broken hearts really do hurt…

yep that’s right the scientists have discovered that a broken heart really does hurt, so now we are all vindicated!  You are now officially allowed to moan, scream & cry when you have a broken heart because you really are hurting!  (I’ve found chocolate to have wonderful healing effects for this particular ailment!)  This very pertinent revelation came from an article in the Telegraph called Why a Broken Heart Really does Hurt compiled from research done by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“I was never one to patiently pick up broken fragments and glue them together again and tell myself that the mended whole was as good as new. What is broken is broken — and I’d rather remember it as it was at its best than mend it and see the broken places as long as I lived.”  Margaret Mitchell

Psychologists at the University of California, Los Angeles say the human body has a gene which connects physical pain sensitivity with social pain sensitivity.The findings back the common theory that rejection ‘hurts’ by showing that a gene regulating the body’s most potent painkillers – mu-opioids – is involved in socially painful experiences too.  People with a rare form of the gene are more sensitive to rejection and experience more brain evidence of distress in response to rejection than those with the more common form.  Prof Eisenberger said this overlap in the neurobiology of physical and social pain makes perfect sense.  She said: “Because social connection is so important, feeling literally hurt by not having social connections may be an adaptive way to make sure we keep them.”Over the course of evolution, the social attachment system, which ensures social connection, may have actually borrowed some of the mechanisms of the pain system to maintain social connections.”

“The sweetest joy, the wildest woe is love.” Pearl Bailey

Another article published in The Psychologist Crazy for you: Frank Tallis asks whether psychologists should take lovesickness more seriously, some quotes below:

TRULY, madly, deeply. If you haven’t actually said those words, you’ve probably thought them – and they are very revealing. They suggest that, as a society, we consider ‘madness’ to be as significant an indicator of love’s authenticity as honesty and depth. We do not expect love to be rational – we expect it to be overwhelming, improvident and unpredictable. We expect to ‘go crazy’.  The similarities between passionate love and mental illness have been noted since classical times. The ancient Greeks employed the term theia mania (or madness from the gods) to describe the sudden overthrow of reason associated with falling in love, and the principles of Hippocratic medicine provide a mechanism that explains why lovers are prone to emotional distress. According to the humoural model, if love becomes too ‘heated’, vital fluids evaporate creating a cold, dry state known as love melancholy (Babb, 1951; Burton, 1621/2001). The symptoms of love melancholy (or lovesickness) have been celebrated by poets and songwriters from classical times to the present day.  Passionate love is generally described as a state of intense longing for the beloved. When reciprocated, passionate love is associated with joy, euphoria and ecstasy; however, these feelings are almost invariably shadowed by darker emotions such as anxiety, jealousy and sadness (Hatfield, 1988). Therefore, it is difficult to experience passionate love in the absence of at least some psychological pain. When unrequited (or frustrated), passionate love will reliably engender a sense of emptiness – and even despair.  It is a sobering thought that marital satisfaction falls with the arrival of children and does not improve again until they have left home (Rollins & Feldman, 1970). Love necessarily overthrows reason to ensure evolutionary objectives. Writers have long suspected that love’s madness might have something to do with Darwinian principles.  For example,W. Somerset Maugham ruefully observed: ‘Love is only the dirty trick played on us to achieve continuation of the species.’  Evolutionary theory also explains another puzzling feature of passionate love – its relative brevity. Although when in the throes of love, we think that love will last for ever, this is rarely the case. Love diminishes, dies or becomes – over time – something closer to friendship (i.e.companionate love). Evolution is parsimonious. Love, on the other hand, is florid and wasteful. Geoffrey Miller (2001) notes: ‘The wastefulness of courtship is what makes it romantic. The wasteful dancing, the wasteful gift-giving, the wasteful adventures.’ (p.128.) Perhaps, because love is so wasteful, evolutionary pressures have ensured that we fall in love only for as long as it is necessary to achieve evolutionary goals – but no longer.  Although the medical establishment has decided that lovesickness no longer exists, the world doesn’t seem to have taken much notice. People still experience love as a ‘sickness’, and poets and songwriters retain a deep affection for the illness metaphor (Tallis, 2004). The pop charts are dominated by young men and women who are ‘crazy’ in love, ‘mad’ for love, who are going ‘out of their heads’ for love.

