Speaker 1: Pushkin. It was my first day of college. I had
Speaker 1: just arrived and he had started this freshman outdoor orientation
Speaker 1: trip where we were going hiking in the mountains and
Speaker 1: he had rock climbing muscles and a bandana around his head,
Speaker 1: and I mean, I think instantly there was a little
Speaker 1: bit of chemistry there. That's science journalist Florence Williams. The
Speaker 1: instant spark she's describing turned into a decades long marriage,
Speaker 1: but that marriage unraveled when Florence was fifty. The breakup
Speaker 1: cracked her open, and what followed as an outpouring of
Speaker 1: new and disorienting feelings. When the person you consider sort
Speaker 1: of your safety net, like your primary attachment partner, when
Speaker 1: they're suddenly gone, it's so disorienting in a way that's
Speaker 1: kind of like a deep freakout, and you feel it emotionally.
Speaker 1: And it turns out our immune systems and our bodies
Speaker 1: are really paying very close attention to that sense of
Speaker 1: freak out. So I had this tremendous urgency to try
Speaker 1: to understand it. On today's episode, a science journalist goes
Speaker 1: on an expedition to try and hack heartbreak. I'm Maya Shunker,
Speaker 1: and this is a slight change of plans, A show
Speaker 1: about who we are and who we become in the
Speaker 1: face of a big change. Florence Williams is the author
Speaker 1: of the book Heartbreak, A personal and scientific journey. That
Speaker 1: journey began one night seven years ago when Florence and
Speaker 1: her husband were hosting a dinner party. I was making
Speaker 1: a salad and friends were arriving for dinner at any moment,
Speaker 1: and my husband was in the next room, and I said, Oh,
Speaker 1: how's your dad doing? And he said, oh, I just
Speaker 1: got this email from my brother. It's on the phone.
Speaker 1: And he handed me his phone and on the phone
Speaker 1: was an email written by my husband to another woman
Speaker 1: talking about how much he loved her. And I was like,
Speaker 1: what is this? And it's that feeling when sort of
Speaker 1: the blood leaves your face and it leaves your limbs,
Speaker 1: and you feel your stomach sort of drop a story
Speaker 1: or two. You're not sure what you've just read, but
Speaker 1: you think it's bad, and in that moment, you sort
Speaker 1: of know that your life is not what you thought
Speaker 1: it was. And then the doorbell rang and our friends arrived,
Speaker 1: and I had to kind of smile all through this dinner.
Speaker 1: There was no opportunity to further investigate. You know, for
Speaker 1: a little while, you see this email on the phone,
Speaker 1: and the doorbell rings, and he doesn't know throughout the
Speaker 1: dinner party that you've seen this information, right, he doesn't know,
Speaker 1: and you have the kind of internal equanimity to move forward. Sorry,
Speaker 1: I feel like Florence, I would have had a very
Speaker 1: different response. The dinner party would have been canceled. At
Speaker 1: a minimum. Well, people are already coming through the threshold.
Speaker 1: You're a very gracious host. I will give you that.
Speaker 1: I want to be invited to dinner at your house. Wow.
Speaker 1: I could not say I talked a lot through that dinner.
Speaker 1: I think I pretty much sat there feeling really stunned
Speaker 1: and probably staring at my very wan salad at that point. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and not looking at your husband, who you're slowly starting
Speaker 1: to hate, not at all. Yeah. At one point I
Speaker 1: think I did excuse myself to go to the bathroom
Speaker 1: and I managed to take his phone, which was in
Speaker 1: the kitchen. There was no password on the phone, and
Speaker 1: we never there had never been a reason for me
Speaker 1: to look at his phone. But I did find that email,
Speaker 1: and I found a couple of other emails, and it
Speaker 1: turns out that he had been drafting a series of
Speaker 1: emails to this woman that he was kind of emotionally
Speaker 1: obsessed with. So the dinner party ends and you have
Speaker 1: to confront him about the fact that you've seen not
Speaker 1: only this one draft that he accidentally pulled up on
Speaker 1: his phone when he meant to pull up another email,
Speaker 1: but other drafts. And you know, you talked about that instinctive,
Speaker 1: biological feeling of the blood rushing from your head, in
Speaker 1: the stomach sinking, and I'm just wondering, with a few
Speaker 1: hours of distance, you can at least have it probably
Speaker 1: equally gut wrenching, but like a more measured response. And
Speaker 1: I'm curious to know what that conversation was, like, yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean I wanted to know what this meant, you know.
