Good Life Project - What Heartbreak Does to Your Body (and what to do about it) | Florence Williams

Episode Date: June 16, 2022

Heartbreak. We all experience it. It’s a horrible feeling, but can it actually, literally, break your heart, along with the other organs and systems in your body? Turns out, the answer is yes. It attacks not just your psychology - your state of mind - but also your physiology; everything from your brain to your cardiovascular, endocrine, immune system, and beyond. It can ravage both body and mind. And, it also turns out, there are things you can do to not only mend your broken heart emotionally but also rebuild your health after it’s taken a major hit.That’s where we’re going with my guest today, acclaimed science journalist, Florence Williams. Her book The Nature Fix was an Audible bestseller. She is a contributing editor at Outside Magazine and has written for the New York Times, National Geographic, and many other publications. But, that’s not what kicked off her interest in heartbreak and what it does to us. For Florence, it was personal. After her decades-long marriage ended, she found herself, not surprisingly, devastated. Not just emotionally, though, but also physically. Ill. Her body and her health started falling apart. And as she began to pick up the pieces, her science journalist’s brain also started wondering how emotional heartbreak was connected to the rash of physical symptoms and illness that had seemed to take over her body. She wondered if there was science behind if and, also, what could be done about it. That curiosity set in motion a quest that led her deep into the rapidly-evolving science of heartbreak, and also to the tools and strategies that culminated in her book Heartbreak: A Personal and Scientific Journey.You can find Florence at: Website | Instagram | Heartbreak AudiobookIf you LOVED this episode you’ll also love the conversations we had with Frank Lipman about how inseparable the mind and body are when it comes to health.Check out our offerings & partners: My New Book SparkedMy New Podcast SPARKED. Visit Our Sponsor Page For Great Resources & Discount Codes  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

We do know that there are some people who are really resilient in the face of these difficult events. People who are open on these neo-personality tests are open to beauty. They're open to new experience. They're very curious. They love art and they're able to experience awe. And you can actually learn to be more sensitive to beauty, unlike a lot of the other personality traits.

So heartbreak. I literally sighed just before I was about to say that. It's this thing that we all experience. It's a horrible feeling. But can it actually, literally, break your heart along with the other organs and systems in your body? Well, it turns out the answer, weirdly, is yes. It attacks not just your psychology, your state of mind, but also your physiology, everything from your brain to your

cardiovascular, endocrine, immune system, and beyond. It can ravage both body and mind. So when you sit here feeling it in your bones, in your belly, everywhere. You really are. And it also turns out there are things you can do to not only mend your broken heart emotionally, but also rebuild your health, your well-being after it's taken a major hit from heartbreak. And that's where we're going with my guest today, acclaimed science journalist Florence Williams. Her book, The Nature Fix, was an A audible bestseller. She's a contributing editor at Outside Magazine, has written for the New York Times, National Geographic, and many other publications. But that's not what kicked off her interest in heartbreak and what it does

to us, and to her in particular. For Florence, it was personal. After her decades-long marriage ended, she found herself not surprisingly devastated. Not just emotionally, though, but physically ill. Her body and her health started falling apart. And as she began to pick up the pieces, her science journalist brain also started wondering how emotional heartbreak was connected to the rash of physical symptoms and illnesses that had seemed to take over her body. She wondered if there was science behind it and also what could be done about it. And that curiosity, it set in motion a quest that led her deep into the rapidly evolving science of heartbreak and also to the tools

and strategies that culminated in her newest book, Heartbreak, a personal and scientific journey. So excited to share this conversation with you. I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is Good Life Project. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch,

getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required, charge time and actual results will vary. I want to dive in with you. This is such an interesting topic. And it's always a little bit, it's an interesting conversation because, you know, we're exploring a feeling that is so universal to so many people. And yet the jumping off point is something that was profoundly

disruptive and really, really deeply painful for you. But I think like, let's actually go there and explore because this is the inciting incident, not just for a big change in your life, but also for a really deep dive exploration into this thing called heartbreak. So you're married, I guess, since you were 18 years old and at the age of 50. Well, I was with him since I was 18. I started dating him when I was 18. You jump in and tell me this story and we'll start there. Okay. Sure. Well, I mean, to start at the very beginning, I guess, my first day of college, I was 18 years old. I signed up for the, you know, freshman camping trip. And I met the man who would be my husband seven years later. So we dated, you know, for seven years, then got married when I was 25.

And we're together for the next 25 years. And, you know, most of that time was really great. I was so young when I met him that I think I probably took on some of his interests and his preferences and so on. He was a few years older than I was, as I think often happens. There's a little bit of subsuming of yourself, which is something I came to think a lot about eventually when at age 50, I found an email that he had written to another woman saying that he was in love with her. And it was just totally a shock to me. I mean, in some ways, looking back, maybe it shouldn't have been. I mean, there were certainly times in our marriage and more recently

then when I think we had been feeling a little bit disconnected, both really, really busy in our careers, you know, two teenagers, a lot going on. But still, it was it was devastating. It was a surprise to feel, you know, like your life partner sort of doesn't love you anymore. I mean, it's really devastating. And I guess, you know, part of why I felt the need or felt compelled to write about it was that I was so perplexed, I guess, by how much it hurt and by how that emotional pain was registering inside my body. That surprised me. So when this initially happens, and I understand it happens in a way also where you can't actually immediately

deal with it. It's sort of like in this short moment where like you, I guess he hands you the phone or like you just happen to see something on his phone, but then you have friends coming over. So this is literally like, okay, something horrible just happened, but I actually can't even have to kind of tuck it away for a little bit now and circle back to it, which must have been a brutal few hours right then as well. Oh, so brutal. I mean, yes, I glimpsed this email on his phone that he had handed to me to look at something else. And then the doorbell rang and these friends from out of town were coming over for dinner. And I don't even know how I made it through that dinner. I think I just sort of plastered a particular, you know, probably smile on my face and, you

know, somehow just got through it. You know, it was so confused. It was so hard to process what that meant. And it took, you know, weeks for me to really untangle what it did mean. It turns out that email was a draft email. His feelings for this other woman, it was really sort of more of an emotional affair, you know, than anything else. And it was all really confusing.

