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Walking around my neighborhood in the evening, I am hit by the smells of summer: fresh-cut grass, hamburgers grilling and a hint of swimming pool chlorine. These are also the smells of summers from my adolescence, and they remind me of Friday evenings at the community pool with my friends and our families gathered around picnic tables between swims. The memories always bring a smile to my face.

As a , I shouldn't feel surprised to experience this warm glow. —a sentimental longing for treasured moments in our personal pasts—and how nostalgia is linked to our well-being and feelings of connection with others.

Triggered by sensory stimuli such as , and , nostalgia has the power to mentally transport us back in time. This might be to important occasions, to moments of triumph and—importantly—moments revolving around close family and friends and other important people in our lives.

As it turns out, this experience is good for us.

How the concept of nostalgia evolved

For centuries, nostalgia was considered unhealthy.

In the 1600s, a Swiss medical student named Johannes Hofer studied mercenaries in the Italian and French lowlands who longed desperately for their mountain homelands. Witnessing their weeping and despondency, he and attributed it to a brain disease. Other thinkers of the time , which persisted through the 18th and 19th centuries.

However, early thinkers made an error: They assumed that nostalgia was causing unpleasant symptoms. It may have been the reverse. Unpleasant experiences, , can arouse nostalgia, which can then help people cope more effectively with these hardships.

Today, researchers view nostalgia as a , albeit bittersweet, emotional experience that serves as a . Importantly, this view has been supported by scientific research.

How nostalgia inspires connection and belonging

Nostalgia provides many benefits. It enhances and makes people . When people feel nostalgic, they feel a greater .

The are particularly well supported. Nostalgia and the willingness of people to give to those around them, such as and .

Nostalgia also makes people to their loved ones by enhancing feelings that they are loved by, connected to, protected by and trusting of others. Nostalgia helps people in their close relationships and .

While nostalgia is a , it is also deeply personal. The moments for which we are each nostalgic and the stimuli that might trigger our nostalgic memories can vary from one person to the next depending on the experiences that each of us have. But people within the same culture may find similar stimuli to be nostalgic for them. In a 2013 study, for instance, my team found that American participants out of a variety of options.

The nostalgic power of scents and foods

In 1922, the French novelist Marcel Proust wrote about the . He vividly described how the experience of smelling and eating a tea-soaked cake mentally transported him back to childhood experiences with his aunt in her home and village. This sort of experience is now often referred to as the .

Science has confirmed what Proust described. Our olfactory system, the sensory system responsible for our sense of smell, is associated with emotions and autobiographical memory. Smells combine with tastes to create our .

Foods also tend to be central to social gatherings, making them easily associated with these memories. For instance, a summer barbecue might feel incomplete to some without slices of juicy watermelon. And homemade pumpkin pie may be an essential dessert at many Thanksgiving tables. The watermelon or pie may then serve as what are known in social psychology as , foods that serve as stand-ins for valued relationships due to their inclusion at past occasions with loved ones.

My research team and I wanted to know how people benefited from feeling nostalgic when they encountered the scents and foods of their pasts. We began in 2011 by and chose 12 of them for our study. Participants rated some scents, such as pumpkin pie spice and baby powder, as highly evocative of nostalgia, while rating others—such as money and cappuccino –as less evocative.

Those who experienced more nostalgia when smelling the scents experienced greater positive emotions, greater self-esteem, greater feelings of connection to their past selves, greater optimism, greater feelings of social connectedness and a greater sense that life is meaningful.

We came to similar conclusions when we studied . Foods seemed to be more strongly linked to nostalgia than either scents or music when comparing the amount of nostalgia our participants experienced for foods to what previous research participants experienced for scents and songs. More recently, we found that and that people find nostalgic foods comforting because those nostalgic foods remind them of important or meaningful moments with their loved ones.

Balancing benefits and trade-offs

Although nostalgia can be associated with foods that should be eaten only in moderation—such as burgers and cookies—there are other ways to channel our nostalgia through foods.

We can have nostalgia with healthy foods. For instance, orange slices remind me of halftime at childhood soccer matches. And many people, including our research participants, feel intense nostalgia around watermelon. Other researchers have found that for Chinese participants.

But when nostalgia does involve consumption of unhealthy foods, there are still other ways to experience it without the health trade-offs. We found that participants experienced the benefits of food-evoked nostalgia just from imagining and writing about the foods—no consumption necessary. Other researchers have found that can enhance well-being. Even helps people enjoy their food while reducing their caloric consumption.

Once seen as detrimental to our health, nostalgia provides us with an opportunity to reap numerous rewards. With nostalgic foods, we might be able to nourish both our bodies and our psychological health.

This article is republished from under a Creative Commons license. Read the .