The School of Life

Dying of Nostalgia; Thomas Dixon Explores Homesickness

Dr Thomas Dixon, writer of the excellent History of Emotions blog, recently interviewed Professor of History at Weber State University, and a leading historian of emotions in the United States, Susan J. Matt. Her first book, Keeping Up With the Joneses, was a study of envy in modern consumer society, and her latest work tackles another emotion: homesickness, in a book titled Homesickness: An American History (Oxford University Press, 2011) which explores how homesickness and nostalgia were transformed from deadly maladies to allegedly un-American emotions. 
 

 

Thomas Dixon [TD]: Hello, Susan, and thanks for talking to us. Perhaps I could start by asking you what got you interested in homesickness?

Susan Matt [SM]: The original impetus was that my own emotional experience of mobility didn’t match up with the mythology of American restlessness. Commentators like Tocqueville and Frederick Jackson Turner as well more modern observers all claimed Americans were naturally restless, that somehow it was in our cultural DNA to leave home. I didn’t find it so effortless or easy to move, and began to wonder if I was alone. Perhaps there was a flip side to American mobility–a hidden history of homesickness. Homesickness also interested me because it seemed in many ways to be the opposite of an emotion I had just been studying–envy. Envy sparks aspirations, pushes people forward, often causes mobility. Homesickness pulls backwards. Both emotions play a role in modern individualism in the U.S.. Americans are encouraged to repress homesickness so they can leave home, be independent, seek more of the world’s goods, act on their envy.

TD: It’s interesting that it was your own emotions that fuelled your desire to revisit their history. I suspect many historians of emotion are in that position. So, what surprised you most about what you discovered when you started digging around in the history of homesickness?

SM: First, how prevalent the emotion was. I thought it would be difficult to unearth, but instead, evidence of homesickness was abundant and easy to find in just about every archive I worked in. Secondly, and perhaps more provocatively, I was surprised at how many Americans died of homesickness, or nostalgia as it was called. I knew there had been European epidemics of nostalgia in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, but didn’t know of American ones. But indeed, the disease of nostalgia was widely known in the United States–during the Civil War, there were 74 deaths from it on the Union side, and more than 5,200 cases of it in the Surgeon General’s records. 

SD: It became such a problem that army bands were sometimes prohibited from playing “Home, Sweet Home,” which at that time, was the most popular song in the country. In peacetime, civilians suffered from nostalgia as well.  The prevalence and intensity of nostalgia and homesickness throughout U.S. history – from the colonial era to the present - ultimately led me to question whether we were and are the individualists that we are so widely reputed to be. I think we’re not.

TD: I’ve been struck too by the great power of the passions in earlier periods – to cause illness, madness or even death. Medical sources of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries abound with fatal bouts of emotion. Is it possible to pinpoint a date after which this changed – when homesickness and nostalgia became mere feelings rather than powerful and potentially fatal mental conditions?

SM: It gradually disappeared as a dangerous disease in the first half of the 20th century. The U.S. Army provides a useful gauge in its records. One soldier in the American Expeditionary Force reportedly died of nostalgia during World War I. Increasingly during the War, however, many of the symptoms associated with nostalgia came to be defined as signs of the newly established syndrome of shell shock. While the diagnosis of nostalgia stayed on the books up through World War II,  and while there were many reported cases of it among soldiers in that war, there were no deaths. In short, from the early twentieth century on, the number of cases of deadly nostalgia declined, although less lethal cases of homesickness continued (and continue) to abound. It seems worth noting that as nostalgia’s cultural meaning underwent this transformation, the tolerance for the acutely homesick declined, since their condition was now seen as less dire.

TD: Historically you clearly have a really fascinating story to tell about nostalgia and homesickness as modern emotions experienced, as all emotions always are, within a particular geographical and cultural situation, in this case in modern America. I wonder what you think about the contemporary importance of this research, and also of research into the history of emotions more broadly?

