A Science Journalist Tries to Hack Heartbreak

Published Mar 20, 2023, 4:30 AM

Science writer Florence Williams felt blindsided when her twenty-five-year marriage unexpectedly fell apart. The heartbreak opened her up to a whole range of new and intense feelings, but it also made her sick. Trained as a journalist, Florence set out on an expedition to understand the science of heartbreak and game her way back to health. She tried novel forms of therapy, immersed herself in nature, and consulted cutting-edge research on the science of awe. But her greatest discovery came when she tried an alternative to “hacking” heartbreak. 

If you’re interested in hearing more of Florence’s story, listen to “Heartbreak: A Personal and Scientific Journey,” a uniquely immersive audiobook, narrated by the author and accompanied by in-the-moment diary recordings and interviews.

For a behind-the-scenes look at the show, follow @DrMayaShankar on Instagram. 

Pushkin. It was my first day of college. I had just arrived and he had started this freshman outdoor orientation trip where we were going hiking in the mountains and he had rock climbing muscles and a bandana around his head, and I mean, I think instantly there was a little bit of chemistry there. That's science journalist Florence Williams. The instant spark she's describing turned into a decades long marriage, but that marriage unraveled when Florence was fifty. The breakup cracked her open, and what followed as an outpouring of new and disorienting feelings. When the person you consider sort of your safety net, like your primary attachment partner, when they're suddenly gone, it's so disorienting in a way that's kind of like a deep freakout, and you feel it emotionally. And it turns out our immune systems and our bodies are really paying very close attention to that sense of freak out. So I had this tremendous urgency to try to understand it. On today's episode, a science journalist goes on an expedition to try and hack heartbreak. I'm Maya Shunker, and this is a slight change of plans, A show about who we are and who we become in the face of a big change. Florence Williams is the author of the book Heartbreak, A personal and scientific journey. That journey began one night seven years ago when Florence and her husband were hosting a dinner party. I was making a salad and friends were arriving for dinner at any moment, and my husband was in the next room, and I said, Oh, how's your dad doing? And he said, oh, I just got this email from my brother. It's on the phone. And he handed me his phone and on the phone was an email written by my husband to another woman talking about how much he loved her. And I was like, what is this? And it's that feeling when sort of the blood leaves your face and it leaves your limbs, and you feel your stomach sort of drop a story or two. You're not sure what you've just read, but you think it's bad, and in that moment, you sort of know that your life is not what you thought it was. And then the doorbell rang and our friends arrived, and I had to kind of smile all through this dinner. There was no opportunity to further investigate. You know, for a little while, you see this email on the phone, and the doorbell rings, and he doesn't know throughout the dinner party that you've seen this information, right, he doesn't know, and you have the kind of internal equanimity to move forward. Sorry, I feel like Florence, I would have had a very different response. The dinner party would have been canceled. At a minimum. Well, people are already coming through the threshold. You're a very gracious host. I will give you that. I want to be invited to dinner at your house. Wow. I could not say I talked a lot through that dinner. I think I pretty much sat there feeling really stunned and probably staring at my very wan salad at that point. Yeah, and not looking at your husband, who you're slowly starting to hate, not at all. Yeah. At one point I think I did excuse myself to go to the bathroom and I managed to take his phone, which was in the kitchen. There was no password on the phone, and we never there had never been a reason for me to look at his phone. But I did find that email, and I found a couple of other emails, and it turns out that he had been drafting a series of emails to this woman that he was kind of emotionally obsessed with. So the dinner party ends and you have to confront him about the fact that you've seen not only this one draft that he accidentally pulled up on his phone when he meant to pull up another email, but other drafts. And you know, you talked about that instinctive, biological feeling of the blood rushing from your head, in the stomach sinking, and I'm just wondering, with a few hours of distance, you can at least have it probably equally gut wrenching, but like a more measured response. And I'm curious to know what that conversation was, like, yeah, I mean I wanted to know what this meant, you know. And he had explained to me that these were draft emails, and I was like, what does