Love is a drug, love is a battlefield. Love is bad medicine, an eternal flame; it leaves us breathless, all shaken up, and shot through the heart. Love hurts.
Love may be an emotional experience, but we can’t seem to help describing its effects in physical terms. And the truth is, love does have an influence on the body, impacting everything from long-term health to physical pain; it affects the activity of our brain, our hormones, and our immune system. Love can shape how we think and change how we sleep; it widens our pupils and makes us less neurotic. And if you were a starfish, love could even turn your stomach inside out (via Queen Mary University of London).
Whether you’re lovesick, moonstruck, crushing on someone new, or once bitten/twice shy, there’s no question that Cupid’s arrow leaves a mark. Read on to find out why love is a matter of much more than just the heart.
Pretty much your entire brain falls in love
The stereotype is that when you’re in love, you think with your heart instead of your head. But imaging studies show that your brain is an active participant in true affection, not a spectator.
An analysis of six studies that took MRI scans of volunteers showed that when they looked at a picture of someone they were passionately in love with, multiple areas of their brain became active. Some of these activated neural networks are known to be associated with feelings of euphoria, and they also become active under the influence of drugs like cocaine. Other lit-up brain regions are involved in processing emotion and are used during higher-level functions like cognition and attention.
The scans also revealed that some areas of the brain became less active when feelings of love are evoked — namely regions involved in anxiety, fear, and grief. Even seeing the name of their romantic partner had this kind of impact on the brain. These effects not only show a scientific basis for romance, they also suggest that understanding brain chemistry could lead to new therapies to help people cope with a broken heart when things don’t work out, according to a press release about the study.
Your OTP helps you handle pain
Being in love is a natural painkiller. In fact, areas of the brain activated by love are the same areas affected by pain-killing medications, according to researchers who studied the effect of romance on pain tolerance (via PLOS One). They recruited 15 college students who were in the first nine months of a romantic relationship and described themselves as “intensely in love.” The subjects were exposed to a mildly painful heat stimulus on their left hand while looking at pictures of their loved one or of a friend. MRI scans during the experiment showed how their brains reacted to the pain.
Not only did people rate the pain as significantly lower when viewing a picture of their romantic partner, but the scans also showed that seeing the image activated the brain’s “reward systems,” i.e., areas involved in motivation, reward, and addiction. “The region tells the brain that you really need to keep doing this,” study author Jarred Younger said in a press release.
But there could be a flip side to this phenomenon: A rocky romance may make pain worse. In a study published in the Annals of Behavioral Medicine, researchers found that on days when people with diabetes or arthritis were feeling tension with their spouse, they reported higher levels of chronic pain.
You have trouble focusing when you’re in love
It’s not just your imagination. When you’re madly in love, it can be difficult to concentrate on anything else. Researchers documented this by having 43 volunteers, each of whom was involved in a romantic relationship and had fallen in love in the previous six months, complete tests of their cognitive ability. Before taking the tests, the subjects were prompted to think about a romantic event with their partner and listen to their favourite love songs to intensify their feelings of romance. The intensity of their love was tested by having them rescue their loved ones from a pirate ship. Just kidding; actually, they filled out a questionnaire called the Passionate Love Scale.
In the tests, the volunteers had to quickly identify target information amidst distracting information; for example, to determine if a word matched the colour it was printed in. It turned out that the more in love someone was, the worse they did at focusing on relevant information in the tests. According to the researchers, it’s possible that this kind of effect is specific to the early stages of passionate love when your brain is more fixated on the object of your affection. “For long-lasting love in a long-term relationship, on the other hand, it seems crucial to have proper cognitive control,” said study author Henk van Steenbergen in a press release from Leiden University.
Your eyes reveal if you’re in love with somebody
You can learn a lot about someone by studying their eyes, including whether or not they have love on their mind. This was borne out when researchers had 20 people view 200 pictures of couples and, in a separate session, individuals of the opposite sex. For each image, the study participants declared whether the photograph (shown on a computer screen) elicited any feelings of romantic love or sexual desire. An eye-tracking device was used to record where the viewers were looking when they evaluated the photos.
The data showed a clear difference in gaze patterns: The more that someone identified the feelings, the more their eyes were drawn to the faces in their photographs. Feelings of sexual desire were more likely to be accompanied by a gaze fixed on the bodies in the pictures, rather than the faces. And while this may sound like a guy thing, it was true for both men and women in the study.