"I just finished writing my mother's obituary. It's the third obituary I've written in the past 18 months, following the one I wrote for my sister in January 2024 and the one I wrote for my dad in May of 2024. It has been, to put it mildly, an emotionally challenging year and a half, providing me with an unbidden and unwelcome education in bereavement."
"During the eight years I have been writing this blog, I have written numerous posts on nostalgia and the many wellness benefits offered by remembering the past. And my interest in nostalgia is by no means a purely scholarly one. Being a temperamentally nostalgia-prone individual, I can personally attest to the validity of studies showing that nostalgia can boost creativity, alleviate loneliness and boredom, enhance feelings of social connectedness, and generally elevate one's mood."
Three close family deaths over 18 months produced an intense personal experience of bereavement. Nostalgia provides multiple wellness benefits: boosting creativity, alleviating loneliness and boredom, enhancing social connectedness, and elevating mood. A 2020 study of 133 undergraduates who had lost a loved one within two years found that dispositional nostalgia predicts reductions in distress among bereaved individuals. Nostalgic individuals experience fewer intrusive thoughts and less hyperarousal associated with grief, which buffers the impact of bereavement without encouraging escapist strategies. Personal nostalgia-proneness can therefore function as an adaptive coping mechanism during periods of loss.
Read at Psychology Today
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]