SM: The history of homesickness explains a great deal about modern American culture and our national identity. Adults in modern America have learned to repress overt expressions of homesickness, for it has come to connote immaturity, a lack of ambition, and failure. It is out of step with the ethos of modern capitalism, which prizes mobility and individualism. However, while they may not discuss their homesickness publicly, in daily habits and behaviors, American make their feelings about displacement manifest. From ethnic groceries that sell the tastes of faraway homes, to sports teams which symbolize loyalty to a hometown, to our addiction to Facebook, cell phones, and emails, Americans routinely show their preoccupation with staying connected to distant places and people. While we may think of ourselves as an individualistic society, our everyday lives suggest otherwise. And our history – full of people suffering and sometimes dying of homesickness - makes clear that mobility has in fact never been an innate trait of Americans. Instead, they had to learn to leave home, and they have still not completely mastered the art of rugged, restless individualism.

The history of the emotions offers historians and the public a new set of tools to assess the past. Rather than merely judging history on the basis of external behaviors, we can bring in people’s motivations and intentions. These often provide a completely different understanding of social life and revises many of our longstanding narratives about national identity.

 Dr Thomas Dixon is Director of the Queen Mary Centre for the History of Emotions. 

Image: American sheet music of ‘Home, Sweet Home’ arranged for piano and violin, c. 1870s. Source American History Online

Smells like... the Future

In recent years our concern for smell has become heightened – helped by smoking bans, and air pollution. It’s perhaps not surprising that we’ve also seen an increasing obsession with managing our own personal impressions, through the use of deodorants, air fresheners, perfumes, car fragrances, clothes sprays, body creams and even flavoured breath mints.

Once considered to be the least important sense, 2004 Nobel Prize-winning neuroscientists, Richard Axel and Linda B. Buck, conclusively proved the power of smell. Since then, products, conversations and aroma possibilities have abounded. But, despite our ability to recall over 10,000 smells, we still have an incredibly stunted vernacular to describe smells without naming the object or cause of the aroma. There is also no agreement, between individual or master perfumers, about what smells good and what doesn’t. Our olfactory values are social, cultural, gender specific, age related and genetically determined.

From the 1980s onwards, we’ve known that crucial factors in purchase decision-making were based upon the emotional and sentimental state. This makes smell a hugely powerful tool for retailers, as this is exactly where smell and memory come into their own. Olfaction is passive, and the experience of odour types can be pervasive and subtle, working at a very different level of cognition. It’s not surprising that brands are increasingly waking up to their powers.

Scratch ‘n’ sniff may seem like something from a time gone by, but the use of scent is the biggest developing trend in sensory marketing and branding today. Fragrance logos which are unique to a product or company are increasingly being used. Diffused when the brand and/or product is present, the limbic part of the brain responds to sensory clues and hard-wires the response in the body-memory.

Odor-styling looks set to diversify and possibly to replace a large percentage of current advertising techniques which are not engaged on a sensory level. Since the advent of digital technologies and cyber worlds, odour biometrics and artificial fragrances are being developed and explored to their full potential.

So, take a deep breath, because you are about to get a scents of things to come. The world of ‘aromanomics’ is about to infiltrate our world; and what is more, we may never know it!

 Dr Morgaine Gaye is a Food Futurologist - academic, consultant and presenter, who looks at food and eating from a social, cultural, economic, trend, branding and geo-political perspective.
She will be part of the team leading 'A Day of Good Scents' on November 26. Click here for more details.

 

 

 

 

Happiness Is Just a Neurochemical Spurt

Happiness is just a neurochemical spurt. Different happy chemicals produce different ways to experience happiness.

Endorphin happiness is triggered by physical pain. The body's natural morphine masks pain, which allowed our ancestors to run from predators when injured. Humans experience endorphin as euphoria, but it obviously did not evolve to trigger a constant feeling of joy. You would touch hot stoves and run on a broken leg if your brain were always releasing endorphins. Nature saves them for moments when they help you do what's necessary to survive.

Dopamine happiness is triggered when you get a new reward. When you see a finish line, your brain releases dopamine. It's nature's reserve tank of energy. Dopamine keeps you going until you catch the prey you've been stalking, even when the chase is long and frustrating. If you surged with dopamine all the time, your energy would be depleted when you really needed it. We evolved to save dopamine for those moments when an important goal is within reach.

