I hate that I love you: The neuroscience of heartbreak

Author: Chiara Bressan holds an EMCL MS in Clinical Linguistics and an MA in Linguistics (U. Padova)

Odi et amo. I hate and I love. Maybe you’re wondering why I do that. I do not know. But I feel it happening, and I suffer. So Catullus, famous ancient Roman poet, described the painful and puzzling feeling of love’s contradiction. And if you have ever experienced heartbreak, it’s very likely that you understand him quite well. Rivers of ink have been consumed on love since writing was invented, and yet its mechanisms remain mysterious. Neuroscience can however help us shed a little light on the complex matter of heartbreak. What happens to your brain when you experience pain from love? ¹

Helen Fisher, the most famous love and relationships anthropologist, dedicated her life-long studies to understand how the brain works on love. And here’s what she can tell about heartbreaks. In a big fMRI study ²³, Fisher analyzed the neural activity of individuals who had been dumped, and found that the active brain areas of people exposed to pictures of their lost lovers were very similar to the ones active in people happily in love. Lovers can remain indeed in love for weeks, months or even years after they have been rejected.

But let’s break down what happens in details through the end of a relationship. Protest and despair are the key words of a romantic wreck ⁴. When you are rejected by your sweetheart, your first reaction is to not accept it. The protest phase can be dissected into smaller steps. First, you spend your energies trying to win your loved one back (warning: this might come with exaggerated doses of embarrassing gestures, humiliations and dignity loss). And listen up, the rejection of your better half is actually increasing your love and obsession for them. Yep, we are complicated beings and we always want what we can’t have. Science-proofed facts.

The adversity intensifies the passion according to a phenomenon called “frustration attraction” ⁵, and it’s due to the dopamine ⁶ and norepinephrine rising occurring when seeking for the abandoner who broke the social tie. These two neurotransmitters are the main responsible for the chemical reactions of love, so when they increase in the attempts of winning someone back, so does your romantic passion for them. Add to the cocktail the suppression of serotonin due to stress increase (which also enhances dopamine and norepinephrine) ⁷ and boom, you’re high on love, even more than before. In addition to that, when an expected reward is delayed, the neurons responsible for the dopaminergic reward system prolong their activity ⁸, keeping you dopamine boosted in the vain wait for the object of your desires.

The last step of the protest phase is the abandonment rage, otherwise called hate (Meloy, 1998; 1999). Apparently useless, it might actually have an evolutionary meaning, to help you move on from a hopeless relationship in order to find new available mates. When the reward is withdrawn, relax and happiness leave place to aggressiveness ⁹, but curiously, hate doesn’t extinguish love. Love and hate can coexist in your brain and are, in fact, profoundly connected (Fisher, 2004). Hate is just another face of love, “the opposite of love is indifference”, as The Lumineers sing in Stubborn Love. And no song title could be more appropriate for the purpose of this article. Now that most of you realized that if they hate their ex they probably still having feelings for them, let’s move on to phase 2. The despair.

The despair comes when you finally give up. No more chasing, no more showing up unexpected shouting your love and begging to get back together, no more hope. This is the phase when you cry a lot, lie in bed binge-watching Friends and occasionally get drunk, with sporadic episodes of rage still surfacing from time to time. It’s the depressive phase, which can in the worst cases even lead to death, from suicide to strokes or heart attacks caused by the depression. Something called broken heart syndrome, or Takotsubo cardiomyopathy, actually exists, and it’s a heart condition in which, in consequence of high stress levels, the left ventricle of the heart dilates, leading to acute heart failure ¹⁰.

Love is an addiction

Contrary to the previous phase, you experience a decrease in dopamine and norepinephrine, due to the decreased activity of the reward system cells, which have realized by now that your reward is not coming, and to the progressively reduced level of stress, all leading to lethargy and depression. As for the rage, the depression phase might seem useless and dangerous, but nothing in nature is pointless. The extreme sadness is indeed a social signal for the people around you that something is wrong, and that you need help. That’s when you need your support system of family and friends to come around and have your back, also because you’re kind of an addict in this phase.

“I get so high when you’re with me but crash and crave you when you leave” sang Kesha in Your love is my drug, and she actually had a point. Evidence shows indeed that romantic love works in a way very similar to drug addiction (Fisher, 2004). Similar brain pathways are involved, for example the mesolimbic reward system, associated with dopamine ¹¹, and the ventral tegmental area (VTA) associated with addiction, active both in cocaine addicted and lovers ¹². Therefore, when your loved one has eventually turned you down you’re pretty much like a druggy in abstinence, experiencing their same symptoms like anxiety, insomnia, irritability, physical pain, and even the risk of relapse. Even long after the relationship ended, in fact, any memory can trigger the lover’s craving, getting you restarted with the will to rekindle contact. It goes without saying that your friends should at all costs avoid leaving you unsupervised with alcohol and a phone during these relapses. Do not. Text. Your ex.

To sum up, love can seriously leave you broken. There’s no way to avoid it, and unfortunately the remedy for a broken heart has not been invented yet, but a series of good practices can be implemented to help lonely hearts pick up the pieces and move on. Strict no contact with the source of your pain, and then physical exercise, sunlight, a balanced diet and novelty have been proven to improve the quality of life after the breakup ¹³. New activities and new environments, together with the heart-warming presence of friends and family can apparently have a positive impact and help you get back on track.

“Love hurts, love scars, love wounds and marks. Love is like a cloud, holds a lot of rain” sang the Nazareth in 1975 (Love Hurts, the Nazareth). Whether you want to get damp and drown in the storm or try to dance in the rain, it’s up to you.