that mean you haven't said them. I don't understand. And the fundamental question was do you still love me? You know, That's what I really wanted to know, and that's what felt really, I guess imperiled. And he said yes, he said I do. He said, I'm really confused. I don't want this marriage to end, and he said, in fact, I'm sort of relieved that, you know, because I've been keeping these feelings secret for at this point, actually a couple of years. He'd been obsessed with this woman. So it was really confusing, and I did feel this betrayal of trust because this has been going on so long. And at one point I said, you need to figure this out. Why don't you go on a camping trip. Why don't you go into the wilderness for a few days and really think about this. And he thought that was a great idea, and he did, and he came back and he said, well, I've done a lot of thinking, and I you know, at this point, you know, we have two kids. He said, I don't want to upset the apple cart. And I was like, well, that's all you have to say, I don't want to upset the apple cart, Like how, you know, where's the reassurance that he actually loves me, yeah, and wants to be in this marriage. And he just, you know, he just he couldn't say that, and so to me, that was finally the neon sign that I was not going to have the relationship that I wanted. He wasn't having the relationship that he wanted, and there just didn't seem to be a way to kind of, you know, move forward from there. I mean we were talking about sort of what we wanted, you know, what do you want out of this marriage? What do you want out of your life? And eventually he said something like, yeah, I just really want to go find my soulmate. And I mean he was telling me these things because we were also such good friends. Yeah, who are confidante. Yeah, there's part of me that understands that, Like, who doesn't want to go find their soul mate? But when you're the one who thinks you are his soulmate, you know, it's incredibly painful. Yeah. But here's a question, Florence. Did you think he was your soulmate? Yeah? I think I really did. And I felt like sometimes he wasn't a great soul mate, but he was yours. But he was mine, and we could we could make it better, you know, after thirty two years together, these two great kids, so many common interests, so many common values. I loved his family, he loved mine. Yeah, so he asked for a divorce. And one thing that was so interesting in reading your book is you've said that before all this you were fairly callous towards people who were enduring breakups, like, yeah, you'll get over it, right, that guy's a loser, that sort of thing, right, don't be so melodramatic. Yes, yes, exactly. But then when it happened to you, When it happened to you, you felt like all those over the top cliches about heartbreak were fully resonating with you. Yes, like missing a limb, the acts through the heart, the adrift in an ocean. Yeah, all those metaphors seemed absolutely perfectly apt. I just felt like my socks completely blown off by the power of this grief and this loss. You know. Claire Bidwell Smith as a psychologist who wrote a book about how anxiety is the missing stage of grief, and that really resonated for me. There's this tremendous sort of anxiety when the person you consider sort of your safety net, like your primary attachment partner, when they're suddenly gone. It's so disorienting in a way that's kind of like a deep freakout, and you feel it emotionally. And it turns out, you know, our immune systems and our bodies or nervous systems are really paying very close attention to that sense of freak out. How did this anxiety physically and emotionally express itself in you in the days and weeks after the divorce? Yeah, I mean first up was you know, intense insomnia, you know, the sort of like lying awake all night, feeling like you're really on edge. You're trying to kind of calculate everything, like your survival odds and where are you going to live and how are you going to afford health insurance? And who's going to get the kids? And what am I going to tell my friends? And what am I going to do now? That's a lot of what am I going to do now? What am I going to do now? So there was that sleeplessness for me. There was like pretty instant weight loss too. There was this sense of being so kind of full of adrenaline and anxiety that I've kind of felt like I was buzzing at one point. I have the metaphor that I felt like I was plugged into a faulty electrical socket. And then eventually I started getting sick. So I found out that my blood sugars were really weirdly high. And I've always been someone who exercises a lot, I'm fit no diabetes in my family, and eventually we figured out that I was diagnosed with an autoimmune type of diabetes, which is type one diabetes. Of just thinking in this moment, we can work to control our mental states, but it seems like something like an autoimmune condition or the inflammatory markers in our blood that feels so out of reach in terms of our ability to