Oxytocin happiness is triggered when we trust those around us. It promotes bonding between mother and child, and between sex partners. It's stimulated when you're with a group of like-minded people, or when you get a massage. But we did not evolve to feel oxytocin happiness all the time because there's no survival value in trusting people who are not trustworthy.

Serotonin happiness is triggered when you feel important. Animals release serotonin when they dominate a resource. Their serotonin falls when they cede a resource to avoid conflict. Being one-up feels good, but conflict can cause painful injuries. The brain is constantly analyzing information to balance the risk of pain against the satisfaction of winning.

Each of the happy chemicals evolved to do a job. They work by making you feel good, which motivates you to go after whatever triggered them. You have inherited a brain that motivates you to go toward anything that promotes the survival of your DNA.

Sometimes you stumble on happiness. When an ape accidentally stumbles on a luscious fruit tree, its brain surges with dopamine. That creates memory, which helps the ape find the tree in the future. New rewards trigger dopamine whether the rewards came by accident or with sustained effort.

The happy chemicals feel so good that we use our big cortex to figure out how to get more. Apes negotiate groomings with each other, and it stimulates their oxytocin. Apes dominate their troop-mates when they think they can get away with it, which stimulates their serotonin. Apes invest time teasing termites out of a mound, and it stimulates their dopamine. Apes are not known to hurt themselves in order to get an endorphin high. People do all kinds of things once they find that it stimulates their endorphins, or their dopamine, or their oxytocin, or their serotonin.

Sometimes it works.

But the brain only releases happy chemicals in limited bursts for specific aims. It did not evolve to release them all the time. If happy chemicals flowed all the time, they could not do their jobs.

When your happy chemicals dip, however, you notice. Something feels wrong.

Nothing is wrong. Your happy chemicals evolved to ebb and flow. But if you attend to this feeling that something is wrong, it can preoccupy you. Your cortex will scan the environment for evidence that something is, in fact, wrong. And it will find evidence to confirm that feeling.

If you expect all the happy chemicals all the time, you're going to be disappointed. And if you focus on that disappointment, you wire your brain to see the world through that lens.

Try as you might, you can't control your environment in a way that ensures a steady flow of happy chemicals.

You could instead accept the fact that happy chemicals evolved to promote survival behaviors, and just appreciate them as they come and go.

Loretta Breuning is author of ‘I, Mammal – Why Your Brain Links Status And Happiness’.  For more details visit her website at: www.imammalthebook.com . 

Happy Day Image: Pavel Sevela / Wikimedia Commons 

Dr Mark Taubert on How To Think About Death

“Where was it?” said he to himself. “Where was it that I read of a condemned man who, at the hour of death, says or thinks that if the alternative were offered to him of existing somewhere, on a height of rock or some narrow elevation, where only his two feet could stand, and round him the ocean, perpetual gloom, perpetual solitude, perpetual storm, to remain there standing on a yard of surface for a lifetime, a thousand years eternity! – rather would he live thus than die at once. Only live, live, live! No matter how, only live!”  - Raskolnikoff in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment

This particular passage in the novel 'Crime and Punishment' captures perfectly that very chilling fear of death. I sometimes think of it when I see people as part of my work as a palliative care doctor. What must it be like to know that time may be short, that death is close and to live with this notion day-in, day-out?

I work in a hospice. At the time of writing this, I have finished seeing fifteen people on my ward round. Of these, some may have years to live, others months, some only weeks or days. We work to try and address a lot of the symptoms people can get when their illness advances. But we would not be doing our jobs well if physical symptoms were all we dealt with. There is a whole person here, with often a whole host of other people around them and they are of course frightened, have a lot of baggage and have questions upon questions. “How long have I got left to live, Doc?”. Our team have to address this very common and reasonable question daily. Rarely is it phrased that clearly or said in quite that straightforward a way, and unpicking what someone is really asking requires skill and time.

