The health hazards of heartbreak

So it happened — it seemed like only yesterday you were going Dutch on the car insurance and playing rock-paper-scissors to decide who gets to pick where to put the bed. Now you’re ugly-crying while you stare at that very same bed, wondering if it’s yet another place where “Babe” cheated on you.

Oh, honey. Let me pick up a cheesy movie and a few medicinal cigarettes — this dark little chapter’s making you physically ill and your homegirl’s got your back.

The science has it too — it turns out that heartbreak isn’t all in your head, but a number of real, physical states your brain or body goes through after experiencing rejection and grief.

Breaking Down the Breakup

Brace for impact: heartbreak likes to get physical.

This isn’t happening! How could (s)he do this to me? This can’t be real! In the initial stages of emotional trauma, the worst sufferers of heartbreak can develop Takotsubo cardiomyopathy, a severe weakening of the heart muscles that results in chest pain, shortness of breath, arrhythmia, low blood pressure and, in extreme cases, congestive heart failure. Unofficially known as “heartbreak syndrome,” it’s believed that the inordinate amount of adrenaline suddenly coursing through your veins constricts the arteries carrying blood to your ticker, resulting in less blood flow and a heart that’s forced to run on fumes as you sort out your business. The recovery period is swift, though — most patients are cleared within a few days — and boasts no known long-term damage.

After the shock wears off, the actuality of what happened settles in and envelops you like a cold, wet blanket. Depression, you suck. The adrenaline frenzy has eased up on your wounded heart, which is good, but now the stress hormone cortisol is tearing around your system like an unattended child at Chuck E. Cheese’s. Present in dangerous and/or traumatic situations, cortisol has real effects on the body. Directing an extra amount of blood to your muscles, it’s got you tensed up and ready for action. Problem is, the only place you’re going is back to bed so all that tension leads to bad headaches and a stiff neck. Diverting blood away from your digestive tract, cortisol also blesses you with tummy cramps, an aversion to food and — umm, let’s just call it some extra paperwork in the john. Excellent, thank you, cortisol! Anything else? Actually, yes. Disruptions due to the release of cortisol can not only pack on pounds pretty quickly (despite the fact that you’re eating less), but it tends to pack them right on the gut, so there’s that, Jelly Belly. Right. I’m going back to bed.

An honorable mention for runner-up in Heartbreak’s Crappiest Hormone goes to norepinephrine. Camping out in your bloodstream, it’s like Adrenaline Lite. A rapid heartbeat leading to shortness of breath doesn’t help the insomnia you’ve developed and it generally keeps you from feeling physically normal. The hits just keep on comin’.

But there’s a whole other war going on in your noggin, on both a physical and psychological plane. Not only are you obsessing on what went wrong and if you’ll ever get back to being happy, your brain pretty much insists that you mull everything over — over and over and over. Doctors observing changes in the brains of the recently-spurned noticed a reduced blood flow going to the hippocampus when shown photographs of their absentee lovers. The hippocampus is responsible for many things, but most situationally-relevant would be its ability to house memories, both good and bad. It’s just a theory, but choking out the hippocampus could result in the inability to “find a happy place” for those who could really use one, leaving you stuck in what you’re feeling right now. What’s worse, surges in blood flow to the anterior cingulate cortex, a brain region responsible for pain signals, also appear in brain scans. The observed behaviors in these jilted Jacks and Jills included anxiety, controlling intrusive thoughts and actual physical pain. Sad, but mostly temporary.

There is no average shelf-life for the symptoms of (physical) romantic anguish, but they’ve been observed for up to six months. Thumbing through anecdotal evidence, though, one might fathom a norm to be around three months — if “one” is yours truly.

Now that you’re armed with the knowledge that what you’re experiencing is a perfectly natural and explicable chemical reaction to your douche-canoe of an ex, tune in for the next Sexuality installment, where we’ll discuss (just in time for Valentine’s day) the top ten ways you can get over this mess.