The Science of Heartbreak With Florence Williams

Love, for most people, is the least scientific thing they could imagine.

Can we equate steamy chemistry with the pulsing heat of an eruptive volcano, or the seismic roar of passion to the cataclysmic tumbling of ice from the top of a glacier? Sure. Might we describe the tenderness of an emotional connection like the flitting wings of a butterfly against the cheek or the gentle lapping of waves on a beach? Yes, of course. 

But no matter what science is at play when hormones do the tango inside our bodies, it’s almost guaranteed that we’re not thinking of data, academic research or lab experiments.

However, if you conducted your own experiment, you’d find that Googling “the science of love” yields nearly 2.4 billion more results than when you Google “the science of heartbreak.” This difference illustrates what Hollywood has proven: The happier side of love has far more appeal than its disruptively dark underbelly.

A scientific quest to make sense of heartbreak

The science of heartbreak is what longtime science and nature writer Florence Williams discovered while on her own quest to unpack the depths of the human heart after her 25-year marriage ended. She had just turned 50 when her husband told her he was off to find his soulmate. In addition to feeling stunned, she says she recalls feeling “power-washed by sadness.”

When she decided to use her science skills to try and make sense of the utterly nonsensical, she was shocked to realize that heartbreak is a woefully understudied area. Only in recent years has more research been dedicated to the topic. But that didn’t stop Williams from finding what did exist—and her personal quest turned public when her book, Heartbreak: A Personal and Scientific Journey, came out in 2022. Not only was the book the recipient of the 2023 PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award in literary science writing, but it has since sparked so many articles, podcasts and interviews that it now tops Google search results on the science of heartbreak.

When researching for the book, Williams traveled across the world, speaking to researchers and experts from California to Croatia and asking intimate questions of complete strangers, like those leaving the Museum of Broken Relationships in Zagreb.

Raw realities of heartbreak

In the audiobook, Williams includes taped conversations with friends, lovers, scientists and academics—and even her therapist—to show us not just the glossy parts of her evolution (like the first time she shared her sleeping bag with a new lover) but also the very real, messy and honest parts. We can feel the pain in her voice when she chokes through tears, begging for answers as to why her life ended up as it did.

For a very long time, laypeople have tried to understand what happens in our bodies and minds when heartbreak strikes. But the answers—or in many cases, theories and subjective guesses—have often left us feeling emptier than when we started our quest for understanding. 

Heartbreak can manifest physically in our bodies

Williams has managed to bypass the confusion by capturing data that’s as eye-opening as it is validating. She points to underpublicized medical terminology like persistent complex bereavement disorder (complicated grief) and takotsubo cardiomyopathy (broken-heart syndrome), which prove that heartbreak is more than just an emotional response to pain.

Broken-heart syndrome, for example, presents with the symptoms of a typical heart attack following a sudden emotional shock, like the loss of a loved one or a natural disaster. But the curious part, says Williams, is that heart attacks are usually “caused by plaques or blockages in the arteries. And in takotsubo [cardiomyopathy]… stress hormone[s] like adrenaline caus[e] the left ventricle to balloon out and not pump effectively.”

Complicated grief, however, is different. In essence, it’s sadness that doesn’t seem to go away, which can feel shameful to people who are told to just “shake it off” or “think positive.”

“It’s controversial [to say], ‘Oh, your grief is taking too long,’” Williams says. “There are certain losses that are just going to change you forever.”

Her research began to show more and more clearly that heartbreak can, and often does, impact physical health. In fact, she found that it can affect the immune system, increase anxiety and cause depression, fragmented sleep, cognitive decline and even early death.

The pain of heartache

Even more curious is the research that supports the ways in which the brain processes physical and emotional pain in overlapping areas. Some of the experts Williams spoke with for her book shared the following information from brain scans of heartbroken patients:

• Parts of the brain that light up after heartbreak are similar to the parts of the brain that light up after receiving a burn or electrical shock.
• There was a similar reaction in the brain when someone’s arm was scalded by hot coffee as when they were shown a photo of their ex-partner.
• The region of the brain that becomes active when someone experiences heartbreak also becomes active when they experience tooth pain.

