Love is an addiction. When love can be responded, harmless and appropriate, it is a positive addiction; When a person’s feelings about love are wrong, harmful, unresponsive or rejected, it is a disastrous negative addiction.
Love is so sweet and scary. People who fall in love may never think that the most wonderful feeling that human beings can experience has a very subtle similarity with drugs that people smell and turn pale.
As a matter of fact, scientists have found a lot of interesting and distinct evidence about the argument that "love is poisonous" by scanning the brains of men and women in love.
It will be addictive and relapse.
Because this series of characteristics that often accompany love are related to all addictions, some psychologists begin to believe that romantic love may evolve into addiction.
First of all, men and women who are carried away are eager to combine with their partners from soul to body, which is the core component of all addictions; When lovers think of their partners, they will feel a burst of ecstasy, which is a form of "intoxication" in addiction.
With the establishment of obsession, lovers will seek more and more interaction with their partners, which is called "reinforcement" in addiction research literature; They also think endlessly about their partners, which is a form of "invasive thinking" and the basis of drug dependence.
People in love will also distort reality and change their priorities and daily habits to match their partners; They often do inappropriate, dangerous or extreme things to keep in touch with their partners or impress them.
Even a person’s personality may change, which is called "emotional disorder". Many people who are madly in love are willing to sacrifice for their sweetheart, just as addicts feel pain when they can’t get drugs, and people feel "separation anxiety" when they are forced to separate from their lovers.
Trouble really begins when you are abandoned by your lover. Most abandoned men and women will show the common characteristics of withdrawal reaction, including protest, crying for no reason, burnout, anxiety, sleep disorder (too much or too little sleep), loss of appetite or overeating, irritability and so on.
People in love will "relapse" like addicts. Even long after the end of the relationship, events, people, places, songs or other external clues related to the old love can stimulate memories, which will trigger a new round of longing, invasive thinking and compulsive connection.
Primitive and basic motivation
Neuroscientists compared the brains of subjects who were enjoying love with those of addicts who had just injected cocaine or opium and were in a state of euphoria, and found that many of the same areas in the reward system of both brains were activated.
Many years ago, neuroscientists conducted special research, using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to observe what happens in people’s brains when they are deeply in love and crazy about it.
First of all, volunteers in love have to complete two different tasks, one is to stare at the photo of their lover, the other is to look at the photo of a person who does not show positive or negative emotions, and at the same time collect data on brain activity.
Next, on the screen in front of the researchers, a large number of light spots show the violent activity of the ventral tegmental area (VTA) — — VTA is a small factory at the bottom of the brain, which is responsible for making dopamine and sending this natural stimulant to many brain regions.
During the test, there are many other areas in the brain, but VTA is particularly important. It is a part of the reward system, which can stimulate desire, search, desire, energy, concentration and motivation. No wonder lovers can stay up all night and talk. No wonder they become so absent-minded, so cheerful, so optimistic, so sociable and so energetic. Because they are in a natural state of excitement.
VTA is close to the primitive brain area related to hunger and thirst, so love is a basic driving force of human beings, and can even be regarded as a survival mechanism, as important as people’s desire for food and water. This driving force, this survival mechanism, is also an addiction.
Passion and anger are interlinked.
Like all addictions, love can ruin life, especially when a person is abandoned.
The experiment also recruited newly lovelorn people to undergo brain scans. The data shows that abandoned lovers are still madly in love and deeply attached to their ungrateful partners. They are suffering from physical and mental pain. They are like rats on a treadmill, indulging in what they have lost. They are even eager to get back together with ungrateful partners, just like the performance of addiction withdrawal.
This trajectory of abandonment and recovery has a fixed pattern: in the first stage, that is, the protest stage, abandoned lovers try their best to regain the love of unfaithful partners. Subsequently, the stage of "obedience/despair" begins, and lovers give up hope and fall into pain and despair.
These two stages are related to the dopamine system in the brain. When lovers encounter obstacles, their passion is even stronger — — This is "attraction frustration".
Frustration strengthens the feeling of love. This phenomenon is rooted in the brain. If an upcoming reward is delayed, neurons in the dopamine system of the brain will continue to be active, which maintains a person’s feeling of strong love.
Stress will enhance this dopamine response. Even if the abandoned party shows sympathy when they break up and continues to perform their responsibilities as friends or children together, many abandoned people still swing back and forth between heartbreak and rage — — There is also a neural connection in this reaction.
In fact, romantic passion and abandoned anger have a lot in common. Both of them are related to physical and mental arousal; Will lead to over-thinking, make people concentrate, strengthen motivation and goal-oriented behavior; Both of them will arouse a strong desire, either to get back together with an ungrateful partner or to get revenge.
The experience of love and anger can coexist.
Ah, that desperate puppy
Since love and anger will compete with each other and strengthen a person’s abandonment addiction, then we must have inherited this protest response, because it comes from a basic physiological mechanism of mammals, and as long as any form of social contact is damaged, this mechanism will be stimulated.
Take the puppy as an example. If the puppy is taken away from its mother and left alone in the kitchen, it will immediately start running, frantically pouncing on the door, barking and sobbing in protest. Separated young rats will also constantly make calls with ultrasonic waves, and they can hardly fall asleep because the brain arouses them too strongly.
The purpose of this kind of protest is to raise vigilance and urge abandoned individuals to object, seek and ask for help. Protest, stress response, frustration attraction, abandonment of anger, desire, withdrawal symptoms … … All this plays a role in crimes caused by love all over the world.
Like all addictions, love can lead to violence. However, abandoned lovers will eventually give up. They stopped pursuing their old love and entered the second stage of abandonment: compromise/despair. At this stage, the abandoned party feels tired, depressed, sad and depressed, which is the so-called "desperate reaction".
Of course, most abandoned people have already felt this kind of sadness in the previous protest stage, but with all hopes dashed, the feeling of sadness is likely to increase. This despair is related to multiple brain neural networks; However, the dopamine circuit is most likely involved.
No one can escape this addiction.
As abandoned lovers begin to believe that rewards will never come again, dopamine-producing cells in the reward system will reduce their activities, which leads to burnout, depression and depression. Short-term stress will promote the production of dopamine and norepinephrine, while long-term stress will suppress the activities of these neurochemicals and cause depression.
Many professionals define addiction as a pathological and problematic disorder. However, because love is a positive experience in many cases (that is, harmless), most researchers are still reluctant to formally list love as an addiction.
However, in terms of behavior patterns and brain mechanisms, love addiction is as real as any other addiction. Even when love is not harmful, it is also related to strong desire and anxiety, and can urge lovers to believe or do dangerous or inappropriate behaviors.
Even, some of the activated reward pathways in lovestruck or abandoned men and women can be activated by other addictive substances, such as alcohol, opium, cocaine, amphetamines, marijuana and tobacco (as well as non-material addictions, such as eating addiction and gambling addiction).
However, other addictions only affect a small part of the population, while love is not. Almost everyone will encounter this kind of love addiction at some stage in his life. The brain system related to dopamine, vasopressin, oxytocin and other neurochemicals plays this "painful and enjoyable" symphony of life together. (comprehensive /Levy)