Transcription
When there's a breakup, it's exceedingly hard, especially if the person is young. Why? Because the relationship represents the whole future. They know there are other people, but it sort of feels like the whole world is shutting down. The brain has to think that the person is gone in time and space.
This has become much harder with social media, right? Because people can check up on people. They can hear from people. In the old days, like when I was growing up, you just took the phone off the hook or you diverted your attention. Now we are constantly renewing that the person is still there.
Love, the loss of love, and death grief are virtually identical. It's that motivational state, and this is why it's so hard to not reach out to somebody that you really miss and want back. I saw a study last week that had researchers asking participants to rate emotional and physical pain of a breakup. They found that women tend to be more negatively affected by breakups, reporting high levels of both physical and emotional pain.
But while breakups hit women the hardest, they tended to recover more fully. Men, on the other hand, rarely fully recovered. I thought that was very interesting. I wasn't too sure what that meant.
Yeah, it's interesting. It also rings true with my experience and my observations. I mean, this could relate to a number of things, and here I'm painting with a broad brush, right? You know how comfortable one is feeling their feelings, male or female, is going to strongly dictate how quickly one moves through grief.
This is the same thing as trauma. The more willing someone is to feel the full depth and intensity of the feelings that they associate with that trauma, the more quickly they're going to move through the trauma. Again, I'm lifting from Paul Kti's words, so these aren't mine.
But you know, people use a number of strategies. They use distraction, they use states like they sublimate to things like anger, and avoidance of various kinds in order to not feel the traumatic feelings or not feel the breakup. People will, you know, try and self-soothe with alcohol or try and self-soothe with multiple new partners or whatever happens to be.
It doesn't work; it just extends it. Because this map of space, time, and closeness needs to be fractured, and the only way to do that is for the brain to confront the reality, which is that by breakup, they are no longer available. It's like the food on the other side of that wall is gone. It's just not there anymore.
Or that the food that was accessible, now there's a wall in between, and you will not get through it. You can see this actually in animal studies that are kind of hard— they're actually very hard to watch. You'll see the animal perseverate, literally damage its own body trying to get through a barrier to something it's highly motivated to.
People do that post-breakup. They usually do that by talking to everybody about the breakup, which is its own form of perseverating on the motivation. What did I do? What did I do wrong? This and that. Some of that analysis is healthy; some of it's not.
Now, why would one group be, let's just say, effective at dealing with breakups? It's probably the ability to really feel the full intensity of how sad it is and be able to confront that. I think from a very early age, there's an ability that at least I'm sure transcends to women too—learning to pack down feelings, right?
So when are we really talking about when we're talking about packed down feelings? I'm not a psychologist, but what we learn is top-down control from forebrain to autonomic control. It's the same thing like, I don't want to jump off the high dive or I don't want to do this public speaking, but I'm going to. I'm going to kind of like, I'm just going to force myself. I'm going to David Goggins it, right?
Grief is an autonomic state. We say it has valence, has negative valence, but it's high levels of autonomic arousal with a negative connotation. Because you can be high levels of autonomic arousal with happiness, right? You can be very alert and aroused and happy. You can be very alert and aroused and sad.
It's very alert and aroused and sad, and yet we learn how to tamp that down. What is tamping down? It's reducing our heart rate. It's going to work each day, being a functional human being. You know, there's a lot of that rather than allowing ourselves to, you know, sob uncontrollably into a pillow.
Some people are better at this. I mean, the late Steve Jobs was a big opponent of scream therapies. He used to go up into the hills behind Stanford. He actually still owns a property back there. He was really into catharsis, a cathartic release of internal state that he felt would allow him to return as a happier, nicer person.
He was also kind of well-known for screaming at people in the office, so he obviously had a lot pent up inside. So I think the better that we can lean into the emotional states that we fear the most, but in a controlled way where we're not harming ourselves or other people, the better.
The more that we try and avoid that, and we try and sublimate, or just, you know, and I've done this, so I'm speaking from experience. You know, I would use the anger or the sadness from an experience to just work ten times longer, ten times harder to just get that much more focus.
You're taking that autonomic arousal, that narrow aperture and that energy, and you're putting it onto something that moves your life forward. So in some cases, that's good because you still need to function. It can give you the—here, I'll just say it—gave me the illusion that I was working through something.
Because you get all the accoutrements and rewards of hard work, but what you don't do is remap that space-time closeness map. Then you find, I guarantee you find yourself five or ten years later wondering why you're so exhausted or why certain things in life aren't going well.
It's because when they say you haven't dealt with the loss, you never actually allowed yourself to feel the feelings. But once you do, it's like a valve; it releases.