Why does breakup hurt so bad?
There are several meanings for the word drama. In theater, for example, drama can mean a text written to be performed. In popular language, but not far from the theater, a dramatic person is the one that frequently makes their complaints bigger than they really are in order to sensitize someone, always involving suffering and distress with exaggeration.
This person can be an actor performing in a great play or a friend saying that he/she will never be able to love someone after the end of the first relationship. It happens that just like in the theater and in the most diverse forms of art, in real life the end of a love relationship usually carries a lot of drama and this is not by chance.
The truth is that no matter how long you have been with someone, or how much you lie to yourself, the ending of a relationship is never easy, especially for those who have been “rejected”.
Breakups bring inevitable waves of emotions that vary between loneliness, sadness, distress, suffering, and anger. Some can be so bad that you lose the desire to get out of bed, eat, or talk to other people. All you want to do is lie there, looking at nothing, stuck in your thoughts, crying, and begging for the sensations of relief to come soon and you return to a state of happiness after the fateful return.
Everybody will go through this one day.
It can happen one, two, three times in a lifetime, and every time it will be as bad as the first one.
But why does an adult person, even after going through this situation so many times, only doesn’t learn to deal with it in the easiest and least painful way possible?
Maybe the answer is the way our brain processes separations and rejections.
For a long time, neuroscientists and psychologists have discussed the importance of social connection for human survival.
Some describe that it was through community life that humans were able to guarantee the necessary resources to survive as a species. This happened because in groups it was much easier to collect food, look for water, build shelters, or even deal with predators’ threats.
Attachment theories describe that humans, like other animals, learn from an early age to find refuge in those they trust, both in times of need – such as hunger and cold – or to search for comfort through touch.
This happen because human babies are born relatively immature, without the ability to feed or care for themselves and for many years need the care of these social bonds to survive.
More recent studies have tried to advance this idea even further by proposing that, as well as the lack of other basic needs,
the lack of social connection can also be “painful”.
The lack of social connection is capable to involve:
- the affective components of pain - which are those related to the unpleasant feelings that arise after a painful stimulus.
E.g.: anguish and suffering. - the sensory components of pain - which are those related to its discriminatory aspects.
E.g.: the ability to know where the pain is, how intense it is, and for how long it hurts.
Before continue, I want you to try to imagine the following scenarios…
First scenario…
You wake up in the morning and decide to make coffee, but you drop a cup of hot coffee on your forearm and feel an intense pain.
The second…
You are checking your social media and you see photos of your ex-boyfriend or girlfriend (a person you recently had an unwanted breakup). As you see each photo, you feel rejected and experience another kind of pain.
A very important scientific study published in 2011 by the psychologist and researcher Ethan Kross and his team, reproduced in the laboratory the scenarios described above in order to understand how similar the processes of social pain and physical pain are in the brain.
The researchers used a functional magnetic resonance imaging machine to visualize brain activity. During the experiment, the participants were placed on the resonance machine, and while inside the machine they saw pictures of their ex-boyfriend or girlfriend or they received heat stimulus in their forearm.
The research results showed that the same regions of the brain that are activated in physical pain caused by heat, are also activated during the rejection pain caused by viewing photos of the ex-partners.
And most importantly of all, this study was able to show that not only the regions of the brain related to the affective components of pain were activated, but also the regions related to the sensory components of pain, which are those that allow us to experience sensations in different parts of our body.
In general, the result was essential to show that an intense experience of separation or social rejection is able to generate a unique experience of social pain, which shares the same regions activated during a physical pain.
A possible explanation for this result is, because of the long period of immaturity of human beings, the neural system of social attachment — the one that promotes social bonds— may have taken a ride in the neural system of physical pain,
Borrowing one’s own sign of pain to indicate when social relationships are threatened and thus promote survival, and feeling pain because of these experiences of social separation can be an adaptive way to avoid them.
Ok, but this makes a lot of sense when you think that for a baby or adults living in the jungle, but it doesn’t seem to make sense if we think of adults living in cities…
It turns out that the whole network involved with pain processing has been maintained throughout the evolution, leaving us with all these sensations and painful feelings that manifest whenever we go through intense situations of separation, rejection or loss.
No wonder we use words and expressions such as “hurt feelings” or “broken hearts” to describe these experiences.
In short, breakups are terrible!
So for those who have just left a relationship or for those who haven’t been through it, but are feeling alone and isolated, it’s important to remember that as terrible as it may seem, the pain won’t last forever… and until then it is important to take some time to heal.
Oh, and ice cream always helps. :)
