Study Says Romantic Rejection Feels Like Cocaine Addiction to the Brain
Research has some interesting things to say about getting dumped
Centuries ago, he’d just been broken up with, and his heart was flooded with a cocktail of raw emotions. He was filled with grief. It felt like he had flames circulating through every screaming cell in his body.
Teetering on an emotional catastrophe, he sat down and penned the following poem:
“Fires run through my body — the pain of loving you. Pain runs through my body with the fires of my love for you. Sickness wanders my body with my love for you. Pain like a boil about to burst with my love for you. Consumed by fire with my love for you. I remember what you said to me. I am thinking of your love for me. I am torn by your love for me. Pain and more pain. Where are you going with my love? I’m told you will go from here. I am told you will leave me here. My body is numb with grief. Remember what I’ve said, my love. Goodbye, my love, goodbye.”
He’d just been dumped. His heart was shattered. And while we may never know his name, we all know his pain.
Truth is, I use the term “he” merely to satisfy a grammatical requirement. This could’ve been written by a man or a woman, which speaks to the near-universality of the pain of unrequited love.
Like it or not, we all feel it.
By now, everything about his life has been lost to time. His family, his friends, his children, and yes, even his identity — all have been eroded by the unforgiving passage of the centuries. His entire world has been erased.
We have nothing left but this poem — a fragment that describes in bitterly exquisite detail one of the most universal human feelings: heartbreak.
We don’t even know exactly when it was written, but we know it’s at least centuries old.
The author was a member of the Kwakiutl people, a tribe of Native Americans who’ve lived in Southern Alaska and British Columbia for thousands of years.
In 1896, it was translated into English once the Westerners arrived. It shows us the cross-cultural ubiquitousness of heartbreak. It shows us that it doesn’t matter what culture you grew up in, what race you are, what you look like, or how much money you make; romantic rejection stings us all.
The Pain of Rejection
Being rejected physically hurts.
I’m not being dramatic, here.
When we’re rejected — especially by a romantic partner — the brain lights up in a way strikingly similar to when we experience physical pain. Studies have even shown that someone who’s recently been rejected can take Tylenol to soothe the pain of being shot down hard.
If only our anonymous Kwakiutl man had some acetaminophen on hand, it might have done him a world of good — but we get his beautiful poem passed down to us through time instead.
The truth is, we can run from it all we’d like, but we’re a social species. We thrive on love. We thrive on giving it. We thrive on receiving it. And heaps of research have proven this to be the case.
The Science of Heartbreak
Since 2005, researchers have known about the portion of the brain that’s activated when we experience heartbreak. They’ve been able to see it on fMRI scans, brain scans that show which portions of the brain are being activated in response to something going on outside in the world.
When you compare the fMRI scans of the recently heartbroken with fMRI scans of people happily in love, you find significant differences.
Several portions of the brain activate when people are in love. But in people who’d recently had their love cut short, one portion of the brain, the ventral striatum/putamen/pallidum, was significantly more active.
These are the same regions of the brain associated with risk and reward, and they fire up every time you go gambling. They’re especially active when there’s a big bet on the line.
But it wouldn’t be until five years later that the story would take another wild turn.
The Lines of Love
In a 2010 study (again by Helen Fisher et al.), researchers decided to compare the parts of the brain that were activated during a hard breakup with people who were going through cocaine withdrawal. They wanted to uncover why rejection can be so absolutely maddening.
First, researchers gathered people who’d recently been rejected. They hung flyers around the State University of New York at Stoney Brook. The fliers said, “Have you just been rejected in love and can’t let go?”
Not the most subtle message in the world, but hey, apparently, it worked.
Next, they conducted interviews and had participants fill out questionnaires. The Passionate Love Scale questionnaire was used. It’s composed of fifteen questions that gauge someone’s love for another person. Participants were asked to think about the person who’d just broken their hearts.
They filled out the questionnaires and then conducted a series of interviews to find out how often they engaged in behaviors like sudden sobbing, crying over their lost love, drinking heavily, and losing control.
What do I mean by “losing control?”
I mean, they wanted to know how often the participants spontaneously texted their love interest, even after learning that the person in question didn’t share their romantic feelings. Or maybe they showed up at the person’s work unannounced just to say hi.
