"Self-discontinuity" is the feeling that our past self has become disconnected from our present self.

When we experience self-discontinuity, it is really our "self-concept" with which we have lost touch.

Studies show that nostalgic memories make people "feel more like their real self."

Nostalgia alleviates self-discontinuity by reconnecting us with our authentic self-concept.

In a climactic scene from Disney’s The Lion King, the spirit of Mufasa appears to his son Simba in the clouds overhead and tells him, “You are more than what you have become.” In addition to spurring Simba on to challenge his uncle Scar and take his rightful place as king, this passage resonates personally, and perhaps a bit uncomfortably, with many viewers of the movie. As we make our way into, and through, adulthood, most of us at some point experience a moment where we feel that, like Simba, we are more than what we have become.

And for us, as for Simba, the reason for our failure to realize our full potential often lies in a basic act of forgetfulness. Mufasa tells Simba, “You have forgotten who you are,” and the same can be said of most of us when we look in the mirror one day and find that the demands and stresses of our life as we’re actually living it have caused us to lose touch with the life that we once imagined we would live, and the person we thought we would become.

Psychologists call it “self-discontinuity,” the feeling that our past self and present self have become disconnected. And while for most of us the self from which we have become disconnected does not involve royal succession, that does not make it any less painful and disorienting when we wake up one........

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