Heartbreak: A Personal and Scientific Journey

Williams and others have also noticed that high openness appears strongly related to the ability to recover from stressful events. So what does it mean to be “open”? The trait is broadly characterized as comfort with novelty and desire for “cognitive exploration.” To measure it, psychologists use the extensive five-trait questionnaire called the NEO (the abbreviation stands for the first three categories: neuroticism, extraversion, openness). The openness category breaks down into five clusters of questions designed to gauge imagination and fantasy, adventurousness, attentiveness to inner feelings, tolerance of others’ viewpoints and ideas, and ability to appreciate and be moved by aesthetic experiences. People scoring high on openness really feel things, and they’re tuned in to how they’re feeling them.

the universe while also making you less focused on yourself. As Emerson said, “The question of Beauty takes us out of surfaces, to thinking of the foundation of things.

You can’t run away from pain for long. You must feel it and then you must wait. And yes, beauty could blow open the possibilities of

I didn’t yet realize it was okay to be broken, that it was even, perhaps, essential to becoming a more porous animal capable of far more real love than I had known was possible. It would still take some time for me to learn that our flaws are not the problem; rather, it is the failure to forgive them—in ourselves and in others—that trips up our hearts.

Chronic loneliness increases the risk of early death by 26 percent, similar to being obese or smoking. But

feeling rejected in this way increases blood pressure and raises cortisol levels while “reducing feelings of belonging, self-esteem, control, and meaningful existence.

When we feel unloved by key people in our lives, we easily assume we are unlovable. As a field of study, rejection and ostracism came to the attention of psychologists a bit late in the day, which is surprising

She knew heartbreak. She also understood the pretzels one folds oneself into for love. She had followed one soulful man down perilous class-IV rapids. Still, he cheated on her. She moved into another boyfriend’s cabin without running water, where her hay fever was so bad she sneezed her way through sex. But by the end of it all, she knew what she wanted and who she was.

Love protects your heart, while loss weakens it, sometimes forever.

These people showed a marked increase in connections between parts of the frontal cortex associated with self-concept and parts of the brain associated with processing sensory and motor information. It’s hard to know what to really make of this, and it’s tricky to attribute emotions or insights to people based on functional brain images. But Williams’s theory is backed up by some other research. Well-connected brains in these areas, she said, tend to be pretty good at processing stressful information and making narrative and personal sense of it. In other words, these drunk-on-beauty people know how to tell themselves a story when something confusing happens. The single emotion they share is awe.

way. If the craving impulse was designed for attachment, then love is necessary to heal addiction.

Addiction is the ultimate pathology of heartbreak.

Julia said the untwining—wrenching though it may be—is a necessary stage of grief and mourning after the loss of love.

There is nothing now but kestrel. And when I return to thinking of the other matter it seems less important.” She calls this process “unselfing,” and we clearly don’t do it enough.

Mindfulness meditation also diminishes activity in this network, as can experiencing an arresting piece of art or moments in nature. Iris Murdoch writes of a beautifully mundane,

Psychedelics offer a chance to observe what a shaky drama queen our perceiving self can be.

phases of the moon, and wild animals, both friendly and fierce. The human brain is wired to feel awe. If this emotion represents the pinnacle of human experience, we are now greatly impoverished.

Humans used to run smack into awe naturally through our once daily but now lost encounters with the Milky Way, the sunset, the

Peter Hendricks, a clinical psychologist at the University of Alabama,

Awe ideally makes us realize that all humans are in it together, all creation is in it together.

To be the best versions of ourselves you need to transcend the self and dedicate your life to something bigger than you,” he said. “Often you can achieve a recognition of that through peak experiences, and those are typified by awe.

PTSD symptoms includes hyperarousal, hostility, mistrust, social withdrawal, hopelessness, impulsivity, and low self-esteem, according to the International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems,

but it was really more of an openness to the truth,” she explained. In the session, “all the ways we protect ourselves dropped off. I really could see the ways in which we weren’t supposed to be together anymore,

I should have been asking, “What am I learning, and what do I want?” And, per Cole’s insights, how can I best help others? There were opportunities out there, not just threats.

he said my immune profile really did not look much better after the river trip than before it. I was disappointed, but not totally surprised.

STEVE COLE CALLED me some months later with the before-and-after-wilderness blood-test results. As a reminder, the first sample Cole analyzed (let’s call it Time One) was taken about nine months after splitsville, and the second sample (Time Two) about five months later, just after the river trip.

The best antidote to loneliness is mission, not togetherness,” he said. Simply being with other people is rarely enough to make people feel fulfilled.

, the gene expression still looked pretty great. In those individuals, having meaning and purpose outflanked even the scourge of loneliness.

Supporting earlier studies, loneliness tended to worsen the CTRA genes while eudaimonia improved them. What was surprising, though, was that in individuals who reported being high in both loneliness and