You know, the creepy stuff.
Finally, researchers hooked the participants up to an fMRI machine and showed them pictures of the person who’d broken their hearts, so they could see how their brains responded.
Again, like clockwork, the “I just got dumped” portions of the brain lit up like a wildfire, the same regions that activate when a gambler rolls the dice on a big hand.
This was to be expected.
But then they compared the results with cocaine users who were experiencing cravings.
When looking at brain scans, both of people who’ve had love interrupted and people who’ve had the elated feeling of a cocaine spree interrupted, you see strikingly similar patterns.
Researchers said:
This brain imaging study of individuals who were still “in love” with their rejecter supplies further evidence that the passion of “romantic love” is a goal-oriented motivation state rather than a specific emotion. Moreover, the fMRI results of the study show that looking at a romantic rejecter and cocaine craving have several neural correlates in common. The findings are consistent with the hypothesis that romantic rejection is a specific form of addiction.
Being broken up with feels like acute cocaine withdrawal, at least to the brain.
And it makes perfect sense.
These sections of the brain are associated with emotional regulation, craving, and winning or losing. Gambling, cocaine use, and falling in love, all three cause elated feelings and exhilaration — and interrupting the process of these feelings comes with consequences.
The crash. The depression. The brain changes.
Cravings for either cocaine or love are eerily similar — beyond the brain scans.
Unlike alcohol, opiate, or benzodiazepine withdrawal, cocaine withdrawal doesn’t present with physical symptoms. It’s all psychological, and the effects are intense cravings, feelings of absolute worthlessness, anxiety, depression, irritability, and the uncontrollable emotional rollercoaster that comes along with feelings of despair.
Ashley McGee, RN, Vice President of Nursing at Mountainside Alcohol and Drug Addiction Treatment Center describes this nightmare:
“If a person with cocaine use disorder abruptly discontinues use, they are likely to experience withdrawal symptoms that primarily impact the mind, such as suicidal ideation.”
The same feelings our heartbroken our anonymous Kwakiutl poet described countless years ago.
Why Does This Happen?
Romantic love is the transition into a goal-oriented state. It’s a shift away from the banal and the day-to-day and towards hope, desire, connection, and feelings of great personal self-worth…perhaps even grandeur. We see what we want right before our proverbial eyes. We desire it with all the chemical power our bodies can muster.
When this process is interrupted, we experience a tectonic shift in our biology.
It’s like someone turned off the lights. We might sink into despair.
Knowing this, it seems that serial monogamists have been gaming the system to get their steady doses of the poor man’s cocaine — good old Love Potion #9.
Skipping from lover to lover might be some people’s way of hopping from dose to dose and avoiding uncomfortable withdrawal symptoms.
What’s more, I wonder, is whether we’ll ever see this develop into a possible treatment for heartbreak. Supposing we could address the problem at the root — the brain — might we someday have effective treatments for love cut short that reduce the destructive tendencies in the rejected?
Will we ever have a drug (maybe not cocaine, but something functionally similar to cocaine) that temporarily alleviates the despair of romantic rejection?
Currently, antidepressants are usually prescribed in really bad cases of heartbreak.
But will we ever have anything better?
And another, perhaps more important, question looms.
Study authors went on to say:
The perspective that rejection in love involves subcortical reward gain/loss systems critical to survival helps to explain why feelings and behaviors related to romantic rejection are difficult to control and lends insight into the high cross-cultural rates of stalking, homicide, suicide, and clinical depression associated with rejection in love.
I’ve written before of the destructive nature of the wrath of unrequited love. It’s a story as old as time. When someone (let’s face it, usually men) gets rejected, sometimes they turn into complete terrors.
Supposing we could address the problem at the root — the brain — might we someday have effective treatments for love cut short that reduce the destructive tendencies in the rejected?
Maybe it’s utopian. Perhaps it’s idealistic. But if it’s a world we can aim for someday, I think we ought to try. We owe it to ourselves.
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Three books I recommend checking out:
Tell Me What You Want: The Science of Sexual Desire and How It Can Help You Improve Your Sex Life
Sex at Dawn: How We Mate, Why We Stray, and What It Means for Modern Relationships
A Billion Wicked Thoughts: What the Internet Tells Us About Sexual Relationships
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