But the bottom line was that I felt like his affections were somewhere else. The sort of bond that I had thought we had wasn't there. We didn't have it. And because his feelings for her were so strong, it was really something we had to kind of sort out and deal with. And eventually, two years later, it resulted in his wanting to seek something else. Yeah. I mean, when you discover this, over that two-year window, I'm curious, were you both sort of saying, okay, so we're willing partners in trying to figure this out? Like, is it workable or is it not?

Or what was actually going on in that two-year window before it came to a head? Oh, there was a lot of therapy. It's a lot of soul searching. There was a lot of the jury is out. Not that we know we want to stay in and work it out. It was maybe we can work this out and maybe we can't. And also it's really awkward because you have kids and there are only some people you feel like you can reveal this to because you're still trying to forge on in your community and in your friend group and you don't want your kids to hear it from someone else. I think maybe I told one or two really close friends that we were struggling so much. But, you know, it's not something you hear a lot about.

And that's one of the reasons I think heartbreak is so difficult and why bad marriages are so difficult, because we don't really share them a lot with other people. Yeah. You know, it's interesting that you added in there why bad marriages are often so difficult also, because heartbreak in this context, and I think when a lot of people think about it, it's like, well, that's what happens when the thing ends. But there are also relationships where, you know, on the surface, you know, according to the contract that was signed on the date, they never actually end. Yet the actual, functionally, the relationship has ended, you know, like months, years, decades ago. And you can have the same profound heartbreak, even when on the surface, the relationship still sustains. Yeah. In some ways it's easier, I think, to process the heartbreak if the marriage is really

over, you know, you're living separately, then it's not this kind of ambiguous loss where this person is actually still in your house and you're still, you know, your best friends, really, you know, still in so many ways. It's very, very, it's a very confusing time. Yeah. So walk me through. So after once you, two years in, you know, like he decides, okay, this is like, this is it. And the marriage actually comes to an end.

So you hit that moment where you sort of have to say, okay, now I actually need to be in this fully. Now I need to process it. I think it's completely understandable. So many people think, yes, it's got to be emotionally and psychologically devastating. And it was as expected, but there was so much more. It hit you and I guess it hits so many people in ways that it sounds like you never saw coming. Yeah, that's right. It does feel like a shock and your body registers it as a shock because

you're used to having this person next to you who you thought for decades that you did feel really safe with and your heartbeats sync up, your cortisol levels line up at night. You know, you're in this like bio rhythm kind of dyad with someone else, which is how mammals are kind of designed to work. When we're really close with another mammal or a family of mammals, we become very accustomed to having them there and our bodies become accustomed to having them there. So when they suddenly disappear, your nervous system registers this as kind of a very alarming event. Suddenly the person you've relied on for safety is gone. And so you feel really threatened,

like physically, you feel like you've been kind of left out to make it through the jungle on your own, or you're lying out on the Savannah and hyenas are nearby. Your brain doesn't really make the distinction between being kind of rejected in love and literally physically abandoned. How does this start to manifest physically in you? Like what's happened? I mean, beyond the emotions, how is it showing up physically in your being as you're sort of like moving through this window? I describe it in the book as that I felt like I'd been plugged into a faulty electrical socket. I had this really kind of anxious, frenetic, kind of buzzing where you're super anxious, but you're also exhausted at the same time. You're not sleeping. I was losing a lot of weight. I had

chest palpitations. My eye was twitching. It's like all these weird little things. I had this wound that wasn't healing. I mean, it's like all these weird little things. I had like this wound that wasn't healing. I mean, it was like my immune system was clearly sort of implicated in this. And then later, you know, not too long after he moved out, I found out that, you know, my blood sugars were really whacked out and my gut bacteria was really whacked out. I actually got diagnosed with type one diabetes as an adult, which is really unusual. You know, so then the science journalist in me was really curious about why that was going on. And then the human part of me was like, I need help.

I need to get better. So I want to find out how to do that. Yeah. Yeah. It's like you tap these two sides of yourself. You know, like you have years of learning, of diving into big, complex questions and going deep and figuring out, okay, so how do we deconstruct this? What's really happening? And then that's actually, there's this sort of weird opportunity for that to be in service, not just of a professional curiosity for you, but of a really deep personal trauma that you're saying, how do I understand this? So you did what was your thing and you just went all in and said, let me, let me run into this rather than let me sort of like pull back, make it entirely private and just sort of like try and survive and work my way through it.

