A Dog Can Help You Fight Your Homesickness
When we are apart from our loved ones, we miss them immeasurably. We believe that living without them is impossible. However, research has shown that the best medicine for overcoming grief or loss is found in man’s best friend.
We can define nostalgia as the pain that emanates from our inner life when we lose someone or something that we hold dear or hold dear.
According to Sigmund Freud, when this happens, we feel like we have lost a part of ourselves. This emotion can quickly get worse and trigger true depression.
This is why it is useful to know how to tame it and to learn some strategies which allow us to keep it under control.
Popular culture teaches us that after a loss, it is important to find someone who can be the object of all the love we have left over.
A love that no longer has a recipient, but which is still present in us. However, beyond the maxim “ one lost, ten found “, we can consider other alternatives.
We can also become pet owners. People generally set their sights on a dog, which is a deeply cheerful, loving, and loyal animal.
The positive effect that a dog can have on our health is no longer a myth: a scientific study has just shown it to be true.
A team of researchers from the University of British Columbia, Canada, carried out a field study on the subject.
Students who had to uproot themselves in order to continue their university studies experienced this separation better when they had a dog by their side, allowing them to overcome their feelings of nostalgia.
The consequence of this is that their school results are much better.
Assisted therapy with dogs to overcome university studies
The researchers carried out a comprehensive analysis, thus compiling the results obtained from 44 universities.
They selected first-year students who claimed to feel nostalgia and asked them to complete a questionnaire to measure their feeling of unease, as well as their degree of integration into campus life.
Then, they chose a test group in each university, to perform therapy with dogs. Nostalgic unselected students had to wait 8 weeks before they too could try it.
The young people selected were able to spend 45 minutes a week in the presence of a group of dogs, in order to fight their nostalgia.
After 8 weeks, all individuals in the test group had to fill out the initial questionnaire again.
The results were crystal clear: the test group members significantly reduced their melancholy, while improving their daily state of mind.
For their part, those who had not been selected saw their discomfort worsen.
Thanks to this work, a new therapeutic avenue has been opened up. The news is far more important than it seems at first glance.
In addition to the positive effect on the feelings of the individuals tested, the researchers were able to observe another interesting phenomenon.
These students were all quite capable before the study. However, they failed to perform optimally in school, as their performance was affected by their homesickness.
Improving their academic performance is a success that can fill us with hope. Who knows if we don’t lose a revolutionary scientist, an innovative economist or a genius author every day because of too heavy a feeling of nostalgia?
The negative effects of nostalgia
Nostalgia causes us to look too much in our past. In this past that we wish for and in which we wish to return.
The smallest event seems to us to be the most wonderful, for it enjoys the almost supernatural brilliance of memories. Our future, on the other hand, appears to us as confused, very distant and dark.
When nostalgia strikes us, we live in this fantasized yesterday and all the following days seem irrelevant to us.
When melancholy turns into a generalized state of mind and is no longer just that familiar place we like to come and snuggle in from time to time, we put aside all our life plans.
If nostalgia strikes you at a young age, like 18 for example, you may not be able to take advantage of all the opportunities that life has to offer. It’s not that you refuse them, but you just can’t see them.
You are no longer able to follow your lessons with the attention you should be getting. You no longer think clearly about what you want and you no longer experience the new routes of your personal journey with the same passion.
This is why it is essential that research advance in this area, especially when it strikes the youngest people. The capacity of young people to cling to life and to love their neighbor is essential for new generations.
