Podcast Episode

Amna Hyder: So I'm on the way back from dropping my daughter off to daycare last week, and on came: 

Song: “I got a feeling” by Black Eyed Peas 

Amna Hyder: Now I gotta feeling too, or rather a few feelings. This song hadnt meant much to me in the past, but NOW? I felt like I was being transported back through a TUNNEL FILLED with ALL the emotions of a decade: Happiness, Sadness, Excitement, Dread. Some of you might feel the same way if not with this song, then another. We have ALL felt notalgia at some point, the powerful warm and sentimental feeling where you yearn for a rosier time in your past. And it got me thinking, WHY do we feel nostalgia in the first place, and should we lean into it or stay away? This is Amna Hyder and you are listening to Tethered Minds. Just like the emotion itself, we dont really know how to feel about nostalgia. We see this confusion in movies all the time. Is it a negative emotion that stops us from progress? 

Movie scene from Aloha 2015: "That's nostalgia and a trap” 

Movie scene from The Cooler (2004): Nostalgia is great and we love nostalgia. 

Amna Hyder: Could it even? Hold the key to unlocking our future. 

Clay Routledge: I think Nostalgia is a resource we use to help us figure things out. 

Amna Hyder: You’ll hear the answers soon, so get ready to be transported through time and space as we look into the the warm and fuzzies of nostalgia alongside the burning pain.  Because let's face it, sometimes nostalgia just plain hurts. And like the emotion itself, the word nostalgia has a bittersweet history. While its associated more with positive emotions now, it was coined in a dark place. 

Clay Routledge: The history of nostalgia is, is crazy. I mean, it's just pretty it. It's pretty wild. 

Amna Hyder: Thats Clay Routledge the Author of Nostalgia, a psychological resource and go to expert on this confusing emotion. 

Clay Routledge: So the term was coined in 1688. 

Amna Hyder: And not long before Europe had experienced one of its longest and most destructive wars, which lasted 30 years. For context, that's seven times as long as World War I. 

Clay Routledge: So you have soldiers many of them conscripted fighting wars in the plains of Europe, So they are separated from home, nothing of these things are great right? And they're really longing for home. They're singing songs they’re telling stories or sharing experiences. but they were miserable, right? 

Amna Hyder: Many of them were experiencing terrifying symptoms, cardiac arrest, loss of appetite, fever, and suicide and people were desperate to understand what was happening. 

Clay Routledge: So what happened is, the physicians at the time were trying to understand this form of depressive homesickness. And so they're like, aha, this is what's going on. This constant longing from home is making these people miserable. 

Amna Hyder: And so they coined this condition nostalgia, from the greek word “nostos” which means to return and “algos” which means pain. Over the years nostalgia continued to have a bad rep 

Clay Routledge: I mean, there are all sorts of wild explanations. Things like demon possession, a lack of maturity and desire to return to the womb. But well into the mid to late 20th century, there was this notion that nostalgia was bad. 

Amna Hyder: The 20th century - Thats when people started to question whether it’s possible nostalgia wasn’t making feel bad, but the people who already struggling might naturally be turning to nostalgia as a way to feel better.  

Clay Routledge: And so it was the distress that maybe was causing them to be nostalgic, not the nostalgia causing them to be distressed. 

Amna Hyder: But the shift in thinking didn't come from scientists. It came from a pretty unexpected group of people who started to intentionally evoke nostalgia: marketers, if you watch the Super Bowl this year, you might have seen T-mobile's nostalgic ad. 

T-Mobile ad from superbowl 2023 “Home Internet from T-Mobile. Wait till you see.” 

Amna Hyder: If you're too young for this, that's John Travolta, reimagining his 1970s musical hit from the movie Grease. 

Continued T-Mobile ad from superbowl 2023 

Amna Hyder: But it’s not just music, there’s something nostalgic about scents too. Hasbro was so certain that the smell of Plato evokes nostalgia that they decided to keep. The scent all for themselves. 

News clip from CBS Miami, May 21, 2018 about Hasbro patenting play dough: “And you know, that smell that play dough has? Of course you. Of course everyone does. Well, apparently it's so familiar and so iconic it's being trademarked. Hasbro secured the distinction on Friday” 

Amna: Is this something you see often? 

Clay Routledge: Yeah, yeah, definitely. I mean, I think that I think that businesses who are marketing products are very aware of the power of familiar senses and sights and sounds too, I mean all sorts of sensory inputs. But yeah, clearly there's something really emotionally potent about smell. 

