Rejected love can cause physical pain
Last reviewed: 23.04.2024
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Pain physical and mental pain have much more in common than it may seem at first glance.
We are talking about spiritual pain, without even knowing how literal this metaphor is. Analyzing the psychological reaction of the rejected person, the scientists came to the conclusion that the pain of a broken heart can be quite likened to ordinary physical pain: both of them are located almost in the same division of the brain.
Interest in the psychological effect of rejection is quite understandable: the rejection of a society or another person is the strongest traumatic experience that people can recall almost all their lives. The researchers analyzed the state of the brain with a "broken heart" and with physical pain and found surprising coincidences in the picture of the working brain that dealt with unpleasant sensations.
Physical pain can be divided into two components: sensory perception (actually pain) and emotional coloring, when the brain decides how unpleasant these sensations are. It is the emotional component that reveals a resemblance to the pain of the soul. The feelings that we experience when we cut ourselves with a knife, and the emotions of the "broken heart" are generated by one brain zones. Moreover, if the refusal was excessively distressing (for example, you were denied the love of your entire life), then the brain can connect even those sites that are responsible for sensory perception of pain.
That is, you will really feel pain, and this will be a very real feeling.
In an article published in the journal Current Directions in Psychological Science, Naomi Eisenberger of the University of California, Los Angeles (USA) describes curious consequences from this coincidence of mental pain and physical pain. For example, a person who is unduly sensitive to physical pain will feel about as lousy with social setbacks, begin to worry about any, the slightest refusal. And vice versa - we can say that the epithets "stale" and "insensitive" refer not only to the mental warehouse, but also to the ability, for example, to calmly transfer visits to the dentist.
Moreover, it was found out that analgesics can weaken not only physical, but also mental pain. A game experiment was conducted in which a person had to interact with other virtual players. If he was refused cooperation, this created a certain psychological discomfort. But if the player before this was given an analgesic Tylenol, he experienced much less. Placebo at the same time, there was no facilitating effect. Does this mean that, for example, before an interview about employment, you need to take an anesthetic? Maybe. But researchers emphasize that mental pain has a perfectly understandable plus: we learn from our mistakes and then try not to make mistakes in socialization. That is, the broken heart has an adaptive function: as the well-known philosopher said, what does not kill makes us stronger. Dulling the heartache that the surrounding people provide us, we run the risk of remaining completely alone, and not having learned to find common language with people.
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