When we grieve the end of a relationship, we are faced with a real experience of loss. Having a “broken heart” generates a very strong emotional pain…
When we suffer the end of a relationship, we find ourselves facing a real experience of loss . Having a “broken heart” generates a very strong emotional pain that can manifest itself in different ways regardless of age and gender. It is something that we feel in our body, which resonates as a strong lump in the throat , a punch in the stomach, an insurmountable weight on the chest.
For this reason, when we talk about suffering for love, we use the expression broken heart. However, it is the brain, the organ that directs the work and from which these very unpleasant bodily sensations originate. When we are abandoned, rejected, or left behind, our brain responds automatically by producing the unpleasant symptoms that we have listed above and at that point we immediately begin to feel the pain. It is important to trace why we think, behave and feel this way when a romantic relationship ends, in order to learn to manage our reactions and gradually “heal” from our “broken” heart. There are many phenomena that occur in our brain when we live this experience. In this case, we will focus on the most important ones.
1. Emotional pain resembles the same sensation as physical pain
Functional magnetic resonance imaging studies have shown that when we suffer for love, the most active areas of the brain are the same as when we feel physical pain : the anterior insula and the anterior cingulate cortex. One study found that these same areas of the brain were activated when subjects who had just gotten out of a romantic relationship were shown photos of their ex-partners. The pain felt by subjects in studies on the effects of a “broken heart” was described as “unbearable.” However, while physical pain rarely maintains very intense levels for a very long period, suffering for love can last for days, weeks, or months. For this reason, this phenomenon is the subject of scientific relevance.
2. Feeling like you’re in substance withdrawal
Love is a mental, neurological and emotional phenomenon . It is a truly empowering experience that activates a wonderful neurochemical storm of oxytocin, vasopressin and dopamine in our brain. The increase in these neurotransmitters is responsible for the pleasurable sensations we experience when we fall in love.
What happens instead when a significant bond is broken? Thanks to neuroimaging studies, it has emerged that the breakup of a relationship causes brain responses very similar to those generated by withdrawal from substances such as cocaine and opiates . The resulting symptoms can be feeling depressed, anxious, irritable, confused to the point of impacting our ability to concentrate, maintain focused attention and function within the various areas of our life. Added to this are physical symptoms such as lack of energy, psychomotor agitation, lack of appetite and sleep disturbances. If we think of a person suffering from drug addiction, in a state of withdrawal, we would never expect that they would be able to be lucid at work or in other aspects of their personal life, because we recognize that they are in a significant state of mental alteration. Likewise, it is essential that we take the same perspective when it comes to the suffering of a sentimental breakup in order to change our expectations of ourselves and others.
3. The presence of intrusive thoughts that obsess us and make us feel blocked
When we grieve the end of a relationship, our mind produces intrusive thoughts of our ex-partner that invade and monopolize our thinking without any warning. It can all start with a mental image, a flashback of an old conversation with the ex, a memory, a sensation, a smell. Every time it happens, we are catapulted into physical pain, activating all the withdrawal symptoms described above again. It is as if we lost the person we love every time.
Since intrusive thoughts can occur many times, systematically bringing us back to feeling very painful sensations , it goes without saying that the process of recovering from a broken heart is a truly challenging journey that requires different times depending on individual differences and the dynamics that characterized the relationship itself. Understanding the mechanisms of how this phenomenon works can help us adopt a more compassionate attitude towards ourselves, trying to curb those dysfunctional forms of excessive self-criticism and attribution of blame . After a breakup, it is easy to come across toxic behaviors that end up damaging our self-esteem even more, such as fueling feelings of shame for the time it takes us to get over it. There is no universal time parameter. All we can do is give ourselves our personal time to process the loss and take note of all those automatic changes that our mind makes and how it is generating suffering.
