflecting on times when you weren’t feeling stuck can inspire you to recreate those things or try new ones. This is a foolproof way to inspire yourself, and it’s all thanks to nostalgia.

Promotes Collaboration and Socialization

You can also use nostalgia to cultivate socialization and a sense of belonging. This can encourage you to work and learn with others, as well as learn from them. There are many benefits to collaborating throughout your learning journey.

But we know it can be intimidating to jump in and meet new people while you’re also tackling new concepts. The beauty is, many nostalgic memories are often universally understood.

Maybe you never learned to ride a bike, but when someone revels in their nostalgia of it, you can empathize and be right there with them. It's sort of why we love biographies so much. The nostalgic memory itself may not be something you can relate to, but the feeling of nostalgia is.

Beyond that, shared nostalgia shows to be a HUGE bonding agent. Think about all the 90s kid's memes. Remembering childhood joys and wonder can help spark friendships and collaborations. And collaborative learning is THE most tried-and-true way to absorb new concepts.

Studies show that there are many benefits to collaborative learning. When educational experiences are social, engaging, and student-owned, they lead to richer outcomes.

Working alongside others allows you to…

1. Develop higher-level critical thinking skills
2. Develop stronger self-management skills
3. Improve your oral communication
4. Improve your retention rate
5. Increase your self-esteem and sense of responsibility

More than that, working with others brings a multitude of perspectives to your learning toolkit. By sharing them with one another, you can all avoid common pitfalls and cheer one another on.

Researchers have even found that nostalgia makes people more generous to strangers. It also makes us more tolerant of those who have views outside of their own. You’re bound to encounter those individuals both inside and outside of the classroom. Learning how to hold space for their opinions and outlooks now can prove beneficial for life. The more willing you are to listen to different viewpoints, the more you can learn.

While nostalgia helps you learn, so does Uvaro

Learn how to capture and isolate good memories. And use them to your advantage. You’ll find that you’re in a better headspace to listen, receive, and ultimately, learn!

That's a very hopeful outlook when you think about it.

Nostalgia helps you learn. And at Uvaro, we believe that learning should be a lifelong pursuit. We offer live, cohort-based courses that can help you unlock your full potential. We want to help you reach your career goals.

Need a little dose of inspiration and motivation? Take out that old photo album, to flip through those memories. Let a hearty wave of nostalgia remind you of all the power that lies within you.

Then, download our Career Success Catalog and flip your way through that too. That first step could be history in the making!