Romantic Breakups Cause Real Pain

Rejection quite literally hurts — the experience and the memory of getting dumped by a loved one trigger brain regions linked with physical sensations of pain, scientists find.



Around the world, people for centuries have used the same language — words like "hurt" and "pain" — to describe mental suffering as well as physical suffering, leading researchers to wonder if the sensations weren't activating the same parts of the brain.

Speculatively, it makes sense that getting your heart broken could feel like something literally breaking. During the course of human evolution, rejection from a group could leave one extraordinarily vulnerable, researcher Edward Smith, a cognitive neuroscientist at Columbia University in New York, told LiveScience, "so that might be why this link evolved between rejection and pain, to make us want to avoid rejection."

Past research had not found much to suggest rejection triggered pain areas in the brain. However, those studies had attempted to elicit feelings of rejection in test subjects by telling them they had been excluded from a computer game, for instance, or that anonymous feedback suggested a stranger did not like them — examples that might trigger only tepid feelings of rejection. "We wanted something bigger," Smith said.

Smith and his colleagues put out fliers in Manhattan and online ads on Facebook and Craigslist looking for people who had been through an unwanted breakup of a romance in the last six months. As the brains of the 40 volunteers were scanned through functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), half the time they looked at photos of their ex, and half the time they looked at photos of a friend. During both situations, participants were asked to focus on experiences they shared with the people in the pictures.

For comparison to their response to physical discomfort, the participants also had probes placed on their forearms that could get painfully hot.

The scientists found that parts of the brain linked with physical pain also lit up when individuals were remembering bad breakups.

"Rejection literally hurts," Smith said.

The researchers are now looking at possible techniques for easing such mental suffering, including methods that therapists already use. "For instance, one piece of advice when thinking about rejection is to view experiences with an ex-partner as an outside person from a distance," Smith said. "We want to see if this really does help at the level of the brain."

Smith didn't recommend taking an aspirin for such pain. "An hour later, you might just start thinking of that person again," he said.

Why a breakup feels like a punch in the stomach

We’ve all been there. A lover, out of the blue, says it’s over. Suddenly there’s a stabbing sensation in the chest, or a wrenching of the gut. Though there’s been no physical damage, it really hurts.

Scientists now know why we feel as if we’ve been physically wounded when the hurt is emotional. A study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that the same brain areas spark, whether we’re experiencing physical pain or deep emotional distress.

“It means that the expression, ‘My feelings are hurt,’ may be more than just a metaphor,” says the study’s lead author, Ethan Kross, an assistant professor in the psychology department at the University of Michigan.

Earlier scanning studies had shown that the brain doesn’t see any difference between the negative emotions elicited by physical and emotional pain.

But Kross and his colleagues wondered if they could explain the actual physical pains people feel when they experience rejection.

The researchers rounded up 40 people who had been dumped by a lover within the previous six months – so the pain of rejection was still fresh.

For the first part of the experiment, the 40 were touched with a hot probe while they lay in a brain scanner. The probe wasn’t hot enough to burn, but it did hurt. “It’s akin to holding a really hot cup of coffee without the little guard to protect your hand,” Kross says. “You wouldn’t want to do it forever, but it doesn’t burn you.”

For the next part of the experiment, study volunteers were again scanned, but this time they were asked to concentrate on a photo of their ex-lover and to think about the break-up.

The same brain areas lit up whether people were being touched by the hot probe or they were mentally reliving their rejections. Some of those areas were the ones that are involved in processing negative emotions, but other areas -- those that help us sense physical pain -- also lit up.

Kross suspects we’ve evolved to feel actual pain at separation because way back when humans were on the savannah they needed to stay connected. Being alone was dangerous -- you’d be more of a target for the wandering saber-toothed tiger.

“One of the most negative things to happen, in terms of survival, is being excluded from the group,” Kross says. “So the feeling of physical pain would be a powerful cue to pay attention to what you’re doing.”