Why is Heartache so Painful?

In 2015, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg’s husband died suddenly at age 47. “The wails of crying in that hospital were unlike anything that I’d ever heard in my life,” said a friend to Time Magazine. She had to be pried loose from her husband’s dead body. She described the pain of her grief in a famous Facebook post. “The emptiness that fills your heart, your lungs, constricts your ability to even think and breathe.” For weeks, her mother held her in bed as Sheryl cried herself to sleep each night.

There are countless stories of overwhelming pain from the loss of a loved one. The amount of pain can even be fatal. Broken Heart Syndrome is a condition where the pain and stress over a lost loved one can damage the heart. In rare cases, it can even cause a heart attack. When Doctor Who actress Mary Tamm passed away in 2012, her grief-stricken husband died of a heart seizure just hours after the funeral. He was perfectly healthy before that.

But it’s not just death that causes extreme heartache. The field of love is littered with broken hearts. Popular songs are full of them. Here’s just one song by Adele: “Sometimes it lasts in love, sometimes it hurts instead.” Even the pain of separation from a lover can be too much. Here’s poet Pablo Neruda: “Don’t leave me, even for an hour, because then the little drops of anguish will all run together.”

So is all that emotional pain the same as physical pain? It sure feels like it. But we often think grief and heartache are only emotions. But they are emotions rooted in the bodily sensation of pain. They are social pain. Neuroscience has shown that the same region of the brain that process physical pain also processes social pain.

The link was first discovered in 2004 by Matthew Lieberman and Naomi Eisenberg. They conducted a simulated social exclusion experiment using brain scans. In a game called cyberball, participants tossed a ball around with other characters. But after a while, participants were left out of the game and never got the ball again. What lit up on the scans for the feeling of being excluded was the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC). Amazingly, that part of the brain is also responsible for reactions to physical pain.

More studies have suggested the same thing. In 2011, Ethan Kross, at the University of Michigan, did a study where people stared at pictures of ex-lovers and thought about the breakup. Sure enough, the dACC was fully activated. Kross concluded, “The experience of social rejection, or social loss more generally, may represent a distinct emotional experience that is uniquely associated with physical pain.”

In other words, the same part of the brain that tells you to scream in pain after being burned with fire is the exact same part that tells you to scream in pain at the loss of a loved one, or the loss of a marriage, or a lover. It’s the same brain circuitry. Your brain treats the loss as real physical pain because your body is under threat. It’s been injured. And that injury is the loss of a deep social connection.

But why does the loss have to be so painful? Because evolution is saying those connections are vital for our well-being and our survival. And when those connections are severed, the pain can be excruciating, the same as breaking a bone or burning your flesh.