De-Romanticizing Heartbreak: The Science Behind Breaking Up
New to the land of heartbreak, I’ve recently found myself crumbling under the weight of unanswered questions. Failing to understand my former partner, I found solace in the next best thing: understanding the mechanisms that control my own behavior.
Why does love feel like an addiction? Why does rejection physically hurt? Why does romantic rejection cause erratic behavior?
I turned to science for help, and set out on a quest to find out why humans fall in love, and why it feels like a near-death experience when that love ends.
What is Love?
To understand what happens when you experience a romantic break up, you first have to understand what happens when you experience romantic love.
To the distress of all poets and romantics, science actually is able to explain love. By definition, love is not an emotion as we’re taught to think, but a goal-oriented motivational state. Once a person chooses a prospective mate, the caudate nucleus is activated — the part of the brain which is associated with motivation and goal-oriented behavior and reward system. Requited romantic love releases a large amount of dopamine, as it gives us all the sources of the feel-good hormone in one place: sexual gratification, rewards for positive behavior, the feeling of belonging and safety, and countless other types of affirmation. The dependency and cravings that are associated with romantic love are symptoms of addiction, both connected to elevated dopamine. In fact, numerous studies using fMRI brain scans have proven that the same region of the brain is responsible for love and for opiod, alcohol, nicotine and gambling addiction. You know all those songs about a lover being like a drug? It’s actually not a sleazy metaphor, it’s a biological fact.
What Happens When You’re Broken Up With?
If your brain in love is like a brain on drugs, then your brain after you’ve been broken up with is — you guessed it — a brain in withdrawal. The neurological processes of being in love continue, but the expected reward is delayed -permanently. You’re left with the brain of a drug addict waiting for their next hit. And when this hit doesn’t come, you react just like a drug addict in withdrawal would.
After being broken up with, people exhibit certain levels or erratic behavior and loss of control. Put more simply, after being dumped, you’re overcome by a demon forcing you to beg for reconciliation, lash out in anger when you’re refused, threaten, cry, scream, excessively call, text, email, Internet stalk, and a number of other embarrassing and counterproductive behaviors you know just make your ex think you’re an insane nuisance. You might find some comfort in knowing that you quite literally can’t help it. Your obsessing, calling and texting is the equivalent to the desperate lengths a drug addict in withdrawal goes to in an attempt to “get the goods”. In fact, various research using fMRIs concluded quite specifically that the area of the brain involved in romantic love is the area of the brain involved in cocaine addiction (the ventral tegmental area), and that the obsessive behavior that results from rejection is very similar to cocaine withdrawal. So, if you’re embarrassed of the way you’ve handled being dumped, just tell your ex you were in cocaine withdrawal — as far as your brain is concerned, you won’t be lying!
“Time Heals All”
Everyone will tell you — give yourself time to heal. Normally, they will mean that you should find a hobby, practice self-care, and try and have some fun. While this advice is good, it’s not actually why time heals heartbreak. The brain eventually learns that “the hit” is not coming. Reality starts kicking in, and the orbitofrontal cortex is activated: this is the part of the brain that learns from emotions and controls behavior. It starts processing the information that the source of pleasure is no longer available. This is when the voice of reason finally shows up in your head, telling you not to click send on that angry message, not to crash that party, not to set your ex’s house on fire. Slowly, painfully, but eventually, the brain readjusts itself to a new reality without the dopamine fix, and the voice of reason wins.
Why Does Rejection Physically Hurt?
You don’t need science to tell you that being broken up with will leave you depressed. Most common reactions include anxiety, crying, loss of appetite and irritability. Depending on many factors such as attachment style, gender, age, and mental health, rejection could result in a shorter and more manageable bout of depression, long term clinical depression, or even full blown PTSD. Emotional pain, however, isn’t the only side-effect.
The physical pain that you feel — pressure on your chest, gastro-intestinal pain, headaches — you’re not imagining it. The pain is very real, and characteristic to all social rejection, not just unrequited love. Numerous studies conducted to examine social rejection using fMRIs suggest that both physical pain and social rejection light up the cingulate cortex; physical pain and social pain have the same underlying processes, involving the anterior cingulate cortex, the right ventral prefrontal cortex and the opioid system. In other words, your body feels social pain just as it feels physical pain.
While all forms of social rejection result in pain, there is a reason why we refer to romantic rejection as “heartbreak”. Romantic rejection is shown to be accompanied by increased blood pressure and elevated levels of cortisol (the stress hormone). Physical pain in the chest area that results from rejection and bereavement is called the broken heart syndrome (also referred to as stress cardiomyopathy or Takotsubo cardiomyopathy). Although heartbreak syndrome has the same symptoms as a heart attack, angiograms have revealed that, unlike in real heart attacks, patients don’t have any clogged arteries, and MRI scans have shown that there is no irreversible heart damage.
Where is the Point?
If you’re anything like me, you’ll start to wonder why on earth this is so. Physical pain has its purpose — it’s a response to danger, a signal that certain parts of our body are malfunctioning. The pain is there to draw immediate attention to the problem with the purpose of keeping us alive. If social pain is the same as physical pain, does this mean that we interpret social rejection as being equally dangerous as, say, an infected wound? Anthropologists say: Yes.
