Love Hurts: The Science of Heartbreak (2024)

[bunniefuu]

- The world that I knew just disappeared.

- I went into, kind of an isolation for two weeks.

- I had these really bad nightmares where I was living

the same scene again. It felt like PTSD to me.

- And so then, you get home, um, and...

- He was gone. - Gone, like...

- Gone. Moved out, never saw him again.

[light music]

- Heartbreak at some point comes for us all.

We're all going to lose a partner or lose a parent,

and we're going to have to learn how to deal with it.

- Heartbreak is a particularly dramatic example

of a body losing its safety net and the brain notices.

- So, I've been on this mission to understand

what exactly happens to us when we go through a heartbreak.

Am I looking at love? - You're looking at love here.

- What happens to our minds? What happens to us socially?

What happens to our bodies?

So what happens to people who have broken heart syndrome?

- These are the same symptoms as the classical heart attack.

- That's amazing.

You essentially created something like a forgetting pill?

- But Anthony, we're not erasing memories.

- There's crazy science that I want to try to unpack

and explore with you guys,

and we're going to use this kind of social experiment

to figure out how to deal with heartbreaks.

- If I could go back to the version of me that could love freely,

I would do that in a heartbeat.

- People want to know what love is.

There's not a person on earth

who hasn't felt this at some point.

Nobody gets out of love alive.

- You guys ready...?

Welcome everybody. My name is Anthony Morgan.

I will be your host this evening.

I'm going to ask a two-sided question.

Your job is to just pick your side based on your gut reaction.

I have a list of absurd questions

about love and heartbreak.

The first one that I want to ask you guys is

have you ever experienced a heartbreak before?

This side is yes.

This side is no.

[indistinct chatter]

Yeah, that's what I thought.

My God, you are the luckiest person I have ever met.

This is incredible.

The sad news is, it's coming.

[laughter]

- I've gone through a pretty terrible heartbreak.

It's not an easy experience,

but I think it's a necessary one.

- There are some lessons

that you can learn that you don't have to experience.

I don't need to put my hand on a hot stove

to know I shouldn't do it.

You can love without ever experiencing heartbreak

in a real and full and complete way.

- This is getting deep.

Today's event is called Love Hurts

because we're going to talk a lot about the science of heartbreak

and there is like a ton of research that I've been exploring

about astonishing things that actually happen to you

and some of the opportunities that we have to deal with it.

I got to meet the guy who pioneered the technique

for reducing the emotional content of a bad memory.

Alain Brunet is a clinical psychologist

who specializes in memory and trauma.

I've come to talk to him about his therapy

for people trying to find a way out of heartbreak,

but first I got to find the guy.

Anyone down here?

Hello?

Alain?

Olly, olly, oxen, free!

Alain. Are you down here?

- Hey, Anthony! - There you are!

I thought I was gonna be down here forever.

Good to see you. - Hey, good to see you.

- Thanks for hanging out with me, I appreciate it.

- Yeah. - So yeah, where are we?

- We're in the bowel of the Douglas Institute.

- This building is old, right?

It's historic. - It's about years old.

- Wow. - This used to be an asylum.

- An asylum? - And so, this is Heinz Lehmann,

director of the Douglas Hospital.

He co-discovered the first effective drug

in psychiatry: the antipsychotics.

Before that, there was no effective treatment

for mental disorders.

And so, the only option we had, was to put people in asylums,

and they would actually live here for the rest of their lives.

- Wow. That is an incredible legacy of innovation,

and I guess, we're not done yet, I mean...

You're following in these footsteps.

- Hopefully. Footsteps of a giant.

My area of research is post-traumatic stress disorder,

but more specifically,

I'm interested in the role of memory

in the development and in the maintenance of PTSD.

- One of the reasons I wanted to talk to you today

is I want to learn all about the science of heartbreak.

What happens to our hearts and minds and bodies

when we go through those kinds of emotional traumas?

You essentially created something like a forgetting pill.

Is that a good way to think about it?

- We're not erasing memories.

We essentially tone down the strength of memories.

- It's probably good to take a step back and think about what memories are,

because most of us think of memory as kind of like a photograph in our mind,

but that's not really what memory is, right?

- We used to think that they were like a picture or a video,

and it's not the case because we modify our memories constantly.

- So the things that I know or remember about the world,

they're not as stable as I tend to think.

That's a really surprising idea for I think, a lot of people.

- They're very changeable.

This understanding of how we store and retrieve memories

has allowed us to create this new form of therapy

with propranolol.

- Propranolol. That's the forgetting drug.

- Yeah. - You have some here.

- Propranolol is a memory reconsolidation blocker.

It means that when you reactivate a memory,

just like in your computer,

when you open a file, you need to save it again at some point

to long-term memory storage.