Amna Hyder: Do you have any idea why? 

Clay Routledge: You know, one idea that's been circulated is the olfactory bowel. 

Amna Hyder: The part of your brain that processes smell. 

Clay Routledge: Is closely connected to. The amygdala, where you form emotional kinds of memories. So there's something about regions of the brain that are connected to smell that really make powerful memories and and more emotional memories. 

Amna Hyder: The amygdala is the part of your brain that processes all sorts of emotion. If you've watched inside out, you can think of it like the little room in Riley's head, where her emotions hang out. 

Clip from Inside out: Sadness: “We should cry”. Fear: “No, we can't cry in front of other kids”. Disgust: “Stop her”. Sadness: “I can't help it, Joy I'm entering a sadness spiral” 

Amna Hyder: The smell center of your brain has VIP access to this room. So when a familiar scientist. Like play dough, it might open a floodgate of emotions and memories from childhood. And marketers were some of the first people to realize a strong power of sense to tug on your nostalgic heartstrings. 

Clay Routledge: But they didn't study like, well, why? Why do we care? And so that's when, you know, the psychologists like me came in when we started really trying to understand what is nostalgia doing  for us? 

Amna Hyder: OK, so I actually want to rewind a little bit. As I understand your journey into nostalgia has started not with psychology, but with your fascination with time travel, right? 

Clay Routledge: I don't know why I just, I like time travel movies. 

Movie clips: 

Quantum Leap (2022): “Travel back in time.” 

Doctor Who - Nightmare in Silver [S07E13] : “I'm a time traveller. I've probably time-traveled more than anyone else.” 

Men in Black 2:  “We made time travel illegal throughout the universe.” 

Clay Routledge: It's fascinating to me that time is something that we can measure fairly precisely, increasingly precisely. Right? But like it's experienced so differently, like sometimes you're sitting there and it feels like the times going really slow. Other times, it feels like it's going fast, so I was just really interested in the psychology of time to begin with. 

Amna Hyder: And while time speeds or slows, our brains are always ready to zoom into the future or rewind into the past. 

Clay Routledge: It's just so cool to me that we can. We can run all these simulations and they're really productive. Right, like if you're going for a job interview next week, what are you doing? You're running simulations. (an elevated state of mind) What if they ask this question? Well, you know you're preparing yourself. That's really, really cool and as far as we know distinctly human. But that that intelligence comes at a price because it has the potential to generate a considerable amount of anxiety because we can fear what might happen in the f uture, most notably our our mortality, right. 

Amna Hyder: And so, Clay started to look into what exactly happens when people think about their fears for the future. 

Clay Routledge: Well, one of the things that you know. You can have those. Well, we don't just go. Forwards and times. And so perhaps the same cognitive capacities that allow us to. Travel into the future. And potentially generate anxiety with that. Also Orient us towards the past. As a way to manage that anxiety. And that's the first studies I started doing is I actually had people writing about death and like other unpleasant topics about the future. 

Amna Hyder: Not morbid at all. 

Clay Routledge: Yeah I know right. And then seeing if having them spend a few minutes also writing about nostalgic memory was comforting. And we found that it was. 

Amna Hyder: So making people nostalgic was helping them manage their anxieties about the future. But do we do this on our own? Do we spontaneously seek nostalgia when we are anxious? Well in 2020 COVID and surging fears about the future presented a real life experiment to test that. Remember how music can stir nostalgic feelings? *I got a feeling** One team combed through not just hundreds, but TRILLIONS of data points from the music streaming platform spotify and drumroll  please...the answer was a resounding YES. When anxiety mounts, we do retreat to the comforting arms of nostalgic music.  (source here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-023-01614-0)

Clay Routledge: So That's pretty cool, but I think where it gets even cooler is if you think about how that connects to other things, like when you feel sad or lonely or detached. 

Amna Hyder: Or otherwise cold emotions. 

Clay Routledge: That triggers nostalgia, which also makes you feel happier and more connected, which you know might associate with the metaphor of feeling warm. 

Amna Hyder: If you aren't already convinced that nostalgia is a superhero emotional shield. Consider this. Could it be helping not only against cold, scary emotions - but also the physical cold? The iconic scene from an affair to remember hints at. 

An Affair to remember: “Winter must be cold for those with no warm memories.” 