“What I needed most was to love and to be loved, eager to be caught. Happily I wrapped those painful bonds around me; and sure enough, I would be lashed with the red-hot pokers or jealousy, by suspicions and fear, by burst of anger and quarrels.”  St. Augustine

Another post called The Science Behind Heartbreak by Ashley Cox cites another study & states:

According to studies on heartbreak and how it affects people, most of whom women, a connection can be found between emotional pain and a literal form of heartbreak- heart attack.  Depression is documented to affect its host physically and so is the case with heartbreak. The emotional stress is harmful and is said to possibly be cause for what’s known as Broken Heart Syndrome, cleverly laid out in the picture below.  Takotsubo Cardiomyopathy is a sudden temporary weakening of the myocardium, producing something similar to a heart attack. When the body becomes overwhelmed, primarily due to stress, hormones such as metanephrine and normetanephrine are released in excess with addition to proteins such as neuropeptide Y, brain natriuretic peptide, and serotonin.    ”Our hypothesis is that massive amounts of these stress hormones can go right to the heart and produce a stunning of the heart muscle that causes this temporary dysfunction resembling a heart attack,” says cardiologist Ilan Wittstein, M.D., an assistant professor at The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and its Heart Institute. “It doesn’t kill the heart muscle like a typical heart attack, but it renders it helpless.”

“It is a curious sensation: the sort of pain that goes mercifully beyond our powers of feeling. When your heart is broken, your boats are burned: nothing matters any more. It is the end of happiness and the beginning of peace.”  George Bernard Shaw

Lastly the MailOnline asks: Can you die of a broken heart? by EMMA CRICHTON-MILLE, You magazine.

Nadine Field is a clinical psychologist for the NHS, but also for an innovative organisation called Psychology Online: “We’ve seen many people where there has been a breakdown or failure in a relationship and it does severely undermine their self-confidence and self-esteem. They literally go into shock and display many of the symptoms of post-traumatic stress, recurring endlessly to a fantasy of the other person. These emotions literally change your body chemistry and can lead to stomach ulcers, heart problems, even cancer.”

“It isn’t enough for your heart to break because everybody’s heart is broken now.”  Allen Ginsberg

Tallis, who also wrote the book ‘Love Sick’, is again quoted in this article as per below:

Drawing on twenty-five years of scientific research into the chemistry of love, Tallis identifies the chief culprit as the amphetamine-like compound phenyl ethylamine (PEA).  This substance is one of the cocktail of chemicals released when you meet someone you are attracted to. Usually accompanied by the release of the fight and flight hormones, adrenaline and nor adrenaline, which sharpen the senses, no wonder you are in a tail spin of energy and exhilaration.  As Tallis puts it: “The existence of PEA not only explains why we crave love, but also why a romance interrupted in its early stages can be so distressing.”  The sudden drop in PEA and general arousal when a lover is rejected leads to depression and extreme agitation – like a drug addict?s crash into ‘cold turkey’.  Should the relationship survive into the second stage, however, another range of chemicals comes into play. When we make love, endorphins are released, opium-like substances which regulate pain and pleasure, and alongside them a hormone known as oxytocin.

“The heart will break, but broken live on.” Lord Byron

“Hell is other people.”  Jean-Paul Sartre

In my early blogging days I also wrote a post How Thick is your Skin which was inspired by a Reuters article: Study may explain roots of Empathy by Julie Steenhuysen.  I spoke about how its important to have healthy boundaries in relationships & how I had developed this particular sensitivity that is mentioned in the article.

When people say “I feel your pain,” they do not mean it literally, but certain people really do feel something that appears to be an extreme form of empathy.  ”We often flinch when we see someone knock their arm, and this may be a weaker version of what these synesthetes experience,” Dr. Jamie Ward, who led the research team, said in a statement.  Other studies have suggested a link between empathy and mirror systems, but Ward said this was the first to suggest empathy involves more than one mechanism: an emotional gut reaction — which appears exaggerated in the mirror-touch synesthetes — and a cognitive process that involves thinking about how someone else feels.

In conclusion I think its fair to say that our feelings are interconnected with our brains & our bodies.  Maybe we need to take our relationships more seriously and we definitely need to pay better attention to our feelings?  If we could be as attentive to these as to our jobs, gadgets or cars, then maybe we could also ensure our bodies are not left damaged by the effects of rejection & loss of love?  What are your experiences with broken hearts – has it affected you physically?  Would love to hear your story in the comments below..

Happy New Year & may you have happy, fulfilling relationships this year!

This is a funny video with comedian Todd Lyn about how women break up with men.  Enjoy….

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