But this pill disables the save button.

So, when your brain tries to save again that memory,

the emotional component of the memory

is going to be dampened

and the episodic part of the memory, like what happened,

the story, the unfolding, that remains fairly intact,

but the emotion attached to it is almost gone.

- So that might mean that I'll remember this horrible experience, heartbreak,

being really sad, crying a lot.

I might remember all that,

but I won't feel the emotions that I felt at that time.

- Exactly, and that has some really important bearings

for several types of mental disorder.

- Primarily, you use it for people with PTSD,

but your lab is beginning to experiment

using it on people who have had heartbreaks.

- Yes.

- So here we wanted to know, was there a significant reduction in symptoms

when they begin treatment?

- I began to see commonalities

between post-traumatic stress disorder and romantic betrayal,

and a graduate student of mine, Michelle Lonergan,

she was looking for a topic for her PhD thesis,

and I tried to convince her to test that idea.

- In my head, I was like, well, that's ridiculous.

How are we going to treat heartbreak with a PTSD treatment?

This makes no sense.

- Eventually, she agreed.

- So before we have Alain meet with you,

I'll just have you fill out this questionnaire.

It's really simple, the instructions are here.

So we're just asking you to rate

the extent to which you've been bothered

by any of the following difficulties

in the last seven days.

One of the things that most people go to therapy for

is relationship issues.

It's one of the major issues that everybody faces,

and so we're looking into understanding

how attachment injuries can impact individual and couple well-being.

- So, is the person having nightmares?

- So it's on the more severe side of the ones that we've been treating so far with betrayals.

- Okay.

- An attachment injury is defined as this event in a couple relationship

where one partner betrays or abandons the other partner

during a time that that partner really needs their support and care.

- So this is like a picture of where you are today.

- Yeah. - What I can see here,

is that the most difficult things on this checklist,

for you, in the past week, has been...

when you talk about it, it's unpleasant

or it makes you upset.

- I don't think it's ever going to go away.

It's always stuck there.

- We don't necessarily want it to disappear.

We just want it to be less bothersome.

As we conducted this research,

we realized that the distress level that we would observe in PTSD was...

it was just as high in people reporting romantic betrayal.

- I was lucky enough to meet a woman recently

who was kind enough to share her story with me,

and she went through basically what you're describing.

She was with this person for almost two years,

and it turns out that

almost the entirety of the relationship was a lie.

[soft music]

- I thought he was the one.

I thought that he was going to be the father of my children,

the person I was going to build a life with,

and also being at my late thirties.

It meant so much more in terms of my future.

- You had your heart broken somewhat recently.

- We were together for two years.

I was really thinking, seriously, I wanted to start a family,

kind of settle down.

I was really looking for someone that would be serious,

and he did a very good job to show me that he was invested.

He was adamant that I meet all his friends.

I quickly met his mother,

so I felt he was showing me that he was serious.

- And then obviously, it didn't work out.

- I got a call from a cousin

saying that they saw him at a club with another girl,

and so when I confronted him about it,

um... he started getting emotional.

He said that it was nothing,

but I went to visit his mother

who opened up to me and she said,

"I love you like a daughter.

I need to tell you, the girl he went to the club with,

he's been dating her for nine months."

- Nine months. - Yeah.

- What do you feel in that moment?

- The world that I knew just disappeared.

Like I had no ground to stand on.

All the reality, all the dreams,

all the aspirations that I had for myself, for us,

were just gone.

I was crying every day

just because I would be replaying

a lot of the relationship in my head.

- Yeah.

- I felt like I knew him, and I knew us,

and I realized that I didn't know it at all.

And I think that was such a shock for me.

How can I trust myself when I was so wrong that time around?

- We are going to go meet Dr. Helen Fisher,

a world-renowned expert in the science of love and heartbreak,

and we're going to kind of put you under the microscope a little bit.

- Yeah, I'm curious. I'm definitely curious to know how it impacts us.

- My hope is that she can help us understand

the experiences we've had at the biological level.

- I'm Dr. Helen Fisher.

I'm a PhD in biological anthropology,

and I study love, the evolution of it

and what happens in the brain when you're madly and happily in love

and when you are rejected in love.

- I wasn't dumped or rejected,

but I ended a relationship because he was cheating on me.

For me, the betrayal, the lie,

there's no way for me to wrap my head around that.

- You not only lose your partner,

what you really lose is an opportunity to send your DNA on into tomorrow.

I mean, I'm an anthropologist.

From a Darwinian perspective,

it's one of the worst things that can happen

to a human being. - Mm-hmm.

I just enter a state of depression

where I had to re-figure out my life.

- And you're still doing that. I would imagine?