You're like, let me figure out what's really going on here and turn this into a quest. So interesting. I had actually no compulsion to keep it quiet or to be private about it. You know, after, I guess, having made it through that sort of two years of not really talking about it, you know, once it was really over and I felt, I felt like I really needed help. I wanted to talk about it. I wanted to try to, you know, talk to other people, learn from them. I wanted to hear their experiences and you can't really, you know, get inside other people unless you're also willing, I think, to disclose. There's that intimacy that happens after disclosure. And I just found it so helpful to just be real and to be vulnerable. And then I guess that did end up

carrying over, you know, into the writing itself. Yeah. Was the original impulse to just figure out what was really happening? Or did you quickly latch on and say, there's something bigger here. This is an experience that is shared by millions of people, maybe not in your unique circumstance, but heartbreak is something that is shared by millions of people around the globe, like every week, every year, every month. Let me turn this into a book. Or did it start out entirely personally? Like, let me just figure out what's going on. This is what I do. And at some point it turns into a book or did it start out entirely personally? Like, let me just figure out what's going on. This is what I do. And at some point it turns into a book. That's such a good question. I think it's hard for writers to sometimes decouple those things.

You know, I mean, I, I, at the time I was working on a podcast and I was recording a lot of people, you know, that I was encountering sort of in my life. And I had this really nice field task cam and I went to a conference in Aspen. It was probably just six weeks or something after my husband moved out. And I emailed Helen Fisher, who was at this conference. She was this anthropologist who studies kind of the neuroscience of love. And I was also speaking at the conference and I sent her an email. I said, Helen, can I come talk to you? I know you don't know me, but I'm a science journalist and I've been through this terrible end of a 25-year marriage and I'm really confused about what's going on in my brain. And she said, of course, honey, come on over. Come on over, kiddo.

She was incredibly warm. And of course, I brought the recorder. I brought it and I turned it on. I didn't know that it would be a book at all. It was just my instinct to sort of take notes while I was learning what I was learning. And then as this kind of went on with other experts and scientists as well, I realized that there was so much art about heartbreak and so much sort of popular conventional wisdom, but I didn't feel like there was a lot of about heartbreak and so much sort of popular conventional wisdom, but I didn't feel like there was a lot of science. And so that's where sort of the journalist light bulb goes off and you think, you know what, not only is this really interesting, but I don't really think it's been done before. Yeah. I mean, when you think about heartbreak,

I almost wonder whether it's because a lot of people look at it as well. This is actually the overlap between like different things that have been studied, like grief and loss. And but not sort of like when it's all in this one unique context. So I'm curious when you have that first meeting with Helen Fisher and you sit down with her, because it sounds like that was really like that was kind of like the early thing that said, OK, so the first time where you sit down and you've got the recorder going and you're learning something like this is I'm starting to actually get the deeper insight about

what's happening. What did she share during that first meeting? Well, she shared that she's actually one of the few scientists who has put dumped people, people rejected in love. She has put them in a brain scanner. In addition to studying what happens to people's brains who are falling in love, she's also one of the few who's looked at the other side of it. And so she said, I can tell you what's happening in your brain. I said, yes, please. What's happening in my brain? And she said, well, there's a part of your brain that's really activated right now that's associated with cocaine addiction. It's like your craving center, I think it's the ventral striatum, is still knowing something is missing. And you're like,

where is that dopamine? Where is that serotonin? Where is that oxytocin that I'm used to getting? I want it back. I want it back. You're feeling the absence of something that you want. And then she said also the parts of your brain that are associated with physical pain. So when you have a toothache, that's processed in dorsal anterior cingulate cortex. So when you have a toothache, you know, that is activated. And when you have a heartache, that is also activated. But then she said, but you know what? It's even worse because with a toothache, it's probably going to get better in a few days or a few weeks, but your heartache, this kind of social pain can linger for months and months and months because it's so

bound up in so many other parts of your identity. It's bound up in your self-concept. It's bound up in your social identity. It's bound up in your calculation of your gains and losses. Your mind is constantly cycling. Where am I going to go for Christmas vacation? Who's going to get the dog? Am I going to be able to stay in the house? How am I going to be able to afford health insurance? You know, like these, these urgent questions are bound up in the social pain. So it's like this double-edged sword almost where you've got almost like a withdrawal from addiction on the one hand, you know, cause those chemicals, you're no longer getting those things and your brain had become habituated them for years. And all of a sudden it's gone and your brain's like, where is this? And there's almost like a withdrawal. And then

at the same time, you've got this physicalization of the social pain, but instead of a wound, just kind of healing on its own fairly quickly. It's almost like every thought that brings you back there keeps picking at the scab and keeping it open sometimes for years. Exactly. And another thing she told me is that, you know, people who have been sort of heartbroken like this, they're freshly heartbroken. They are thinking about their departing beloved 85% of their waking hours. So you're like absolutely, you know, obsessing over what happened, where did they, you know, what, you know, what am I going to do? What happened? It's all consuming. And I had just really never quite experienced anything like that, even though

I had lost my mother who died of cancer in my 20s. You know, she had been sick for a couple of years. And I think I had time, you know, to sort of adjust to that. And it wasn't like I was living with her day to day. I felt like this was a whole different layer for me of grief. Yeah. If you're at a point in life when you're ready to lead with purpose, we can get you there. The University of Victoria's MBA in Sustainable Innovation is not like other MBA programs. It's for true changemakers who want to think differently and solve the world's most pressing challenges. From healthcare and the environment to energy, government, and technology, it's your path to meaningful leadership in all sectors.

