The majority of us consider the connection between social and physical discomfort to be symbolic. We agree that “love hurts,” but we don’t think it hurts as much as getting a shin kick. Simultaneously, reality frequently gives strong proof that both sorts of pain stem from the same source. Old couples frequently make the news because they can’t physically survive without each other. In early 2012, Marjorie and James Landis of Johnstown, Pennsylvania, died just 88 minutes apart after 65 years of marriage. You don’t have to be sentimental to believe in broken hearts; merely having a subscription to the New England Journal of Medicine would suffice. A group of doctors from Johns Hopkins University described a rare but severe heart condition that was brought on by intense emotional distress a few years ago. Officially, the ailment is known as “stress cardiomyopathy,” but the media loves to call it “broken heart syndrome,” and medical experts don’t mind. Behavioral research is catching up to anecdotal evidence as well. Psychologists have recently discovered that metaphorical terms that relate love and pain contain a lot of physical reality. The brain areas involved in processing physical pain and those connected with social grief overlap greatly, according to neuroimaging study. Because the link is so strong, traditional physiological painkillers appear to be capable of mending our emotional wounds. After all, love may be painful, and it can be very painful. Unexpectedly, in the late 1970s, signs of a brain relationship between social and physical pain surfaced. Jaak Panksepp, an animal researcher and an APS Fellow, was studying social bonding among puppies. According to Panksepp in Biological Psychiatry, when puppies were removed from their mothers, they cried, but the distress sounds were significantly less strong in those given a low amount of morphine. The findings had a significant implication: if an opiate could relieve emotional misery, it was plausible that the brain processed social and physical pain in the same way.