- I was able to do all the things

that as a psychologist, I would tell my people to do.

Really leaning on the people that care and love you,

working on rebuilding yourself.

- That's exactly right.

- Because I could see that without utilizing all those things,

I would still be, as we speak, in my living room,

on my couch... - Yeah.

- Maybe with a glass of wine at noon,

or eleven, I don't know! [laughing]

People often think that romantic love is part of the supernatural.

It isn't.

We have put people in the brain scanner.

We know the brain pathways of romantic love.

These are basic brain systems like fear and anger.

- So, let's start with the basics.

This is an fMRI brain scan.

What does an fMRI brain scan show people?

- Okay, well, it shows you which brain regions are active and which are not.

This happens to be the basic brain region

that becomes active when you're madly in love.

It's called the ventral tegmental area,

and what it does is it makes dopamine

and dopamine is a natural stimulant

and it gives you that energy, the euphoria, the focus,

the motivation, the craving.

- All the good stuff, all the lovey-dovey feelings.

- As long as they like you back.

- One of the things I really wanted to ask you about,

I know you study not just the falling in love part

and the love-drive part of our brain.

You also study the heartbreak and the differences.

What happens to our brain when we're heartbroken?

Because I've been heartbroken before.

Most people have, right? - We all have!

Nobody gets out of love alive. - So now I'm shattered.

I'm lying in this fMRI machine.

Where is the part of our brain that is on fire when we've been rejected?

- Well, we are going to find activity in the ventral tegmental area.

You're still madly in love.

We're going to find activity in brain regions linked with attachment

because you can't let go that rapidly.

- That's that guy there. - There's that guy there,

the ventral pallidum,

and you're going to find activity in the nucleus accumbens linked with addiction.

These people are addicted to the person.

When you lose a partner, the addiction becomes rabid.

You're just obsessed with them, and it can go on for years.

It's a sticky substance, romantic love,

sticky when you're happily in love

and sticky when you've been dumped.

- I went to the fMRI machine

and I was a little anxious

and even curious about how I was going to respond.

- I know that you sent a group of pictures of this man.

And I wanted to show you the picture that they chose,

just for a second. I just didn't want you to lie there,

and be in shock and wonder why they chose that picture.

I just want you to think about the man.

I will be with you the entire time.

You're going to look at a photograph of him

and you're going to look at a neutral photograph.

The whole point is we want to compare your brain in a neutral state

with your brain in the state of sorrow or pain.

Are you worried about when you see that photograph of him?

- I'm not sure. I'm not sure how I'm going to respond.

I guess I'm almost curious to know how I'm going to feel. - Yeah.

We're starting the experiment,

so just take a look at the screen

and follow the instructions and then it'll be over.

- So, the next question is,

would you rather have a very mild heart attack

or a very serious heartbreak?

Okay...

- You could actually have a mild heart attack and not know it at all.

I will know if I have a heartbreak.

So, I'm choosing this side.

- I've had a lot of heartaches,

but I've had even more health struggles

and like heartache sucks,

but there's less existential dread that comes along with it,

so I'll take the heartbreak.

- So, there's a lot of research that suggests

that heartbreak doesn't just have impacts on our psychological functioning.

It's got to do with our physiological functioning as well.

There's something called Takotsubo Syndrome

where you may literally die.

- A broken heart is not just a metaphor.

So to better understand the impact of losing love on your heart,

I am talking to a heartbreak power couple.

I'm talking to Jay-Z and Beyoncé of the field.

- Jelena Ghadri and Christian Templin are global authorities

in something called Takotsubo Syndrome,

better known as broken heart syndrome.

[Anthony]: Hello. - Hey, Anthony, hello!

- Christian, Jelena. I'm so excited to get to talk to you.

I'm on this mission to kind of understand the science of heartbreak

and what happens to our minds, our bodies, our souls,

when we experience heartbreak,

and there are probably about a thousand questions that I want to ask you.

Let's start with the name of the syndrome.

- The name comes from the Japanese

because on coronary angiography,

the shape of the heart looks like a historical pot

to catch octopus,

and the Japanese name is takotsubo.

- After the octopus trap.

- So here we go.

This is the original Japanese octopus trap.

- You trap octopus with this?

I have a hard time imagining how that works,

let alone where that fits in my heart.

But maybe you can walk me through this.

- Here you can see this is a kind of narrow neck here,

and then you have the wide body,

and this looks like this,

if you have a Takotsubo syndrome patient.

So you have here a hypercontractile base of the heart

and the midventricular and the apical part

are not contracting anymore.

Therefore, the function of the heart is severely reduced.

- Okay, so what you're telling me is that in a person with broken heart syndrome,

their heart is trying to pump blood out,

but it's kind of like having a hose that's pinched at the end.

