{"id":117377,"date":"2026-09-30T03:04:02","date_gmt":"2026-09-30T07:04:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/?p=117377"},"modified":"2026-09-30T03:04:02","modified_gmt":"2026-09-30T07:04:02","slug":"what-is-nostalgia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/health-and-wellness\/what-is-nostalgia\/","title":{"rendered":"What Is Nostalgia? It Started Out as a Disease in 1688"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class='booster-block booster-read-block'>\n                <div class=\"twp-read-time\">\n                \t<i class=\"booster-icon twp-clock\"><\/i> <span>Read Time:<\/span>10 Minute, 57 Second                <\/div>\n\n            <\/div><p>A song comes on in a shop. Or you smell rain on a hot road. Or someone cooks onions the way your grandmother did.<\/p>\n\n<p>And for a second you are not in the shop any more. You are somewhere years ago, and it is warm there, and it hurts a little, and you don&#8217;t want it to stop.<\/p>\n\n<p>So what is nostalgia, really? Most people would call it a nice feeling with a sad edge. That is close. But the word did not start out as a feeling at all.<\/p>\n\n<p>It started out as a disease. A doctor-in-training made the word up in 1688, and for about two hundred years people were treated for it.<\/p>\n\n<h2>What Is Nostalgia? The Short Answer<\/h2>\n\n<p><strong>Nostalgia is a bittersweet longing for your own past.<\/strong> It is mostly warm, with a thread of sadness in it, because the thing you are remembering is gone.<\/p>\n\n<p>It is nearly always about people. Ask someone for a nostalgic memory and they rarely describe being alone. They describe a table, a holiday, a friend, a parent, a team.<\/p>\n\n<p>And it seems to be the same all over the world. In 2014 a group led by the psychologist Erica Hepper asked 1,704 students in 18 countries, on five continents, what nostalgia is made of. The list included places as far apart as Cameroon, Chile, China, Ethiopia, India, Japan, Poland and Uganda. The students <a href=\"https:\/\/pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov\/24866530\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">largely agreed<\/a>: fond memories, of people who matter to you, more happy than sad.<\/p>\n\n<p>These were students, not whole populations, so it is not the last word. But it is a strong hint that this is a human thing and not a local habit.<\/p>\n\n<div class=\"convertkit-form wp-block-convertkit-form\" style=\"\"><script async data-uid=\"6491fb8269\" src=\"https:\/\/bgodinspired.kit.com\/6491fb8269\/index.js\" data-jetpack-boost=\"ignore\" data-no-defer=\"1\" data-no-optimize=\"1\" nowprocket><\/script><\/div>\n\n\n<h2>The Student Who Invented the Word<\/h2>\n\n<p>In 1688 a young man named Johannes Hofer was studying medicine at the University of Basel, in what is now Switzerland. He came from Mulhouse, a town about 35 kilometres away. He was not yet twenty.<\/p>\n\n<p>For his final paper he wrote about a sickness that everyone around him already knew. In German it was called <em>Heimweh<\/em>, which means home-pain. Young people sent away to work, study or fight would stop eating, stop sleeping, run a fever and waste away.<\/p>\n\n<p>Hofer thought a home-grown word was not serious enough for a medical paper. So he built a new one out of two Greek words: <em>nostos<\/em>, the return home, and <em>algos<\/em>, pain. <strong>Nostalgia.<\/strong> The pain of wanting to go home.<\/p>\n\n<p>He even said sorry to his readers for handing them a strange new word. He offered two spare names in case they liked those better: nostomania and philopatridomania. Thankfully, nobody did.<\/p>\n\n<p>So the word nostalgia did not mean missing the past. It meant missing a place. It was homesickness with a doctor&#8217;s label on it.<\/p>\n\n<h2>The Patients Were Not Who You Would Expect<\/h2>\n\n<p>The story usually told is that nostalgia was a soldiers&#8217; disease. That came later. Hofer did mention soldiers. But the patients he actually described, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.americanacademy.de\/pandemic-nostalgia\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">in the cases historians still quote<\/a>, were ordinary young people a long way from home.<\/p>\n\n<p>One was a student from the city of Bern, studying in Basel. He grew sad, then feverish, and the medicines did nothing. In the end he was sent home.