Depressed, obsessed, unhinged — this is your brain on breakup. But science reveals you can get over your agony a lot faster than you think.
Shannon, 20, locked herself in her room and bawled while obsessively scrolling through photos of her ex.
Lan, 33, found herself crouching in the bushes outside her ex-boyfriend's apartment window late at night, relieved to see he was alone but wondering if she'd lost her damn mind.
Jessica, 32, stopped showering and eating, except for Fruit Roll-Ups.
And a full year post-breakup, Jen, 34, still thinks about her ex. "He and his girlfriend are getting married," she says, "but part of me still thinks there's a shot for us. How messed up is that?"
Let's call it toxic ex syndrome: post-breakup sadness on crack. It's a condition that breaks not only your heart but also your spirit and your will to shower. It makes you feel crazy, reducing your days to Instagram stalking and crying jags. And it's not just in your head. It affects both your brain and your body.
Your brain after a breakup is "on overdrive," says Helen Fisher, Ph.D., senior research fellow at the Kinsey Institute and a pioneering researcher on the biology of love. "Heartbreak drains your mental, emotional, and physical energy."
Fisher is the lead author of a groundbreaking study in which recently dumped people had their brains scanned while being shown pictures of their exes. The study found that the regions of the brain that lit up when viewing photos of an ex are the same areas associated with addiction and pain. As far as your nervous system is concerned, love is as addictive as meth, and losing it suddenly can even cause you actual physical pain.
On top of that, a breakup doesn't just feel like it's taking over your life; it actually is. "Obsession is a real physiological response to a breakup," says Fisher. Many of her study subjects reported an "inability to function well in their daily lives." All subjects reported thinking about their exes more than 85 percent of the time they were awake.
This all-consuming response to romantic rejection is primal. Some scientists believe love is as important to human survival as food and water. The idea is that love flourished to keep people reproducing. But even in relationships that aren't focused on making babies, having love in our lives is scientifically proven to make us feel happier, healthier, even more creative. Losing all those very real benefits has very real side effects.
"You're not just losing a partner and the potential future of your DNA, you're losing stability, daily routines, and a social and economic system," says Fisher. Not to mention the agony you feel when the bastard happened to be amazing in bed (and the dread of having to find someone else all over again). With so much at stake, it makes sense that our brains are wired to see breakups as "failures" and to try to understand what happened. Take Jessica (she of the Fruit Roll-Ups), who "obsessed about what I could've done differently," she says, "from big things like being less controlling to little things like painting the walls gray like he wanted."
As awful as toxic ex syndrome is, it isn't chronic. And it turns out, your brain is keeping a stealth little secret from you. As you're combing his Twitter feed for hidden messages, your brain is healing under the surface. Psychologically, we overestimate the pain of a breakup and underestimate our power to get over it—this process is called immune neglect. The truth is, "we get over breakups more quickly than we think we will," says Timothy D. Wilson, Ph.D., a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia.
You can further speed your healing by redirecting your obsessive thinking. Instead of rereading every text he sent you, plan a girls' trip to Riviera Maya or dive into the dance-cardio craze. Transferring your energy to something productive will help.
And sorry/not sorry, but if you really want to detox from your ex, staying friends is a bad idea. People who remain in contact with their exes only end up stunting their own recovery process. "If you're giving up booze, you do not keep a bottle of vodka on your desk," Fisher says. "Make it a clean break."