On Purpose with Jay Shetty - 3 Ways Love Affects the Brain & 3 Steps for Healthy Relationships

Episode Date: October 14, 2022

Today, I’m going to talk about three aspects of love that affect our brain and the way we think. If we can understand how our brain processes these emotions, then we can become better at handling our emotions as well as our relationships. I start by explaining what these three aspects are, the chemical reaction that happens in our body when we feel them, and the ways we can improve how we handle these feelings. Come join me and discover what aspect you can gradually improve. Key Takeaways:00:00:00 Intro00:03:39 Love and relationships affect the brain00:05:34 Three ways feelings of love show up in the brain00:05:58 Attraction00:06:12 Lust00:17:44 AttachmentLike this show? Please leave us a review here - even one sentence helps! Post a screenshot of you listening on Instagram & tag us so we can thank you personally! Do you want to meditate daily with me? Go to go.calm.com/onpurpose to get 40% off a Calm Premium Membership. Experience the Daily Jay. Only on Calm Want to be a Jay Shetty Certified Life Coach? Get the Digital Guide and Workbook from Jay Shetty https://jayshettypurpose.com/fb-getting-started-as-a-life-coach-podcast/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The Therapy for Black Girls podcast is your space to explore mental health, personal development, and all of the small decisions we can make to become the best possible versions of ourselves. I'm your host, Dr. Joy Harden Bradford, a licensed psychologist in Atlanta, Georgia, and I can't wait for you to join the conversation every Wednesday. Listen to the Therapy for Black Girls podcast on the the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. Take good care.

The one you feed explores how to build a fulfilling life amidst the challenges we face. We share manageable steps to living with more joy and less fear through guidance on emotional resilience, transformational habits, and personal growth. I'm your host, Eric Zimmer, and I speak with experts ranging from psychologists to spiritual teachers, offering powerful lessons to apply daily. Create the life you want now. Listen to the one you feed on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hi, I'm Brendan Francis Nunehm. I'm a journalist, a wanderer, and a bit of a bon vivant, but mostly a human just trying to figure out what it's all about. And not lost is my new podcast about all those things. It's a travel show where each week I go with a friend to a new place and to really understand it, try to get invited to a local's house for dinner. Where kind of trying to get invited to a dinner party, it doesn't always work out. Ooh, I have to get back to you.

Listen to not lost on the iHeart radio app or wherever you get your podcasts. So what do we do in that situation? When you're feeling lusty, it is natural. It is a desire for sexual gratification, that's what it is. And to see as that clearly, and not change the language to someone else or to ourselves.

Now if you're in a relationship and you're experiencing this for someone else, what do you do in that situation? You have to realize it can be common and that every time you feel it, it doesn't mean you need to act on it. At the same time, you don't want to suppress it, so what do you do about it? What do you do about it? Hey everyone, welcome back to On Purpose, the number one health podcast in the world, helping you become happier, healthier and more healed. How many of you know that that's what you're looking for in your life, you're looking for health, happiness and healing, you're in exactly the right place. And I want to thank you all because it has been phenomenal to see the number of downloads

is growing month upon month upon month. I know so many of you are recommending the podcast to your friends. I see hundreds of thousands of you sharing it in your stories every week. And it's been truly heart touching for me. Because when I started this three and a half years ago, I had no idea where it was going to go. And whether you started listening three episodes ago, three months ago, or three years ago, you have been a huge part of making mental health mainstream about making

these conversations and these topics be a part of everyday life so that we can positively improve and impact the lives of other people. And so thank you so much for being a part of that. It means the world to me. I can't wait because my new book's out next year, 31st of January, eight rules of love. If you haven't ordered it already, you can grab it at eightruesoflove.com. And I'll be coming on tour as well. So if you pre-order it, you'll get access to my tour dates as soon as they're announced.

And today's topic is about love and relationships. I think I've been recording a lot on this theme for the last year because it's been front and center for me, my clients and my community. And it's amazing because it's an area of our life that can bring us the greatest joy or cause us the greatest pain. And I think we often think about how relationships impact our heart. We think about the emotions of love, enjoy and fulfillment as heart-based feelings. We talk about having our heart broken or our heart won.

