Getting Over a Breakup – Using Your Brain to Heal Your Heart

 

Dealing with heartbreak – whether the loss of a loved one, the end of a relationship, the development of an illness, or other change in life circumstances is a common life experience. Getting over a breakup is an often-misunderstood healing process. Many of us have also heard the common cliché from well-intentioned people and experts “Give it time, you’ll heal” …

Yet, often we continue to struggle despite our best efforts and while time passes, we suffer.

That’s what happened to me after the death of my 4-year-old daughter and the end of my marriage. In the midst of these life-changing events, I didn’t know how to feel better or love again. My perspective of then, is quite different from now, and as I look back, I realize what was possible; but I just couldn’t imagine it. I’m now living a delightful, satisfying, truly fantastic love life with Gregg. And for most of my 56 years of life, finding true love for me seemed like a mission impossible. I dreamed of it, wished for it, fell hopelessly into obsessions and fantasies about it. I spent years heartbroken, feeling rejected, empty, lonely, and got an inside view of what it is to be lovestuck.

Like many, I was off-course looking for love in all the wrong places. My self-esteem was at rock bottom, and I thought I wasn’t good enough for love. I speak about my journey to amazing love, how I discovered and used the latest neuroscience research on breakups to help myself – and now hundreds of other people – heal and grow after relationship losses and accelerate resolution by learning; to “play the brain for a change.”

Yes, you can use the neurobiology of heartbreak to get over a breakup.

I discussed these brain-based solutions for How to Heal from Heartbreak

with my friend and fellow psychologist, Traci Stein, Ph.D., in the most recent episode of the “Unpacking Possibility” podcast.

In this podcast interview, I talked to Dr. Traci about how the brain changes after Breakups

 

Getting Over a Breakup

 

Why Your Brain is Still Responsive to the EX

When we fall for someone, our brain forms an emotional memory. The pleasant memory is often unconscious, a love drive trying to take you back for more rewards. The lower brain operates with primary emotions, including Lust systems that attract us to new love—that experience of feeling good connecting with someone fires and wires in more pleasure-reward-seeking response patterns. The emotional brain learns and remembers from these relational experiences. And even when thinking of the loved one, it produces pleasure responses to these feel-good thoughts or memories.

So, you are lovestruck, infatuated, or falling in love at the beginning of a relationship. Still, you can get a lovestuck brain (post-break-up) as these same lower in brain reward-seeking processes continue to play you, thereby producing pain, withdrawal, and cravings. Brain research illustrates why we can continue to crave and long for certain relationships even when we know logically they aren’t good for us. BOTTOM Brain becomes lovestuck. It’s a drive and addictive, automatic seeking some old feel-good reward, and often involuntary, an impulsive quest for attention, connection, or love that is no longer available.

Helen Fisher, an expert on the neurobiology of love and heartbreak, has research using the fMRI brain scanner to study the brain in various stages of love and the breakup brain. She says that romantic love is “really a drive that is deeply primordial and primitive.” She explains that romantic love experiences “are way below the emotional center and are no emotions, but rather a powerful drive and need to be shared by all human beings.”

Through thousands of imaging studies both in the U.S. and in China, Fisher and her research team have established just how important it is for human beings to be in relationships where they experience reward for their feelings and efforts toward their significant other.

Romantic breakups can cause negative emotional systems of panic and grief to activate, bringing on uncomfortable sensations in the body. Heartache coming from the primary emotions that turn on automatically feels embodied and stressful. These changes in the brain’s emotional system respond to any actual or perceived disconnection from a loved one. For instance, imagining someone has left you or will leave you someday can activate and perpetuate emotional suffering.

After a Breakup, in addition to painful withdrawal of love, you can have Post-Romantic Distress, which includes body distress signs that accompany the emotional brain activations, such as:

• sleep changes such as insomnia
• restlessness
• a racing pulse, pounding heart, or unusually rapid breathing
• dizziness
• shakiness, or weak knees
• pain or tension in your head or chest
• gut pain or nausea
• increased tearfulness, or the sense you’re constantly on the verge of tears
• flushed or feverish skin

Once these emotional distress and craving responses turn on, I refer to a brain-based phenomenon as Lovestuck, occurring when lower brain regions take over, involving emotion, reward, and survival systems in the non-conscious processing of information and reactive responding.

You may feel blindsided by the end of a relationship, caught in a vicious cycle of automatic brain responses. Still, you can learn to control your emotional reactions by understanding how uncomfortable feelings and thoughts are triggered and processed in the brain.

What I often hear my clients say many of the same things after a breakup that they have been thinking while in emotional distress:

-I can’t believe they dumped me!

