That Neuroscience Guy - The Neuroscience of Toxic Relationships

Episode Date: May 23, 2023

Have you ever had a friend exhibit harmful or toxic behaviour? Maybe you have been in a romantic relationship where your partner consistently manipulates or makes you feel unsafe. Either way, it can be difficult for us to get out of these unhealthy situations. To kick off season 5 of That Neuroscience Guy, we discuss the neuroscience behind staying in toxic relationships. 

Hi, my name is Olaf Kregolsen, and I'm a neuroscientist at the University of Victoria. And in my spare time, I'm that neuroscience guy. Welcome to the podcast and welcome to season five. You know, everyone in life has had a relationship with someone that we call toxic. You know, whether it's a friend or someone you're dating, the relationship just, you know, it's not great. You know, it's causing you stress. It's causing you anxiety. It might even be someone that we would call a bad person, if you will.

But we stick with it. We just don't let go. So why do we do it? Why do we stay in toxic relationships? And that's today's topic, the neuroscience of why we stay in toxic relationships. So let's just operationally define that. I kind of did in the intro, but you know, a toxic relationship is one that's a negative to you in a sense. You are unhappy, you're stressed, you're anxious, and it can even be a negative to the people around you because typically people in toxic relationships impact the people around them. So if I'm in a toxic relationship with someone else, I could be impacting my friends because of this. But we stay. We don't leave. In these relationships,

you know, this applies to friends. You could have a friend and it's a toxic friendship. For the kids that listen, this could be you. It could be a kid you're hanging out with at school and it's just not a great relationship. It could be someone that you work with, someone in the workplace that you interact with and you go for lunch with them and you just keep going back and it's bad for you. It could be someone you're dating. You could be dating someone and they're just not nice to you or it's just a bad relationship. And of course, it could be someone you marry. You could marry someone and be in a toxic relationship, and you got married for what we classically say, all the wrong reasons. So why do we do this? Why do we stay in toxic relationships?

Well, for a quick review, and we talk about decision-making a lot, but let's just go over it quickly and get to the basics so we can frame this in terms of toxic relationships. If you're in a toxic relationship, you really have two choices. Stay in the relationship or leave the relationship. Whether it's a friend, someone you're dating or someone you interact with at work. There's a, you know, someone that you work with, there's a, you could stay in communication with them and, you know, right. Or you could just remove yourself and just be a hundred percent professional. If it's someone you're married to, there's, you know, do you stay in the marriage or do you leave? And if it's just a friend, it's just something as simple as do I

keep hanging out with them? Now, in terms of decision-making in the brain, we know that there's a value for staying. All right, and there's a value for going. We use value, it doesn't mean dollar value, it's just a way that we sort of say how much the choice is worth. And in the case of a toxic relationship, the value for staying is higher. It's really just that simple. You value staying more than you value leaving. Now, don't forget these values can change over time, right? So a value isn't a constant. You know, when I was a kid, I would have told you that Kentucky fried chicken was the best thing in the world and it had the highest value. If you got me to pick any food, I would have said Kentucky fried chicken. I know that sounds pretty

gross, but I was a kid and growing up in a small town in BC, it was our biggest and best restaurant. But now that value for Kentucky Fried Chicken is pretty close to zero. Now in a relationship, let's think of it that way. You know, you become friends with someone and as you become friends with them, the value for staying friends with that person increases. You know, they do nice things to you. You have fun together. And this applies, of course, for any relationship. But, you know, over time, that value could stay at that point because they keep reinforcing that, or it could go down. You know, you find out that your friend said something behind your back, right, that wasn't really great. Or you found out, you know, I don't know, they were cheating on you in terms of dating or a partner and the value goes down.

And these values change over time. But why is the value for staying higher? If we were completely rational, and I always go back to the Star Trek thing, I love this for decision making, you know, we want to be Mr. Spock and we want to be a hundred percent rational, but what we are is Captain Kirk. We have emotions. So let's get into this. Why do we stay in toxic relationships and why is the value for staying higher? Well, first of all, fear. All right. The fear of being alone, the fear of not being in a relationship. This is the amygdala. We talk about the amygdala a lot, but without the amygdala, and to be fair, a couple other parts of the brain, we would be Mr. Spock. And the amygdala is giving you this emotional thing where it's saying, I'm afraid of being alone. And the amygdala stokes

that up. All right. It's adding value to the choice for staying. All right. So if you could remove your emotions from the thing, you might decide to leave. But because your amygdala is going wild and if you're stressed and anxious in this toxic relationship, it's going to increase that value even more. Well, you don't go, right? The value is there. And if you talk about the fear of not being in a relationship, there is another piece to this we've talked about in the past, which is our low-level midbrain systems, sort of the ones that run our fight or flight responses, the hypothalamus we've talked about in the past in regions like this. And to be fair, there's some low-level cortical regions, but we have a desire to be a part of a group and not offend the group. This goes right back to the dawn of time where being in a group

was essential for survival, and it applies to relationships. So the amygdala and these low-level systems contribute to this value for staying in a toxic relationship. A second thing that keeps us in toxic relationships is low self-esteem. There's a lot of brain regions that are involved in self-esteem. There's the left frontal cortex, which maintains our belief in the world, and the right part of the brain, which tries to override and update our values. And of course, this is what's happening in a toxic relationship. Our left prefrontal cortex is basically saying,

well, this is the state of the world and this is okay. And possibly because of the fear response and other things, the right brain just can't override this. Now, in a lot of cases, with luck it does. Eventually enough of that evidence accumulates. The right brain in the right prefrontal cortex, to be specific, can go into gear, and it can basically say, all right, your worldview is wrong. This is a bad person.

