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Broken heart?
Here’s a tip: take two aspirin, and don’t call me in the morning.
Hey guys, Tara here for Dnews - and anyone who’s ever been through a big breakup, knows
just how awful they can be.
You don’t eat, you don’t sleep, everything sucks - but what can you do?
Well, according to Walter Mischel, a Psychology Professor at Columbia - all you have to do,
is pop a couple aspirin.
Seems almost TOO easy.
But as controversial as his theory is, it does have a somewhat solid basis in science.
Multiple MRI studies have shown that the part of your brain that gets activated when you
experience feelings of romantic rejection, is the same area of your brain that processes
physical pain.
Which is why Mischel recommends that heartbreak be treated like any other injury.
It sounds ridiculous, but again - there is evidence that simple painkillers can help
people deal with feelings of rejection.
Scientists at UCLA conducted a study recently, where they asked a group of volunteers to
take either an over-the-counter painkiller, or a placebo pill, for 3 weeks straight.
None of them knew which one they were taking.
They were then asked to monitor their levels of pain caused by social rejection, on a day-to-day
basis.
Volunteers who took the placebo pill, showed no change in their daily feelings of rejection
- at all.
But by day 9, the volunteers who took painkillers, began reporting a significant reduction in
their daily hurt feelings, which continued to last until the end of the 3-week period.
A short while after, they repeated that same study, but this time - they put all of the
volunteers into an fMRI machine, and asked them to play a game of Cyberball - which is
a virtual reality game, from which the volunteers were intentionally socially excluded.
Sure enough, the people who had been on painkillers for 3 weeks, showed significantly less neural
activity in the parts of their brain that processes pain.
Of course, not everyone is comfortable with the idea of using drugs to mitigate heartbreak,
but according to Mischel - there are other ways to soothe the pain.
His number 1 rule?
Don’t talk about it.
A lot of times, when someone goes through a breakup, all they wanna do is talk about
it.
And it CAN be good to get those feelings out in the open.
But there’s a limit.
And as Mischel points out, it’s important to step outside of the situation, and view
it from a distance.
“Self-distancing,” he says “allows [people] to get a more objective view, without reactivating
their pain,” and that technique has been shown to lower blood pressure caused by emotional
distress.
So instead of staring at old photos of your ex, he recommends you try to think about the
people in your life to whom you’re “deeply attached.”
People you love, who also love you back.
Ruminating on that, he says, makes it easier to overcome the pain that otherwise keeps
you trapped in your past.
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In the meantime, if you guys have any suggestions on how to best get over a breakup, just leave
em in the comments below - otherwise, thanks for watching!