“Our brains process social pain in ways that are very similar to how they process physical pain,” Williams shares. “And what that says to me is that A) heartbreak hurts—it really does, [and] it’s not just a metaphor—and [that] B) our brains seem to be hardwired to take social pain very, very seriously.

“The fact that it’s rooted deeply in these very old regions of our brains means that these responses have been with us for a very long part of our evolution. … Physical pain tells us to slow down. It tells us to stop moving, [or] sometimes it tells us to seek help. And social pain is something we’re also really supposed to notice and we’re supposed to deal with. And if we don’t, it activates all these other biological processes in our bodies, [such as] the threat state and feeling unsafe.”

We don’t talk about heartbreak

But how do we deal with our feelings when we haven’t been taught to talk about our emotional pain like we talk about our physical pain?

In Heartbreak, Williams shares how people who experience heartbreak often suffer alone in silence, whereas with a more visible physical injury, it’s acceptable for people to ask us questions about what happened.

“Some cultures are better at expressing pain and processing it collectively or through ritual[s],” she says, adding that “we don’t have a lot of rituals for heartbreak [in the U.S.]. We also, as a culture, aren’t very comfortable with expressing big emotions. We’re sort of taught to tough it out and chin up and get on with it. And sometimes that’s helpful for being productive, but it’s not very helpful for getting over grief or processing it.”

What’s helpful—and even critical—is a willingness to be vulnerable, according to Williams.

“Unless we can acknowledge our emotions and connect with others in a truly authentic way, we’re just sort of kidding ourselves about dealing with difficult feelings. And when you’re vulnerable with other people, it just forges a more authentic connection, a deeper connection where you really feel like that person is there for you and you’re there for them.”

More than that, Williams says that vulnerability helps you “recognize your own humanity and the humanity of others.”

Williams admits that she “had never written this personally before, but it was all part of my process of learning more deeply who I am and learning more about accepting who I am and accepting my full range of emotions and emotional experience. But you don’t have to write a book to do that. You could do it with a friend or a therapist or a group of women out in the wilderness.”

Healing in the wilderness and heartbreak recovery tips

That last piece of advice is something that Williams has taken literally—she leads groups of women on wilderness retreats three times a year. She does this because connection has been one of the biggest tools that has aided her own healing, and she believes it to be a very strong emotional balm for others.

Though Williams says time is the best cure of all, there are three things she has discovered throughout her journey that help to ease the sting of rejection and loss:

• Calming your nervous system: You can’t heal when you’re in a state of fight or flight.
• Connection: Having a connection with both other people and the natural world can make us feel profoundly less lonely.
• Meaning and purpose: Williams doesn’t believe that we are the same as we were before heartbreak, so she has found that asking a few simple questions helps people reframe the pain into something more useful. “What can we take from our experiences moving forward?” she suggests asking. “What lessons can we take, and how can we help others?”

Here’s the question most of us really want to know: Besides causing tremendous pain, does heartbreak perhaps serve a more noble purpose than we realize? Does it make us better humans?

The answer, for Williams, is a definite yes.

Understanding post-traumatic growth

“This term, post-traumatic growth, is a real thing,” she says. She adds that “for people who’ve gone through all kinds of devastating losses and experiences, it’s a catalyzing force for us to understand our humanity a little better and to reach out to others in this meaningful and authentic way. And it’s a motivator to help make the world a better place.

“We are wired to feel pain,” she adds. “And so anyone who thinks they are not feeling it is maybe not paying attention. We’re also wired to recover from [pain], so I think it’s all part of this full human experience that makes us ultimately feel alive. And that’s a beautiful thing.”

Photo by Tonuka Stock/Shutterstock