Speaker 1: And he had explained to me that these were draft emails,
Speaker 1: and I was like, what does that mean you haven't
Speaker 1: said them. I don't understand. And the fundamental question was
Speaker 1: do you still love me? You know, That's what I
Speaker 1: really wanted to know, and that's what felt really, I
Speaker 1: guess imperiled. And he said yes, he said I do.
Speaker 1: He said, I'm really confused. I don't want this marriage
Speaker 1: to end, and he said, in fact, I'm sort of
Speaker 1: relieved that, you know, because I've been keeping these feelings
Speaker 1: secret for at this point, actually a couple of years.
Speaker 1: He'd been obsessed with this woman. So it was really confusing,
Speaker 1: and I did feel this betrayal of trust because this
Speaker 1: has been going on so long. And at one point
Speaker 1: I said, you need to figure this out. Why don't
Speaker 1: you go on a camping trip. Why don't you go
Speaker 1: into the wilderness for a few days and really think
Speaker 1: about this. And he thought that was a great idea,
Speaker 1: and he did, and he came back and he said, well,
Speaker 1: I've done a lot of thinking, and I you know,
Speaker 1: at this point, you know, we have two kids. He said,
Speaker 1: I don't want to upset the apple cart. And I
Speaker 1: was like, well, that's all you have to say, I
Speaker 1: don't want to upset the apple cart, Like how, you know,
Speaker 1: where's the reassurance that he actually loves me, yeah, and
Speaker 1: wants to be in this marriage. And he just, you know,
Speaker 1: he just he couldn't say that, and so to me,
Speaker 1: that was finally the neon sign that I was not
Speaker 1: going to have the relationship that I wanted. He wasn't
Speaker 1: having the relationship that he wanted, and there just didn't
Speaker 1: seem to be a way to kind of, you know,
Speaker 1: move forward from there. I mean we were talking about
Speaker 1: sort of what we wanted, you know, what do you
Speaker 1: want out of this marriage? What do you want out
Speaker 1: of your life? And eventually he said something like, yeah,
Speaker 1: I just really want to go find my soulmate. And
Speaker 1: I mean he was telling me these things because we
Speaker 1: were also such good friends. Yeah, who are confidante. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's part of me that understands that, Like, who doesn't
Speaker 1: want to go find their soul mate? But when you're
Speaker 1: the one who thinks you are his soulmate, you know,
Speaker 1: it's incredibly painful. Yeah. But here's a question, Florence. Did
Speaker 1: you think he was your soulmate? Yeah? I think I
Speaker 1: really did. And I felt like sometimes he wasn't a
Speaker 1: great soul mate, but he was yours. But he was mine,
Speaker 1: and we could we could make it better, you know,
Speaker 1: after thirty two years together, these two great kids, so
Speaker 1: many common interests, so many common values. I loved his family,
Speaker 1: he loved mine. Yeah, so he asked for a divorce.
Speaker 1: And one thing that was so interesting in reading your
Speaker 1: book is you've said that before all this you were
Speaker 1: fairly callous towards people who were enduring breakups, like, yeah,
Speaker 1: you'll get over it, right, that guy's a loser, that
Speaker 1: sort of thing, right, don't be so melodramatic. Yes, yes, exactly.
Speaker 1: But then when it happened to you, When it happened
Speaker 1: to you, you felt like all those over the top
Speaker 1: cliches about heartbreak were fully resonating with you. Yes, like
Speaker 1: missing a limb, the acts through the heart, the adrift
Speaker 1: in an ocean. Yeah, all those metaphors seemed absolutely perfectly apt.
Speaker 1: I just felt like my socks completely blown off by
Speaker 1: the power of this grief and this loss. You know.