We talk about how something feels in our chest. We talk about our heart skipping a beat or losing our breath. When someone takes your breath away, it's all related to that area of our lives. We also often unconsciously talk about our gut, like I feel nervous, I feel butterflies, right? These are all gut-based feelings in relationships. Or we say, I know he's not right for me, I feel it in my gut. Or what does your gut say? And so a lot of our language, a lot of our vocabulary, a lot of our thoughts around love and relationships are based around the heart and the gut. And we often say things like, well, make sure your head screwed on straight.

You know, does that make sense in your head? Take your head with your heart. But we often don't realize that love, relationships and the aspects included in it actually affect the brain. The brain is interacting with these different emotions, different feelings, different ideas, and the brain is impacted and shows chemical changes, chemical balances, imbalances, and I think that for all of us to understand love deeper in our lives, for us to understand what we're really experiencing, like how many times have you ever felt like someone loves you, only to realize they weren't in love with you? Right? I'm sure you've had that experience or you have a friend that's had that experience.

Or how many of you have ever had the experience where you feel you love someone, but then you realize you didn't really love them. It was something else and loves this big word that gets thrown around, talked about, over-popularized, oversubscribed to, only for us to not know what it actually means. Studies show that men often think about expressing feelings of love first, and on average, it takes them 97.3 days to consider saying, I love you, while women take around 138 days to say it. And men consider confessions of love acceptable after about a month, whereas women think about

it after 2 to three months. So we realized that a lot of us are quite good at falling in love too fast. And that's why I like looking at the brain's perspective, because if I ask you what did you feel, what were you going through, how did you know? It can be quite subjective, but the way these different feelings of love show up

in the brain are actually really interesting. So there are three ways love shows up in the brain, or feelings of love show up in the brain. And they are lost, attraction, and attachment. Now, I think we can all relate to these, right? We've all experienced lust, or at least we know what that looks like and what that feels like, and we'll talk a bit about that in a moment. The second is attraction. It's a deeper sense of lust, testosterone and estrogen are the most active chemicals. With attraction, it's dopamine, neuropernephrine, and serotonin, and for attachment, it's oxytocin and vasopressin. So we realize that what we group together or often lump together is Love infatuation attraction or maybe you are good at knowing the difference.

I think it's very hard to know the difference in the moment. And I'm taking this from a Harvard Business School research study. In 2005, Fisher led a research team that published a groundbreaking study that included the first functional MRI, FMRI images of the brains of individuals who are experiencing romantic love. They looked at about 2,500 brain scans and what they did is that they showed them pictures of acquaintances and they showed them pictures of people they were romantically involved in. And they wanted to see what happened.

And they found that when people were shown pictures of people they were romantically involved in, the brains became more active in regions rich with dopamine, the so-called feel-good neurotransmitter. And what they found is when we're falling in love, there were a few things that happened. Our physical body reacts, so we have racing hearts, sweaty palms, flush cheeks, feelings of passion, and even anxiety. And levels of the stress hormone cortisol increases during the initial phase of romantic love. And it almost makes your body feel like it has to cope

with the state of crisis. If you've ever felt like, well, I need to message them, when are they gonna message me? When am I gonna see them? What am I gonna wear? It's almost like a heightened sense of stress that we're experiencing in pressure. And we see that stress in pressure as excitement.

And we may also see it as stressful. It's interesting, isn't it? Because we may also experience that with different things in our life, when we're about to do something exciting, when we're about to do something big, but we often see it as negative. Now what happens is, as the quarter's all levels rise, Schwartz says that the serotonin becomes depleted. And those low levels of serotonin is what sparks, what Schwarz says, are the intrusive, maddeningly preoccupying thoughts, hopes, terrors of early love, like the infatuation that's gained with that. Why is this important to us? It's important because we need to know the difference between last attraction and attachment, stress, anxiety,

overwhelm, burnout. What do all of these have in common? A lack of perceived control over your time, thoughts, and tasks. But what if I told you fixing all of these problems is as simple as fixing your mindset towards them? I know not simple at all.

