Nostalgia, High Sensitivity, and Body Image: A Nervous System Perspective
Dec 23, 2025I have a complicated relationship with nostalgia.
Memories and personal history braid together with potent emotional overwhelm; the endings of things make me melancholy in a way I've never properly understood.
Over the years I’ve come to see how closely it connects to high sensitivity, the nervous system, and the way many people relate to food and their bodies.
For most people, it seems like nostalgia shows up as a passing feeling. A memory. It can feel warm and sentimental, but not devastating.
For others—especially highly sensitive people—it’s embodied. Songs, places, seasons, endings, or transitions don’t just bring up thoughts about the past. They recreate emotional states in the body.
During emotionally loaded times of year, after transitions, or when old memories get activated, urges around control, checking, restriction, overeating, or mental spiraling tend to intensify.
Highly sensitive nervous systems process memory differently. Emotional experiences are stored with strong sensory and physiological components. There is a perception not just of the events themselves, but of their meaning. When a thing ends, highly sensitive people move through the existential experience of loss.
Childhood and adolescence are periods of transitions -- quite a condensed period of beginnings and endings. For highly sensitive people, we may not understand the range of our emotions during this time. It is also an age loaded with identity formation, belonging, emotional vulnerability, confusion, social rupture, loss of innocence. Without support and understanding, these experiences may never get fully processed.
And for sensitive nervous systems, those experiences don’t simply resolve with time. They can remain as open stress loops.
In somatic work, these unresolved loops are sometimes described as vortex patterns. There’s a pull toward something unfinished—not because we desire it necessarily, but because it never reached completion. The nervous system continues to seek containment and resolution.
Food and body focus often become the place where that unresolved emotional energy goes. Control is concrete. It has structure. It creates a sense of stability when internal states feel overwhelming. Over time, the body learns that food and appearance are reliable ways to regulate intensity.
This helps explain why people can feel drawn toward periods of their lives that were objectively painful or destabilizing, including the patterns of disorder themselves. The pull isn’t toward the suffering -- it’s toward the only coping mechanisms that offered safe witnessing and escape from the overwhelm. Letting them go can feel like leaving behind a younger self who depended on them for survival.
In recovery and nervous system–based body image work, this is often where grief plays a role in recovery. When familiar buffers are no longer available, emotions come back online. This can mean re-entering that old emotional swelling—strong sadness, anger, longing, or existential loneliness that was once too difficult to hold.
But the point isn't to "fix" that emotion, or even to become the kind of person who doesn't feel so deeply.
What changes in recovery isn't our level of emotional depth. It’s our capacity to hold it.
Somatic work builds containment. It helps the body learn that intensity can move through without taking over, and that emotions can be felt in the present without pulling someone entirely into the past.
In my coaching work, this often looks like learning how to notice when emotional overwhelm arrives, recognizing how food or body thoughts are being recruited to manage that state, and shifting toward direct nervous system support instead.
For a more in-depth exploration of this topic, check out my Full But Not Finished podcast episode on YouTube.
Want support with this?
If this lands for you and you want help untangling nostalgia, emotional overwhelm, and the food/body spiral through nervous system and somatic work, you can book a discovery call with me. We’ll talk about what’s been happening, what you’ve tried, and what kind of support can help you meet your sensitivity with compassion and regulation.