Clay Routledge: Well, it turns out if you put people in colder room that triggers, you know, higher levels of nostalgia, which makes them feel.... 

Amna Hyder: wait for it

Clay: ...Colder 

Amna: Maybe that's why the coldest months of the year host some of the most nostalgic. To name a few Christmas, Diwali, Hanukkah, New Year's Thanksgiving Quanza, and Saint Lucia's day. Maybe part of their purpose is to give us some of that long lasting warmth that comes from nostalgic memories. 

Clay Routledge: So that was my thinking was nostalgia is is a psychological defense to help you counter negative psychological states, both in terms of your actual physical environment, but also your emotional or psychological. But then what we started discovering is. Nostalgia might be more than that. 

Amna Hyder: But before we get into that, let's understand a bit more about what nostalgia is. And because this episode is about time travel, we're going back to 1818 to a small cabin in Pigeon Creek, Indiana, where a woman named Nancy Lincoln. She was so weak that she would have. Struggled to shift into a position. From which she could appreciate the beautiful. Fall colors outside. Instead, she would have seen the rest of her 360 square foot, unfinished cabin, an iron pot and her worried 9 year old son. This son was Abraham Lincoln. It was in this small cabin that Lincoln lost his beloved mother and was left under the care of his 11 year old sister. It was where they both faced hardship over hardship, well before they moved and Lincoln's new life led him to become one of America's most important historical figures. Like Abraham Lincoln, many of us have dark and painful periods of our lives. What's worse is that our brain tends to store negative memories with much more detail than our positive ones. That's one of the reasons people avoid thinking about their past. 

Movie clip War (2007): “You will find the only pain living in the past” 

Amna Hyder: You would think that Lincoln would also want to avoid this traumatic, painful past. But 28 years later, he wrote a beautiful poem about his return to this cabin. My childhood home, I see again. And saddened with the view. And still, as memory crowds my brain, there is pleasure in it too. And wait pleasure. What is that pleasure coming from exactly? Clay has found that this type of reflection isn't rare. 

Clay Routledge: One of the things that we discovered. Was that in about 3/4 Of nostalgic narratives, there's what we referred to as a redemptive sequence, and what I mean by that is. People would be talking about something in that memory that makes them a little bit sad or gives them some sense of loss or disconnection. But then what we found is often that was overwhelmed by a subsequent sense of appreciation or gratitude or happiness. 

Amna Hyder: So why does nostalgia feel so good, even when it shouldn't? See, it's not just your brains, emotion hub and memory center working. 

Movie clip Inside Out: “Im entering a sadness spiral” 

Amna Hyder: There's a couple of other areas that you see too. For one, there's something called the ventral striatum. This part of the brain sometimes has a bad rep because it's responsible for that addictive hit from gambling and drugs, but it might explain why nostalgia feels so good. And then there's the medial prefrontal cortex. This is the big shot in your brain responsible for decision-making and self-reflection. It’s like the movie director behind the scenes, putting together clips from your life to make sense of your past and how it has shaped you. But plot twist -theres something else that activates these same brain areas. Regret - and thats why they so often go hand in hand. 

Clay Routledge: And you know, I have a memory like this where had a very good friend. He actually had been battling cancer for a long time and it beat it. And you know, so we're, of course, we're really excited about that. 

Amna Hyder: Clay remembers one day that his friend reached out. 

Clay Routledge: You know, at the time actually sent me a text saying, hey, you want to go get a beer and, you know, I was busy at things going on and I saw him a lot. Like I thought anything. Was going to happen to him and I didn't. I didn't go. I kind of blew them off. Little bit and that was the. Last, you know communication I had with them. 

Amna Hyder: The last communication before Clay found out that his friend had unexpectedly passed away. 

Clay Routledge: And you know, it was very upsetting. I felt I felt guilty. I felt like. I can't believe all just some stupid stuff. I was trying to finish it work getting the way of just going to hang out with a friend. 

Amna Hyder: During this period of grief, Clay started to retreat to nostalgic memories of all the times he did hang out with his friend. And there were a lot of them. 

Clay Routledge: I used nostalgia to learn something from this, like those were meaningful memories, and it's a good reminder that you never know whats going to happen in life, so the things that are really important to you, you have to you have to privilege those over over other things. 

Amna Hyder: Regret is an important emotion that comes with its own set of lessons, but its difficult to process. Nostalgia softens its blow by focusing on the meaning behind those memories. Maybe Clay couldn’t get another opportunity to hang out with his friend, but he was able to refocus on what he might prioritize in the future. 

