Whether it’s your first love or your thirty first love, one thing is certain, and it’s the overwhelming feeling of pain you experience when it’s broken off. Believe me, I’ve had my fair share. The relationship didn’t last long, about a month or so of building and growing. And then the plateau hit, and the relationship became stagnant,stale in a way that I didn’t want to accept. The attraction was lost, and the little “sparks” that people seem to think are there when a person really likes another, fizzled out. There was a loss of connection, like we couldn’t talk anymore, weren’t being true to ourselves. I felt like I was pushing, trying to stay in a relationship that wasn’t really a relationship anymore. We broke up. It was...a good breakup all things considered. But the feeling of being stabbed in the heart multiple times was tangible, and the pain seemed to even extend to my hands, to the point where my hands ached if I tried to move them. I had expectations, none of which were truly met, though I kept trying. I wanted the relationship to work so badly that I just convinced myself it was ok. But I’d gone down this road before, with expectations and hopes of a good long term relationship, when truthfully it only ever ended with us going our separate ways. I wanted to scream at the universe, stick up my middle finger at how unfair everything was, still is. The loss of contact made me do crazy things, like avoid certain places where we used to hang out even though it was the memories that stung the most. We explored downtown Fredericksburg like most couples. But there were certain places, the coffee shop on the corner, the antique mall that always had new antiquities, I avoided for quite some time. It made me consume copious amounts of Herrs original flavor potato chips, not ice cream, but chips. And I definitely cried, a lot. Into pillows, my friends’ shoulders, in public if it was a particularly awful day.
It wasn’t until later when I began to wonder why it seemed like my heart was being pulled through a spaghetti strainer, even though I had always reasoned physical and emotional pain were different. As it turns out, heartbreak is no joke, and when it comes to the emotional and physical pain of it, it turns out that that’s no joke either. I wanted to figure out and understand why there seemed to be a link between emotional and physical pain in the body. I’m a scientific person, and to me, there are biological reasons and processes behind that all too unbearable feeling of “heartbreak”. The first study I came across called “Does Rejection Hurt? An fMRI Study of Social Exclusion” revealed that indeed, breakups do hurt. In fact, through a social experiment where participants were excluded from a virtual game of catch, in all of the fMRI of the brain, or functional magnetic resonance imaging, the neural pathways in the brain that experience physical pain lit up when the participants felt the emotional pain of being excluded.
Now, that has to say something. According to Dr. C. Nathan DeWall, humans have innate need to be accepted socially. When that acceptance is suddenly ripped away it can cause the brain and the body to undergo copious amounts of stress. So, not only do we feel emotionally exhausted, our bodies are are also physically exhausted. The parts of the brain that light up under this kind of stress are the dACC, dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, and the AI, or Anterior Insula. The dACC is the biggie though, because it controls the heart rate, blood pressure, impulse control, and most importantly, your emotions. So, while I was busy crying into my friend’s shoulder for an hour, my dACC was pumping signals from my brain through the neural pathways to my body, putting my body through elevated levels of stress, increasing my blood pressure as well as making me want to eat all the food that was around me.
Another study, and this one seems even worse, was conducted by scientists Cross, Berman, Mischel, Smith, and Wager, where 40 participants were placed in socially exclusive situations. The participants were shown pictures of their exes, in which each breakup was regarded as unmutual. This experiment focused less on the activity within the brain, and more on the somatosensory response of the body. According to Medscape, the general principle of somatosensory response “are the electrical signals generated by the nervous system in response to sensory stimuli”. Sensory stimuli in this case can mean visual and noise stimulation, and not just sensory stimulation by touch. The aim of the study was to see if the somatosensory responses within the body also “lit up” when experiencing social rejection. The study concluded that while the dACC and the AI respond automatically to any sort of social rejection or social stress, the somatosensory response only activates under extreme amounts of social stress. So going through a small breakup would only be mildly uncomfortable. But a long term relationship is much, much worse. No wonder my hands hurt so badly, all the electrical signals in my body were going haywire under the emotional and social stress!
An article from the American Psychological Association titled “The Pain of Social Rejection” summarized that the reason emotional and physical pain are so interwoven is because evolution programmed us that way! Dr. DeWall explained, “Instead of creating an entirely new system to respond to socially painful events, evolution simply co-opted the system for physical pain”. Another Article from “Greater Good magazine: Science-Based Insights for a Meaningful Life” highlighted the positive effects that a relationship has on the body and brain. When we are happy and in a committed mutual relationship, the drain releases dopamine, or the happy feel good chemical that in turn, makes us happy. The release of dopamine can be triggered by drugs as well, cocaine, for example. People are addicted to cocaine, just like they are addicted to love. So, when your body is experiencing the pain and absence from a broken off relationship, you’re just like a cocaine addict who has had their drugs ripped away. So woohoo, heartbreak is so bad, it is literally like going through drug withdrawal.
But, not everything is doom and gloom. The old saying “time heals all wounds” isn’t exactly wrong per say. But, it’s not entirely right either when it comes to the process of a broken heart. Criminologist Brian Boutwell of Saint Louis University noted that if people never recovered from social rejection, there wouldn’t be a human race. The parts of the brain that cause us to feel pain are a small fraction of the brain. And though they can impact us greatly, evolution has also given us the ability to adapt. According to the study, the brain is wired to adapt and to move on. Even though our bodies are going through a chronic pain induced state, our brains are already re-wiring themselves to move on and look towards the future. So, while I couldn’t help the stabbing sensation in my chest, at least I understood why it was there, and why it was so potent a feeling. And, in the end, it really lifted me up knowing my brain may have been spazzing out at the time, but within a week or so, maybe more, the old noggin would be back to its normal self.