control it, even though by the way, this might be all illusory and the mental states are just as hard to control as the physical manifestations that our blood work, for example, but certainly I would feel so daunted by the physical expression, like this whole thing had just run away from me, exactly, and that creates more anxiety exactly. There's a meta level of anxiety, right, and what's the next shoe that's going to draw? And if my body is registering this pain, I need to fix it, And of course I am sort of a fixer. I didn't want to get sicker. It didn't seem fair to be heartbroken and sick at the same time. So I had this tremendous urgency to try to understand it. I wanted to understand what was happening to me. The science journalist in me wanted to go talk to the experts not only to try to understand what was happening to my immune system, but also how I could kind of game it, if there was a way to game it, to sort of speed it up. It sounds like it was a journey motivated by survival. I mean, you are a science journalist, but this had so many personal undertones. It was kind of like, the things that I find out from this expedition will have a direct impact on my ability to live through this. That's right. But it was really survival on two fronts. It was the sort of physical survival. I want to understand what's happening so I can get better, But it was also like, you know what journalism is what I do. It's who I am, and this is what's going to help me feel like I'm surviving in a more metaphysical way. You know, this is who I am. Yeah. I love that, retaining your own sense of individual purpose and fulfilling a mission on your own. So where did you start? How did this expedition begin? Well, I think, like so many journeys, it starts out somewhat accidentally. I ended up at a conference and I was a speaker there, and I saw another speaker there was Helen Fisher, whose biological anthropologist. She's written a lot about what happens to our brains when we fall in love. And I send her an email and I said, can I talk to you? And she said, sure, honey, come on over. And I just said, okay, look, this is what's happened. My husband of twenty five years just moved out a few weeks ago. I can't sleep. And she said, oh, are you having trouble keeping weight on? And I said yes, And she said do you feel really anxious? And I said yes. She said, okay, I can tell you everything that's happening. And I was like, please tell me, tell me what's happening. And it was so reassuring. It was so helpful for me, maybe because I'm a signed journalist, but I found it reassuring to know that there was a reason for feeling what I was feeling, for my brain to be kind of in this high alert zone. And she was also just reassuring in herself because she said, you know what, We know this because we have put heartbroken people in a brain scanner. Many of them have these exact same symptoms. You're not alone in the world. This is what the brain does. Our brains are built for attachment and because of that, they're also built for heartbreak. And she was so sweet about it. She said, I've been there. Let me tell you about my heartbreak. Funnily, that's what almost all the scientists I spoke to said. They said, oh, let me tell you about my heartbreak too, And that alone, right, is very comforting and sort of humanizing and makes us realized that even though this feels like such a singular and lonely experience, of course it is a universal experience. Yeah. See, you meet with Helen Fisher and she helps ground you by at least sharing Look, you're not alone in this. Let me also share my own personal experiences with heartbreak. And here's why all this stuff is happening to you. Where do you go from there? I went to talk to Stephen Cole, the immuno geneticist, who was analyzing blood markers, so transcription factors in our white blood cells that change the way we regulate different immune responses based on and this is so interesting to me, based on our social state. So he has for a long time been researching how people who rate themselves as lonely get sicker and trying to figure out why that is. Why would your immune system care if you're lonely. He has found that these transcription factors really change a suite of about two hundred transcription factors in our white blood cells. And so we decided to do an experiment where we took samples of my blood every few months during the course of my recovery, hopefully recovery from the heartbreak. And what did they find in those early tests, Well, he told me at one point, yeah, you have the blood of a lonely person. And what that meant for me was that my inflammation markers were really high. And at the same time, there were cells that fight viruses that were not getting expressed. Wow, So what were some of the interventions that you try so you get this blood work done? You understand there's going to be a baseline, and yeah, tell me about the kinds of things that you tried out. One of the places I visited on this quest was the University of Utah. There's a