- Exactly. Exactly. - Yes.

- So what are some of the symptoms of broken heart syndrome?

- These are the same symptoms as the classical heart attack.

So chest pain, shortness of breath.

[ambulance sirens in the distance]

- An -year-old patient came to the emergency department

because she experienced chest pain radiating into the neck.

The initial thought, it was a heart attack,

and we did a coronary angiography,

where we insert contrast material in the left chamber.

We saw that the coronaries were open.

There was no blockage of the coronary arteries.

But we saw an apical ballooning pattern.

- This is a great example of Takotsubo syndrome.

You can see here this is a hypercontractile part of the left ventricle,

but then the midventricular and the apical area of the left ventricle

is not contracting anymore.

So, the heart is in a kind of shock.

[Anthony]: This is incredible.

It means that having a broken heart is a literal term.

The emotional stress of a heartbreak

can actually stun your heart's muscles

and stop them from pumping blood properly.

- Interestingly, the patient told us that her best friend passed away.

Often, if you experience grief or loss of a beloved person,

then patients can develop Takotsubo syndrome.

- Takotsubo syndrome is more prevalent in women.

We identified that about % of our patients were women.

- Most cases post-menopausal.

This is typical age group of up to .

- It's not clear why women are more often affected,

but we think that hormones play a very important role in this disorder.

- What is really striking, we know the case of Carrie Fisher,

she died, and one day later, her mom, Debbie Reynolds died.

And she was very close to her, to her daughter,

and we suspect this might be a case of Takotsubo syndrome.

- If you have broken heart syndrome, what does recovery look like?

Is it a full recovery, your heart goes back to normal or is there...?

- In almost all cases, there is full recovery.

- But you need to overcome the acute phase,

which can be life-threatening,

where the patient can die, of course.

- So I have had the opportunity to chat with some people

who study heartbreak from the perspective of the brain,

looking at scanning our brains and seeing what happens when we're broken-hearted.

But apparently you two are finding a connection

between the brain and the heart.

- We did functional magnetic resonance imaging of the brain

of the patients with Takotsubo syndrome, and interestingly,

regions of the brain where emotions are processed.

If you have stress,

this goes directly from the brain via nerves to the heart.

- Right, and that is what produces Takotsubo syndrome.

- Exactly. Exactly.

[Anthony]: While in an fMRI scanner,

Fabienne was repeatedly shown a photo of her ex.

Based on her groundbreaking research,

Helen Fisher already knows

which areas of Fabienne's brain have likely been triggered.

- First of all, how are you feeling?

- Feeling good. It was a little bit

more emotional than I expected it to be.

- Okay.

- I haven't seen pictures of him for a while now.

I did feel myself getting a little teary-eyed a little bit.

I was remembering when that picture was taken

and it was a good moment.

So yeah, I was surprised.

- This is your brain.

It's beautifully shaped, by the way.

[laughing] - Thank you. Thank you.

And this is what we are anticipating,

we know that this brain region is associated with addiction.

- Is this part of the brain that's still highlighted when someone is in love?

- Yes. It's an addiction whether you're madly and happily in love

or heartbroken. Yes.

When I first started studying the brain circuitry,

I realized that a brain region associated with all of the addictions becomes activated.

The substance addictions, the behavioral addictions,

and indeed feelings of romantic love.

It was new to discover, actually, that romantic love is an addiction.

- At the same place. Uh-huh. - Yeah.

And this brain region,

that's the brain region linked with physical pain.

It's one of many, but it's the main one that becomes active

when you have a broken heart.

Love hurts literally and figuratively.

It's the same brain region that becomes active when you have a toothache.

You've just done quite a thing here.

What do you think you're going to get out of this?

- To be honest, I'm not fully sure,

but I think it's going to be an ongoing journey.

But I'm hoping that being able to participate in all of this

is going to be kind of a milestone of me

turning to the corner of feeling like I'm not a victim of this situation.

I am steering the ship.

[soft music]

It was so validating and helpful

to know how it's impacting your brain,

how it's impacting your body when someone goes through a heartbreak.

It makes you feel crazy.

Like it really makes you feel like there's something wrong with you.

And you have these physiological and emotional experiences

that if it's your first heartbreak,

you've never experienced before.

So I think learning more about it, just feels like...

normalizes it a little bit.

Understanding what I was going through in the process

made me feel "less crazy".

It did! Because I've never felt this way before.

- I want to ask our next question, which is about

enduring commitment.

Humans, in most cultures around the world,

currently are monogamous or close to it.

And there are a lot of people asking questions

about whether or not that's kind of the natural state of human beings

or whether it should be.

So the next question is: is marriage outdated?

This side is yes, this side is no.

- When you say marriage is outdated, right,

you look at how it started, it was transactional, right?

