Broken heart
Encyclopedia
A broken heart is a common metaphor
Metaphor
A metaphor is a literary figure of speech that uses an image, story or tangible thing to represent a less tangible thing or some intangible quality or idea; e.g., "Her eyes were glistening jewels." Metaphor may also be used for any rhetorical figures of speech that achieve their effects via...

 used to describe the intense emotional pain
Psychological pain
Psychological pain, sometimes called psychalgia, is any mental, or mind, or non-physical suffering. Emotional pain is a particular kind of psychological pain, more closely related to emotions...

 or suffering
Suffering
Suffering, or pain in a broad sense, is an individual's basic affective experience of unpleasantness and aversion associated with harm or threat of harm. Suffering may be qualified as physical or mental. It may come in all degrees of intensity, from mild to intolerable. Factors of duration and...

 one feels after losing a loved one, whether through death
Death
Death is the permanent termination of the biological functions that sustain a living organism. Phenomena which commonly bring about death include old age, predation, malnutrition, disease, and accidents or trauma resulting in terminal injury....

, divorce
Divorce
Divorce is the final termination of a marital union, canceling the legal duties and responsibilities of marriage and dissolving the bonds of matrimony between the parties...

, breakup
Relationship breakup
A relationship breakup, often referred to simply as a breakup, is the termination of a usually intimate relationship by any means other than death. The act is commonly termed "dumping [someone]" in slang when it is initiated by one partner...

, physical separation or romantic rejection.

Heartbreak is usually associated with losing a family member or spouse
Marriage
Marriage is a social union or legal contract between people that creates kinship. It is an institution in which interpersonal relationships, usually intimate and sexual, are acknowledged in a variety of ways, depending on the culture or subculture in which it is found...

, though losing a parent, child, pet, lover or close friend can all "break one's heart", and it is frequently experienced during grief
Grief
Grief is a multi-faceted response to loss, particularly to the loss of someone or something to which a bond was formed. Although conventionally focused on the emotional response to loss, it also has physical, cognitive, behavioral, social, and philosophical dimensions...

 and bereavement. The phrase refers to the physical pain
Pain
Pain is an unpleasant sensation often caused by intense or damaging stimuli such as stubbing a toe, burning a finger, putting iodine on a cut, and bumping the "funny bone."...

 one may feel in the chest as a result of the loss, although it also by extension includes the emotional trauma of loss even where it is not experienced as somatic pain. Although "heartbreak" ordinarily does not imply any physical defect in the heart, there is a condition known as "broken heart syndrome
Takotsubo cardiomyopathy
Takotsubo cardiomyopathy, also known as transient apical ballooning syndrome, apical ballooning cardiomyopathy, stress-induced cardiomyopathy, Gebrochenes-Herz-Syndrom, and simply stress cardiomyopathy, is a type of non-ischemic cardiomyopathy in which there is a sudden temporary weakening of the...

" or Takotsubo cardiomyopathy, where a traumatising incident triggers the brain to distribute chemicals that weaken heart tissue.

Philosophical views

For many people having a broken heart is something that may not be recognized at first, as it takes time for an emotional or physical loss to be fully acknowledged. As Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson
Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson
Dr. Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson is an American author, residing in New Zealand. Masson is best known for his conclusions about Sigmund Freud and psychoanalysis...

 states:
Human beings are not always aware of what they are feeling. Like animals, they may not be able to put their feelings into words. This does not mean they have no feelings. Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud , born Sigismund Schlomo Freud , was an Austrian neurologist who founded the discipline of psychoanalysis...

 once speculated that a man could be in love
Love
Love is an emotion of strong affection and personal attachment. In philosophical context, love is a virtue representing all of human kindness, compassion, and affection. Love is central to many religions, as in the Christian phrase, "God is love" or Agape in the Canonical gospels...

 with a woman for six years and not know it until many years later. Such a man, with all the goodwill in the world, could not have verbalized what he did not know. He had the feelings, but he did not know about them. It may sound like a paradox — paradoxical because when we think of a feeling, we think of something that we are consciously aware of feeling. As Freud put it in his 1915 article The Unconscious: "It is surely of the essence of an emotion that we should be aware of it. Yet it is beyond question that we can 'have' feelings that we do not know about."

