What Happens during Love and Heartbreak
by Chelsea Hernandez | October 18. 2022
You’ll start to feel very compassionate toward someone when you fall in love with them. Your relationship takes on new dimensions as a result of the intense want to be connected to this person. These include emotional or physical intimacy, desire, and a desire to learn everything there is to know about them and be known by them in return. When your relationship experiences even the slightest setback, you experience a range of emotions, including elation, euphoria, increased energy, restlessness, loss of appetite, shaking, a racing heart, rapid breathing, and feelings of despair.
Dopamine and oxytocin flood the pleasure and reward-related parts of our brains when we are in love, causing physical and psychological reactions like decreased pain perception, addiction reliance, and increased desire for sex with your spouse. It is possible to love someone so deeply that doing so causes pain, and there are good reasons why individuals do this. People frequently love too much in relationships because they don’t believe they are deserving of it.
When people are estranged from their significant other, they may go through severe depression. When we lose that special someone, we often face a variety of symptoms, including loss of appetite, insomnia, significant anxiety, and difficulty concentrating. These feelings are comparable to withdrawal symptoms for a reason: a brokenhearted person also experiences withdrawal symptoms. Rarely, someone may truly pass away from a broken heart.
When we are in love, our bodies release more dopamine and oxytocin, two hormones that make us feel happy and want to repeat behaviors. The stress hormone cortisol then replaces these hormone levels when a person experiences heartbreak.
Adrenaline is also released in the brain by love. A person may stumble over their words, perspire profusely, and experience heart palpitations when they are really in love. According to a 1989 study that was published in the Journal of Research in Personality, that flutter in your heart when you encounter someone may not be love at first sight, but it undoubtedly involves some biochemical activity. You’re going through a deep kind of sadness that might make you sick. With these actions, you’ll have a chance to recover.
Our brains stop receiving these neurotransmitters on a regular basis when we separate, which causes us to experience neurological withdrawal. Broken hearts damage minds in this way. Subjectively, a lack of these substances might leave us feeling uneasy, down, and lonely.
Some individuals say it feels like a dull ache, others say it’s stabbing, while still others say it’s crushing. The pain may be momentary and then go away, or it may be chronic and last throughout the day, draining you like, instance, the pain from a physical disability or a migraine.
It may take weeks or even months for heartbreak to pass. There is simply no way to forecast how long loneliness will persist because this duration differs from person to person. A specialist can offer assistance if unwelcome physical or emotional problems persist for longer than a week or two.
You can and will fall in love again, which is wonderful news, even if you are currently experiencing heartbreak and feel there’s no hope for tomorrow. However, you can probably expect that the next time you fall in love, it won’t feel the same as it did before your heart was broken.