For many reasons it is a difficult question to answer. Every illness is different, although it may be called by the same name. Every individual is different. Every treatment has the potential to have a different response. Add in the newspapers that will inform of a new miracle cure on their front pages about once a week and you have more questions and sometimes dashed hopes. The truth is that no one really knows the right answer, no one is perfect at predicting the outcomes of a terminal illness other than to say that it is likely to lead to death at some point in time. If I personally were to find myself in a similar situation, as a patient or as a carer, I would ask exactly the same searching questions of whichever professional I was seeing. It is a natural thing to want to know. And it is not uncommon to discover that there is another, underlying question to the one above. Often the real question is "Are you someone who will listen to me and who will be frank and honest- when I am ready?".

How important this supportive communication is, was highlighted by a nurse who was dying of breast cancer. Days before her death she wrote: “There are so many questions, concerns and problems to face in the lightening ball mirror. To overcome the sense of powerlessness the traveller runs through a maze seeking someone who might actually listen to their pleas for help, someone who actually knows that the traveller is there.” (Bushkin E. 'Signposts of survivorship' Onol. Nurs Forum, 22(3), 537-43 1995).

Death is a certainty and we know it is inevitable. But some events in life bring it into much closer focus. The death of a friend or loved one, or being told you have a terminal illness, are just some examples. Health professionals can rely on the latest scans and blood tests to tell us what is happening within someone’s body at a given moment in time. Add to that some intuition, as well as past experience with similar pathologies and we might hazard a guess. Weeks, perhaps, days, not months? We are often inaccurate in our predictions, as research has shown. But what we can do is listen, discuss and maybe help the person to achieve what is important to them in whatever time they have left.

I try to explore what people are most frightened of: dying or death itself. The process of dying is for some the most distressing thought. Will there be suffering, pain, agitation, breathlessness? Then there is the perceived loss of control in those final hours or days. For a few, even the final years seem unbearable, knowing that the illness will catch up with them eventually. How futile an existence that must end soon! Then there are those with the overwhelming fear of death itself as a construct, that sheer panic when someone realizes that their essence, their being, their self will at one point no longer be there. Void? Nothingness? What? Yet again these are issues that need to be explored in the context of an individual and the people closest to those in this terrifying situation. And talking about it openly helps.

Let me join other writers on this site by inserting a quote from someone famous; Bob Dylan said “Those not busy being born are busy dying.” This wisdom in part depends on your outlook on life. Here in the hospice, we meet a broad spectrum of people who know they will die at some point in the not too distant future. Of course, they all have different outlooks and personalities. Some spend the last days/weeks/months/years of their lives focussing on living, some on dying. Most do a little bit of both. What makes me most happy is to see those people who know they are living with dying be able to lapse into moments of fulfilment and contentedness; to this effect we try to help fulfil some of their wishes, some of the things that make life worth living. Pain-free time with loved ones, enjoying a meal without feeling nauseated, organizing a trip or even just going back to their local pub for a drink or two are some examples of what we can try to achieve. Some think of hospices as dark and miserable places, but only yesterday I arrived on the ward and there was laughter, a patient leaning over the nurses station and telling staff and fellow-patients a joke (it was rude). No one was thinking about dying.

Sometimes, open discussions about what happens at the end can help people prepare, and they can address questions like where they would like to be in the final days and hours and with whom. Hopefully this collaborative approach means that less of us will feel like Dostoevsky’s afore-mentioned condemned man on his rock, but can prepare for death, with support, comfort and knowledge about what may happen, by living, not dying to the end.

Dr Mark Taubert  - Consultant in Palliative Medicine, Marie Curie Centre Penarth, Cardiff, Wales

Limited tickets are still available for the 'How To Think About Death' class on Wednesday September 26 at The School of Life, Russell Square. Click here for more details

Lizzie Shupack on Anger and Synchronicity

Week 3 of The Artist's Way, is all about emotions.  The chapter starts with Anger.  It continues with further discussion about Synchronicity.  I found the passage about Anger extremely synchronous, given that prior to reading it, I had just had a blow-out argument, centered around my struggle to make decisions about what I want, what I need, and what I am striving for, both in this process and beyond.