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You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot him, we need him. Y'all need a pilot? Flight risk. And I think it's also important to note, we said this happened in the context of this super long relationship that ended in um divorce but like you said heartbreak can happen

in so many different contexts and i think it will happen to all of us at some point in some way shape or form you know so it's one of the most universal things. I'm so fascinated by, by this, the notion of social pain leading to physical pain though. And I know you went a lot deeper into that as well. I want to know more. I want to know more how, like what are the pathways and how does that actually show up? Yeah. I mean, so I, I started really diving into the science of loneliness and the science of isolation. And as you say, you know, there's so many different kinds of heartbreak, but I think we can all sort of identify with the sense of sort of grief and anxiety, you know, that we've experienced over the last couple of years, you know, of the pandemic. I mean, some of us have been really directly affected by grief and

some of us just affected by sort of feelings of anxiety and loneliness. But what we know is that I was, well, I was particularly interested in a group at UCLA that's been looking into the science of loneliness and specifically how it registers in our brains and then also how it registers in our specifically white blood cells. So I was told about a guy named Stephen Cole, who's been looking at the transcription factors. So the genetic markers in our white blood cells that drive the health effects of loneliness. So we've known for a long time that people who identify as feeling lonely have a 23% increased risk of early death. They have increased risk of dementia, increased risk of diabetes and other

metabolic diseases, increased risk of cardiovascular diseases. It's basically the equivalent of smoking and of being obese, being lonely. And so he was really interested to find out why, why would your immune system really care if you have a spouse or not, or if you feel lonely for some other reason? And so he said, why don't you come into the lab and we'll look at your white blood cells and we'll look at your transcription factors. And I thought that was an invitation I couldn't refuse. I thought it would be really interesting, not only to see what my transcription factors look like a couple of months after the split, but then again, nine months later, and again, nine months after that, or maybe after

trying some heartbreak interventions or cures, was that going to make my transcription factors look different? And he'd never had a journalist come in to do that. Here I was, real-time heartbreak, it just seemed like kind of an interesting way to tell the story. Yeah. When you talk about transcription factors, what are you actually talking about? Yeah. So we have genes that upregulate and downregulate for different kinds of white blood cells. Our immune systems are really, really complicated and we have cells that fight bacteria and we have cells that fight wounds and we have cells that fight cancer. It's incredibly complicated and our immune systems can't do everything at once.

As we've seen with the pandemic, I mean, kids have totally different kinds of immune cells that come out and fight viruses than people who are older. They don't necessarily have the same kind of dendritic response or the same T cells. And Steve Cole knew from studying gay men who'd been infected with HIV that the ones who didn't have social support, the ones who considered themselves more basically lonely, progressed to full-blown AIDS faster and died quicker. And so then, you know, eventually he was able to kind of drill down and actually look at the actual transcription factors to see which genes were getting upregulated and which genes were getting downregulated. He eventually identified a suite of about 200 genes that change in their sort of, you know, transcription, what they're, you know,

what are the instructions that they're giving to the RNA and then the DNA. And what he found eventually is that, and these were in healthy, sort of healthy, lonely people as well, that they were up-regulating genes for inflammation and they were down-regulating genes for viruses. And, you know, I was like, well, why, you know, why would your immune system care system care? I don't get it. Who cares? Why is your white blood cell basically listening for loneliness? And his theory I thought was really interesting. And it's that when you feel like you are abandoned and stumbling through the jungle on your own, you're more likely to get injured. You're more likely to have a blood injury, a sort of wound injury. So you want the inflammation. You're not

living in groups anymore. You're not living with your close people. So you don't need the virus protection as much as viruses are spread in groups. So, you know, that's interesting. It's hard to prove, I think, but it makes sense that, you know, we would maybe be trying to help ourselves by pumping out extra inflammation if we're feeling like we're in a more threatened environment. But of course, you know, in modern life, we're not about to be attacked by a predator generally. And when that inflammation keeps pumping out for months and months and months, and in some cases years, that's what's going to lead to this, you know, recipe of basically molecular soup of death for the inflammation that leads to all these other chronic diseases.

Yeah. So when you learn this, and I know you said you were during that same window of time also, you were diagnosed with Hashimoto's and Diabetes 1, which in Diabetes 1, I think a lot of people are familiar with sort of like a diagnosis of type 2 diabetes in adulthood. It's become increasingly common, sadly. But Diabetes 1 is much, much rarer for adults. Did it seem to you like those diagnoses could have been attributed to the process that he was describing? It didn't right away. It just seemed like, oh, bad luck. It's like, oh, we're just piling on. We're just piling on. Exactly. What else is going to happen?

But the more I talk to people, experts in the field and the immunogeneticists, including Steve Cole, who's an immunogeneticist, he's like, yeah, increased inflammation, metabolic disease, it can be a trigger for metabolic disease. And then I talked to Michael Snyder at Stanford who said, yeah, you know, we know with some of these autoimmune diseases, there definitely can be a stress trigger or an emotional trigger that sort of tips you over the edge if perhaps you're already somewhat inclined that way. You know, for me as like an N of one, it's impossible to say, you know, what caused my diabetes, but certainly it does make sense that inflammation can be

a trigger for these. And we know from my own blood analysis that I did, that I was upregulating genes for inflammation. So you do this analysis where you're sort of like checking your blood markers early on and then sort of like midway through and then further down the road. So you can literally start to see as I learn more and as I actually start to step into a recovery or an intervention, like what do I do with this mode? Is it actually changing them? One other thing that you reference also is this notion of this also can have a very real physical effect on your heart. You know, like when we talk about heartbreak, we talk about it, oh, it's this emotional feeling, but it literally can affect,

you know, like this vital organ in your body, the functioning of your heart. Yeah. I mean, heartbreak is not just a metaphor. People's hearts do break from grief and from other extreme blows. And I think it was William Farr, who was this doctor in 1908, he said, the tragedies of life are largely arterial. Our heart very much does feel them. We've known for quite a while that husbands and wives sometimes die within a few days of each other. And we saw it with Carrie Fisher and her mom who died a few days after