Clay Routledge: Because it's not like a life review where we're 90 years old and we're looking back of our life. It's a life review that you can do at any point in time, whether you're 18 or 40 or 70. And you can look at what are the memories from your life that are really most important to you and that can help you focus your attention on what to do in the future. 

Amna Hyder: As one of my favorite nostalgic movies, Lion King tells us:  

Lion King clip:  “Ohh yes, the past can't hurt, but the way I see it you can either run from it or learn from it”  

Amna: But other than life lessons or comfort there's a little more to why we love being nostalgic. 

Clay Routledge: So if you give people the opportunity to spend a few minutes thinking about a nostalgic experience, the people in the nostalgic condition subsequently report a greater sense of what we call self continuity, which means feeling like they have like a stable sense of self across time. 

Amna Hyder: The world around us is constantly changing, and so is the world within us. Every 7 years, nearly all the atoms in our body are replaced? Our bodies are in a constant state of flux. It's a humbling thought but it raises an even bigger question: who are we, really? And nostalgia offers us a way to answer that. It breathes life into disconnected memories and allows us to build a personal identity. 

Clay Routledge: I think there is something about stepping outside. Of the moment. And seeing how things are connected. And and that's inspiring. 

Amna Hyder: Because, ultimately, nostalgia is about our identity. It helps us define who we are, what we value, our sense of purpose and where we belong. Life pulls us in all directions, but when we know who we are we can navigate the world. We all have memories, but nostalgia is different. It's not just about remembering the past, but feeling it. That feeling can infuse all sorts of meaning and importance in those memories. After the break, we will look at one of the most nostalgia inspiring speeches of the last decade. And what can happen when the emotional allure of nostalgia is too strong. 

Donald Trump: We will make America great again. 

Amna Hyder: And what happens when the emotional allure of nostalgia is too strong? We're back and we're talking to Doctor Anna Stefaniak, who takes nostalgia to a whole new level because it turns out nostalgia isn't just about us, it's about our communities, too. 

Background Music by Atch Stream: https://linktr.ee/atchmusic 

Anna Stefaniak: So our identity is really comprised of two elements, our personal identity so our traits and our experiences and how we define ourselves as a person, but also our group identity, and here we're touching on one of the probably biggest theories in social psychology that tells us that one of the ways in which people define themselves is through the groups to which they belong. So because we have this aspect of our identity, the social identity, we can also feel emotions that are related to that, 

Amna Hyder: Emotions like the collective joy you might have felt when your country won an olympic medal or your favourite team made it further than they ever had before. 

Anna Stefaniak: and collective nostalgia is one of one of these sort of group level emotions that we may feel, and it essentially entails feeling sentimental, longing for how our group used to be in the past 

Amna Hyder: If you’re like me, when you hear “longing for how our group used to be in the past” it might remind you of a popular nostalgic statement? 

Donald Trump: And we will make America great again. 

Amna Hyder: Anna knows all about this. 

Anna Stefaniak: And what we've witnessed with Donald Trump's and many other radical right wing politicians appeals to nostalgia is their attempt to create a vision of the past that excludes certain people, and then they promise to bring that pass. If voters support them, right? 

Amna Hyder: OK. So you just mentioned other radical right wing politicians when you talked about Trump and you know, my immediate thought too was that there are a lot of other politicians who share some of Trump's nostalgic rhetoric and, you know, some examples would be like Boris Johnson, Ardon and. And anecdotally, it seems like they lean a little conservative. So is there an actual link between nostalgia and political ideology, or does it just seem like that? 

Anna Stefaniak: This is an excellent question, and it really touches upon the most important element of my recent research, because nostalgia, by definition, seems like the type of emotion that would be more appealing to conservative participants because conservatives. Positive evaluation of the past and willingness to preserve it, right? It just seems like a intuitively conservative emotion, so at least some of the research conducted on collective nostalgia shows that conservatives do report greater nostalgia. 

Donald Trump: I love the old days, you know. 

Anna Stefaniak: However, when you think about Barack Obama, for instance, very liberal politician. When he was trying to gain support for his immigration reform, he invoked the tradition of America as an immigrant country, right that accepted all those people who maybe were persecuted in other lands, right? 

Barack Obama: We were strangers once, too. And whether our forebearers were strangers who crossed the Atlantic or the Pacific or the Rio Grande, we are here only because this country welcomed them in. 