Like dads give away their daughters for economy,

or politics, whatever. But now, women are independent

you can leave if you want, and our notions of love are changing as well.

Maybe it will last years, years, not your whole lifetime.

- I'm an accountant, so I can be sure of this.

If you take even one tax class,

you realize that the main purpose of marriage at the end of the day,

is for those sweet, sweet tax benefits.

[laughing]

- Personally, I would like a husband because I don't want to work anymore.

[laughing]

- It's very romantic.

I love it.

- I am still dead set on this mission to figure out what happens to us

when we have our hearts broken and we've been studying what happens to the human brain,

but I think there might be some value

in understanding what happens to other species as well.

So, I am heading to meet Zoe Donaldson

at the University of Colorado Boulder

to learn all about prairie voles, of all animals,

and study what happens to their brains when they fall in love

and when they have their hearts broken.

It's going to be really cute and kind of sad,

but I'm excited.

So, it turns out that humans aren't the only members of the animal kingdom

who are affected by the loss of a loved one.

At the University of Colorado Boulder,

Zoe Donaldson is making scientific breakthroughs

by studying the most ridiculously adorable animals.

- So, this is our animal area. This is where our animals live.

So, one of the first things that we're going to do is we're going to gown up.

My initial motivation was to understand bonding.

So, I did my PhD focusing on sort of

what are the genetic changes that have occurred through evolution

that enable prairie voles to form bonds.

It wasn't until later in my career that I became really interested

in the flip side of this coin, which is loss.

So today you're going to meet a vole family.

We're just basically watching how this family interacts with each other.

Prairie voles in the wild have a very limited lifespan.

Typically of the order of months.

Because they're essentially the popcorn of the prairie.

So they get eaten by pretty much everything.

- When we're looking at voles in nature, what does their family structure look like?

- Typically, they're monogamous.

Not many people think about the sex lives of rodents,

but your standard laboratory mice and rats

are very much in the mate and leave category.

So, in my laboratory, we actually have prairie voles,

which are a monogamous species.

- Which is probably part of why it's useful to study them.

From a human perspective, because we're similar.

- Absolutely, yes. - And would you say

that what mom and dad have here is real love?

- He is probably conveying like, I like you better than any other vole,

and I am here to help groom you and take care of these babies.

- Happy little family. You guys!

- And this is how they spent the majority of their time,

in a big cuddle puddle. - Awn.

I pray to God that this is the scientific name for it,

because "cuddle puddle"... - I wish.

We call it huddling,

I think 'cause cuddle sounds a little too anthropomorphic.

- Okay. - So we change one letter.

So, pair bonding is essentially falling in love.

It's a scientific term for it that we use,

especially when we're talking about other species

because we can't exactly ask a rodent, "Are you in love?"

So, we've developed a task in which voles can press a lever.

A door subsequently opens

and they get transient access

to go interact with and hang out with their partner.

There we go. - Awww! You guys.

- I'm just amazed. They can't actually physically touch each other.

They can just smell each other and communicate through the barrier.

But you can see that's what they do.

Each successive trial,

they have to press the lever more times in order to gain access.

- So that lets you measure kind of, how much they love their partner?

- If you measure love in effort, then yes.

- Okay, so how strong is vole love?

What's the highest number of presses we get to?

- We saw one reach . - presses!

- In minutes. - minutes.

- I love my partner, but I don't know if I would do push-ups

to see her for... [laughing]

That's a lot of work.

So how many presses would it take this time?

- So this'll be five.

- Okay, so she got up to three.

Aw, she loves him and he loves her.

So how do you see what is happening in their brains in that moment?

That seems like a really hard thing to do.

- We can actually measure the electrical activity of multiple neurons

at the same time, and then we can also visualize activity in neurons.

- Visualize activity? - Yeah.

What we do is we actually genetically manipulate the neurons in the brain

so that when they fire an action potential, they glow,

and then we actually have a little microscope that sits on top of their head

and peers into their brain.

And so then on the computer screen, what you see is

an image of all these neurons firing.

And so yes, sometimes it's so obvious;

they press a lever and they run over

and immediately like all these cells light up when they reunite with their partner.

- Oh, that is so cool. - Yeah.

- And here we have it.

What are we looking at?

- So, imagine right now that you are looking through a tiny lens

into a teeny tiny part of the brain called the nucleus accumbens.

- Okay, the reward center. - The reward center.

So you see these purple flashes of light that are individual neurons

that are firing as the animal is running around interacting with its partner.

- So the answer for this particular vole is...

am I looking at love? - You're looking at love here.

At least a few neurons of love.

- Do they experience heartbreak like we do?

When they lose their monogamous partner, do they seem bothered by it?