Everyone's busy, everyone's stress, but we could all use more calm in our lives and learning to stay grounded and grateful is truly a daily practice. That's why I've partnered with calm.com to bring you the daily J. If you've ever wanted to meditate with me and take back control over your busy mind, join me on the calm app for the daily J. A daily guided meditation where I'll help you find calm in the chaos, plant beautiful intentions for a happy, abundant life and simple steps for positive actions to get you closer to the life of your dreams. Meditate with me by going to calm.com forward slash J to get 40% off a calm

premium membership. That's only $42 for the whole year for daily guided meditations. Experience the daily J only on calm. I'm Danny Shapiro, host of Family Secrets. It's hard to believe we're entering our eighth season. And yet, we're constantly discovering new secrets. The depths of them, the variety of them, continues to be astonishing. I can't wait to share ten incredible stories with you, stories of tenacity, resilience, and the profoundly necessary excavation of long-held family secrets. When I realized this is not just happening to me, this is who and what I am. I needed her to help me.

Something was annoying at me that I couldn't put my finger on, that I just felt somehow that there was a piece missing. Why not restart? Look at all the things that were going wrong. I hope you'll join me and my extraordinary guests for this new season of Family Secrets. Listen to season eight of Family Secrets on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hey, it's Debbie Brown, and my podcast deeply well is a soft place to land on your wellness journey. I hold conscious conversations with leaders and radical healers and wellness and mental health around topics that are meant to expand and support you on your journey. From guided meditations to deep conversations with some of the world's most gifted experts in self-care, trauma, psychology, spirituality, astrology, and even intimacy. Here is where you'll pick up the tools to live as your highest self. Make better choices. Heal and have more joy. My work is rooted in advanced meditation,

metaphysics, spiritual psychology, energy healing, and trauma-informed practices. I believe that the more we heal and grow within ourselves, the more we are able to bring our creativity to life and live our purpose, which leads to community impact and higher consciousness for all beings. Deeply well with Debbie Brown is your soft place to land, to work on yourself without judgment, to heal, to learn, to grow, to become who you deserve to be. Deeply well is available now on the iHeartRadio app, to learn, to grow, to become who you deserve to be. Deeply well is available now on the I Heart Radio app Apple Podcasts or

wherever you listen to podcasts. Big love, namaste. The therapy for Black Girls podcast is the destination for all things mental health, personal development, and all of the small decisions we can make to become the best possible versions of ourselves. Here we have the conversations that help black women dig a little deeper into the most impactful relationships in our lives, those with our parents, our partners, our children, our friends, and most importantly ourselves. We chat about things like what to do with a friendship ends,

how to know when it's time to break up with your therapist, and how to end the cycle of perfectionism. I'm your host, Dr. Joy Harden Bradford, a licensed psychologist in Atlanta, Georgia, and I can't wait for you to join the conversation every Wednesday. Listen to the therapy for Black Girls podcast on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast,

or wherever you get your podcasts. Take good care. Now last, as I talked about before, stimulates the production of sex hormones, testosterone and estrogen from the testes and ovaries. And we often mistake that for love or deeper attraction, but the brain science shows that it's actually different. Now, for anyone who's experienced lust before,

I mean, lust is what makes us cheat. Lust is what makes us sometimes do regrettable things. Lust is also what makes us love bomb, makes us make someone feel like we are deeply into them. And then the next day forget about them. And so lost decision making is often unhealthy. And I find that we've created a society where lust is somewhat glorified, lust is seen as, you know, some people see lust obviously religiously as a negative thing.

But we think of that spark and we think of that stress and we think of that pressure as all positive. And while it can be a sign or an indicator or a signal in the right direction, it is not a sign of love. And I think when you're on the receiving end of that, when you're on the receiving end of someone obsessing about you and being really into you,

it can be really captivating feeling, like it can be really intoxicating as a feeling when someone's lasting after you. But it's important for you to realize that that's not the stabilizer of a relationship. That's not what makes a relationship sustainable. It's not what makes a good quality relationship lost. And so it's just something to think about. Now, if you're someone who feels like you get attracted to a lust after someone every single week,