researcher there who studies the kind of salubrious effects of being in close marriages. How great that is for your health. And then of course, he had this litany of kind of bummer trivia about what happens after you've been divorced, how you're more likely to get sick. That really bummed me out. As one immunogeneticist told me, he said, you know, heartbreak is one of the hidden land mines of human existence, and we don't really take it seriously enough, but it does make us sick, and in fact, it increases our risk over early death, It increases our risk of metabolic disease. You know, all these chronic diseases, and most of them are really mediated by inflammation, which is what your immune system is responding to with this kind of anxiety. But then I went down the hall to visit another psychologist named Paula Williams, who said, yeah, yeah, you know, we know the statistics are bad health statistics divorce, but we know that there are some people who can be really resilient. And I sort of leaned forward and I was like, tell me more, who are those people? I want to be that? And she said, well, our lab has shown that it's the people with a personality trait of openness, people who are open to new experience, open to curiosity, and open to beauty, especially open to this sense of awe, sort of what she called esthetic chill, which is the idea that you can get goosebumps when you're listening to a beautiful symphony or looking at a beautiful painting, or looking at a waterfall. And she said, not only do we think that open people are more resilient, we actually think you could learn to be a more open person than you already are. I love that very hopeful message. It was so hopeful. I just clung onto it like a lifeboat. I was like, I can do that. I'm just going to claw my way through a heartbreak by aweing my way through heartbreak. We'll be back in a moment with a slight change of plans. Florence Williams felt blindsided when her twenty five year marriage came to an end, so she went on an expedition to try and understand the science of heartbreak and ideally game her way through it. Florence tried novel forms of therapy, immersion in nature, and even visited the Museum of Broken Relationships, where she learned rituals to help mark the end of her marriage. And throughout it all she kept consulting with scientists about the latest research. Florence was especially inspired by the idea that she can learn to be a more open person and how does one cultivate more of an openness, more of an ability to appreciate beauty? I think, like anything, you can ask your way into an experience by being present, right, like what am I seeing? What am I hearing? What am I smelling? What is my sensory body noticing about this beautiful place I'm in instead of just thinking about your to do list or the conversation that you had at work. There are sort of ways we can queue ourselves into kind of our sensory bodies that when we do that, when we can wake up our sensory bodies. It's kind of a shortcut to reducing our blood pressure, slowing our respiration, putting us in a better mood. And it's really mindfulness. It's just another way of being mindful. But it doesn't involve sitting on a cushion, you know, it involves actually being present in whatever environment you find yourself. But you can microdose AWE. It doesn't have to be the Grand Canyon. You know. You can find AWE on your block. You can look up at the moon you can watch the sunset, you can watch the bees for a while. For me, my greatest form off Lawrence was looking at the results of the twenty twenty election. Who knew? That's collective? Collective all, Yeah, the most profound form of pain relief I've experienced in some time. So on this topic of AWE, I'm thinking, I'm going back in time and remembering the times where I felt like my heart had been torn into pieces by another person, and your whole world is shaken up, and it's so devastating, and it's hard for me to know when you're really in the throes of heartbreak. I think it can be really hard to even imagine finding things beautiful against the backdrop of such pain. But one thing that was so reassuring for me is in reading your book, when you are in the throes of heartbreak, you describe almost these out of body experiences with AWE where you're just overwhelmed by beauty, And I mean, that's wonderful that it's possible to feel that way when you're just so torn up. Well, here's the funny thing. I actually feel like it's more possible to feel those things when you're so torn up, say more. Well, suddenly you're torn down to your studs. You're going to feel the deep abyss of your emotions. You're going to feel big emotion in a way that I had never really experienced before. And there's something about feeling those big emotions that actually extends also to the good emotions. I felt like, all of a sudden, I am a feeling animal. I'm feeling things I've never felt before, and I'm also feeling joy. Well, that's unexpected. I'm feeling beauty, I'm feeling love, I'm feeling lust like, I'm feeling just these big, big things, and in fact that's normal. You know. I think it seems counterintuitive, but we are capable, fully capable of feeling two things at once, and even feeling conflicting things at once. It's just that so many of us are uncomfortable with big feelings that we don't go there very off. I see. Yeah, So what you're arguing is that you're forced to open the lid on all of your emotions, and maybe that makes the feeling of all even more accessible because it requires a certain depth of emotion to feel those things in the first place. Is that right? I think? So it's like all the guardrails have now busted open, shattered and shattered, and all of a sudden you feel terrible, but you kind of feel alive, and then all of a sudden the beauty comes in too. Yeah. I spent quite a lot of time in nature. You know, this was something I was quite invested in believing was helpful. I had already written a book called The Nature Fix on how nature can make us happier and healthier. So I thought, Okay, this is a big heartbreak. I need to spend a lot of time in nature. So I started going for more walks in the woods. I just thought, Okay, I need more of this, I need more awe. I'm going to go into the wilderness and I need to learn how to be more self sufficient. I need to learn how to be comfortable alone. And I eventually ended up embarking on a thirty day wilderness river trip in Utah, and about half of that was solo trip. I thought, Okay, I'm scared of being alone. I need to learn how to be alone. So here I go. I'm going to paddle my own boat. Now I'm going to do it alone. I am going to nature fix my way out of heartbreak. Right, I'm gonna cure this thing. I'm gonna cure this thing. So tell me how that trip unfolded in how things turned out. I think I had sort of romanticized the idea of being alone in the wilderness, that it would be this experience of solitude, you know, not loneliness, but solitude, that I'd be able to really spend time thinking things through and looking at beautiful light on the rocks and talking to the great blue herons. And there was some of that, but there's also this sense of, oh shit, I'm alone. Yeah, I'm actually suddenly feeling even lonelier because I am alone out here. Yeah, I can see that. Florence, what do you think are some of the greatest misconceptions that we have about heartbreak? I think we have a lot of kind of easy pablem about how to get over it. And you know, one of the things you hear a lot is, oh, you shouldn't jump into another relationship. You have to learn to love yourself. There will be no happiness until you can love yourself first. And that just didn't ring true for me, and I just felt like I'm not gonna figure everything out, and I don't want to like stay away from other relationships. And I was like, well, where's the science. Is there any science that really says we're better off if we don't have any relationships for a while, And it turns out there was no science suggesting that, and in fact, there was some science suggesting that people who have rebounds after a breakup actually do better. That they end up with more self confidence, more self esteem, They're able to more quickly separate themselves from their ax and distract themselves in kind of a good way. So I went for that. I had some rebounds. I thought they were, well, it was a mixed bag. If you read the book, it's definitely a mixed bag of I wouldn't recommend that people necessarily jump out and find a rebound, obviously, it's, you know, got to feel right for you, and it's got to feel safe. Yeah, but in your case, what did you feel with some of the benefits. In my case, you know, I was fifty when my marriage split up, and our culture does not really make us feel super sexy and desired when we're fifty, especially when our husband has dumped us. And so for me, actually, the rebounds were great. They made me feel desirable. They made me feel like, Okay, maybe maybe I have some life left in this body, and I kind of like this. Actually it was another way for me to wake up my sensory body and just frankly, to calm down my nervous system. I mean, we know that human touch and there's a lot of science showing this releases oxytocin, which is a direct counter to stress hormones like cortisol. Yeah, but I think one of the biggest surprises in the book for me when I spoke with the scientists who is analyzing my blood. He's done a lot of large studies looking at the blood of lonely people and trying various interventions and seeing what makes their genetic markers healthier. And what he's found is that it's not necessarily interventions where people hang out together or become more social that is not the antidote to loneliness. What he has found is that it's people who have this deep north star of who they are and what they want to do, why they believe what they believe. These are the people who have a lot of meaning and purpose in their lives, and if they're lucky, that purpose will find some common ground with other people that's the best scenari but these are the people who end up having the healthiest immune systems and the healthiest genetic profile. So that was really interesting to me, and he really talked to me about these two different kinds of happiness, you know, hedonic versus udmonic hedonic being I think, you know what, so much of our culture drives us towards, which is sort of entertainment and amusement and being mirthful and having a celebratory time. Eudemonic, on the other hand, is this kind of deeper purpose that is not necessarily associated with anything mirthful. Like you can be really tired and kind of grumpy because your workings are or because you're caring for someone or caring about something, But those are the people who are actually going to live the longest. Yeah, in full Florence, how long was the entirety of your intervention period, as we'll call it. Well, I was hoping it would only be a year and then I'll be all better. But you know, I did the wardship at about a year out and I was like, damn it, I'm still not better. I knew I wasn't better, and that was something we found out after doing, you know, some of my evidence based interventions to try to get better, it was really disappointing that they didn't instantly cure my heartbreak or my immune system. Yeah. I wonder how you reckoned with the limitations of science and what it could offer you, because you know, you adopted an interesting mentality, right, which is that maybe you could hack your way through heartbreak or as you said, gain your way through heartbreak. But because the science is relatively underdeveloped in this space, I imagine it's hard to find satisfying answers, and even harder to find the right answers for any given person. And so on the one hand, it's kind of an intoxicating mission to be like, I'm going to figure this all out. But then sometimes you realize, oh darn, the science is not at a place where I can just write my little recipe down and okay, boom boom boom boom boom, here are my seven steps. Right, We're so far away from that. If ever, Yeah, I thought everything I tried, you know, frankly was a little bit disappointing. It's like, oh darn, that didn't work. I mean, ultimately, yes, I had to reckon we all have to reckon with the fact that science does not supply every solution, but also with the basic humility that you know, we can't always hack our way out of our own situation. That we do have to be more comfortable with ambiguity. More comfortable with the ambiguity of grief. I mean, grief is it's such an idiosyncratic kind of beast. It's different for everybody, but it rarely gets neatly tied up. We don't go back to being the person we were, and that's okay. But I had to rejigger my expectations. I had to realize that instead of being someone who was so kind of eager to find closure, I had to learn how to become the sort of person who didn't need closure. And I was able to reframe that after talking to these AWE researchers that if you're a person who doesn't need closure, you're a more resilient person, and you're likely to be more open to curiosity. You're more likely to look at the world in terms of modulated tones of gray and not just black and white. You don't look for authority figures to tell you what to do and what the solutions are so it's like, oh, maybe this is a win. The great happy ending of heartbreak is not necessarily, you know, finding the new life partner, because not everyone's going to do that, and there isn't always a perfect life partner waiting. You know, there are so many of these post divorce books where there's some handsome, hunky guy at the end, and that just didn't happen in my book. The fact that there is no closure and I could be comfortable with that is a win. I can try to be someone who doesn't need everything to be so predictable. Hey, thanks so much for listening. Join me next week when I talk to psychologist Jamil Zaki, an expert in empathy. Jamiel argues that empathy is something we can and should cultivate, and once we do, we can actually choose where we direct it. Empathy is like a spotlight. The thing that I think is really important to remember is that we are the ones pointing that spotlight, and that we have agency. We have autonomy to align our emotional experiences with the people we want to be. A Slight Change of Plans is created written an executive produced by me Maya Schunker. The Slight Change Family includes our showrunner Tyler Green, our senior editor Kate Parkinson Morgan, our sound engineer Andrew Vastola, and our associate producer Sarah McCrae. Louis Scara wrote our delightful theme song, and Ginger Smith helped arrange the vocals. A Slight Change of Plans is a production of Pushkin Industries, so big thanks to everyone there, and of course of very special thanks to Jimmy Lee. You can follow A Slight Change of Plans on Instagram at doctor Maya Schunker

A Slight Change of Plans

You can follow the show at @DrMayaShankar on Instagram. Apple Podcasts’ Best Show of the Year 2021. 
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