You can't be with them. There's also a bit of bias that comes in. We basically value things that reinforce our beliefs. So occasionally that toxic person does do something nice. It's pretty rare that someone stays in a relationship with a person's mean all the time. Um, it does happen in extreme cases, but usually in occasionally they, they do something nice. And when that happens, remember reinforcement learning, you get that massive prediction error, that surge of dopamine that sort of wipes out all of those beliefs you're building up saying this person's

really, really bad. And what happens then is that massive positive prediction error and that onrush of dopamine is basically reinforcing your desire to stay in the toxic relationship. The third piece is a poor assessment of decision values. You know, we reviewed decision-making in the brain at the outset, but basically we have a hard time assessing decision values. You know, if I leave this person, what will life look like? And you don't know, like that's the truth. The thing is you know what you've got. If you stay in a toxic friendship, you know that your friend's going to make fun of you on the walk to school, for instance, or you know your coworker is going to make fun of you in front of a group of colleagues.

And you think to yourself, well, this isn't great. But the value of walking away from that friendship, relationship, or marriage is a true unknown. And it makes it very hard to assess. And because of that, our decision is to stay. All right. Another piece that comes in, and this is the fourth reason we stay in toxic relationships, is investment. These values I've been talking about for the past eight or nine minutes are typically stored in the orbital frontal cortex, although they are in truth distributed, but the orbital frontal cortex brings it together. And basically with time, we value any relationship more and more. That's just a natural response. All right. It's the

investment of value we call it. And because this thing is being with you for a long time, you sort of look in the mirror and you think, well, Hey, the value is actually pretty good. You know, I've been in this relationship for 10 years. For those of you that are older, this is classic in the divorce scenario, which is people think about it and they go, you know, we've been together 20 years. And, you know, even though things are bad, that's, we've been together 20 years. Well, that is a perceived value tied to investment that is basically inaccurate, but that's another reason you stay in a toxic relationship you know and put put it put the reverse for this point in

which is if you just started dating someone and you go on two dates and then you find out something about them that makes you see that they're not a nice person well it's pretty easy to end that relationship you just don't go on date number three. Same thing with friendship. You hang out with a kid after school or whatever scenario. I want to throw some of this out for our younger listeners. And you hang out one time and you find out they're a jerk. Well, guess what? You don't hang out with them again. But if you hang out with them for a couple of years, then guess what? You've got investment of value and that's the orbital frontal cortex bringing that together. And that's another reason you stay in a toxic relationship. And of course, there's the number five, the fifth reason we stay in toxic relationships

is just love. All right. You can love someone that is bad. All right. And this again goes back to your amygdala. And, you know, there's serial killers that are being on death row and their parents still love them. You know, they know they're horrible people, but they still love them. You know, when my son screws up and does something silly, you know, I still love him. And guess what? When dad screws up and does something silly, he still loves me. In a toxic relationship, you can still really care about the person, even though you know that they're not a great person to be with. And that's where that phrase comes from, is I love you, but I cannot be with you. So there you go. Why do we stay in

toxic relationships? Fear the amygdala, fear of being alone fear of being not being a relationship and that biases your decision values to stay or go low self self-esteem that left brain right brain worldview structure basically your worldview is it you're not a great person and that's the best you can do poor assessment of decision values it's very hard to decide and to get a good feel like, if I leave this relationship, what does the future look like? Investment values increase over time for these sort of situations. So you've been with someone or been friends with someone for a long time, so we value staying higher. And love. Last of all, the amygdala.

You love the person. You can love them even though you're bad. Now, what can you do about it? I know nothing about relationship counseling, so that's probably what you need to do. But from a neuroscience perspective alone, what you have to strive to do is to try to remove emotion and fear from the equation. You know, shut down the amygdala and try to assess the decision values as accurately as I can. In the words of the immortal clash, should I stay or should I go?

All right, that's the neuroscience of toxic relationships. Couple of things, because it's our first episode of season five. Thank you so much to you, the listeners. We're closing in on 500,000 downloads and every single episode in season five, including this one, as a suggestion from the listeners. And I want to just make a note there that we're going to really try to focus on the neuroscience of daily life. That was the goal at the start of season one. We've drifted sometimes and got a bit too technical and nerdy.

We're going to keep it to the neuroscience of daily life. I want to say recently, thanks to the Canadian Broadcasting Company. They put our show on the podcast playlist, which is awesome. Thank you so much. And a big thanks to Matt Hammerstrom. Matt is the producer. He's a graduate student in my lab. He does all of the sound editing. He posts all the episodes. And when we're brainstorming ideas, it's him and I that sit down and do it. He doesn't get enough credit, but without him, the show does not go on. And of course, just the usual, thatneuroscienceguy.com. There's links to our Etsy store. We are going to put up some new t-shirts.

We kind of failed on our break to design them, but we have some ideas. Patreon, I know a lot of people don't get it. Basically, the deal is simple. If you like the podcast, you enter your credit card details and you can give us a dollar a month, a dollar a week, $5 a month, a million dollars would be nice. But all of that money actually goes to Matt. Matt's a starving graduate student

and literally lives off an amount of money that I'm not going to say, but it's not as much as he would like or I would like. And all the money's just going to him. So you're supporting the podcast by supporting Matt in a sense. Of course, if you have ideas, you can follow me on Twitter at that NeuroSci guy and DM me. I'm trying to get back to people. I'm really hopeless at it because I get so many emails and messages, but Twitter is the best menu to contact me. And of course, the podcast. Thank you so much for listening. Thank you for subscribing.

And I hope you enjoyed our first episode of season five. I know I'm excited after a few weeks off and can't wait for the next episode. My name is Olof Kregolsen and I'm that neuroscience guy. Thank you so much for listening and I'll see you in a couple of days for another neuroscience bite.