Speaker 1: Claire Bidwell Smith as a psychologist who wrote a book
Speaker 1: about how anxiety is the missing stage of grief, and
Speaker 1: that really resonated for me. There's this tremendous sort of
Speaker 1: anxiety when the person you consider sort of your safety net,
Speaker 1: like your primary attachment partner, when they're suddenly gone. It's
Speaker 1: so disorienting in a way that's kind of like a
Speaker 1: deep freakout, and you feel it emotionally. And it turns out,
Speaker 1: you know, our immune systems and our bodies or nervous
Speaker 1: systems are really paying very close attention to that sense
Speaker 1: of freak out. How did this anxiety physically and emotionally
Speaker 1: express itself in you in the days and weeks after
Speaker 1: the divorce? Yeah, I mean first up was you know,
Speaker 1: intense insomnia, you know, the sort of like lying awake
Speaker 1: all night, feeling like you're really on edge. You're trying
Speaker 1: to kind of calculate everything, like your survival odds and
Speaker 1: where are you going to live and how are you
Speaker 1: going to afford health insurance? And who's going to get
Speaker 1: the kids? And what am I going to tell my friends?
Speaker 1: And what am I going to do now? That's a
Speaker 1: lot of what am I going to do now? What
Speaker 1: am I going to do now? So there was that
Speaker 1: sleeplessness for me. There was like pretty instant weight loss too.
Speaker 1: There was this sense of being so kind of full
Speaker 1: of adrenaline and anxiety that I've kind of felt like
Speaker 1: I was buzzing at one point. I have the metaphor
Speaker 1: that I felt like I was plugged into a faulty
Speaker 1: electrical socket. And then eventually I started getting sick. So
Speaker 1: I found out that my blood sugars were really weirdly high.
Speaker 1: And I've always been someone who exercises a lot, I'm
Speaker 1: fit no diabetes in my family, and eventually we figured
Speaker 1: out that I was diagnosed with an autoimmune type of diabetes,
Speaker 1: which is type one diabetes. Of just thinking in this moment,
Speaker 1: we can work to control our mental states, but it
Speaker 1: seems like something like an autoimmune condition or the inflammatory
Speaker 1: markers in our blood that feels so out of reach
Speaker 1: in terms of our ability to control it, even though
Speaker 1: by the way, this might be all illusory and the
Speaker 1: mental states are just as hard to control as the
Speaker 1: physical manifestations that our blood work, for example, but certainly
Speaker 1: I would feel so daunted by the physical expression, like
Speaker 1: this whole thing had just run away from me, exactly,
Speaker 1: and that creates more anxiety exactly. There's a meta level
Speaker 1: of anxiety, right, and what's the next shoe that's going
Speaker 1: to draw? And if my body is registering this pain,
Speaker 1: I need to fix it, And of course I am
Speaker 1: sort of a fixer. I didn't want to get sicker.
Speaker 1: It didn't seem fair to be heartbroken and sick at
Speaker 1: the same time. So I had this tremendous urgency to
Speaker 1: try to understand it. I wanted to understand what was
Speaker 1: happening to me. The science journalist in me wanted to
Speaker 1: go talk to the experts not only to try to
Speaker 1: understand what was happening to my immune system, but also
Speaker 1: how I could kind of game it, if there was
Speaker 1: a way to game it, to sort of speed it up.
Speaker 1: It sounds like it was a journey motivated by survival.
Speaker 1: I mean, you are a science journalist, but this had
Speaker 1: so many personal undertones. It was kind of like, the
Speaker 1: things that I find out from this expedition will have
Speaker 1: a direct impact on my ability to live through this.
Speaker 1: That's right. But it was really survival on two fronts.
Speaker 1: It was the sort of physical survival. I want to
Speaker 1: understand what's happening so I can get better, But it
Speaker 1: was also like, you know what journalism is what I do.
Speaker 1: It's who I am, and this is what's going to
Speaker 1: help me feel like I'm surviving in a more metaphysical way.
Speaker 1: You know, this is who I am. Yeah. I love that,
Speaker 1: retaining your own sense of individual purpose and fulfilling a
Speaker 1: mission on your own. So where did you start? How
Speaker 1: did this expedition begin? Well, I think, like so many journeys,
Speaker 1: it starts out somewhat accidentally. I ended up at a
Speaker 1: conference and I was a speaker there, and I saw
Speaker 1: another speaker there was Helen Fisher, whose biological anthropologist. She's
Speaker 1: written a lot about what happens to our brains when
Speaker 1: we fall in love. And I send her an email
Speaker 1: and I said, can I talk to you? And she said, sure, honey,
Speaker 1: come on over. And I just said, okay, look, this
Speaker 1: is what's happened. My husband of twenty five years just
Speaker 1: moved out a few weeks ago. I can't sleep. And
Speaker 1: she said, oh, are you having trouble keeping weight on?
