Science Vs - Heartbreak: Why does it hurt so bad?

Episode Date: October 3, 2019

We’ve all been dumped, but some of us have felt physically sick from a heartbreak -- sometimes really sick. Neuroscientist Prof. Lucy Brown explains how pangs from a heartache might not just be in our heads. Check out the full transcript here: http://bit.ly/2OhEIi9 Selected references: Lucy’s FMRI study of the rejected in-love college students: http://bit.ly/355Xz5B The social/physical pain overlap in the brain: https://bit.ly/2IkRQiVHow psychological stress affects the immune system: https://bit.ly/333CsiS Credits: This episode was produced by Michelle Dang, with help from Wendy Zukerman, Rose Rimler, Meryl Horn and Lexi Krupp. Our senior producer is Kaitlyn Sawrey. We’re edited by Caitlin Kenney and Blythe Terrell. Fact checking by Diane Kelly. Mix and sound design by Peter Leonard. Music written by Peter Leonard, Emma Munger, and Bobby Lord. A huge thanks to all the scientists we got in touch with for this episode, including Professor Larry Young, Professor Tiffany Field, Professor Ethan Kross, Professor Sandra Langeslag, and Professor Naomi Eisenberger. A special thanks to the Zukerman family and Joseph Lavelle Wilson. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Y'all afraid of ghosts? How about ghost peppers? It's the moment you've been waiting for. The ghost pepper sandwich is back at Popeyes. A buttermilk-battered chicken breast served on a brioche bun with barrel-cured pickles. And here's the best part. It's topped with a sauce made from ghost peppers and oncho chilies. If that doesn't send a chill of anticipation down your spine, nothing will. Get your ghost pepper sandwich today at Popeyes.

Before it ghosts you for another year. Bumble knows it's hard to start conversations. Hey. No, too basic. Hi there. Still no. What about hello, handsome? Who knew you could give yourself the ick? That's why Bumble is changing how you start conversations.

You can now make the first move or not. With opening moves, you simply choose a question to be automatically sent to your matches. Then sit back and let your matches start the chat. Download Bumble and try it for yourself. Hi, I'm Wendy Zuckerman and you're listening to Science Versus from Gimlet. On today's mini-episode, we're pitting facts against feeling crushed as we tackle heartbreak. It turns out that science can help us with one of our most universal experiences, getting dumped. Let's start with a tale of heartbreak,

from right here at Science Versus. It happened to our producer, Rose Rimler. I was just, like, completely devastated. Rose's big heartbreak happened when she was in college. She had a huge crush on this guy for a while, and he was a little unsure about it. But then one night, it all came together. I remember there was like a meteor shower.

I know we were like sitting next to each other on like lawn chairs looking up at meteors. And then we're just like up all night talking and kissing and stuff. And I was like, oh my god, what's happening? They dated for about a year. Movie nights, chatting for hours on AOL Instant Messenger. Hey, it was the 2000s. And everything was going great. Until one day, when it wasn't.

One night he said, I'm going to come up and we need to talk or something. And so I knew what that meant, but I was very nervous, thinking, like, maybe that's not what it meant. But it was what he meant. He said, it's over. And this happened just a few days after Valentine's Day. So I had this balloon that said, Happy Valentine's Day, like, hearts on it.

And it was a helium balloon. And the day he broke up with me, it was still in my apartment, like, floating. And then over the next few days, I just watched it gradually lose and lose helium and become, like, shriveled and, like, fall to the floor. And I was like, this is the perfect metaphor for my heart. Rose was devastated. She was sad, of course, but it wasn't just that.

She felt awful throughout her whole body. Yeah, I remember feeling kind of like listless, like sick, and I was in bed a lot. Right afterwards, it felt like whatever I was doing, I was only half there. Most of my mind was spent thinking about him. So like you're just like going over it and going over it and going over it indefinitely. Rose couldn't study.

She couldn't sleep. And she said she felt like she was going crazy. And many of us have heard heartbreak stories like Rose's. Friends who said they felt so bad they couldn't go to work. Or maybe they got a cold that they just couldn't get rid of. And lots of us might have thought, come on, it can't be that bad. But science is just starting to learn about what happens to us during heartbreak. And it turns out, it can be that bad. Today on the show, the new research on heartbreak

and what science can teach us about how to get over our Xs. When it comes to heartbreak, there's lots of... I was just, like, completely devastated. But then there's science. Today, we are finding out what science can tell us about heartbreak. And we want to start with what is happening in our brain. So for this, we need... My name is Lucy Brown. I'm a neuroscientist.

Lucy is a professor at Albert Einstein College of Medicine. And she said that when her colleagues found out that she wanted to study heartbreak, there were a lot of haters. Neuroscientists said, oh, it's too messy, too much emotion. You can't study it scientifically. It seems magical. We said, oh, we think maybe we can. And so Lucy and a few colleagues took a crack at it.

And their idea was that if you put heartbroken people into an MRI, maybe you could see heartbreak in their brain, like that their brains would light up in a unique way. First step, the heartbreak squad needed a bunch of people who were heartbroken. Being at universities, they put out flyers all over the campus saying, have you just been rejected in love but can't let go? Give us a call.

And then, as puffy-eyed college kids walked through their door, the researchers asked them a ton of questions to make sure that they were truly, truly heartbroken. Like Rose-level heartbroken. The main thing is that they can't stop thinking about the other person. That it's really being obsessed with thinking about the other person. They're crying a lot. They can't sleep. 15 sleep-deprived sad sacks fit the bill for Lucy's experiment. Now, step two, the brain scan.

To make sure that their guinea pigs would be all sad and heartbroken while in the MRI, the researchers asked them to bring in a photo of their once-beloved's face so they were looking into their dumper's eyes while they were in the MRI. Believe me, when you're in that machine and you open your eyes and you look, it's like right there, you are immersed in that person. Yeah. That must have been

awful. Oh, they were crying to, you know, remembering the heartbreak. Yes. They really came out crying. Oh yeah. Yeah. Tears in the, in the scanner, tears down their face. Yes. They really came out crying. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Tears in the scanner, tears down their face. Yes. To be able to see what was heartbreak and what was just regular brain, Lucy and her team needed to do one final thing. They had the same college kids go back into the MRI, but this time they looked at a photo of someone else, someone they weren't emotionally attached to at all.

Then the researchers compared the two. And Lucy remembers when the results from each scan started coming in. I do. I do. When I first put, you know, the first 10 and then 12 and then 14, and I first looked at that. It was pretty amazing. The experiment worked. And Lucy told us that she saw a few really curious things

in those heartbroken brains. One of the things that was interesting is that a part of the brain that registers physical pain was active. So we weren't feeling the physical pain, you know, like a pinch or a cut or a broken bone, but that part of the brain that says that this hurts, that's active. That's so interesting. Like I think about that as different things, to break my leg, to break up with someone, But it's not that different. It's not that different. It's this connection between physical pain and emotional

pain. And it's all suggesting that when people say I'm hurting, they literally are hurting. And this doesn't just happen in heartbreak. It can also happen at other times when we're rejected, like when we get bullied or left out of a game. It's what science calls social rejection. OK, so that's the hurting part of a breakup. But Lucy also saw that when these heartbroken saps looked at their exes, another part of the brain lit up. The reward system. And this system gets triggered when we do stuff we like. Eat chocolate, take drugs, you know, the fun ones.

And when we're in love. So it's this two thing, it's causing them pain, but there he or she is. That face that gave so much pleasure, so many good times, made me feel so good in my heart. And during heartbreak, when our brain is hurting and all these systems are getting triggered, what's happening in our brain,

it can trickle down to the rest of our body. The brain is influencing the body and all these systems are interacting. And one thing that you see in heartbroken people is that certain hormones related to stress, like cortisol, can start racing around their body. And this is not just in sad sack college kids. Researchers have found the same thing in coupled-up prairie voles,

which are like these potato-shaped rodents. When scientists separated these critters from their partners, their stress hormones jumped too. And early research is suggesting that this cascade of stress hormones can cause real problems. Surveys have found that it can affect your sleep for months, it can mess up your immune system, and heartache can quite literally hurt your heart, possibly even giving you a heart attack. The scary side of heartbreak right after the break. The heartbreak. Welcome back.

We've just told you that you can actually see the effects of heartbreak in the brain. And those effects can trickle down affecting your immune system and even affecting your heart. Here's neuroscientist Lucy Brown again. You do, you feel a deep, sunken, tight feeling in your chest. And in some cases, the pain in your heart can become something quite serious. You can actually have a kind of heart attack. It's known as Takotsubo syndrome, and during Takotsubo, one chamber of your heart balloons up in this very specific way, which is actually where the syndrome gets its name from.

Your heart starts to look like a Japanese octopus trap called a Takotsubo. And Takotsubo isn't just found after heartbreak. It can happen during other kinds of stress, like even from public speaking. So where does all this leave us? Well, from what we found out, we know that heartbreak can cause these real effects throughout your body, like increased stress hormones and sleep problems and chest pains. So our producer Rose and all you other heartbroken folks out there, you aren't crazy. You're not crazy. This is your brain. This is a physiological thing.

You're not to blame for this. Don't blame yourself for all of this. All right. So now that we know all this, can science help us get over a breakup? Well, Lucy reckons that we can get some tips on how to deal with heartbreak by looking into research about how to break bad habits. And one thing that has been shown to help people is to stay away from triggers or cues. So, for example, if you want to stop eating popcorn, don't go to the cinema. There was actually a study on this.

If you want to quit smoking, then don't have cigarettes around. When it comes to heartbreak, applying the same logic. If you want to stop thinking about your ex, clear out their text messages, block them on Instagram. Throw away all of the things that were associated with that person. You should just get rid of them. Go live somewhere else entirely. If you're really having a big problem, just get away from there.

But if you can't uproot your entire life to get over someone, we did find another suggestion in the scientific literature. It's called negative reappraisal. And it's a fancy science word for saying, just keep reminding yourself of what a turd your ex was. I tried to get Rose, the producer of our show, to give it a go with her ex. You know, the one that gives out Valentine's Day balloons to people right before dumping them. I wanted her to tell me what was wrong with him. Um, he, God, that's funny. What was wrong with him?

You're too nice. You're too nice. Maybe. Did he ever give to charity? Did you ever see him give any money to charity? Not once. Yeah. What about that time he kicked the dog? Oh, my God, he was such a dog kicker.

You know, that trip he took to the Arctic to club baby seals really didn't sit right with me. Jokes aside, Rose said that actually hearing all the science stacked up made her feel much better about her heartbreak. The feeling of heartbreak is so intangible. Like, there's nothing, there's not a cut. It's not like you lost a finger and everyone can see exactly what's going on.

It's very lonely and it's very hard to quantify from the outside. I think that makes people trivialize it because you can't, you don't really know what the other person is feeling. And so the fact that science can measure, find this thing, this despair, it's kind of validating. It's like, oh, it's really happening. It is real, yeah. That's great. I wish I had known that at the time. I felt so screwed up,

like such a screw up for being that upset. But that's how a lot of people feel? That's how a lot of people feel. And the science can tell us that? Science can tell us that. It's very useful science. That's Science vs. Heartbreak. Hi, Michelle Deng. Hi, Wendy.

Producer of Science vs. I don't know what to say to that. How many citations in this week's episode? 46 citations. It's a baby episode. Yeah. Research and heartbreak just starting to break out. Mm.

Mm. If people want to see these citations, where should they go? They should check out the link in our show notes. Thanks, Michelle. Thanks, Wendy. Next week, pandemic. We've seen the blockbuster films, but what would really happen if a pandemic swept through the globe today?

We at Science Versus created a fully fictionalised but scientifically approved pandemic. So how bad does it get? OK, I've just snuck into the intensive care ward. No-one seems to have noticed. All the doors to the ward are shut, but I can see through some of the windows. All the rooms are full. There seem to be a lot of people connected to ventilators. Most of the patients I can see don't look so good.

Their skin is pale. Some of them look a bit blue. You did really well. Your scenario was quite realistic. This episode was produced by Michelle Dang, with help from me, Wendy Zuckerman, Rose Rimler, Meryl Horn and Lexi Krupp. Our senior producer is Caitlin Sorey.

We're edited by Caitlin Kenny and Blythe Sorrell. Fact-checking by Diane Kelly. Mix and sound design by Peter Leonard. Music written by Peter Leonard, Emma Munger and Bobby Lord. A huge thanks to all the scientists we got in touch with for this episode, including Professor Larry Young, Professor Tiffany Field, Professor Ethan Cross, Professor Sandra Langeslag, and Professor Naomi Eisenberger. A special thanks to the Zuckerman family and Joseph Lavelle Wilson. I'm Wendy Zuckerman. Back to you next week. I remember the first time I felt back to my old self for a moment was like maybe a few weeks later.

I went and had a burrito somewhere. I had this thought like, I can still enjoy burritos. And that was a really nice feeling. And if you know me at all, you know that I feel really strongly about burritos. And I remember really thinking, like actually seeing from the outside, like, oh, this is me. I feel like my old self again.