When people talk about breakups, they often use words like “trauma,” and this isn’t really an exaggeration: Psychologists say breakups are right up there with serious illness and the death of a loved one on the list of the most stressful life events people commonly experience.
As anyone who’s gone through it can likely confirm, heartbreak can have physical symptoms. It’s not just our feelings that are hurt, it’s also our bodies. This manifests in different ways. Some people can’t sleep or eat, others sleep or eat to excess, but the commonality is often a sort of obsession. That’s one of the hallmarks of heartbreak: We become consumed by thoughts of the person who hurt us.
Scientists have studied what exactly is going on in the brains of the heartbroken, and have found that when heartbroken people think of the person who rejected them, the same areas of the brain are activated as when we feel physical distress.