<\/p>\n\n<p>He began to get better a few miles down the road. By the time he reached Bern, Hofer wrote, he was his &#8220;whole sane self.&#8221;<\/p>\n\n<p>Another was a country girl working as a servant in a town that was not hers. She fell, hit her head, and woke up in a hospital. She would not eat. She would not take medicine. She only kept crying out three words: <em>&#8220;Ich will heim.&#8221;<\/em> I want to go home.<\/p>\n\n<p>Her parents came and took her. Within a few days, Hofer wrote, she was &#8220;wholly well, entirely without the aid of medicine.&#8221;<\/p>\n\n<p>Then there is the third case, and it is the strange one.<\/p>\n\n<p>A Swiss man working for a merchant in Paris became ill with the same longing. He asked to be let go so he could travel home. His employer said yes.<\/p>\n\n<p>And then he stayed. He never made the trip. Hofer records that he remained in Paris, no longer troubled by the disease.<\/p>\n\n<p>Read that again, because it is easy to miss. The first two patients were healed by going home. The third was healed by finding out that he could.<\/p>\n\n<h2>How Nostalgia Stopped Being a Disease<\/h2>\n\n<p>Doctors kept the diagnosis for a long time. Armies feared it. Records from the American Civil War in the 1860s list more than 5,000 cases among soldiers.<\/p>\n\n<p>Then it slowly faded from medicine. By the end of the 1800s it had mostly dropped out of the medical textbooks, and in the 1900s it was treated as a matter for the mind, not the body.<\/p>\n\n<p>Somewhere along the way the meaning moved too. Nostalgia stopped being about a place you could walk back to. It became about a time you cannot.<\/p>\n\n<p>That is a bigger change than it looks. Hofer&#8217;s patients had a cure: a road. We don&#8217;t. Nobody can send you home to when you were nine.<\/p>\n\n<h2>Is Nostalgia Good or Bad for You?<\/h2>\n\n<p>For years the modern answer was simple: good. Much of that came from two psychologists at the University of Southampton in England, Constantine Sedikides and Tim Wildschut.<\/p>\n\n<p>In study after study, they and their colleagues asked people to bring a nostalgic memory to mind and write about it. Afterwards those people reported feeling more loved, more connected to others, and more sure that their life had meaning, compared with people who wrote about an ordinary memory.<\/p>\n\n<p>Their reading was that nostalgia is a kind of store cupboard. When you feel lonely or lost, you reach in, and you come out with proof that you have been loved before.<\/p>\n\n<p>But here is the part that rarely gets repeated.<\/p>\n\n<p>Those studies asked for nostalgia on purpose. In 2020 a researcher named David Newman and his colleagues looked at the other kind, the kind that just turns up in the middle of a normal day. People reported on their feelings as they went about their lives.<\/p>\n\n<p>The picture flipped. On ordinary days, feeling nostalgic went along with feeling <em>worse<\/em>, not better. A follow-up by Newman and Matthew Sachs, using about 6,000 daily reports from 504 students, found the link was <a href=\"https:\/\/www.frontiersin.org\/journals\/psychology\/articles\/10.3389\/fpsyg.2020.02185\/full\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">strongest on the days people felt most lonely<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n<p>The researchers were careful, and we should be too. Daily reports like these cannot prove what causes what. It may be that a bad day pulls up nostalgia, not that nostalgia spoils the day.<\/p>\n\n<p>Still, their summary is worth keeping. Going back on purpose to a treasured memory may do you good. Being pulled back without warning, by a song or a smell, may not feel good at all.<\/p>\n\n<p>Same memory. Same person. The difference is whether you chose to visit or got dragged.<\/p>\n\n<p>It also helps to know when nostalgia tends to knock. It shows up most when you are lonely or low. So if you have been feeling it a lot lately, that may be less about the past and more about right now. Our free <a href=\"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/how-lonely-am-i\/\">How Lonely Am I? check<\/a> takes a few minutes and can help you see that plainly.<\/p>\n\n<h2>Remembering on Purpose Is a Very Old Idea<\/h2>\n\n<p>Put those two things side by side. A man in 1688 who got well the moment he knew the way home was open. And modern people who are helped by the past when they visit it by choice, and hurt by it when it ambushes them.