-What am I going to do now that I’m suddenly single?

-I’m highly emotional after this breakup. Am I going crazy, doc?

-My heart is breaking; I can’t sleep. When will I recover?

-I’m Obsessed with the Ex

-I can’t get over this relationship ending.

-I’m so afraid I’m never going to love again.

 

Why our instinct is often to avoid dealing with painful emotions

One of the problems humans seem to have with primary emotions is that we instinctively struggle with, try to suppress, or avoid them. But unfortunately, that approach can make emotional pain problems involving these primary emotions—fear, rage, and panic-grief worse. And when we don’t acknowledge and communicate with our brain by tuning into emotions, we miss opportunities to rewire the patterns. And so that can cause chronic stress states, confuse and block us from seeking future love.

The double-edged sword of neuroplasticity says that the brain wires and fires nerve cells, repeats and becomes better at the brain response, whether good or bad. So brain repeats the response without thinking, checking timing and judging. And so, the dark side of neuroplasticity is that it can make emotional pain and stress worse; as you let emotions and automatic thoughts go on and on.

When we struggle with emotions or thoughts, we begin to get very preoccupied with what it means to be this way, and we can focus all our attention on the patterns we don’t want, causing them to stabilize and grow. Sometimes we find that if we use food, pills, alcohol, and other substances, we get a temporary change in our feelings. Some of my clients found that they used food, drink, or drugs to self-mediate, escape, and numb emotions. That might buy you some temporary relief, but then you rely on other stuff to feel relief, need more of it, and lose the chance to release and resolve the pain.

And my client Laura had this to say about her experience with self-medicating pain after her husband told her he had fallen in love with someone on a work trip and wasn’t coming home. Laura said, “Oh yes, my friend said to have some wine and calm down. I tried it for several nights, but the emotion just returned, and I have kids at home, so drinking more to feel relief that didn’t work for me.” Laura found new ways to deal with her panic, grief, and anger –the breakup brain emotions that came up after she found herself suddenly single. She used the brain-based perspective I taught her to understand and relate to the emotional pain in new ways for then she could rewire emotional pain responses with neuroplastic healing steps.”

 

Your Brain is Plastic and Changeable

Breakups hurt, emotional distress is on, and instinctive struggle with your feelings is typical. When you hear that how you feel after an unexpected change in relationship is just temporary, it takes time to heal, and you will move through stages of grief, what’s left out of this practical advice is that this is something your brain is doing. You can do something to change it. You feel it when your brain responds to the change in your connection with someone. Your brain is neuroplastic – and you can help it change and adapt so you can shift painful emotions and feel better using scientifically proven strategies.

The rapid resolution of Post-Romantic Distress involves influencing emotional healing with brain change interventions. Including ways to interrupt and update specific unconscious Lovestuck patterns, change unhealthy habits by rewiring the brain using the latest neuroscience discoveries on how the brain responds to triggers, processes information, and stores memory. The neuroplastic healing steps of Emotional Pain Intervention (EPI®) allow you to notice and alter the brain response. After a breakup, you heal the brain to mend the heart so you can get free of the past and be genuinely open to future love.

You can take the lovestuck quiz here to know better how to recover from a breakup.

Play the Brain for Change Tools and Techniques

Insight alone into what is going on in the breakup brain isn’t enough. The brain needs to be changed if only to reset to calm that way, lovestuck patterns don’t replay, and brain systems can go from stress to survive to thrive mode.

I shared a simple breathing technique on the podcast that activates the vagus or 10^th cranial nerve in brain-body communication. You use this technique to heal the brain. Think of it as a way to have a brain-heart connection put one hand on your belly and another hand on your heart, breath in slowly and deeply through your nose, exhale through your mouth, blow out all the air to help you start feeling better right now.

In conclusion, breakups hurt because of something the brain is doing in response to the loss of connection, withdrawal cravings, negative emotions are part of Post Romantic Distress. Understand the origins of emotional pain in heartbreak, so you are empowered to use neuroplasticity steps, techniques, and tools to influence responses and patterns. Getting over a breakup with neuroscience is involves using your brain to heal your heart. Brain-based solutions accelerate breakup recovery and free you to love again.

I hope you give the podcast a listen.

You can find this episode of the “Unpacking Possibility” podcast on all of your favorite streaming services. And the YouTube video will be up shortly.

And please do remember to like, share, and follow. It really helps Dr. Traci bring more great content to people who can benefit from it.

And if you’re interested in learning brain-based solutions and rapid resolutions for getting over a breakup, check out https://drelizabeth.mykajabi.com/