AMANTE: Your heart may not break, but it sure will feel like it
Breakups suck.
I’d say it more eloquently than that, but what’s the point? The fact of the matter is they are painful and devastating and just plain sucky.
Those feelings you have when you’re breaking up, when you feel like you’ve got the wind knocked out of you and your heart quite literally aches? (I liken it to someone stomping on my chest — not just because of the heartbreak metaphor.)
I thought all of it was my own imagination, a psychosomatic symptom.
As it turns out: Not so much. Breakups really do cause physical pain, according to a University of Michigan study.
The researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging and found the same brain networks are activated when you are thinking about the one who scorned you as when you burn yourself on hot coffee.
The brain doesn’t distinguish between physical and emotional pain. Social rejection manifests in the same area of the brain as physical pain.
What’s particularly interesting to me is how this could change people’s behaviors post-breakup.
I go from extremely productive and downright hyperactive to hiding under my comforter with my carefully-selected depression playlist on repeat whilst wallowing. I know I’m particularly devastated when I play the same song on repeat more than once, usually Fleetwood Mac and Stevie Nicks’ impeccable “Silver Springs” or The Smiths' “I Know it’s Over.”
Could you now go to the doctor and be issued painkillers when dumped? What’s more, would this be a socially-accepted solution to post-breakup stress?
But you would just be numb, and the pain would not leave any sooner. Perhaps that’s the preference for some, but not me.
The way I see it, if Stevie (I love her so much we’re on a first name basis) was given painkillers post-breakup with bandmate Lindsey Buckingham, there is no way in hell we’d be blessed with the perfection that is “Silver Springs."
Listen to it — it’ll give you chills. She’s so beautifully angry at the end!
The point is, without the pain, we wouldn’t be human. Anesthetizing it may feel good short-term, but in the long run, it simply leaves you less equipped for your next tribulation. I hate to be cliché, but what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.
Embrace the pain; own it. Learn from it. You can’t escape it, life will always have something just as horrifying waiting for you around the corner.
When your heart is broken, that pain is real. We know that for sure now. But the best way to manage it all is to just push through.
