Right now, we’re in the thick of break up season.
Data from Facebook tells us relationship statuses are more likely to change for the worse in the months around Christmas, between November and March, and the first Monday in January is widely known as ‘Divorce Day,’ given the surge in married couples seeking a split.
Now, a New York psychologist has explained why people who experience a break up can actually experience physical pain.
Writing for Psychology Today, licensed psychologist and author Guy Winch said heartbreak activates certain mechanisms in the brain that are also activated during physical pain. This is why a break up can feel like a punch in the stomach or have you doubled over in, what quite literally is, agony.
MRI scans during a 2011 study, as reported by the Mirror, showed how pain centres in the brain lit up when 40 recently separated volunteers were asked to look at photographs of their former lovers. The problem, Winch says, is that physical pain can be solved or turned off. Emotional pain cannot.
“While physical pain rarely remains at such intense levels for extended durations of time, the pain of heartbreak can go on for hours, days, weeks, and even months,” he writes. “This is why the suffering heartbreak causes can be so extreme.”
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Then there is the way, just as many artists have attested, that love acts like a drug.
Further MRI studies have shown that a break up can trigger the same mechanisms in the brain that occur when addicts are ‘coming down’ off illicit drugs. An addict’s obsession with cocaine and opioids have some commonalities with the intense feelings of love, and heartbroken people struggle with thinking logically, focusing properly and functioning day-to-day.