Is it a problem for them? - So one of the things you can do is

you can take this vole and you can put 'em into the same place

where they've previously been able to hang out with their partner,

they expect their partner to be there

because it creates a task in which we know that they are anticipating

access to their partner.

But then if the partner's not on the other side of the divider,

we can look at what's happening in the brain.

And so we can use the signals of what happens

when they realize that their partner's not there

as one indicator of how the brain is processing loss.

- Right. - They're really upset when they lose their partner.

Their stress hormones go up,

how they cope with the world changes,

they show increased anxiety.

Our work is very much focused on trying to identify what does yearning look like in the brain?

Because if we can understand what are the neural molecular processes,

what are the neural activity patterns that contribute to yearning,

then maybe we can start to try to manipulate these processes in a vole,

in order to alleviate some of that emotional pain

and facilitate the adaptive process.

Because there's a subset of people

where that process is disrupted, it's stalled.

They're having a really hard time moving on or adapting to loss.

- And I guess, I mean the kinds of treatments or strategies you're looking at

can help people like that? - That's the goal of this research

is to help people who have experienced loss,

who are having difficulty moving on.

- It seems like sometimes there are heartbreaks where you just kind of get stuck,

and it turns out that science has afforded us an opportunity

to get past these negative experiences.

So, the next question for our game is,

if I give you the option to take a pill

to erase a bad memory of a breakup, would you take it?

This side is yes.

This side is no.

So, this is really fascinating to me

that so many people would choose

to hold on to suffering and to pain and to heartache.

- I think of being human as experiencing pleasure and pain,

and if I take away one aspect of it,

in a way I'm taking part of my own humanity away.

- Without those kinds of heartbreaks,

the light doesn't get in. The chasms don't go that far,

and into those chasms grow the roots of our next selves

for us to grow higher.

- Somebody liked that.

- I went through a pretty bad breakup.

It restructured me at a cellular level to go through that real pain.

And if I could get rid of that,

if I could go back to the version of me that could love freely,

I would do that in a heartbeat.

- So, this is really incredible.

You've developed an incredibly powerful technique

that is capable of helping people who really do get stuck.

- This is a little revolution in psychiatry.

We're using medication to repair the brain

instead of just masking the symptoms.

With propranolol, within six sessions,

the symptoms just vanish.

They just go.

- You've seen this in your patients?

What does the change look like?

- I see this in my patients and they are stunned.

We can put people back on their feet,

people who have been through a very difficult heartbreak

and just cannot turn the page.

- I mean, I had been dumped before

and I got over it. - It's never easy.

- It's never easy.

But I'd gotten over it

after a couple of weeks, months, you move on,

and this one time, and I could not explain why,

but I kept thinking about it

and it was really like... it felt like PTSD to me.

- Trauma is defined as something that involves a life-threatening experience.

So, betrayals in romantic relationships aren't trauma,

but people who have experienced betrayals and abandonments

can experience trauma-like symptoms

that are really rooted in the memory of what they experienced.

- I had these really bad nightmares

where I was living the same scene again.

- Like Groundhog Day, just over and over.

- Yeah. All the time, and I had these bad anxiety attacks too

when I was going somewhere where there was a chance that I could run into my ex.

For some reason, every time I sat in my car,

I would break down crying. But it's par for the course.

I'm like, this is horrible, but it'll pass.

But then weeks pass and then months pass and then years pass.

It lasted for more than three years.

- Wow.

- I felt really bad about it

'cause it takes a toll on all your relationships.

I went on a couple of antidepressants for a while,

and then I did try some anxiety medication,

which helped, but there's side effects,

and you don't want to get hooked on that.

And then what happened is I was listening to the radio one day on CBC,

and Michelle Lonergan was being interviewed

and she was talking about this research project she was in

about heartbreak and a new therapy she was experimenting

for people who were going through a hard break up, basically.

Of course, the first thing I thought about was Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,

and it's crazy 'cause it's like one of my favorite movies.

- That movie was kind of based on this research.

- Yeah, it's crazy.

- The technique to erase the pain of a breakup.

- It's not Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

It is not. We're not erasing full people,

although some participants did ask us for that. [laughing]

Alain and I are very adamant

to remind people that we're not erasing anybody's memories.

We're taking a traumatic memory and making it a bad memory.

So, for the first treatment session,

you'll take your medication here.

It's very safe medication.

It's been used for , years in the treatment of high blood pressures.

They report few side effects. So for people who are eligible

for this study, you shouldn't be experiencing many side effects.

And if you do, they tend to be mild, you know,

a little bit of tiredness, maybe a bit of dizziness.

And to take the medication and to be included in the study,

you have to go through a medical evaluation with a trained physician.

- I know the research is ongoing right now.