every single month, and maybe you're in a committed relationship, I wanna get to an uncomfortable conversation here about how so many people who are in committed loving relationships can still experience lust for someone else. And when they do, usually they do two things. They act on it, or they suppress it. And in that moment, the acting on it, of course,

makes you feel guilty, makes you feel shameful, makes you feel regret, and maybe you even do it in secret. So you're scared of being found out, and we see that happen or someone suppresses it. They pretend it doesn't exist. They act like it's not real. They don't tell their partner about it or don't talk about it openly because they're scared

of feeling judged. And that suppression usually leads to something insurmountable in the future when it all erupts. So what do we do in that situation? When you're feeling lusty, when you're going through that triggered response, how do you want it to that? I think the first thing we have to realize is that it is natural. It is a desire for sexual gratification. That's what it is.

And to see it as that clearly and not change the language to someone else or to ourselves, to not kid ourselves that it's something deeper or more meaningful, and to not convey that to someone else because we may end up misleading them as well. I think that's a really healthy way of thinking about it. Now, if you're in a relationship and you're experiencing this for someone else, what do you do in that situation? I think one of the first things is, you have to realize that it can be common and that every time you feel it,

it doesn't mean you need to act on it. At the same time, you don't want to suppress it. So what do you do about it? Well, one of the things you need to do is come up with an internal dialogue to coach yourself through it. You have to think about what's really special about what you have. You have to think about what's really special about what you have. You have to think about what's important about what you've built. You've

got to reconnect with that feeling you probably had about the person you're with right now. And it naturally wore off. And here's the thing. So what changed is that the stress hormone actually decreased as time went on. So in the beginning, you're experiencing the high stress. As you get to know someone, your stress decreases because being with them reduces your stress. Now, sometimes we see that as a sign of the sparks gone. We see that as a sign of we've lost what we had. No, you haven't. You've actually gained something. Their company makes you feel calm. Their company makes you feel peaceful. That relationship is giving you the benefits of a deeper relationship, but we got so used to identifying that stress

of what do I wear around them? How do I feel about them? Do we get along? Where should we go? What should we do? We saw that as love when actually was just lust that was going to evolve If we allowed it to so Where do we go from here? We're experiencing lust attraction attachment When we talk about attraction High levels of dopamine and a related hormone

Neuropeineph, are released during attraction. These chemicals make us giddy, energetic, and euphoric, even leading to decreased appetite and insomnia, which means you can actually be so in love that you can't eat and sleep. You notice how these physical descriptions of love actually come from what is chemically happening. And so when people are going through this,

often we're like, oh yeah, you're just attracted, you're just infatuated, which is true, but it is a chemical reaction. And when we know this in and of ourselves, we can learn to say, okay, well, I should eat, I should sleep, I may feel like I can't, but I have to think about my health and well-being during this time as well.

And attraction seems to lead to a reduction in serotonin, a hormone that's known to be involved in appetite and mood. Interestingly, studies show people who suffer from obsessive, compulsive disorder also have low levels of serotonin, leading scientists to speculate that this is what underlies the overpowering infatuation that characterizes the beginning stages of love. So notice how the beginning stages of love are like this giddy and energetic euphoric. This then calms down as I was talking about earlier, but then we want that feeling again.

It's almost like a drug, right? There's almost an addictive nature to it. And a lot of the science shows that love is addictive. So some research goes on to suggest that falling in love is an obsession. And the research says that while you're wild about someone, your serotonin levels go down, which is the same trend typically found in people with obsessive-compulsive disorder. It's also true that a brain in love is very similar to a brain in throws of addiction. Further brain imaging studies show activity in the nucleus acumbens,

a region of the brain that lights up when someone is addicted to a substance like cocaine or a behavior like gambling. Again, the love bombing aspect, the aspect of someone being addicted to you and then being distant from you. The idea of feeling addicted to someone that you need to see them every day, that you want to see them every day, that you want to be with them every day. And this is something we have to monitor.

It's something we have to be aware of. It's something that we don't just let it take over again and again and again because the idea that we're addicted to someone can be extremely painful when that someone is no longer around, no longer with us, no longer in our vicinity, maybe out of reach. What I'm suggesting you do is understand the chemical imbalances that are going on here, because when we don't understand these, we think it's all real.