The pain of social rejection has an evolutionary purpose. Back in the baby-days of the human race, being separated from your pack or your mate could quite literally mean the difference between life and death. Like any other animal, humans are stronger, and safer, in groups. Being rejected from a group leaves the individual vulnerable and exposed, an easy target to predators, and it makes finding sustenance and shelter more challenging. The body reacts with pain, alerting us to the dangers of the situation, signaling that we have a problem that needs immediate attention — find yourself a new pack. Nature, being practical and effective, didn’t develop two separate parts of the brain to process essentially the same information, instead simply packing up pain, regardless of type, into the same region of the brain. Even though being separated from your group is no longer life threatening, the instinct to form groups and the pain that comes with losing them is something that we still haven’t, and might not ever, evolve out of.
Medicating Heartbreak
Upon realizing that the all-round misery of romantic rejection is nothing but very particular brain activity, you might ask yourself why we can’t just manipulate it like we do everything else that happens on the level of the body. Rest assured, there’s quite a number of scientists working on this as we speak.
Because we know that love has the mechanisms of addiction, and that social rejection has the mechanisms of physical pain, we might be able to create the right combination of chemicals to combat both. Current research has shown that cognitive behavioral therapy, intranasal oxytocin, MDMA, and acetaminophen, all reduce the pain of social rejection and aid the physical and mental ailments of the break-up process. Many postulate that painkillers and anti-addiction drugs could work just as well on heartbreak as they do for physical issues. The combination of psychotherapy and medication that is used to help overcome addiction promises to work on helping the lovelorn as well. While it’s still a long way away, the dream is to create a heartbreak pill. Many do, however, warn about the ethical implications of drugs that effectively make you fall out of love.
When Heartbreak is an Anesthetic: Stress and Chronic Pain
It is well known that levels of stress have an influence on pain levels. The more stressed you are, the more unpleasant a chronic condition gets. However, there is a point in which mental and emotional stress get so high that they trump physical pain.
I found this out the fun way: during my own break up, a fascinating thing happened — for the first time in 10 years, I, a person exhibiting severe endometriosis symptoms, could walk on my period.
My reactions to the break up were quite severe, resulting in panic attacks, severe chest pain, sleep deprivation, and complete loss of appetite. In all this, although I felt the period pain, in some bizarre way it seemed like I didn’t have the brainpower to fully register it. For the duration of my entire period, I took 300 mg of ketoprofen, as opposed to taking between 200 mg and 400 mg daily. Guided by some irrational fear of standing still, I walked straight through the pain, half-aware of it. I clearly remember pacing up and down my room, holding onto the wall with one hand, hysterical thoughts switching from: “How can he want to break up?” to “How am I able to stand?”
It turns out, there’s a thing called stress-induced analgesia.
What is Stress?
By definition, stress is a state of disharmony or threatened homeostasis. Our body has three responses to stress — neural, endocrine and behavioural — out of which the behavioral response includes an increase in pain threshold. Humans can have one of two responses — analgesia (anesthetizing pain) or hyperalgesia (exaggerating pain), and this is highly individual and dependent on the emotional response the individual has to stress. Fear, it is shown, causes stress-induced analgesia.
In a nutshell, stress-induced analgesia occurs when a person is physically injured during a stressful situation, and the stress enables the person to ignore the pain. Stressful events promote the production of the hormone noradrenaline which in turn numb’s the brain’s pain-processing pathways. Stress-induced analgesia, however, is a phenomenon which is quite individual, and it’s frequency and intensity varies based on a person’s degree of opioid sensitivity and startle response, as well as age, gender, and prior exposure to stress. What this means is that in my personal case, I reacted to the stress of my break up with fear, and my brain interpreted the danger of my break up as greater and in need of more immediate attention than the danger of my physical illness. My brain prioritized, utilizing all resources to attempt and solve my “addiction problem”, rather than solve the problem facing my uterus.
So, with all this in mind, what really happened to me?
My Love Story, Scientific Version:
I met a human of the opposite sex and concluded that this specimen was a compatible mate. We formed a long-term partnership which instigated a regular production of large amounts of dopamine. The caudate nucleus and the ventral tegmental area were activated: my brain made the connection between exposure to a particular person with the production of dopamine and I was put in a goal-oriented motivational state. The length of the experience turned this into a full-fledged addiction.
Unexpectedly, the dopamine-source became unattainable. My brain kept repeating the same behavioral patterns expecting the same reward, but the reward wasn’t coming. I went into withdrawal, which resulted in panic-induced erratic behavior, depression and anxiety. The experience of rejection activated the region of the brain which causes bodily pain as a way to signal the occurrence of what was perceived as a life-threatening situation.
At the same time, my estrogen and progesterone levels dropped and my endometrium started to shed. Normally, at this stage the brain becomes aware of the misplaced tissue overgrowing the uterus and surrounding organs and it detects it as a threat. An excessive amount of prostaglandin — the hormone that deals with injury and illness — is released on the problematic spot, in a futile effort to combat the threat. The prostaglandin causes inflammation, rise in bodily temperature, vomiting, diarrhea, and violent uterine contractions. The agitation caused by overall inflammation causes the tissue to press on the surrounding nerves impairing the use of legs.
Under severe emotional stress, the brain responds with fear. Fear rises the pain threshold, effectively anesthetizing the pelvic cavity. The brain interprets the loss of the dopamine source as a more life-threatening danger than the endometriosis.
The brain looked at my endometriosis and said, “I don’t have time for this!” The amount of noradrenaline released countered the amount of prostaglandin, and I was able to push aside all the pain it caused so that I could focus on the only thing that mattered — figuring out how to get my dopamine back.
The orbital frontal cortex eventually processed the new information and started rewiring the rest of the brain and changing behavioral patterns. The physical pain subsided. Normal physiological function was restored. The mental and emotional functions are a work in progress.