Anna Stefaniak: So again, by garner support for his reform, he was also referring to positively valued elements of America's past. Only he was selecting those that supported his agenda. 

Barack Obama: That's the country our parents and grandparents and generations before them built for us. That's the tradition we must uphold. 

Amna Hyder: So nostalgia on both ends of the political spectrum, but for different things. Is it possible that these could be entirely different types of nostalgia? Anna got together with her colleague Michael Wohl and tried to answer that question. 

Anna Stefaniak: We initially conceptualized two types of nostalgia, so nostalgia for a more open Society of depression, nostalgia for a more homogeneous Society of the past. 

Amna Hyder: And idea was that liberals would experience more openness nostalgia and conservatives, who typically yearn for a more traditional society, would experience more homogeneity nostalgia. 

Anna Stefaniak: And this is indeed what we found. So conservative participants scored higher on the measures of liberal participants scored higher on the measure of openness, nostalgia, which again slightly contradicts previous work showing that conservative participants are simply more nostalgic. Our work shows that that's not the case once you factor in the types of nostalgia that people may experience 

Amna Hyder: Right, so depending on your political orientation you might be more likely to feel nostalgic about a more open tolerant past or more nostalgic for more homogenous. But, Anna, here’s what boggles my mind – the way politicians paint these rosy pictures of the past feels like they’re living in totally different worlds! Which gets me wondering, how much can we really trust these nostalgic memories? Are we dealing with a dash of reality with a whole lot of imagination here or what?” 

Anna Stefaniak: That's an excellent question. What we know from work on representations of history and and also from the ways in which human memory works. Is that this is a creative process. In a way. And this also means that, in principle, nostalgic memories don't have to have a whole lot to do with reality, right? So they have a subjective element in which, say, people who are strongly identified with their national group tend to recall less. Events from the past. That would put their group in a negative light. 

Amna Hyder: You have some personal experience with this, right in Poland. Can you talk a little bit about that? 

Anna Stefaniak: Sure, So I come from Poland and one event that really sparked my interest in that area was the publication of the book Neighbors by Jan Tomasz Gross, who basically described an event from World War Two in which Polish neighbors burned their Jewish neighbors. 

Amna Hyder: This book was published in the year 2000. 

Anna Stefaniak: And what happened in Poland at the time was a huge outcry of people basically denying that that ever happened because they were unable to process that information about their in-group, And to me that was really interesting because we were dealing with what I thought was a field of historical facts. But some people were ready to deny that event even happening, despite all the evidence for that having actually been the case 

Amna Hyder: I couldnt find any currently living survivors from this massacre to talk to (I mean it has been over 80 years and there were very few survivors to begin with), but I was able to get in touch with the grand daughter of one of the most vocal Polish Jewish survivors, Rabbi Jacob Baker. Her name is Yael Levy and here is some of our conversation.  

Yael Levy: My grandfather wrote a memorial book what's called Yiskor book to remember the town that was 

Amna Hyder: And in this book he talked about the massacre that took place in his town in 1941. Can you talk a little bit about that? 

Yael Levy: From what I understand, that was when the Jews were rounded up into the town square and they cut off the rabbis beard, stripped him naked, had him drag around the fallen Russian statue that was up. 

Amna Hyder: Was your grandfather there at the time? 

Yael Levy: He left right before, he would got literally on the last boat out, but he compiled the memoirs of the the handful of survivors. 

Amna Hyder: Do you know how the survivors made it out? 

Yael Levy: There are a few people hidden by a Polish Christian woman. While the massacre was happening, they saw everything. They heard everything, they knew everything. 

Amna Hyder: How did the Polish Government and the Polish people respond to the testimonies that your grandfather shared? 

Yael Levy:  The Polish Government kept flip flopping about. There was a point where they were honoring my grandfather for speaking out and letting people know about this. The consulate made a whole. Party for him and his family. He got an award and then. They flip-flopped and said no. No, there was no Polish culpability. It's own life. The Nazis did it because it became a crime. Now you're not even allowed to say in Poland. You can't say. That the polls were responsible for murdering your neighbors. It's the law. 

Amna Hyder: As wild as it sounds, this law is a real thing. 

News clip from Washington post February 1, 2018: “Any suggestion that Poland was complicit in the Holocaust could land offenders in jail under a new law which Polish lawmakers approved on Thursday this.” 

