Written by Suzanne Rath, a high-performance strategist, endurance athlete, and speaker who works with founders and leaders to close the gap between ambition and the capacity to sustain it. She is the creator of the ENDURES™ Framework and hosts the ENDURES Podcast daily.
There’s a particular feeling that hits when an old song comes on unexpectedly, or you catch a smell that takes you straight back to a moment from twenty years ago. A warmth. A kind of ache. Something that feels significant, even when you can’t quite explain why.
We tend to dismiss it as sentimentality. A distraction. Something to smile at and move past.
But what if nostalgia is actually one of the most reliable signals we have about who we are — and who we’re meant to become?
What Nostalgia Actually Is
For most of its history, nostalgia was considered a medical condition. The word was coined in 1688 by a Swiss physician who used it to describe the severe homesickness experienced by soldiers away at war. It was classified as a neurological disease. Sufferers were treated with opium, leeches, and trips to the Alps.
The science has moved on considerably.
Today, researchers understand nostalgia as a complex social emotion, one that is fundamentally different from simple fond memory. It is, according to psychologist Dr Constantine Sedikides at the University of Southampton, who has spent two decades studying the phenomenon, a self-relevant and social emotion. When we feel nostalgic, we’re not just remembering a moment. We’re remembering who we were in that moment, who we were with, and how it felt to be most fully ourselves.
Sedikides and colleagues have found that nostalgia consistently produces measurable psychological benefits. People who experience nostalgic states report higher levels of social connectedness, a stronger sense of self-continuity, and, critically, elevated feelings of meaning and purpose.
Not escapism. Purpose.
The Forward-Facing Nature of Nostalgia
Here’s the part that surprises most people: nostalgia is not actually backward-looking.
Research published in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin found that nostalgia functions as a psychological resource, one that connects our past self to our future self, creating what researchers call a sense of self-continuity. When the thread between who we were and who we are feels coherent, we feel more capable of moving forward with intention.
There’s a maxim in business, leadership, and life that we overestimate what we can achieve in a year, but underestimate what we can achieve in three. Nostalgia is one tool we can use to reflect fondly on where we’ve come from and gain clarity over our next best steps.
Studies have also found that nostalgia increases what psychologists call approach motivation — the drive to pursue meaning and connection — and reduces existential anxiety. We become less afraid and more purposeful when we feel anchored to something real.
Which brings us to a question worth sitting with: what do you feel nostalgic about in your business, leadership, or life? And what does that tell you?
The Moments That Stay Are the Moments That Matter
While running eighty kilometers through the forests and beaches of Margaret River alongside people who genuinely challenge and inspire me, I found myself thinking not about my sore knees, but about why I continue to sign up for mammoth events. Yes, I’m obsessed with actualizing potential. But more than that, it’s the chats. The Taylor Swift tunes. The views, which make the post-race pain worthwhile. And the knowledge that I was anchoring each moment in my memory to look back on when I needed a reminder of my strength, resilience, purpose, or the beauty that surrounds us.
That moment of forward-looking nostalgia — imagining looking back on the present from some future vantage point — is a well-documented psychological tool. Researchers call it prospective nostalgia or, more commonly, anticipatory nostalgia. It involves projecting yourself into the future and imagining how you’ll remember right now.
When you do this, something interesting happens. You start to see the present more clearly. The things that feel urgent but won’t matter fade out. The things that will endure — the connections, the moments of full aliveness, the times when you felt most like yourself — come into focus.
And when those things come into focus, purpose follows.
Why We Look in the Wrong Places
Most conventional approaches to finding purpose — or our why, our vision, our mission, you can substitute in any ‘hard’ question there — ask us to answer forward-facing questions. Where do you want to be in five years? What do you want your legacy to be? What would you do if you knew you couldn’t fail?
These aren’t bad questions. But without a lot of prior work and coaching, at worst, they can produce a level of existential crisis or answers that borrow from someone else’s vision of success. The problem with achieving a goal that doesn’t really matter to you is that you never really feel it when it happens.
Purpose isn’t constructed through logic. It’s recognized through feeling.
Nostalgia gives us access to the feeling faster than almost anything else because nostalgia doesn’t allow us to be performative. It doesn’t care about our goals, our LinkedIn profile, or what everyone on Instagram is doing right now. It pulls us straight to the moments that were real.
Those moments are data.
How to Use Nostalgia as a Purpose Compass
The process is simpler than most people expect.
Start with the memories that carry weight. Not just the happy ones, the meaningful ones. The moments you keep returning to. The experiences that, when you describe them to someone else, your energy visibly shifts. A project that consumed you in the best possible way. A conversation that cracked something open. A season of your life where you felt the most like yourself.
Ask what was present in those moments. Connection? Creative freedom? Physical challenge? Service? Leadership? Contribution to something larger than yourself? The themes that repeat across your most meaningful memories are not coincidental. They are consistent signals about what your nervous system recognizes as purposeful.
Notice the nostalgia you haven’t experienced yet. Anticipatory nostalgia — imagining looking back from the future — can be a powerful compass for decisions in the present. When you’re at a crossroads, ask: Which of these choices will I look back on with meaning? The answer is often immediately clear in a way that logical analysis isn’t.
The Science of Meaning-Making
Meaning is not something we “find”. Research from Viktor Frankl through to contemporary positive psychologists consistently shows that meaning is constructed through the stories we tell about our own lives, and that the most powerful source of those stories is experience we can reflect on with genuine emotion.
Nostalgia is, at its core, a meaning-making emotion. It takes experience and transforms it into narrative — a story about who we are, what matters to us, and where we came from. And narrative is the engine of purpose.
People who are disconnected from their purpose are rarely missing information. They are missing reflection. I’ve been there — the high performance through hustle, externally oriented goals, hoping that when I got to the next thing, I’d be content. But when I started to develop my ENDURES framework for sustainable high performance, reflection sits there within its core. Reflection doesn’t need to involve yoga retreats, weeks offline, or long holidays. It’s a process we can all adopt into our everyday work and lives. Something you can build into two minutes of your morning, a pause between meetings, or a question you carry on a run. Reflection doesn’t require you to go offline. It requires you to go inward.
Where to Start
You don’t need a three-day retreat or a personality assessment to begin. You need two minutes in your day and the willingness to ask these three things.
What is my vision for my life and leadership?
What’s going well on the path towards this?
What can I let go of that’s not moving me forward?
