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How nostalgia can carry us through tough times

“Ah, those were the good old days.”

Whohasn’tthought something like this before?These feelings of warmth and longing can be about a time in our personal lives or about an era in history. The feeling is called nostalgia.

Nostalgia is something we all experience.According to psychologists, the past can help us make sense of the present and can even offer us tools for a more resilient future.

Psychologist Clay Routledge writes:

But nostalgia is a complicated emotion.We discusswhy it can become dangerous to desire a return to a past that wasn’t actually all that great. How can we learn to use it for good? 

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Haili Blassingame