Broken hearted
August 27th, 2008
…and my love stays bitterly glowing,
spasms of it will not sleep,
and I am helpless and thirsty and need shade
but there is no one to cover me –
not even God.
(from Divorce, Anne Sexton)
Cognitive scientist Steven Pinker writes that heartbreak is “an internal doomsday machine, pointless once it goes off, useful only as a deterrent.”(1) If you doubt that heartbreak breaks down the body, than you’ve never suffered its sting.
A mate’s comings and goings, his glances, her voice, what she does, what he doesn’t, directly influence our bodies. A mate’s life habits create a physiological familiarity that literally grafts itself into our regulatory thermostat. If disrupted, our bodies, as well as our emotions, are literally thrown “out of whack.”
Thomas Lewis calls it “limbic regulation.”(2) Our limbic system regulates our emotional response to the social world and affects every other system in our body – hormonal, behavioral, cognitive, and perceptual. When that soul mate shows up, he or she alters not only how we think and feel about ourselves and the world, but our hormone regulation, our heart function, sleep rhythms, and even our immune system.
Our body is an open loop. It’s dependent upon, as well as reactive to, what happens outside our skin. Consider a baby. That crying, pooping, gurgling ball of joy is maximally open-looped. Without moms and dads cooing, caressing, and burping, his vital rhythms collapse. He will grow deficient, if not die. We need people around not just for comfort. Our bodies need the regulation that other warm bodies bring. Research has established that life expectancy can be directly related to whether or not we have people in our lives, and to what extent.(3)
When the bad news comes — he’s leaving, she needs space – our first response is protest.(4) We urge, coax, bargain, and plead. Our heart rate and body temperature go up. Stress hormones are released. Our body compels us into desperate “search, seek, and hold on” mode. (Who in the initial throes of heartbreak hasn’t felt like Jennifer Holliday below!)
Jennifer Holliday - And I am Telling You
The purpose of all this frenetic activity is to bring back that person and thus, regain our physiological, as well as emotional, well-being. “Protest is the alarm that follows a breach in these life-sustaining adjustments. Protest is the behavioral response to the physiological changes.”(4) Those who protest are those most likely to recover their love and thus their bodily equilibrium. We’ll find him or her, we’ll urge him back, all is not lost!
And if the protest fails? That doomsday machine goes off. The disruption becomes widespread. There’s nothing we can do, nor want to do, but curl up, bury ourselves beneath our sheets, refuse human contact. We speak less. We eat less. Our heart rate, appetite, and body temperature decrease. Oxygen consumption, REM sleep, and cellular immunity break down. Indeed, our hearts and bodies break.
If you’ve been there you know that there is no magic pill, nor words of wisdom that comfort. There is no cover.
Isn’t there anything we can do? See my upcoming blog ”Sophie Calle’s Bed.” Take another little piece of my heart now, baby.
Janis Joplin, Take a Piece of my Heart
_________________________
1) Pinker, Steven. How the Mind Works. New York: W.W. Norton & C., Inc, 1997. p. 421
2) Lewis, Thomas, M.D., Amini, Fari, M.D.; Lannon, Richard, M.D. A General Theory of Love. New York: Vintage, 2001.
3) See Sapolsky, Robert M. Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers. New York: Owl Books, 2004. “The impact of social relationships on life expectancy appears to be at least as large as that of variable such as cigarette smoking, hypertension, obesity, and level of physical activity. For the same illness, people with the fewest social connections have approximately two-and-a-half times as much chance of dying as those with the most connections…” p.164
4) Lewis, Thomas,