Um... So far, does it work?

What's the success rate for your patients?

- Yeah, the success rate has been quite good.

Of course, I can't guarantee that it'll work for everybody,

but what I do hope is as we go through,

it's something that you'll be able to benefit from.

- Each time we see a patient, we ask them to fill out

a small questionnaire on their symptoms.

And you essentially have a symptom score,

and we can monitor the impact of the treatment.

- At the first session, the patient will write

an account of their romantic betrayal event.

- The idea is that you are retelling the story

and reliving the memory

so that the emotional core of the memory is reactivated.

- The work of the medication is to prevent protein synthesis,

which will solidify the memory

and the memory that will be saved will be somewhat degraded,

but mostly it will be less emotional.

- The first few sessions, nothing much happens,

and I'm kind of frustrated about it

'cause I'm usually in a hurry in life.

And then I would say around the fourth session,

things start to really shift.

The act of writing the story became so easy for me.

It was like there was no emotional charge to this at all.

- And gradually, session by session,

we're going to rub off one layer of emotionality

around that dreadful moment.

- So, it's almost like erasing a tattoo.

It takes many sessions and it fades a little bit across time. - Exactly.

- Oh God, I felt so relieved!

Like you have this weight lifted off your shoulders.

I flipped the switch off.

Like, I kind of understand the mechanism,

but it still feels like magic to me. Yeah.

[Anthony]: Thanks to Alain Brunet's revolutionary therapy,

JP has finally been able to move on...

but the toll of prolonged heartbreak isn't just psychological,

it's physical and it can go all the way down to your genes.

- The idea that the outside world affects our genes is

a relatively new one for most genomic scientists.

I was at a think tank meeting

and bumped into this loneliness expert,

and he said, "Can we analyze the genomic mechanisms

of loneliness-related health risk?"

And heartbreak,

you can think of it as an extreme version of loneliness

that gets generated by the loss of a really personally significant relationship.

For instance, Sara had already suffered her heartbreak

and was staggering through the aftermath

and interested in how the loss of social relationships impacts her health and biology.

- I'm really grateful that you took the time to be with us today.

You know kind of what we're doing, right?

We're on this mission to understand the science of heartbreak?

- Correct. Yeah.

- You had a really bad experience.

- We had been living together for four years,

so there were definitely big future plans together.

Then I went to Africa on a -day safari.

Everything seemed okay.

When I was about to get on a -hour flight home,

I got a text message saying,

"I'm not going to be at the airport to pick you up, find your own way home."

- And so then you get home and...

- He was gone.

- Gone like... - Gone.

Moved out, never saw him again.

He never took the responsibility

to just come out and say the reason why he left.

But social media has a way of uncovering truths,

and I found out there was another woman and she was pregnant.

- And what are you feeling? What are you thinking?

- I went into kind of an isolation for two weeks trying to process.

Because I felt like I left in one life

and a portal transported me in that plane

to a different universe.

Everything wasn't the way I left it. [Anthony]: Yeah.

- I did feel scared.

You know, just being in the house by myself,

'cause that was a new feeling,

I've never lived on my own before.

Um...

And then... sorry, my cat is...

- You're not alone! Not as long as you've got that adorable guy.

What's his name? - Cleo.

- Hi, Cleo, nice to meet you.

How are you now?

- So I sold that house.

I moved out to Marina Del Rey, it's on by the beach.

I quit my job to start over.

- A whole new woman. - Mm-hmm. Yup.

- Part of the reason we're talking today is because you answered an ad.

Can you tell me about the ad you saw?

- So, it was talking about science

and being related to figuring out

if heartbreak really does affect the body.

- So, you got to talk to Steve Cole,

and he's a genomics researcher at UCLA?

- Correct, yeah.

- For Sara's analysis, what we did is sent Sara

a bunch of little blood self-sampling kits

so she could take blood samples from herself at a couple of different times.

- I'm about to poke a needle in my arm and draw some blood out.

[Steven]: Just press that thing down and hold it for two seconds.

- Okay. [Steven]: Alright. You're good to go.

So, you can pull that thing off whenever you're ready.

- Okay.

- What we do is we apply a bunch of chemistry tricks

to get the RNA out of those blood cells

and produce a list of the genes that were more active in that blood sample.

So basically what we did is we surveyed

how much activity there was for each of the , genes in the human genome

at each of these nine sample points.

So, the first three you collected right before you went on vacation

during this period where you're still trying to get past this heartbreak.

- Did I change as a person because of this

and I don't think I had a choice but to change.

- Heartbreak is a particularly dramatic example

of a body losing its fundamental safety net, relatively quickly.

Inflammation genes ramp up in activity to defend you against wounding injury,

putting you in this acute state of threat.