Carrie Fisher did, that our heart can really suffer from this pulse of especially stress hormones like adrenaline that acts on receptors in the heart muscle itself, can cause the left ventricle to balloon out in a condition called Takotsubo cardiomyopathy. And it represents about 5% of all hospital admissions for heart failure. So it often occurs, I think 80% of cases are in postmenopausal women. So there seems to be something kind of protective about the estrogen protecting the heart muscle. But certainly men also do get it. In fact, there are cases in the literature of men suffering from this particular kind of heart attack, not because of the conventional reason, which is that there's like a blockage in an artery, but after their favorite soccer team

loses the world cup, they will collapse from this trauma of this soccer game. So we see it in all kinds of instances. Yeah. A different kind of heartbreak. A different kind of heartbreak. Yeah. I mean, some people take their soccer very, very seriously. Yeah. So it's interesting that, you know, you're seeing this connection in the research between this feeling of heartbreak and loss and loneliness and genetic markers and an upregulation and downregulation of genes and the expression within cells and disease risk and inflammation. Did you also see relationships where it led to physical pain, like muscle pain, like literally like physical beyond sort of like the symptoms of a larger systematic illness, literally like myofascial pain in the muscles, in the joints, in the connective tissue in your body?

Oh, yeah. Well, a little bit. I talked to some neuroscientists who studied that, And we do know that people who are heartbroken, if they injure themselves, or if they're in an experiment where they're receiving, for example, an electrical shock or a heat probe, they will register that pain as being more painful. And the opposite happens if they're still happily in a relationship and they're holding their loved one's hand, or they're looking at a photo of their loved one, they will register that pain as being less painful. And this is not just, you know, on a scale of one to 10, it's actually, you can see the pain centers of their brains

are less active given the same, you know, heat probe if they're holding a loved one's hand. So researchers have known this kind of thing for a while. And one researcher said to me, yeah, if you're heartbroken, don't slip on the ice because it's going to hurt a lot more if you're heartbroken. And here's the other funny thing. Looking at ways to help people, they were like, well, if it's registering in the same way, social pain and emotional pain and physical pain, if we give you a Tylenol, will that help the heartbreak go away? Will it help relieve some of it? And the crazy thing is it actually looks like it does.

People who will play these, they'll play these computer games. There's one called Cyberball where you're literally sort of, you start playing a game with two other players and then the two other players just start passing the ball to each other and they leave you out. And people actually register this in a big way. They don't like it at all. They kind of get stressed out about it because as social animals, we are hypersensitive to

being rejected and to feeling ostracized. And then if you give those people a Tylenol, they'll be like, oh, actually, I don't feel it doesn't hurt so much to be left out of this game. But the risk, as I learned, oh, and also, of course, marijuana does this too. And opiates, which is one of the reasons why maybe we have a huge opiate addiction problem in this country because of loneliness. But if you take Tylenol, it may also help flatten your happy emotions, which is not something you want. So you don't want to just run home and take Tylenol every day because it can sort of flatten out your other emotions. So I think you need to take these kinds of things with a lot of consideration. Yeah.

It gives a whole new context to sort of like the old school, you know, like take two aspirin, call me in the morning line. But I guess my other curiosity is, okay, so if it works so that we can identify that heartbreak and loneliness and loss can literally cause physical pain and we become hypersensitized to this, you know, like something where it would register as a two for one person who wasn't there would register as a five for somebody who is in a state of heartbreak. I also wonder whether the exact opposite experience could be true and whether you saw that in any of the research that you did. Because one of the experiences that people report regularly when they're going through suffering and loss and heartbreak

is a numbing effect, a psychological numbing effect. And I wonder whether that psychological numbing effect, you know, a psychological numbing effect. And I wonder whether that psychological numbing effect also can lead to a physical numbing effect. Yeah, I think that happens also. I mean, it's, you know, known as disassociation or dissociation. You know, people who have been through a big trauma do numb sometimes as a coping strategy and a survival strategy. We see this a lot, especially with survivals of sexual assault. I spent time for this book with a group of women who were survivors of sex trafficking and repeated sexual assault. And it was such an interesting trip because they had already been through a year of sort of residential treatment and counseling in Georgia. And then

they came out to Colorado to participate in a nature experience, a backpacking trip that, you know, was believed to and hoped to be helpful for healing. And after spending, you know, three or four days with these women, they did say to me, some of them said to me, it's amazing to feel my body again, to feel the sun, you know, on my face and to feel the ache in my shoulders from carrying the backpack, feeling the cold at night because they had been so numb to physical sensation in their bodies. Yeah. I mean, in conversation with Vesal Van Der Kolk, who has done so much research on trauma and his whole focus has been an embodied approach. Like you've got to get back into your body to process all of this, to really, he doesn't say get over to get through it. He uses the language of integrated because it's basically, it becomes a part of you, but a part of you that you learn to be with. Yeah. And another way it was described to me with, especially with these women was that in order to heal, you do have to feel your body again because you have to start taking care of it and you have to sort of feel

