how to tell if you have a broken heart

this dnews episode is brought to you by domain.com broken heart? here’s a tip: take two aspirin,and don’t call me in the morning. hey guys, tara here for dnews - and anyonewho’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 psychologyprofessor at columbia - all you have to do, is pop a couple aspirin. seems almost tooeasy. but as controversial as his theory is, it does have a somewhat solid basis in science. multiple mri studies have shown that the partof 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 recommendsthat heartbreak be treated like any other injury. it sounds ridiculous, but again - there isevidence 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. theywere then asked to monitor their levels of pain caused by social rejection, on a day-to-daybasis.

volunteers who took the placebo pill, showedno change in their daily feelings of rejection - at all. but by day 9, the volunteers whotook painkillers, began reporting a significant reduction in their daily hurt feelings, whichcontinued to last until the end of the 3-week period. a short while after, they repeated that samestudy, but this time - they put all of the volunteers into an fmri machine, and askedthem to play a game of cyberball - which is a virtual reality game, from which the volunteerswere intentionally socially excluded. sure enough, the people who had been on painkillersfor 3 weeks, showed significantly less neural activity in the parts of their brain thatprocesses pain.

of course, not everyone is comfortable withthe idea of using drugs to mitigate heartbreak, but according to mischel - there are otherways to soothe the pain. his number 1 rule? don’t talk about it. a lot of times, when someone goes througha breakup, all they wanna do is talk about it. and it can be good to get those feelingsout in the open. but there’s a limit. and as mischel points out, it’s important tostep 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 beenshown to lower blood pressure caused by emotional

distress. so instead of staring at old photos of yourex, he recommends you try to think about the people in your life to whom you’re “deeplyattached.” people you love, who also love you back. ruminating on that, he says, makesit easier to overcome the pain that otherwise keeps you trapped in your past. switching gears for a second, i wanna senda quick shout-out to domain.com for making this episode possible. no domain extension will help you tell yourstory, like a .com or .net domain name. and if you’ve ever thought about startinga website or a blog - domain.com is affordable,

reliable, and easy-to-use. they’ve also set up a special offer, justfor you dnews viewers - all you have to do is enter the coupon code dnews at checkout,and you can get 15% off domain.com’s domain names and web hosting. in the meantime, if you guys have any suggestionson how to best get over a breakup, just leave em in the comments below - otherwise, thanksfor watching!