Red here, that means your immune cells are more active

than the average person at this point.

Chronic loneliness produces chronic stress

and that chronic stress contributes fertilizer

to the production of every major disease that we know about,

particularly metastatic cancer.

- Now, imagine somebody that was always that high.

How troublesome would that be?

- So, for a couple days or even a couple of weeks,

it's actually not troublesome at all.

So, our bodies are made to kind of surge and rest

and adapt to the various things that life throws our way.

What we don't want is people to be operating

in that high inflammatory zone

for weeks and months and years.

It's like an iron, basically.

It's great if you need to flatten out a wrinkle,

but if you leave the iron on all day, eventually it's going to burn down your house.

So that's kind of how it is with the biology of inflammation.

So, these kinds of red colours mean,

"Yeah, you're a little bit high on those things,"

but the good news is as you went on vacation,

a lot of the red settled down

and you start to get blue coming in here,

and this is typically what we see when people relax.

- On a scale of one to , I'd say I'm a nine

and I think that's 'cause the other day I went to Disneyland, Paris,

and that's on my travel bucket list.

So, Disneyland just makes me happy.

That's the most excited I've been in a while.

Definitely the happiest I've been on the trip.

- Those are your inflammation-related genes ramping down in activity level

and your immune system is settling down.

That means your body is basically relaxing,

it feels like you're safe.

And so, there's another block of genes

that ramps up when you're relaxed

and you're interacting with other people.

This is a block of genes that's involved

in defending you against viral infections,

because historically, they got viruses from spending time with other human beings

in close proximity, hanging out around the fire gossiping,

or sharing food or that kind of stuff.

Then you can see, when you got back,

it bumped up a little bit more, which is not surprising.

You're back to contending with all kinds of changes in your life.

So that's a good example of an inflammatory gene

that is responding to these different ways of being.

- Makes me feel good about the decision that I made to move.

I might get a little emotional now,

so it was, like... taking a risk

to just leave everything behind,

but now I'm glad that I took that risk

because I know it will be better for me.

Literally, healthier for me in the long run.

When we get a cut, we can see it and you heal.

What I now understand is I had a cut that you couldn't see.

It was like my body was kicking in like,

"Oh, we need to repair this,"

and I didn't even realize that was going on.

- It's really quite poetic that heartbreak is like this cut that you can't see,

but my God, do you know it's there. - Mm-hmm.

- Given what we learned here tonight

and have experienced personally of heartbreak,

would you rather be alone for the rest of your life

or fall in love again

in a relationship that is guaranteed to be heartbreak?

Let's see how we really feel, guys.

- Who said it better than Shakespeare?

"It's better to have loved and lost

than never to have loved at all."

- So, I've been with my boyfriend for a while now

and you never know where it's going to go,

but I know that if it were to end, it would've been a pleasure to love him anyway.

- I love that.

[applause] That's really nice.

- Well, I'll choose the breakups every single time

because at least I'll get to write lyrics like Taylor Swift.

[laughing]

- I don't think all lessons in life are easily learned.

I've gone through a pretty terrible heartbreak,

and I think it's necessary because it makes you who you are.

I think it makes you closer to who you're supposed to be.

- A very common expression: Time heals all wounds.

You look at the brains of voles who are going through this.

Is that true from what you've seen?

- For most voles, that seems to be the case.

But I actually don't really like the expression

"Time heals all wounds", because it makes it sounds like

time is doing something, when actually it's your biology

that's doing something.

- People who are starting to look into the molecular biology of their bodies

realize that they're not some kind of passive victim

of circumstances, and so we certainly can choose to lead our lives in ways

that run a healthier, happier, more resilient body.

The number one tip for healing a broken heart is

finding things that will make a difference in our molecular biology.

So for instance, just choosing to take a break,

go on vacation, it's going to be very apparent how that changes

how our immune system is working.

- Does time heal?

We've seen in the brain that the answer is yes:

time does heal.

The longer rejected people got from that moment of rejection,

the less and less activity we found in this brain region

link with attachment.

The brain is built to love again when you've lost.

- A lot of people would say that you can't learn

if you don't have these hard experiences to learn from it.

I mean, I've heard of something called Post-Traumatic Growth

where people can take these traumatic experiences and transform them.

- We have a funny relationship with suffering.

We like to cast it as a learning experience.

It is a learning experience,

but sometimes we have had enough of learning

and we need solace. We need relief.

I think there is a time to mourn

and there is a time to turn the page.

- Yeah...

Give yourselves a round of applause!

You guys have been amazing.

Thank you so much and good night.

- You're awesome. Can I get a hug? - You bet!

- How do I look? - You look fantastic.

- Wow, the whole Heartbreak g*ng.

Bye, guys.

Anyone down here?