And I'm not saying it's not real, it is, but it's short-lived, it's temporary, it's ephemeral. Last but not least is attachment, which is the predominant factor in long-term relationships. So while lust and attraction are pretty much exclusive to romantic relationships, attachment mediates friendships, parent-infant bonding, and many other intimacies as well. And the two primary hormones here appear to be oxytocin and vasopressin.

So we start to notice that if you want a long-term relationship with someone, it is natural for that initial feeling to subside, but that is a healthy thing. That is a healthy thing because the stress that comes from life is what is balanced out by the quality of our relationships. The challenges that come with navigating our workplace, the challenges that come with navigating things in our home environment, ideally our partner and our friends and our long-term relationships, actors almost like a cushion to catch us, like a net. And I wanted to talk about this because I find that a lot of the time our partner has the pressure

to provide everything we need, right? We put a lot of pressures on our partners to provide all of our needs. They need to be interesting as well as exciting. They need to be knowledgeable as well as silly. They need to be there for us as well as independent. They need to be confident as well as be vulnerable. We want them to be everything. We want them to be into sports, but we want them to be in touch with their emotions.

Now, I'm not saying these things are mutually exclusive. I'm not saying that these things are opposites, but I'm saying that there are a lot of demands on a singular person. And that's why we find that we jump from romantic relationship to another, to another to another. It's why we move from entanglement to entanglement

to entanglement because we're constantly looking for that reduction in serotonin. We're constantly looking for that reduction in serotonin, we're constantly looking for that production of testosterone or estrogen, and we're constantly chasing that emotion because it's so addictive. And that's why we get bored in long-term relationships. It's why we start feeling like the love has gone away when actually it potentially has deepened.

So I hope this episode, it's very different from my usual on-purpose episodes, but I wanted to give an attempt to explaining what's happening behind the scenes because I think it will change the way we approach love. It will change the way you look at your partner this week because I'm hoping that listening to this, if you've been in a long-term relationship for a while,

you'll look at your partner and you'll try and notice the potential of the greatness that's there, the value that you've built. And if you're someone who's in a new relationship, you'll realize that we're not trying to make this feeling last. It will go away. But let's get excited of where we're going to. And if you're someone who's single, who's going through these experiences, you start to realize that they're natural, you are are gonna feel infatuated,

you are going to get attracted, but you wanna temper that with a bit of balance and see how it grows. So thank you so much for joining on purpose today. I am loving all of the engagement, all of the interaction that we have. I appreciate you so deeply, and I cannot wait to see you for an next episode.

I hope you're loving our solos and our guest episodes. Thank you so much for believing in me, trusting me, past this onto a friend who needs to understand the science about what's happening in the brain with love and relationships. And I'll see you again next week or tomorrow. If you're listening to so many other of our incredible, incredible archive of episodes, thank you so much. When my daughter went off to hop trains, I was terrified I'd never see her again, so I followed her into the train yard. This is what it sounds like inside the box car.

And into the city of the rails. There I found a surprising world, so brutal and beautiful that it changed me. But the rails do that to everyone. There is another world out there. And if you want to play with the devil, you're going to find them there in the rail yard. Undenail Morton. Come with me to find out what waits for us

in the city of the rails. Listen to City of the Rails, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple app Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. Or cityoftherails.com. I'm Jay Shetty and on my podcast on purpose, I've had the honor to sit down with some of the most incredible hearts and minds on the planet. Oprah, Kobe Bryant, Kevin Hart, Lewis Hamilton, and many, many more. On this podcast, you get to hear the raw real-life stories behind their journeys and the tools they used, the books they read and the people that made a difference in their lives so that they can make a difference in hours. Listen to on purpose with Jay

Shetty on the iHeart Radio app Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. Join the journey soon. I am Miyaan Levan Zant and I'll be your host for The R Spot. Each week listeners will call me live to discuss their relationship issues. Nothing will tear a relationship down faster than two people with no vision. Does your all are just flopping around like fish out of water. Mommy, Daddy, your ex, I'll be talking about those things and so much more. Check out the R-Spot on the iHeart video app Apple Podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts.