Something You Should Know - Why And How To Awaken Your 5 Senses & What Happens When Someone Breaks Your Heart

Episode Date: April 17, 2023

It is hard to get through life without writing things down on a yellow legal pad. You probably have some of those writing pads in your home right now. So, why are they yellow? And what makes them “legal”? Listen as I start this episode with the story. https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/30325/why-are-legal-pads-yellow You probably take your five senses for granted. That’s about to change when you hear my discussion with Gretchen Rubin. Gretchen had an experience in a doctor’s office that caused her to reassess her understanding and appreciation of her 5 senses. That, in turn, led her on a journey that we can all learn from and participate in. And it just might make you a happier person in the process. Gretchen Rubin is the host of the hit podcast Happier with Gretchen Rubin https://gretchenrubin.com/podcasts/, she has written several books on happiness and her latest book is titled Life in Five Senses (https://amzn.to/41q1BCg). There’s a pretty good chance you’ve had your heart broken by someone at some point in your life If so, you know how horrible it can feel. Some people are devastated and can barely function while others are able to deal with it and move on. What is a broken heart exactly? Why is the pain so intense? Can you actually die from a broken heart? And what is the best way to get over it? Joining me to discuss that is Florence Williams. She is a contributing editor at Outside magazine, and author of the book Heartbreak: A Personal and Scientific Journey (https://amzn.to/3KWFDRX). A lot of us start our day with a hot cup of coffee. Maybe too hot. Listen as I reveal why one recognized coffee expert reveals what is the best temperature for a cup of coffee and why. https://www.coffeedetective.com/what-is-the-correct-temperature-for-serving-coffee.html PLEASE SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS! Discover Credit Cards do something pretty awesome. At the end of your first year, they automatically double all the cash back you’ve earned! See terms and check it out for yourself at https://Discover.com/match If you own a small business, you know the value of time. Innovation Refunds does too! They've made it easy to apply for the employee retention credit or ERC by going to https://getrefunds.com to see if your business qualifies in less than 8 minutes! Innovation Refunds has helped small businesses collect over $3 billion in payroll tax refunds! Let’s find “us” again by putting our phones down for five.  Five days, five hours, even five minutes. Join U.S. Cellular in the Phones Down For Five challenge! Find out more at https://USCellular.com/findus Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Download June's Journey now on Android or iOS. Today on Something You Should Know. Why are legal pads yellow and what is it that makes them legal? Then Gretchen Rubin is going to help you find happiness by awakening your five senses. Go to the fridge, grab a jar of pickles, smell it with one nostril, then smell it with the other nostril. And you'll see how each nostril really perceives something slightly different. Just like both eyes perceive something slightly different and both ears perceive something slightly different. The nostrils do too. Who knew?

Also, what's the perfect temperature for a hot cup of coffee? And the pain of a broken heart. It can be so devastating, which makes you wonder... You know, why would evolution design us to feel it this deeply? And I think the interesting answer to that is that just as we're wired for attachment, we're actually wired for heartbreak. We're supposed to feel it deeply. All this today on Something You Should Know.

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to remind myself to ask a question or whatever. And I got to wondering, well, first of all, why are they yellow? And secondly, what's so legal about them? So I looked it up. And apparently, the legal pad was invented by Thomas Holly in 1888 at a paper mill in Holyoke, Massachusetts.

It seems that he and his co-workers threw out a lot of scrap paper, so he hit on the idea of cutting the scrap paper into the same size and then binding them into small notepads. And since the paper was essentially trash, they could sell them pretty cheap. The pads sold well, so Holly quit his job and started his own company, the American Pad and Paper Company, and that company still exists today, still selling notepads. There are competing theories as to why they are yellow. They probably were not yellow at first, but somehow came

to be yellow, and now they come in other colors. And what makes them legal? Well, it's the rather wide 1 1⁄4 inch left margin. That margin, that big fat margin on the left, was put there in the early 1900s at the request of a loyal customer who was a judge and needed that space to write comments on his notes. And that is something you should know. You likely take your five senses for granted, particularly if they all work pretty well. You can't really imagine life without them. They just work to help you navigate through the world. And there they are. But what if your senses

could actually make you a happier person if you took the time and made the effort to use them in a different, more intentional way? Now that may sound a little woo-woo, but if anybody knows what it is that can make people happy, it's Gretchen Rubin. Gretchen is one of the big thought leaders when it comes to happiness, and something happened to her that got her to appreciate her senses better. And the result is pretty amazing. And that's what she's here to talk about. Gretchen is the host of the hit podcast Happier with Gretchen Rubin. She's written several books on happiness, and her latest book is about the connection between your five senses and your

happiness. It's called Life in Five Senses. Hi, Gretchen. Welcome back to Something You Should Know. I'm so happy to be talking to you again. So let's start with what happened to you. You had an experience that kind of launched this whole project. So explain that. I had a bad case of pink eyes. So I went to the eye doctor. And as I was getting ready to walk out, he said to me very casually, like, remember to drink enough water. He said, well, be sure to come in for your regular checkup because, as you know, you're

at greater risk for losing your vision. And I said to him, no, I don't know that. What are you talking about? And he said, oh, yeah, you're extremely nearsighted. And that means you're more at risk for having a detached retina if that can happen it can affect your vision so we would want to figure it out right away i walked out of the doctor's office and i started heading home i live in new york city so i was walking home and i was looking all around me and i thought i'm taking it all for granted i didn't notice one thing with my sight on my on my walk to here and i'm taking everything for granted and as

i was having that feeling it was as if every dial in my brain got jammed up to 11 and i could see every sight with crystal clarity i could hear every sound on a separate track i could smell every you know a smelly new york city smell And it all just felt almost like psychedelic in its intensity. And it lasted for my whole walk home. And by the time I got to my front door, I thought, this is what I need to think about. I've been studying happiness for such a long time. But this is the element that I knew I was overlooking something and this is what it was. It was the way I could have direct contact with the world and other people and with myself through the experiences of my five senses. So how do you take that experience of going to the doctor and hearing

that news and having that kind of awakening moment? How do you take that moment and turn it into this big project? I'm not, how do you get to that level? So I went, I took classes because the more you know, the more you notice and studied. I went on adventures. I did experiments. I would, you know, every once in a while I would buy some little thing like kinetic sand to see ammonia inhalants, because, you know, that's smelling salts. And I always have been really curious about what is the smell of smelling salts. But now I had a reason to find out. I did everything that I could think of to engage more directly with my five senses as a way to awaken my appreciation and my understanding for the senses and what i discovered is that for

practically any aim you're trying to achieve uh to make your life happier whether you're trying to deepen your bonds with other people or connect more deeply to your own past or give yourself more energy or you know on the other hand help yourself calm down or spark your creativity and boost your focus. There's just for just about any aim. There is a way to harness the power of the five senses to help you achieve that aim. And so what did you discover as you began this journey about the five senses and happiness? What did what did you do? Well, one thing I did is I realized that most of us have some senses that we appreciate

and some that we sort of overlook. And I actually created a quiz about this at gretchenbrubin.com slash quiz. You can take a very quick free quiz that will tell you your neglected sense. And this is a great thing to find out because that's low hanging fruit. That's something you can turn to for more adventure more fun more connection more pleasure more comfort that you probably haven't been tapping into because it's your neglected sense so for me that was taste that's the sense that i neglect so i thought okay well how could i tap into the sense of taste to connect more deeply with other people beyond just like let's go out to dinner with some people or let's have some people over for brunch. So what I decided to do was have a taste party with some friends where we would do taste comparisons, like varieties of apples and

varieties of potato chips. This is just super playful and fun, a great way to get together with friends that felt a little bit more fresh and new. So identifying your neglected sense is one great thing to do. So I think one of the great examples of using your senses to create a richer life in the way you described is your experience with ketchup. So explain that. So ketchup is magic. In fact, I always titled the book, Why Ketchup is Magic, because ketchup is the rare item that gives us all five of the five basic tastes at once. It's sweet. It's salty. It's sour.

It's bitter. It's umami. This is really hard to do. With some difficulty, you can get to four, like the classic margarita is four, but it's not umami. But it's very hard to get to five, which explains why ketchup, it's the secret ingredient in many popular foods. It's one of the, like just a bonkers number of American households has a bottle of ketchup, especially Heinz ketchup in the fridge. It's just extraordinarily popular. And when we did the taste experiments with my friends, I had them all taste ketchup and really pay attention to it. And a friend of mine who's very sophisticated foodie said, you know, if I didn't know this

was ketchup, I would think it was this rare, very expensive thing because it's just, it's so complex. And then vanilla, vanilla is funny because we think of it as being a flavor, but it's really a smell. It doesn't really have a taste. It's a smell. But of course, smell and taste are very intimately connected. So that's the vanilla flavor. And it's added to so many things because it really rounds out the flavor. But here's something interesting. In the West, vanilla is so closely associated with sweetness that often you can make something taste sweeter by adding vanilla. You think that it tastes sweeter just because it has that vanilla note to it. But in other cuisines, vanilla isn't associated with sweetness.

So they don't experience that effect. And again, taste was my neglected sense. And I didn't really expand my appreciation for taste by going out and trying a lot of cuisines that I'd never tasted before and never enjoyed before, I found more pleasure by just deepening my appreciation for the things I already loved, but kind of took for granted. Well, what's really interesting about ketchup, I think, is that ketchup, there's no one recipe for ketchup. You can call pretty much anything ketchup, and they all taste different,

but almost never do we taste them side by side we get ketchup from that restaurant or out of that bottle and that's the one we use but we're not testing it against other ketchups but some are a lot better than others and and and some taste very very different but that's a great example of something that would be really fun to do a taste comparison with friends, because it's like, this is something that we all eat all the time, and we take it for granted. But when you really taste side by side by side, it's like, okay, here's this gourmet ketchup that's three times as expensive. Do I like it better? Maybe I do, maybe I don't. You can taste the texture, the consistency, like the flavorfulness. That's a great example of the kind of thing that's really fun to compare.

And this is the kind of thing you could do it. And like a two-year-old can enjoy this with an 82-year-old. You could do it at work because it's sort of fun and playful, but it's not intimate and revealing in a way that would make people uncomfortable. I've heard of people doing this with things like different brands of vanilla ice cream. You know, there's cheap and premium. Can you really taste the difference? Like which ones are better, which ones are worse? Yeah, but ketchup is so familiar and so common, it would be really interesting to really do those taste comparisons. Well, I love that you came up with this idea because I've never heard of anyone doing this, of taking your senses and putting them front and center and saying, let's test our senses. Let's experiment with our senses. that are kind of arduous, that are kind of like require discipline and that we know make us happier. But this is a way to do it that's fun and energizing and playful. Like there is just

a vitality that comes with it. There is just, even if I said to you, okay, go to the fridge, grab a jar of pickles, smell it with one nostril, then smell it with the other nostril, then smell it with both nostrils. And you'll see how each nostril really perceives something slightly different, just like both eyes perceive something slightly different and both ears perceive something slightly different. The nostrils do too. And it's just like, who knew that is just fun. It's just like a fun, playful thing to do. And then you know your own body better and it just, it makes experience richer. Is that true? Is that really true? Absolutely. Absolutely. That's why if you see like, you know, people like perfumers or whatever, testing something, you'll see that

they wave it back and forth under their nose. And that's so that they can, because both nostrils will pick up slightly different. And then when you've got together, you'll pick it up kind of in the round. The body is so clever, right? By having these two slightly different experiences, it rounds out what we perceive. Yeah, and it's just fun. It's a fun thing to do. And it makes you understand your own body and kind of the wonders of the universe more. I'm speaking with Gretchen Rubin. She's host of the podcast Happier with Gretchen Rubin, and she's author of the book Life in Five Senses.

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Connect with a credentialed therapist by phone, video, or online chat. Visit BetterHelp.com to learn more. That's BetterHelp.com. So, Gretchen, let's talk about the sense of smell. It's one of my favorite senses, the sense of smell. And I've noticed too that as I get older, I noticed that very gradually my sense of smell is diminishing, which I guess is pretty common. So talk about how you explored that sense in this whole context. Well, first of all, you're right. As we age, we do often experience a diminished sense of smell. And many people think

that it's their sense of taste that's being affected, but it's really, it comes from the loss, the diminishment of the sense of smell. Oh, I did a lot of things. And I went into it loving the sense of smell as well. It sounds like you and I both appreciate the sense of smell. I went to two classes in perfume because I thought, well, the more I know, the more I'll notice. And so I learned a lot about perfumes and just kind of the mechanics of smelling and creating a smell. I did a lot of smell tests. I bought, there's a very fun board game called follow your nose, where it's 30 little vials and And you sort of play bingo by trying to identify scents. And it's surprisingly compelling. Like I played this with my daughters,

and we were just like, so riveted by this exercise. And when they have friends over, I'm like, go play Follow Your Nose. And everybody loves it. It's just, again, it's this there's something very playful about it. And one of the things that was funny with smell is for my mother-in-law, one of my, one of my, my most vivid memories of her is her signature perfume, which is a perfume called First. And the funny thing is she doesn't even wear this perfume anymore. And she kind of forgotten that it ever had been her signature perfume. But when I first met her, of course, when you're meeting your mother-in-law, it makes a big impression on you. I remember this vividly. So this ended up being almost a more important scent memory for me than it was for her, even though it's a memory of her.

So the senses can do so much to help us feel connected to other people and to our past and to our own memories. Yeah, I find more than I think any sense that when I smell certain smells from my past, I just like a laser beam am transported back to the place and the time and just instantly, and no other sense does it quite like that. Well, it's funny because people will often uh point to the sense of smell as having particular power and i have to say in my experience i feel like they're all really powerful like if i had to say is scent more powerful than like hearing a song that i haven't heard in years that i used to listen to in high school or seeing a picture of my childhood bedroom or my favorite outfit or eating something that I that my grandmother used to make

um I feel like they all have that trans that that kind of that ability to transport me back but it is true that people often do point to smell partly because of the mechanics in the brain partly because I think it's it's sort of this invisible influence. We don't know that it's coming. It kind of takes us by unawares. And all of a sudden, you're flooded with memories. I remember I walked by a hair salon and this kind of sharp smell of a very particular hairspray came out. And I was instantly transported back to being like a little kid and my parents getting ready to go out for the night and leaving me with a babysitter and that kind of sad feeling that you have as a little kid um because it reminded me of my mother's hair spray and i completely forgotten about my mother's my mother doesn't use that hair spray anymore um

but it took me right back so there is maybe a special power yeah well i think too i mean songs can bring you back but you hear songs so many times in so many different places, it's hard to associate it with a specific thing. Whereas Grandma's House smells like Grandma's House. And if you ever smell that smell again, it's only Grandma's House. Yes, exactly. Like, what was the smell of your grandparents' kitchen? But you know what I did? This was so interesting.

I was trying to think back, like, what did my grandparents' house look like? And it occurred to me, well, you know, there are all these real estate sites that have pictures of houses. Maybe that house, which, you know, I haven't been in years, maybe it's listed in some, you know, back inventory of, you know, it was on for sale at some point. And I went and looked up and oh my gosh, there was pictures of my grandparents' house. Like, and I recognized every room, nothing had changed. I mean, it still looked pretty, I mean, it was unfurnished, but like the drawer pulls and I'd forgotten about this sort of lazy Susan cabinet that they had. And, and I, it all just came back so vividly. So that was a really interesting way to, and then I went back and looked at kind of

every house I'd ever lived in. You know, when we take pictures often, like we're very focused on the people and maybe like the Eiffel Tower, but we don't think about taking pictures of just like ordinary life. And I realize now, like I'm very interested in that when I look at old photographs. And actually one of the things that I did is I created an album of now where I just took pictures of every room in my apartment, the inside of the refrigerator, the pantry, what the street looked like. Years and years from now, it's those ordinary things that will probably be of great interest to me. You know, what's familiar is so easy to ignore. But in the future, that's often what's most interesting.

Let's talk about touch for a while. How did you dive into that sense? Oh, I love the sense of touch. And this was a funny thing because I went into this thinking like, oh, I don't really pay much attention to my sense of touch, but I actually am extremely touch focused. So this was something, you know, you might think, well, of course I know myself. I just hang out with myself all day long. But one of the things I realized was that I did not know my own preferences very well. I wasn't very tuned into it. And here's a funny thing that I figured out.

So I'm very focused on touch. And so I'm very aware of how things feel. And I was looking at my clothes. You know how every once in a while you go through and you're like, okay, let me donate the stuff that I'm not wearing. And I thought to myself, well, why is it that there's this certain kind of shirt that I'm not wearing? It was all these sort of cotton button down shirts, which I like the way they look, but somehow I never wore them. And I was like, well,

why is that? And I thought it's because I don't like the feel of that kind of cotton. I don't like to put it on. But one of the things that research shows us is because of the wiring of the human brain, sight takes up the most real estate. So we're wired to be kind of sight first. And if there is a conflict among the senses, sight will usually trump. And so I realized what was happening is I would be trying on these clothes. I would like the way they looked. And that would sort of overwhelm my awareness that I maybe didn't like the way they felt. So now what I do, when I go into a dressing

room, is I take a minute and I shut my eyes and I just focus on the feel of a garment. Because I'm like, in the end, if it's scratchy, if it's too tight, if it's too heavy, even if I like the way it looks, I won't want to wear it because I won't like the way that it feels. And it's funny too, I found out there is a lot of, well, this is true of all the senses. There's polarizing sensation. For instance, it turns out with silky. I like silky, but many people do not like silky. It almost gives them the creeps.

Or I have a friend who refuses to go into water. He takes the shortest showers he possibly can. And he will never get submerged in water. He won't go in a pool. He won't go in a bathtub. He won't go in the ocean because he doesn't like that feeling of being wet all over. And I thought, gosh, who knew? Like, that's a good thing to know about yourself. I actually don't mind being. And then my father-in-law takes a bath twice a day often because he loves the feeling of being submerged in water. So again, it's one of these things where it's a good thing to know about yourself. It's a good thing to realize that people can be different. And maybe there's aspects of your sensory surroundings that you

could dial up or dial down depending on your preferences once you're aware of it instead of sort of brushing it aside. I'm happy to hear that other people don't like the feel of silk because I don't, I had silk sheets once and it was horrible. Interesting. How do you feel about velvety? Kind of the same way. Interesting. You don't like that soft feeling. But I do, I do. But I think it's more the silk than the velvet because the velvet has a little more of a, you know, friction to it. Yeah. But silk just felt, I don't know, creepy. Yeah.

I guess creepy is a good word. I just didn't enjoy it at all. And everyone said, oh, but there's silk. And I said, well, okay, fine. Right. Well, and then you look at something like taste and of course then these polarizing tastes like candy corn um you know it turns out a lot of people really i mean everybody knows that brussels sprouts are kind of polarizing but i didn't know that candy

corn was a very polarizing food um but turns out a lot of people disagree about about candy corn oh and here's a question i mean speaking of like shaping your auditory and your, your sensory environment, if you really need to focus, what works best for you? Silence, like white noise, a busy hum, like being in a coffee shop, music with words or music without words. Silence. Silence. See me too, but many people need, will flourish in different environments. And so part of it is like, once you think about that about yourself, you could say, okay, well, how can I get myself in the surroundings that will be the most helpful for me? Which might be different for somebody else. Or, you know, you're a parent, you might say, oh, listen to a child.

Listen, if you're going to concentrate, you really need silence. But maybe that child needs a busy home or maybe that child wants music without words or white noise. It's really helpful to realize that other people may have different preferences and also to show consideration for people who may be bothered by things where we're like, well, this is no big deal. What's the fuss? And it's like, oh, this is really bothersome to this person. So sum this all up, Gretchen, what's the takeaway that you got from all this? Well, it's interesting because obviously I went into this with the idea that it would make me happier. And it did. But what surprised me is that when we're trying to boost our own happiness, often we have an aim, like I want to connect more deeply with the people that I love, or I want to remember my own life better and understand myself better, or I want to spark creativity, or I want to calm down, or I want to boost my energy, or there's so many things that we might want.

And what I found is that for so many aims, practically any aim that you might be striving for, there are ways to harness the five senses toward that aim. So you can use your five senses to help you engage more deeply with other people. There's so many ways to do that. You can use the five senses to help spark your creativity. So many ways to do that. You can use the five senses to help you like calm down and feel less stressed out. Yes, there's so many ways to use the five senses for that. And at the same time, if what you want is more energy, kind of paradoxically, you can calm down and

pep up using the five senses. And so what I found is it's just this, it's this concrete approach that will help you achieve so many aims depending on what it is that you're seeking. But you can do it through the five senses. Well, this has been kind of fun to explore happiness through the five senses. I've really enjoyed this. I've been talking to Gretchen Rubin, host of the Happier with Gretchen Rubin podcast. And her latest book is called Life in Five Senses. And you'll find a link to that book in the show notes.

Thanks, Gretchen. Really appreciate it. Thanks so much. I still enjoyed our conversation. Bumble knows it's hard to start conversations. Hey. No, too basic. Hi there.

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and overall behavior due to the hormonal changes it causes. Apple named The Jordan Harbinger Show one of the best podcasts a few years back, and in a nutshell, the show is aimed at making you a better, more informed critical thinker. Check out The Jordan Harbinger Show. There's so much for you in this podcast. The Jordan Harbinger Show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you live long enough, it seems, there will come a time when someone breaks your heart. And since it seems to happen to everyone sooner or later,

there's this kind of, oh well, that's what happens in life kind of attitude about it. But what really happens when someone breaks your heart? Why does it hurt so much? What effect does it have on you physically, mentally, and emotionally? And how can you best recover from a broken heart? Well, that's what Florence Williams has investigated. Florence is a contributing editor to Outside Magazine, and she's author of a book called Heartbreak, A Personal and Scientific Journey. Hi, Florence. Welcome to Something You Should Know. Hi, thanks for having me. So what is a broken heart? Because obviously your heart doesn't physically break, but it sure hurts. It's painful.

And so what is that? What is that sensation? What I'm talking about is a very intense emotion tied to the loss of an attachment bond. So that can be the loss of a bond to a person, a loved one. It can be the loss of a bond to a place or even an idea. These are things that we become attached to. We're humans, we're built for attachment. And when we lose those bonds, we feel it very, very deeply in our sort of prehistoric emotional brain. But, you know, it's not just a metaphor, which is, I think, the way, you know, poetry would

have us believe in music. And we know that actually we do feel these emotions in our cardiovascular system. We feel them in our arteries. There are people who suffer legit heart failure in the wake of a big emotional low. It would seem, and just, you know, thinking back on times in my life when there's been a breakup or, you know, a heartbreak of some sort, part of it is that I've lost this and I'll never have it again, that it's gone forever. And now what am I going to do? There's like a helplessness and a hopelessness that is somehow wrapped in all of this. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, when we've lost a romantic

partner, we've lost a way of life. You know, we've lost a set of routines that we've, you know, grown accustomed to. We've lost a sense of the future. You know, we may have envisioned in our heads, you know, what our old age is going to look like together. What, you know, what our future goals would look like together. All of a sudden, you know, that rug has kind of slipped out from under us. We've lost a sense of our identity, you know, in this family or in this couple. So multi layers of loss, everything from sort of victimhood and woe is me to just a more kind of

physical, you know, absence of something that we've grown used to, something that we associate with safety. You know, being in a pair bond for many of us really feels safe. And when that loss occurs, you often hear people say, you know, I cannot, I can't live without him or her. I can't. Well, and everyone knows, including you, that you can live without him or her. Life will go on. But in that moment, it really feels like that. And we lose our objectivity. We lose our, I don't know what it is. It's that weird feeling that you're drowning in something that you're not really drowning in,

but you can't see it because you're in it. That's right. There's so many metaphors for this kind of heartbreak. It's like you feel an axe in your heart, or you feel like you're missing a limb, or like you're adrift in an ocean, or what you said, it just feels like this tremendous, I can't go on, I can't possibly go on. And I think evolution has sort of overdone it, you know, with the melodrama of our response. It's like, why do we have to take this so seriously to the point of almost, you know, obsession or dysfunction? You know, some of us like literally can't get off the floor, you know, for a period of weeks or months. It's like, why would evolution design us to feel it this deeply? And I think

the interesting answer to that is that just as we're wired for attachment, we're actually wired for heartbreak. We're supposed to feel it deeply. And if we look at the animal models, which I did for the book, I spent some time with researchers studying voles, who also mate for life. And then, you know, if there's a little vole divorce, they kind of freak out. And a researcher at the University of Colorado has actually, you know, analyzed the neurons involved with this, the stress hormones. And it looks like the reason we feel this so intensely is that we're supposed to kind of look for our lost mate, you know, in terms of our deep prehistoric past. If our mate wandered off, if our little mole vole partner wandered off, it was better for our offspring, better for

our future, you know, genetic propagation propagation of the species if we waited around and pined and missed that missing mate so that when they did maybe come back, all would be well, we wouldn't have run off and found someone else. And if they did come back, then eventually we are wired to recover. So it's like a lot of drama all squeezed in to a little mammalian lifespan. Well, that's interesting because I've heard it explained that one of the reasons loneliness feels so bad is because it's supposed to motivate you to stop it, to go find some connection to alleviate your loneliness. But as you say, with heartbreak, it's like in overdrive and it's instead of motivating, it's demotivating where you just want to crawl under the covers and never get up again, that

it's having that overdone effect. Yeah, for a while. You know, we're not supposed to feel it forever, unfortunately, because otherwise, yeah, we would be in trouble as a species. But some people do seem to feel it forever in that there is that obsessive, you know, I can think of someone who just never got over the heartbreak and would always talk about her and, oh my God, and this is years later. Yeah. Well, just as there's a condition known as complicated grief, which is also when grief lasts and lasts and lasts to the point where people aren't really able to necessarily kind of function very well. That is an aberration. But unfortunately, it does affect about 10 to 15% of people who are suffering grief, for example, and bereavement, but it also affects about 10 to

15% of people who are divorced, people who are suffering heartbreak. And we know that in those people who cannot really recover very well from their heartbreaks, who therefore suffer chronic loneliness, we know that they have a 23 to 26% greater risk of early death, of increased chronic disease, of a host of health problems. So loneliness and heartbreak are conditions that actually we really need to take very seriously. And we need to do what we can to try to feel better and to try to help others who are going through this, like our friends, feel better too. relationship wasn't all that great in the first place. The rejection somehow makes that other person who dumped you so much more attractive than they were before. There's something about that rejection that seems to play a big part in heartbreak. Yeah, rejection is a super powerful and interesting emotion. We are designed to be sort of hyper sensitive to social status, to social position and to social slights because we are a social species. And so in our deep past, if people rejected us, if for example, our clan sort of kicked us out, or if our intimate kin group kicked us out, rejected us, that meant death. It meant we were wandering in the jungle alone. And so we worked very, very hard to be liked, to be powerful within the group, to be respected. All of these things are incredibly important to an individual's survival. And so rejection, it's really huge.

Our brains kind of take that as a big threat. So given that people are different, relationships are different, every breakup is different, but are there things we can learn from broken hearts collectively, or is everybody just different? Everyone is different. But I was really struck, as I went through my own heartbreak and wrote this book, at all the commonalities.

You know, when you're going through it, you feel alone. Because heartbreak, in fact, even though it's kind of a universally experienced phenomenon, it doesn't happen very often in a lifetime, you know, maybe a couple of times. And so, you know, our close friends, you know, may not be going through it. I didn't know anyone at the time who was going through it. And so I felt very lonely. And it was great to be able to talk to people who could say, for example, all the researchers and experts I talked to, they would say, you know, I feel for

you. I feel for what you're going through because I went through this when I was in graduate school, or I went through it, you know, when I was a teenager, or I went through it a few years ago. There are a lot of similar responses that we have. Well, and it seems that if you live long enough, your heart will be broken because how can it not, whether it's the loss of a pet or the loss of a love of different kinds of heartbreak, and we might feel attached to a landscape or attached to a geography that is now on fire or flooded. These are other kinds of heartbreaks. And you're right, because we love things, because we care about things, and because we care about people, we're all going to go through this. So when your heart gets broken, as it someday will, probably multiple times, is it just,

you know, you're on your own because everybody's different? Or is there some advice that can really help the process? Oh, yeah. I definitely felt that I probably sped up my recovery from heartbreak About 75 to 50%. And I did it by trying a lot of different evidence-based kind of interventions and suggestions. And I'm really happy to share them because I do think it's important that we try to recover sooner rather than later because of the health effects that these feelings of loneliness and heartbreak can bring on. And some of those things are what?

Some of those things are, I kind of put them into three big buckets. And the first one is just calming your nervous system, just calming down because we feel very hypervigilant and anxious when we don't feel safe. And so, you know, if we've lost a partner, we're going to feel really on edge. A lot of people lose weight. They don't sleep. They feel very jittery and agitated. This is like our cortisol. This is our adrenaline kind of helping us kick into survival gear now that we're kind of, our bodies think we're on our own. So just calming down and And that might be doing yoga, meditating, walking outside, dancing, whatever it is that your body likes to do to sort of feel calmer. The second piece is connection.

So that would be finding others who maybe help you feel less lonely, maybe because they've gone through this before, or maybe because they just love you and they care about you. So, you know, finding sort of meaningful connection with friends, with family, and again, also with nature has been shown to make people feel less lonely. We can connect to the natural world as well. So calm connection. And then the third piece, and this one kind of surprised me, is finding a sense of meaning in the heartbreak. What did you learn through this experience that you can take moving on to grow from the experience to be a better partner or better person in your relationships as you move forward? Not just romantic relationships, but how can you be a more empathetic kind of listener, a better friend? Heartbreak really

can open our hearts in many ways to help us do that. So finding, again, that sense of meaning and also a sense of purpose, maybe to help others who are also going through similar kinds of pain. What is it you find are some of the common missteps, myths, misconceptions about heartbreak? Yeah. I mean, I think the first is that it's just a metaphor, you know, that it's just an emotional kind of storm in our brains. And what I found and what I learned from talking to these immunologists and geneticists and psychologists is that we feel these emotions in our bodies. Another thing people get wrong, I think, are some of the recommendations for solutions. For example, I often heard, oh, you shouldn't jump into another relationship too quickly. You know, you need to learn to love yourself first before you can love

someone else. And I was like, well, where's the science there? You know, who says you shouldn't be in another relationship too soon or that rebounds are not a good idea. And in fact, I found some signs indicating that rebounds are a good idea in terms of helping recover your self-esteem, your self-confidence, helping you kind of distract yourself from the pain in kind of a good way that actually can be positive, not just negative. I actually found it really helpful to talk about my emotions rather than sort of keeping them in. I think that's something that we as a culture, you know, in Western societies often do. We're not so comfortable with big, dramatic emotions. You know, we tend to kind of plaster a smile on our face and keep going. But that's actually not

very good for recovery. It's much better if we can talk about it, be vulnerable with each other. I had to learn how to do that. I wasn't very good at that. But it sure did help me feel better. I know people, though, who can't stop talking about it. Like, you know, they just want to go on and on and on. And it's like, all right, all right, yeah. But maybe you're a little obsessed and maybe you need to distract yourself and go do something else besides talk about him or her. talking and talking, but it really generally sometimes is helpful if you can be a listener for a while. And then you're right. Then try to provide some distraction, like, Hey, let's go hear some music. No, let's go. Let's go for a hike. It's just one of those things where if you can really be there for your friends, they need you. So yeah. One thing I've always wondered, I don't know if there's ever been any science on this,

as to like, if you get your heart broken, is the next time easier or is the next time harder? You know, I am happy to say I cannot speak from experience on that. I've only had my heart broken once. I think that if you really can grow after your heartbreak and end up feeling sort of positive about that growth, you know, like in many ways, I actually do feel like I am a better person. Then I think you're pretty, you know, you're perhaps a little bit better armed for the next time it happens. You know, you can get through it. Um, I think if you're one of those people who hasn't recovered fully from your heartbreaker very well, then, you know, it can be sort of like cumulative trauma. It can be one after the other,

and then it could be worse. Yeah. I've, I've always thought like if you get your heart broken really horribly and you, you feel things you've never felt before that the next time it happens it's going to conjure up those feelings again and that you never knew you could feel that feel so horrible yeah but on the other hand you also know that the feelings don't last forever you know that you know big feelings like this are transient right this is something we learn from from you know all from all the Buddhists now and the meditation. Everything that's out there is telling us big feelings are transient. They come and they go. We can have hope and faith that we will feel better tomorrow or maybe next week or

maybe next month. And then for me, I learned that I am resilient. I learned that I'm a survivor. I also wonder if those people who ever got their heart broken in a romantic situation and then miraculously found a way to get back together with that person, if anyone has ever looked to see, is that ever work? Is that ever a good idea? Or when it's over, it's over? Yeah, good question. There actually have been some studies suggesting that people who break up and get back together often are much better off the second time around or the third time around. I mean, I know a lot of couples who've broken up two or three times and are really happy

now. I think breaking up and conflict, these are natural things. And I think we get better at learning how to be in a relationship. We get better at kind of defining what we want, how to show up for the other person. There's nothing like a you know, kind of like a threat to the relationship to help you kind of step up in some ways and get better at it. When you're around someone who's had their heart broken and they're all upset and, you know, people will say things like, you know, there's other fish in the sea or, you know, don't worry, you'll meet someone else. Are those good things to say or bad things to say, or they don't really mean much? They're not very helpful. You know,

oh, you'll get over it. Oh, he was a schmuck anyway. Oh, just move on. You'll be fine. Not so helpful. I think the more helpful responses are, I'm really sorry that you're having such a hard time with this. I'm, I'm here for you. You know, let's talk about it. How can I help you? Um, let's go for a walk in the woods. Um, it's,

it's really listening, right? That's what people need. Well, since it is kind of a downer subject, is there some good news here about heartbreak? I don't think it's cause for despair. You know,

heartbreak means that you are capable of love and it means that you're human. And these emotions are normal. It's important to remember that. And it's also important to remember that there are lessons in heartbreak. If we're not afraid to kind of feel our feelings and examine the ways in which this can help us and change us for the good, then we can get through it. Well, and also it's comforting to hear that it is really a universal experience. Pretty much everybody gets their heart broken and pretty much all of us survive, get through it and move on.

I've been talking with Florence Williams. She is author of the book Heartbreak, A Personal and Scientific Journey. And if you'd like to check it out, there's a link to that book in the show notes. Thanks, Florence. Oh, wonderful. Thank you, Mike. Bye. You know that coffee you had this morning? It takes about nine months of effort for that coffee to go from bean to cup. So you might want to slow down and enjoy it.

And in fact, according to coffee expert George Howell, the best tasting cup of coffee is actually around room temperature. When we take that first sip of hot coffee, our taste buds shut down. If you let it cool off a bit, you'll get much more flavor. Like wine, coffee flavor is actually enhanced and opens up a bit after it's had a chance to cool and breathe.

And that is something you should know. If you'd like to show your support for this podcast, and I encourage you to show it, just leave a rating and review wherever you listen. That would help us a lot. I'm Mike Kerr Brothers.

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