Heartbreak is a damning inevitability every person faces at some point in their life; it could be the death of a loved one, losing a dream you held onto or grieving the death of a relationship.
When we experience heartbreak, we’re experiencing a form of trauma which ignites a fight or flight response. Our body responds in interesting ways as this leads to a slew of symptoms that we can feel in our chest, our head, our stomach. Because of this, we seek out ways to mitigate and limit the pain.
I have known heartbreak to place extreme levels of stress on my body and I cannot sleep or eat properly. This came up again recently, and for someone who is used to bruises and cuts from a decade of martial arts, I was confused why my body responds the way it does and also about how to handle it.
Like any good son I reached out to someone to help me with this — my dad, Derrek Falor, who conveniently is a practitioner and mental skills coach at Seattle-based Thrive: Excellence in Sports Performance. He notes that grief triggers alterations in the levels of these chemicals in our brains which in turn causes changes in how our body reacts.
These reactions, he says, come down to the body’s regulation of dopamine and serotonin, chemicals which regulate sleep, mood and other bodily functions.
He put me in touch with Lee Arakawa, who has a Ph.D. in psychology and also works at Thrive, to chat some more about my questions on the effect of heartbreak. “We can’t separate the mind from the body or, in that case, the heart from the body — the emotions,” Arakawa says.
He notes the connection between the mind-body response, which can have many different reactions in people, but notes that heartbreak can often lead to tightness in the chest, restlessness or an inability to sleep, lack of appetite and even physical weakness.
Arakawa describes this as a crisis within ourselves that can last for an undetermined amount of time.
“Why is it that a person might stay in that fight or flight response for an extended period of time? Well, it just depends on a number of factors,” Arakawa says. “What are their coping skills or mechanisms? Do they have the appropriate support around them?”
He says, “In some cases, the idea of loss can be so great that they don’t want to face it, and they would rather be in denial.”
Fundamentally, there is a chemical connection between the mind and the body. Otherwise, we wouldn’t work. We can find real-world examples of mental afflictions having real time effects on the body. These can be depression and its connection to stress or anger and tensing your body so much you become sore.
Arakawa says there is “no timeline” for dealing with the hurt. How people go about it changes per person, as does how they’re feeling.
He also says there is a wrong way to deal with it, “like, over-correcting, you can try to go just way too far in the other direction, burying yourself in other sexual partners, looking for any sense of desire, fulfillment and obviously, there’s substance abuse.”
However, healing heartbreak isn’t an exact science unlike knowing the chemicals that cause it. Arakawa reiterates “We all have our own response to grief, we all have our own timeline for it.”