ownership of it and you have to, you know, that's part of the healing process. And so that's fascinating. Yeah. So you described this trip with these women, but nature also, I mean, nature has always been a part of your life. It's been a part of your professional life also, like with the previous book, The Nature Fix. But it also, it your entire adult life when you go through this. And it sounded like it was a part of your relationship. It was part of your shared life for so long. And I wondered when I was sort of like reading the story, whether that gets jettisoned because of its association in the past. But in fact, your experience was no, like becomes this invitation to return to it and actually to immerse yourself in nature as a form of intervention and therapy and treatment. Yeah, absolutely. At this point, I had so totally bought into the idea, you know, that nature was so important for calming one's nervous system, for, you know, feeling comfortable, for, you know, for just mental well-being. And I already knew

that that was true for me. But even before I met my husband and my family of origin, nature and wilderness experience was also a very important part of my childhood. And so, you know, in an effort to kind of return to my core identity of even who I was before the marriage. Nature was still going to be a part of it, but I wanted very much to kind of make it my own again, especially with the river trips. I did a lot of river trips with my husband and I literally needed to learn how to paddle my own boat now. And so that metaphor was very appealing to me. And part of the reason why I embarked on a long river trip, you know, as part of my kind of recovery from this divorce. If you're at a point in life when you're ready to lead with purpose, we can get you there.

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So you end up in Green Tributary in Colorado River, going through it, some with, I guess, like close family members and some completely in solitude. I'm wondering about the experience of you being back on the river for fairly long periods of time in solitude and how you experienced that. Yeah. So I spent a month on the Green River and the first half was with other people. And then the second half was totally by myself. And I had never spent a night in the wilderness actually alone. And I felt like I was afraid of being alone in a sort of global sense in life. I was afraid of being alone. And so I felt like I need to go be alone. Like I need to make myself do this. I need to learn how to be alone. I need to access my bravery. I need to, you know, row my own boat. So let's just go do this. And it was really hard. It was really hard. The first

night out alone was, you know, it was like 104 degrees. I pulled the canoe, launched the canoe off of the Green River boat ramp in Green River, Utah. The light was fading fast. I couldn't really see very well. I hit a bunch of rocks in this incredibly heavy canoe that I was carrying 10 canisters of water, 10 days worth of water. I almost capsized. And I was like, what am I doing? What am I doing out here alone? This doesn't actually feel, what I need to do is feel safe. I need to feel safe in my new state of life, in my new social situation as a single mom and a

single person. And right now I'm not feeling safe. I'm not sure this is such a good idea. So I immediately felt like maybe I'd made a terrible mistake. And I had to really wrestle with that for the next 13 days being out there. Yeah. I mean, but what's that like? Because at some point, you know, is it, is it a 13 day or 14 day wrestle the whole time? And then you come back and you're like, well, glad that was over. Or is there, you know, like, do you reach a point? Like, I'm always curious about moments of inflection. Like, do you reach a point where it's struggle, struggle, struggle, struggle, and then something happens, like a flip gets switched and you're like, this is different. Like, I feel different.

I'm different. You know, look, I mean, I'm a writer, right? So I'm so aware of narrative arc. I so wanted to have that inflection point where, oh, here's where I'm going to be healed. Here's where it's going to be better. I really suffered for those first few days. And now I am like shiny and fantastic. That's not what happened. It was more, you know, like I had some good days, I had some bad days. I had really joyful, peaceful, awe-filled, wonderful, you know, stretches on the river. I spent a lot of time birding and

listening to birds and I felt like I was sort of talking to birds. And there, you know, at one point there was a beaver and I, you know, when you're, when you're alone, you still sort of talk to these animals around you. Like in some ways they felt like my friends, they felt like they were keeping me company. You know, the light was incredible. You know, sitting on these beaches alone in the evening, watching the sunset. I mean, there were so many amazing moments. But the other thing that happens when you're alone for a long time, even as I started to feel sort of more comfortable in the environment, I still was going down these difficult psychological

rabbit holes. And I wanted to do that to some extent while I was out there. I wanted to, and in fact, people told me, this is a really good time to reflect on what was your role in the marriage failing? How did you contribute? What are your flaws, Florence? And so I was like, okay, I'm going to really investigate that. But that is not a good idea to investigate those sort of dark places when you're alone, which is another thing I realized sort of too late. I didn't have my best friends there to tell me, oh, Florence, you're being an idiot. He's at least as big a loser as you are. Sure, you have flaws, but you also have a lot of great strengths. Don't just think about your flaws. And that's what I was doing when I was out there. So I had some really, really low points, I have to say. Yeah. I mean, so when you're in this space

and you're sort of like doing this reflecting and you have good days and bad days, you also brought up this notion of like there were moments of awe along the way. And I know that's something that you expand upon. And I've been fascinated by the state of awe and the research that has been building around this state of awe and how it just affects us on a day-to-day basis. But in this unique context, it sounds like awe plays a role in sort of like a return to a returning from heartbreak to a certain extent as well. Yeah, it really does. And that surprised me. I'd never heard that before. I'd never heard that awe and beauty could be an antidote to loneliness or to heartbreak. But I learned it, at least I was told it pretty early on in the reporting. I was talking to psychologists who document all the

terrible health effects of being divorced. And there are many. In fact, divorced people are worse off than single people. They're probably worse off than widows and widowers, you know, taken in aggregate. But there was a woman, Paula Williams at the University of Utah, who said to me, we do know that there are some people who are really resilient in the face of, you know, these difficult events. And I was like, tell me who are those women? I want to be one of them. I want to know what are the resilient qualities.