<\/p>\n\n<p>It turns out someone worked this out a very long time ago.<\/p>\n\n<p>The oldest faith traditions did not tell people to forget the past. They did not tell people to live in it either. They did a third thing. They put remembering on the calendar.<\/p>\n\n<p>A set meal, on a set night, with set foods. Children asking what it all means, and the old ones answering. The same story told again every year, out loud, together: this is where we were, this is how we were carried out of it.<\/p>\n\n<p>And the point of the telling was never &#8220;those were the days.&#8221; The point was today. The God who carried us then has not gone anywhere.<\/p>\n\n<p>That is remembering with the door left open. It is the past used as proof, not as a hiding place. It is very close to what the studies say works.<\/p>\n\n<h2>How to Use Nostalgia Well<\/h2>\n\n<p>None of this needs money or spare time.<\/p>\n\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Visit on purpose.<\/strong> Pick one good memory and stay with it for two minutes. Who was there? What did it smell like? That is a very different thing from being knocked flat by a song in a shop.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Say it out loud to someone.<\/strong> Nostalgia is about people, so it works best shared. &#8220;Do you remember when&#8230;&#8221; is one of the kindest sentences there is.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Ask what it is pointing at.<\/strong> You usually do not miss the year. You miss being known, or safe, or needed. That thing can be looked for today.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Remember that memory edits.<\/strong> The past you miss has had its hard parts softened. We looked at how that works in <a href=\"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/entertainment\/2026-is-the-new-2016-part-we-edited-out\/\">2026 Is the New 2016: The Part We Edited Out<\/a>.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Notice when it has no address.<\/strong> If you miss somewhere you have never actually been, that is a different ache with its own name. We wrote about it in <a href=\"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/personal-growth-and-life-skills\/homesick-for-a-place-that-doesnt-exist\/\">Homesick for a Place That Doesn&#8217;t Exist?<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n<h2>So, Is It a Sickness?<\/h2>\n\n<p>No. Hofer was wrong about that. But he noticed something true, and he wrote it down in the case nobody quotes.<\/p>\n\n<p>The man in Paris did not need to go back. He needed to know he was not locked out.<\/p>\n\n<p>Maybe that is what nostalgia is for. Not to pull you backward, but to remind you that you were once at home somewhere, with someone. If it happened once, it is the kind of thing that can happen.<\/p>\n\n<p>The next time a song stops you in a shop, you don&#8217;t have to fight it and you don&#8217;t have to follow it. Let it tell you what you loved. Then carry that back out the door with you, into the day you are actually in.<\/p>\n\n<h2>Questions People Ask About Nostalgia<\/h2>\n\n<p><strong>What is nostalgia in simple words?<\/strong><br>Nostalgia is a bittersweet longing for your own past. It is mostly a warm feeling with some sadness mixed in, because the time being remembered is gone. Nostalgic memories are usually about other people, such as family meals, friendships, holidays and childhood homes.<\/p>\n\n<p><strong>Who invented the word nostalgia?<\/strong><br>The word nostalgia was coined in 1688 by Johannes Hofer, a medical student at the University of Basel who was not yet twenty years old. Hofer built it from two Greek words, nostos (the return home) and algos (pain), as a medical name for severe homesickness, which was known in German as Heimweh.<\/p>\n\n<p><strong>Was nostalgia really considered a disease?<\/strong><br>Yes. From 1688 until roughly the end of the 1800s, nostalgia was a medical diagnosis for severe homesickness. Symptoms described by doctors included loss of appetite, sleeplessness, fever and a racing heart. Johannes Hofer&#8217;s recommended cure was sending the patient home. Records from the American Civil War list more than 5,000 cases among soldiers.