Amna Hyder: This was a highly controversial bill and for many people around the world, tt was seen as an attempt by Poland rewriting its history. It also happened to coincide with the increasing nostalgia for a vision of Polish heritage that was less diverse now, before Anna started researching nostalgia, she'd also been interested in Polish history and heritage herself. 

Anna Stefaniak: So I was working with a nonprofit organization in Poland that teaches Polish youth about the historical presence of Jewish minority.  

Amna Hyder: And in true researcher fashion, and I gave out questionnaires to the students before and after the program. 

Anna Stefaniak: We included a measure of collective nostalgia for a more open and tolerant Society of the past and a collective nostalgia for a more homogeneous Society of the past and what we were able to show is that. Essentially, participants became less nostalgic and less sentimental about times in their groups past when it was maybe more homogeneous and became more nostalgic about times when Poland was more open to cultural and religious. 

Amna Hyder: So just learning about a multicultural history made people sentimental about an open, tolerant past. But it did more than just that. 

Anna Stefaniak: Well, just in engaging with a multicultural heritage changed how participants in the study felt about the history of their country and in turn, these changes in nostalgia explained their attitudes towards Jewish people and towards ethnic diversity. And we also saw significant positive associations. Between nostalgia and willingness to become civically engaged in one's local. 

Amna Hyder: What we're taught about our history shapes our collective identity and in turn, that identity shapes how we behave. So that history lesson you might have dozed off in. Might have actually had a bigger impact on your politics than you'd like to think. Nostalgia infuses the history we're taught with emotion, and that can inspire action. 

Anna Stefaniak: For instance, in a series of studies that actually established collective nostalgia. As a group. Level emotion and started this whole line of research. The studies were published by Tim Wildschut and Constantine Sedikides and their colleagues. They were able to show that when students were asked to recall a collective nostalgic memory, so a. Memory that makes them nostalgic that they experience with other members of their group than those nostalgic memories were associated. With greater willingness to associate with other group members greater support for the group, even greater willingness to punish a transgressor who is not treating another member of their in-group properly. 

Amna Hyder: And this can be seen outside of psychology labs as well. 

Anna Stefaniak: So I know that there is evidence showing that appeals for donations that use versus do not use group based nostalgia tend to be more successful. So there are tangible benefits at the at the individual and group level. 

Amna Hyder: So we know that nostalgia can be a powerful driver for political action, but given that our memories aren't always accurate. I asked Anna how we could avoid falling for politicians who might try to play the nostalgia card on us. 

Anna Stefaniak: So nostalgia arises when people perceive their present as being more negative than their past. 

Amna Hyder: Right. 

Anna Stefaniak: So if you're feeling lonely, if you're feeling. Being anxious if the weather is bad and in a host of other negative circumstances, people tend to use nostalgia to help alleviate those negative feelings. So maybe if we can improve people's situation in the present, then we should be able to also limit the appeal of. Radical right wing politicians may use that metric. 

Amna Hyder: Whether it's politicians on the left or the right. They know nostalgia hits US right in the fields. As we navigate the choppy waters of social upheaval, COVID and climate change. Many of us are using nostalgia as an anchor to study our ships. From nostalgic speeches. 

Obama speech: We were strangers once, too. 

Amna Hyder: To music that stirs old memories.  

Song: “I got a feeling” 

Amna: And products that evoke simpler times.  

Play dough advertisement 

Amna: Nostalgia is in demand. Its magnetic pull is so strong that it can be used in all sorts of ways by all sorts of people. But, the silver lining - we dont have to let others dictate what we feel nostalgic for. In Clays highly awaited new book, he tells us how we can use nostalgia to patch up hearts, get our creative juices flowing, and light the way when things get fuzzy. Its called “Past Forward: How Nostalgia Can Help You Live a More Meaningful Life” and you can find a link to pre-order it on our website. Thats all for now, so, unless you're jumping into another episode of Tethered Minds, now might be just the moment to cue up some of your nostalgic favorites. We will see you next episode, where we dive into the world of touch - that fundamental human sense that might shape you in more ways than you imagine. We'll unravel its vital role in our growth, the profound consequences of its absence, the deep scars left by unwanted touch and the incredible healing power of a simple, caring touch, and how you can bring that into your own life. Trust me, you won't want to miss it! 

You can pre-order Clays new book here: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/past-forward-clay-routledge-phd/1143362608

Music credit to:

Coming Home - Atch

Stream: https://linktr.ee/atchmusic