Buddhism

Regarding the sadness of loss and heartbreak, the Buddha
Gautama Buddha
Siddhārtha Gautama was a spiritual teacher from the Indian subcontinent, on whose teachings Buddhism was founded. In most Buddhist traditions, he is regarded as the Supreme Buddha Siddhārtha Gautama (Sanskrit: सिद्धार्थ गौतम; Pali: Siddhattha Gotama) was a spiritual teacher from the Indian...

 had the following admonition:

O, monks! Why should every female, male, layperson, or priest always consider that all things they love would one day go away from them? What is the advantage of taking the said matter into consideration? Hearken, monks! All fondness and love existing in the beings lead them to perform physical, verbal or mental bad deeds. Upon having always taken such matter into consideration, the being will be able to leave or lighten such fondness and love. O, monks! That is the advantage that every female, male, layperson, or priest should always consider that all things they love would one day go away from them.

In classical references

This biblical reference highlights the issues of pain surrounding a broken heart:
Psalm 69:20 Insults have broken my heart and left me weak, I looked for sympathy but there was none; I found no one to comfort me.


In this Psalm, King David says that insults have broken his heart, not loss or pain. It is also popular belief that rejection, major or minor, can break an individual's heart. This heartbreak can be greatly increased if rejected by a loved one or someone whom you respect.

Plays of William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare was an English poet and playwright, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon"...

 feature characters dying from a broken heart, such as Ahenobarbus
Ahenobarbus
Ahenobarbus was the name of a plebeian family of the Domitia gens in the late Republic and early Principate of ancient Rome. The name means "red-beard" in Latin...

 and Lady Montague - though Rosalind
Rosalind (As You Like It)
Rosalind is a fictional character and the romantic female lead in the comedy As You Like It by William Shakespeare.She is the daughter of the exiled Duke Senior and niece to his usurping brother Duke Frederick. After angering her uncle, she leaves his court for exile in the Forest of Arden...

 claims (of men at least) that 'these are all lies: men have died from time to time, and worms have eaten them, but not for love'.

Broken Heart Syndrome

In many legends and fictional tales, characters die after suffering a devastating loss. But even in reality people die from what appears to be a broken heart. Broken heart syndrome
Takotsubo cardiomyopathy
Takotsubo cardiomyopathy, also known as transient apical ballooning syndrome, apical ballooning cardiomyopathy, stress-induced cardiomyopathy, Gebrochenes-Herz-Syndrom, and simply stress cardiomyopathy, is a type of non-ischemic cardiomyopathy in which there is a sudden temporary weakening of the...

 is commonly blamed for the death of a person whose spouse is already deceased, but the cause is not always so clear-cut. The condition can be triggered by sudden emotional stress caused by a traumatic breakup or the death of a loved one. Broken Heart syndrome is clinically different from a heart attack because the patients have few risk factors for heart disease and were previously healthy prior to the heart muscles weakening. The recovery rates for those suffering from "broken heart syndrome" are faster than those who had heart attacks and complete recovery to the heart is achieved within two weeks.

Psychological and neurological understanding

A study has shown that a broken heart hurts in the same way as pangs of intense physical pain. The research demonstrated that the same regions of the brain that become active in response to painful sensory experiences are activated during intense experiences of social rejection, or social loss generally. "These results give new meaning to the idea that social rejection 'hurts'," said University of Michigan social psychologist Ethan Kross, lead author of the article. The Michigan research implicates the secondary somatosensory cortex and the dorsal posterior insula
Insula
Insula is the Latin word for "island" and may refer to:*Insular cortex, a human brain structure*Insula , an apartment building in ancient Rome that provided housing for all but the elite...

.

The psychologist and writer Dorothy Rowe
Dorothy Rowe
Dr. Dorothy Rowe is an Australian psychologist and author, whose area of interest is depression. Dr. Rowe currently resides in the United Kingdom....

 recounts that she thought of heartbreak as an empty cliché until she experienced it herself as an adult. Heartbreak can sometimes lead people to seek medical help for the physical symptom, and may then be related to a somatoform disorder
Somatoform disorder
In psychology, a somatoform disorder is a mental disorder characterized by physical symptoms that suggest physical illness or injury - symptoms that cannot be explained fully by a general medical condition, direct effect of a substance, or attributable to another mental disorder . The symptoms that...

.

The neurological process involved in the perception of heartache is not known, but is thought to involve the anterior cingulate cortex
Anterior cingulate cortex
The anterior cingulate cortex is the frontal part of the cingulate cortex, that resembles a "collar" form around the corpus callosum, the fibrous bundle that relays neural signals between the right and left cerebral hemispheres of the brain...

 of the brain, which during stress may overstimulate to vagus nerve
Vagus nerve
The vagus nerve , also called pneumogastric nerve or cranial nerve X, is the tenth of twelve paired cranial nerves...

 causing pain, nausea or muscle tightness in the chest.

See also

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