Helpfully, Cameron explains that Anger is useful, and is there to be listened to.  That said, she does note that it is "to be acted upon.  It is not meant to be acted out." Oops…  Nonetheless, I am glad that the emotional turbulence that surrounds me, has some context, and I am relieved that I'm not an anomaly in my confusion.  

In my first post, I wrote that one of my motivations for embarking on this process, was to become unselfconsciously creative, and find clarity around what it is in life that makes me fulfilled, makes me feel excited, makes me feel proud of what I do.

It's a big ask to be honest.  Those are big questions.  In my case, they are also complicated by the fact that as I write this, I'm sitting in Kaffe 1668 in New York, which means that in the three weeks since embarking on this course, I've travelled to five cities; cities which are all inspiring, creative and full of people and opportunities which all contribute to my decision-making process.

However, despite all that, the biggest thing that's holding me back, is without doubt, me.  Cameron spends some time talking about Shame, which I think is deeply tied to self-esteem and confidence.  Shame is often what prevents people from pursuing creative projects; "What if my work/my idea isn't any good?", "I can't write about that, it's too embarrassing!", "If I'm not honest, this won't have integrity, and I'm too scared to be honest".  They are all understandable fears, but fears that keep us wedded to analytical work, and logic-based activities, which are all very safe.  And very boring.

Cameron therefore suggests, that you find a couple people who can nurture and protect your early work.  Your prototypes, test-cases, scribbles, stories.  They are probably not the people you go to for constructive criticism - that’s a whole different thing - but instead they are simply proud of you and your aspirations, and have the creative and emotional intelligence to help you along.

Throughout all this, Cameron advises you to be nice to yourself.  To not beat yourself up, and to accept compliments and nice things from people along the way - things like an invitation to dinner, or new socks.  She acknowledges that yes, you will be babying yourself, but that thinking positively, and kindly, will go a lot further towards aiding your productivity; creative or otherwise, than tough-love or deprivation.

Next week, Week 4, is about Integrity.  And it requires a whole week of reading deprivation!!!!!!  A whole week!!  Beyond the books, magazines and newspapers I read, I have at least 50 RSS feeds and hundreds of bookmarked articles that I look through all the time...  Help!

 

'The Artist's Way' is by Julia Cameron and can be found at amazon.com

Lizzie Shupak is a Digital and Brand Strategist.  She is also one half of the international social experience, Wok+Wine.  She is currently on a journey of creative discovery, which may or may not affect her biography, in the weeks and months ahead.

Wok+Wine - The World's Most Delicious Social Network

Global Lifestyle Project - A Global Experiment in Lifestyle Design

Chris Johnstone on Resilience

Imagine a child tugging at your arm and asking “what is resilience and how do you get it?” Our reply expresses our ‘story of resilience’, our inner understanding of what resilience is and what it is based on. Because that story powerfully shapes our response to adversity, reviewing it and identifying ways we can develop or strengthen it is one of the keys to becoming more resilient.

When I worked for many years in the addictions treatment service, my clients would often describe how, as children, they’d watched family members use alcohol or drugs as a way of dealing with stress. We learn by watching others, and the story they took in was that resilience is based on chemical props. A big part of my work involved teaching ways of dealing with crisis and adversity that didn’t involve alcohol or drugs.

When our story includes a good understanding of how we can develop resilience, then we carry this into every situation we face. A strong story of resilience is more than the sum of its parts; it can become a source of strength within us. So what I teach is how we get to know this story, have a clear sense of the shape of it, so that whatever we face, we can ask ‘what would a story of resilience look like here, and how can I play my part in it?’

There is good research evidence that teaching resilience skills to adults and children reduces their risk of depression. Strengthening our capacity to cope with adversity also liberates us to pursue more exciting goals, because we’re less likely to be put off by the inevitable bumpiness that journeys of significant change involve. That’s why I love teaching resilience. It is a life skill that brings us more to life.

Dr Chris Johnstone is author of 'Find Your Power' – A Toolkit For Resilience and Positive Change' (2^nd ed, Permanent Publications, 2010). He is teaching this week at our Summer School and will be running the Resilience One Day Workshop at The School of Life on Saturday 24 September.