Meghan Laslocky discusses where that sensation originates from and why it's beneficial.
When you're reeling from the end of a love relationship you didn't want to end, your emotional and physiological reactions are a tangle: You're still in love and want to reconcile, but you're also furious and confused; at the same time, you're craving a "fix" of the person who abruptly departed your life, and you're willing to go to dramatic, even ridiculous, measures to obtain it, even if a part of you knows better.
What does our brain look like when we're in the grip of such anguish? This isn't simply a theoretical question. The answer can help us comprehend not just what's going on within our lovelorn bodies, but also why humans have evolved to feel such visceral sorrow after a breakup. In this view, the neurobiology of sorrow might provide some practical—and provocative—ideas for how we can recover from a failed love.
Addicted To Love
From approximately 2005, the first pairings of brain research with love study established the baseline that will drive future research: what a brain in love looks like. Individuals who were passionately in love watched photos of their beloved while having their brains scanned in an fMRI scanner, which maps neural activity by detecting changes in blood flow in the brain, in a study headed by psychologist Art Aron, neurologist Lucy Brown, and archaeologist Helen Fisher. The fMRI's brilliant yellow, green, and blue casts—fireworks throughout grey matter—clearly demonstrated that romantic love stimulates the caudate nucleus through a rush of dopamine.
The caudate nucleus is linked to "motivation and goal-oriented behaviour," or "the rewards system," according to researchers. According to several of these specialists, the fact that love ignites there implies that love is a "goal-oriented motivational state" rather than an emotion in and of itself (though portions of it are certainly extremely emotional). (If that concept is perplexing, consider it in terms of facial expressions: Emotions are defined by specific, fleeting facial expressions—a frown with anger, a grin with delight, an open mouth with shock—whereas identifying the face of someone "in love" would be more difficult.
However, romance isn't the only thing that boosts dopamine and its rocket-like route through your reward system. Nicotine and cocaine both follow the same pattern: When you try it, dopamine is produced, you feel good, and you want more—you are in a "goal-oriented motivational state." Take this to its logical conclusion, and while you're in love, you're not an addict in terms of brain wiring. You are a drug addict.
Love Hurts
When you're in the grip of heartbreak, you're undoubtedly feeling agony somewhere in your body, most often in your chest or stomach. Some describe it as a dull aching, others as piercing, and yet others as a crushing sensation. The pain might be brief and then go, or it can be persistent, lingering and exhausting you in the same way that a back injury or a migraine would.
But how can we reconcile the impression that our hearts are breaking—even if they aren't, at least not literally—with biophysical reality? What happens in our body to provide that sensation? The short answer is that no one is sure. The lengthy answer is that the discomfort might be produced by the simultaneous hormonal activation of the sympathetic activation system (also known as fight-or-flight stress, which increases heart and lung activity) and the parasympathetic activation system (known as the rest-and-digest response, which slows the heart down and is tied to the social-engagement system). In essence, it might be as if the heart's accelerator and brakes are pulled at the same time, resulting in the experience of heartbreak.
This perfectly complements the discovery that love, like cocaine and nicotine, may be addicted. We may conceive of "heartbreak" as a word expression of our anguish, or that we "can't quit" someone, but these are not artificial creations; they are anchored in bodily realities. It's good that science, especially photographs of our brains, have revealed that metaphors aren't just poetic fancies.
On the surface, such functionality doesn't seem very important right now—after all, few of us are at risk of being attacked by a wild animal coming at us from behind the lilacs at any one time, and living alone doesn't entail dying slowly and lonely. But the suffering is still there to teach us something. It directs our attention to important social occurrences, forcing us to learn, rectify, avoid, and move on.
When you examine social suffering from this angle, you must realise that in our culture, we are frequently pushed to conceal it. We sealed it up. While it is possible to be private about one's pain while still dealing with it, and it may not be healthy to share your sob story with everyone you meet on the street, if you completely ignore it and the survival theory holds true, you are putting yourself at risk because you are not alerting others to a potential crisis.
The Heartbreak Pills
Several studies, also employing the heat probe + picture + fMRI combination, have demonstrated that staring at an image of a loved one lessens the sensation of physical pain, much like holding a loved one's hand through a terrifying or unpleasant treatment, or kissing a child's boo-boo helps the tears stop. Love is a good analgesic, according to science, since it activates the same parts of the brain as morphine and cocaine do; additionally, the effects are fairly intense.
On one level, this proposes a delightfully easy and elegant remedy to physical or mental pain, albeit a New Agey one: all you need is love. And it reinforces the concept, flawed though it may be for some of us, that if you have a shattered heart, moving on quickly might provide relief.
Some specialists believe that once you start using medications to help you feel better emotionally, you have to ask if you're going against nature's purpose. You're supposed to feel horrible, to sit with it, to worry over what went wrong, so that you learn your lesson and don't make the same mistake again.
While they may not acknowledge it, understanding love on a physiological level is equivalent to discovering the Holy Grail for biologists and psychologists. After all, the more we learn about love in terms of science... the closer we are to knowing what makes people human, an advancement that may be comparable to physicists solving the puzzle of the space-time continuum.
All of this success, in the end, points to one thing: therapy, using both painkillers and antiaddiction medicines. Perhaps recuperating from heartache is as simple as wearing a patch (Lovaderm! ), chewing a special gum (Lovorette! ), or popping a tablet (Alove!) that just masks the agony.
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