And she said, it's people who are those women? I want to be one of them. I want to know what are the resilient qualities. And she said, it's people who are open, people who are open on these neo-personality tests. You know, they're like these big five personalities. We have, you know, introversion, extroversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism. Anyway, one of them is open, openness. People who are high on the openness scale are open to beauty. They're open to new experience. They're very curious. They love art or however they find their beauty. They love art and nature. They're able to experience awe. And I was like, well, isn't everyone able to experience awe? And she said, well, yes and no. She said, we think that there are some people who actually get goosebumps in the presence

of great beauty. And she calls that aesthetic chill. And specifically, the people who are more resilient after these sort of terrible events in life are the ones who experience a lot of aesthetic chill. And furthermore, she said, you can actually learn to be more sensitive to beauty, unlike a lot of the other personality traits. You can't necessarily learn to be more sensitive to beauty, unlike a lot of the other personality traits. You can't necessarily learn to become less neurotic.

So I thought, okay, that's what I'm going to do. That's going to be my heartbreak plan for the next two years or the next year. I was optimistic. I was like, in a year of looking at beauty, I'll be all cured. It turns out it took a little bit longer than that. But I do think that the awe and the beauty seeking did become a central thread and a central sort of motivator of mine. And that's actually really the theme of the book. And I don't think it's one that really gets recognized very often. Yeah, no, it definitely jumped out at me.

And I think maybe in no small part, because I've been fascinated by the subject as well and how it affects us. But I actually hadn't heard the connection between the big five and the trait of openness as being this sort of like central thread or almost like a precursor to be able to experience awe. And also the notion that, because so many people look at the big five and they're kind of like, it is what it is. You know, like a lot of people feel like

it's not really changeable, but the notion that, well, this one thing, maybe that's the one thing where you can almost like you can practice it on a level where over time you become more open. And part of that is becoming more open to awe and the experience of awe literally rewires your brain and your physiology. But it's, it was also interesting to me to hear that that wasn't, that's not necessarily a universal experience.

Cause I always just assume that everyone experiences it. And when they do, it just captures your breath. It changes you in some way. So it was interesting to hear. Well, not necessarily. I thought that was fascinating. Yeah. I mean, she said maybe 50% of people don't experience aesthetic chill. And I actually wasn't sure if I did. I thought I probably did. And at one point she had me wear a special device with little cameras on it. I wore it on my wrist and it can actually see your hair standing up on end if you're getting these goosebumps while you listen to, you know, like a Bach concerto, for example, or listen to Carl Sagan, you know, talking about the cosmos. So it turns out I did experience aesthetic

chill, but there are ways, and I was so interested in this, there are ways to cultivate this. And one way is you can micro-dose awe by even just trying to focus in on things that are beautiful in your day, you know, whether it's a special meal or a blossom or, you know, a butterfly crossing your path. And I think we've all had that experience of seeing some awe in something like that, where it's like unexpected and you stop thinking of whatever it is you're thinking about. You know, I had this experience walking down a trail, you know, I was sort of thinking about something negative and really kind of obsessing over it. And then this incredible great horned owl flew out in front of

me and my brain just stopped, you know, and I just took in this owl. And Iris Murdoch talks about a really similar experience she had looking at a kestrel and she calls it unselfing. For a while, for like a moment, you step outside of your own sense of self. You're suddenly like no longer, you know, who you are. You're now like part of this creature and you're just this kind of sensory field. I mean, it's very, it's very meditative and it's very mindful. And of course, people also experience this kind of thing on psychedelics, which is not microdosing, but macro dosing. And so that was something I wanted to try as well. Yeah. I love the notion of all being available to you in a micro dosing format.

Because I think so often we think of all and we're like, oh, we need to go to this stunning place. You know, like I remember driving into Yosemite and seeing El Capitan on the left and just being lost. Like immediately I had a sense of how like small I was in the history of the universe and the history of everything and how vast everything was. But also that I participated in. I remember lying out in

1987 on a sheep station in the middle of Australia in the middle of the night, watching the stars fall into the earth. But I love the notion that you're sharing of microdosing on, being like, but actually you don't necessarily have to do all of those. It's more about opening your eyes because it's probably, you have opportunities for this all around you on a daily basis. It's sort of like savoring. When something beautiful does cross your path, to just sit with it and to take two or three breaths and just be there with it. It takes one minute. And there is some emerging science. There's a new study out of Berkeley indicating that this kind of microdosing exercise, if you do it a couple of times a day, after six weeks, it really does

change your outlook on life. It could change your mood. It can increase your feelings of well-being, decrease some negative associations you're having with your job or your relationships. It's pretty interesting. And if you think about it, you know, as in our deep evolutionary past, we used to encounter awe all the time. I mean, we had stressful lives, but we always had the stars. We always saw the sunset. We always encountered wildlife. We're so cut off from that scale of awe now generally. And I think it's having a much larger effect on our sense of wellbeing and our sense of community, our sense of belonging-being and our sense of community, our sense of belonging to something larger than ourselves. And we don't spend enough time, I think, appreciating that. I so agree with that. And I think we feel it, but we don't necessarily

know that's what we're feeling. Okay. So you brought up also the notion of psychedelics, and I'm fascinated with this area. I think it's getting a lot of airtime these days. And also, you know, it's fascinating to see now the medical community diving in and for the first time because they're running some really fascinating studies and research on it. And you decide, okay, so I need to not just not microdose on all, but I actually need to find out what's going on with psychedelics and could it change things for me? I had heard that MDMA, you knowMA or ecstasy was being used in couples

counseling. And I thought, well, maybe there's something here in terms of decoupling. And I had heard that from a friend too, that she actually worked with her ex-boyfriend, with a therapist, to take these substances as part of decoupling. It's like a divorce drug because it can sort of help make you more empathetic to this person, make you less fixated on your own reaction and more sort of able to maybe see where they're coming from, maybe able to experience forgiveness, maybe becoming better able to let go. And that is something that I was certainly looking for. So yeah, I mean, it was Dacher Keltner, who's a specialist in awe,

psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley, very aware of the studies showing psychedelics and therapeutic use as being very helpful for trauma and for depression and other things. And he said, yeah, go for it, try it. Because we actually now think that awe may be the central pathway for why psychedelics is so transformative for people. It may be this pathway of awe. questionnaire, which sort of like evaluates, like, were you just kind of tripping? Like, did nothing happen? Or like, did you actually reach the state of having a mystical experience? It'd be interesting to know that, you know, like if there was a really strong association with that

and the way that you would describe awe. Well, you know, being scientists, they're trying to quantify mystical experience, which seems like kind of an oxymoron or something, but yeah. So there are these, I took the mystical experiences questionnaire, and it turns out I did have a mystical experience while I was taking psilocybin and MDMA at the same time. In that, you know, I felt this unbounded sense of time. I had this kind of overview effect where I was, you know, sort of like far above the ground. I had this feeling that what I was experiencing was in some ways true. This is the D capital T truth that is being revealed to me. And also that I was not myself, that I was, you know, one filament of light swimming with an ocean of other filaments of light.

I couldn't tell which filament of light was me. You know, that's that kind of unselfing, but writ large that Michael Pollan talks about so much as well. And it's a classic sort of mystical experience ingredient that you feel that you are one with everything else. I had never experienced that before. And it's certainly capital A off. Yeah. When you look back at this year's long journey, and there were a whole bunch of things that you sort of like explored. It was like, let me try this. Let me try this that we haven't even gotten to, you know, like electrical shocks while looking at pictures of your ex and things like that. When you think of all the different things that you did, and then eventually, you know, you take blood work early on, you take blood work in the middle, and I guess sort of like more towards the end. While you're experientially, emotionally, psychologically sort of was still kind of on edge, you know, being alone in the wilderness. But after

a lot more time with friends in nature, more kind of gentle nature exposures that I got on a pretty regular daily basis, almost, I was feeling better. And I also found that, let's see, I wonder if I did, I'm trying to remember if I drew the blood after or before the psychedelic experience. I think it was, yeah, I think I drew the blood after that because for me, I felt like I really turned a corner in terms of being able to two things. One, say goodbye to my marriage. I felt like I was better able to do that after my therapeutic psychedelic experience than with anything else I tried. And I also felt like I was less afraid of the future. So both of those two things, I felt much more strongly kind of after that specific experience. But in general, in terms of just calming my nervous system, kind of getting out of fight or

flight, feeling like my blood sugars were sort of getting a little bit more aligned. Maybe it was the sort of regular walks in nature, the being with friends, maybe doing some EMDR trauma therapy, also very helpful. And also, you know, to be honest, I mean, we haven't really talked about this, but I also found a lot of comfort by dating again and having sort of physical comfort in that way. That's really helpful. So by two years out, when we did the final blood draw, the transcription factors were finally looking much better, I'm happy to say. It was great news because the pandemic was just hitting and you want your viral fighting cells to be working. Yeah. And I'm sure in no small part, sort of like a reintegration into a social life and a personal social life. Powerful. But also let's zoom the lens out because I think there's this meta experience that's happening through this years long, like tests and interventions and doing all this're a writer and journalist that you're like, let me go deep into this, which I have to imagine in some way, shape or form provides this,

like you're wrapped by this broader quest and sense of purpose. Like I am on a journey to discover this and to figure it out. And I wonder if you've reflected on how that larger scale, sense of quest and sense of purpose and sense of I'm exploring and working towards something meaningful and deep into the craft that I've become so skilled at, how much that affected the entire experience? It's not actually as simple as you might think. The quest, the mission, I think it was very helpful, but it was a mixed bag because I was also, the quest I was on kept my feet kind of in the fire of heartbreak for a long time. Oh, that's interesting. Yeah.

You know, I was writing about it for years and sort of reliving painful scenes and not sort of moving on, you know, in some helpful ways. I was really like untying every thread. And so sometimes the writing of it just felt like, oh, you know, I can't believe I like have to still talk about heartbreak for the next nine months while I'm writing this book. But then when I was done with the book, I really kind of felt like I was done with heartbreak. You know, there was some sense of closure. You know, I mean, one of the myths I kind of debunk is that there's never like a perfect closure to this kind of grief. You know, it stays with you in ways that are actually sometimes positive and helpful. But nevertheless, I did feel like I'm kind of done with heartbreak now when I was finally done. Yeah. It's like you came

full circle on it to a certain extent. Yeah. And this feels like a good place for us to come full circle actually in our conversation. So sitting here in this container of good life project, if I offer up the phrase to live a good life, what comes up? To live a good life is to love really fully, I think. And we didn't really talk about this, but I think one of the ultimate lessons for me of having my heart broken was actually increasing my capacity to love. And I think that's what it's all about. Thank you.

Hey, before you leave, if you love this episode, say that you'll also love the conversation Thank you. listening app. And if you appreciate the work that we've been doing here on Good Life Project, go check out my new book, Sparked. It'll reveal some incredibly eye-opening things about maybe one of your favorite subjects, you, and then show you how to tap these insights to reimagine and reinvent work as a source of meaning, purpose, and joy. You'll find a link in the show notes, or you can also find it at your favorite bookseller now. Until next time, I'm Jonathan Fields, signing off for Good Life Project. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist,

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