<\/p>\n\n<p><strong>Is nostalgia good or bad for your mental health?<\/strong><br>It depends on how nostalgia arrives. In experiments by Constantine Sedikides, Tim Wildschut and colleagues, people asked to recall a nostalgic memory on purpose reported feeling more connected to others and more sure that life has meaning. But studies of everyday life published in 2020 by David Newman and colleagues found that nostalgia arising on its own during the day was linked with feeling worse, especially on lonely days. Those daily studies cannot prove which causes which.<\/p>\n\n<p><strong>What is the difference between nostalgia and homesickness?<\/strong><br>Homesickness is longing for a place you could, in theory, return to. Nostalgia today means longing for a time in your own past, which cannot be returned to. The two were originally the same thing: when the word nostalgia was invented in 1688 it simply meant severe homesickness.<\/p>\n\n<h2>Over to You<\/h2>\n\n<p>Do you think nostalgia mostly helps people or mostly holds them back? You do not need a study to have a view on this one. Tell us which way you lean in the comments, and why.<\/p>\n\n<div class=\"convertkit-form wp-block-convertkit-form\" style=\"\"><script async data-uid=\"6491fb8269\" src=\"https:\/\/bgodinspired.kit.com\/6491fb8269\/index.js\" data-jetpack-boost=\"ignore\" data-no-defer=\"1\" data-no-optimize=\"1\" nowprocket><\/script><\/div>\n\n\n<h2>Share This<\/h2>\n\n<ul>\n<li>I just learned nostalgia was invented as a DISEASE in 1688. A student made up the word for homesick patients, and the cure was sending them home. https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/?p=117377<\/li>\n<li>One of the first nostalgia patients, in 1688, got permission to travel home, and then never went. He was fine from that day on. He did not need to go back. He just needed to know he could. I can&#8217;t stop thinking about that: https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/?p=117377<\/li>\n<li>Turns out nostalgia helps when you visit a memory on purpose and can hurt when it ambushes you on a lonely day. That explains a lot about certain songs. Worth a read: https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/?p=117377<\/li>\n<\/ul>        <div class=\"booster-block booster-reactions-block\">\n            <div class=\"twp-reactions-icons\">\n                \n                <div class=\"twp-reacts-wrap\">\n                    <a react-data=\"be-react-1\" post-id=\"117377\" class=\"be-face-icons un-reacted\" href=\"javascript:void(0)\">\n                        <img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/wp-content\/plugins\/booster-extension\/\/assets\/icon\/happy.svg\" alt=\"Happy\" title=\"\">\n                    <\/a>\n                    <div class=\"twp-reaction-title\">\n                        Happy                    <\/div>\n                    <div class=\"twp-count-percent\">\n                                                    <span style=\"display: none;\" class=\"twp-react-count\">0<\/span>\n                        \n                                                <span class=\"twp-react-percent\"><span>0<\/span> 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A bittersweet longing for your own past. The word was invented in 1688 as the name of a disease. Here is what changed, and what it is for.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":117376,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_wp_convertkit_post_meta":{"form":"-1","landing_page":"0","tag":"0","restrict_content":"0"},"footnotes":""},"categories":[3711,3715],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-117377","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-health-and-wellness","category-personal-growth-and-life-skills"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/117377","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=117377"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/117377\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":117379,"href":"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/117377\/revisions\/117379"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/117376"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=117377"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=117377"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=117377"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}