Speaker 1: And I said yes, And she said do you feel
Speaker 1: really anxious? And I said yes. She said, okay, I
Speaker 1: can tell you everything that's happening. And I was like,
Speaker 1: please tell me, tell me what's happening. And it was
Speaker 1: so reassuring. It was so helpful for me, maybe because
Speaker 1: I'm a signed journalist, but I found it reassuring to
Speaker 1: know that there was a reason for feeling what I
Speaker 1: was feeling, for my brain to be kind of in
Speaker 1: this high alert zone. And she was also just reassuring
Speaker 1: in herself because she said, you know what, We know
Speaker 1: this because we have put heartbroken people in a brain scanner.
Speaker 1: Many of them have these exact same symptoms. You're not
Speaker 1: alone in the world. This is what the brain does.
Speaker 1: Our brains are built for attachment and because of that,
Speaker 1: they're also built for heartbreak. And she was so sweet
Speaker 1: about it. She said, I've been there. Let me tell
Speaker 1: you about my heartbreak. Funnily, that's what almost all the
Speaker 1: scientists I spoke to said. They said, oh, let me
Speaker 1: tell you about my heartbreak too, And that alone, right,
Speaker 1: is very comforting and sort of humanizing and makes us
Speaker 1: realized that even though this feels like such a singular
Speaker 1: and lonely experience, of course it is a universal experience. Yeah. See,
Speaker 1: you meet with Helen Fisher and she helps ground you
Speaker 1: by at least sharing Look, you're not alone in this.
Speaker 1: Let me also share my own personal experiences with heartbreak.
Speaker 1: And here's why all this stuff is happening to you.
Speaker 1: Where do you go from there? I went to talk
Speaker 1: to Stephen Cole, the immuno geneticist, who was analyzing blood markers,
Speaker 1: so transcription factors in our white blood cells that change
Speaker 1: the way we regulate different immune responses based on and
Speaker 1: this is so interesting to me, based on our social state.
Speaker 1: So he has for a long time been researching how
Speaker 1: people who rate themselves as lonely get sicker and trying
Speaker 1: to figure out why that is. Why would your immune
Speaker 1: system care if you're lonely. He has found that these
Speaker 1: transcription factors really change a suite of about two hundred
Speaker 1: transcription factors in our white blood cells. And so we
Speaker 1: decided to do an experiment where we took samples of
Speaker 1: my blood every few months during the course of my recovery,
Speaker 1: hopefully recovery from the heartbreak. And what did they find
Speaker 1: in those early tests, Well, he told me at one point, yeah,
Speaker 1: you have the blood of a lonely person. And what
Speaker 1: that meant for me was that my inflammation markers were
Speaker 1: really high. And at the same time, there were cells
Speaker 1: that fight viruses that were not getting expressed. Wow, So
Speaker 1: what were some of the interventions that you try so
Speaker 1: you get this blood work done? You understand there's going
Speaker 1: to be a baseline, and yeah, tell me about the
Speaker 1: kinds of things that you tried out. One of the
Speaker 1: places I visited on this quest was the University of Utah.
Speaker 1: There's a researcher there who studies the kind of salubrious
Speaker 1: effects of being in close marriages. How great that is
Speaker 1: for your health. And then of course, he had this
Speaker 1: litany of kind of bummer trivia about what happens after
Speaker 1: you've been divorced, how you're more likely to get sick.
Speaker 1: That really bummed me out. As one immunogeneticist told me,
Speaker 1: he said, you know, heartbreak is one of the hidden
Speaker 1: land mines of human existence, and we don't really take
Speaker 1: it seriously enough, but it does make us sick, and
Speaker 1: in fact, it increases our risk over early death, It
Speaker 1: increases our risk of metabolic disease. You know, all these
Speaker 1: chronic diseases, and most of them are really mediated by inflammation,
Speaker 1: which is what your immune system is responding to with
Speaker 1: this kind of anxiety. But then I went down the
Speaker 1: hall to visit another psychologist named Paula Williams, who said, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, we know the statistics are bad health statistics divorce,
Speaker 1: but we know that there are some people who can
Speaker 1: be really resilient. And I sort of leaned forward and
Speaker 1: I was like, tell me more, who are those people?
Speaker 1: I want to be that? And she said, well, our
Speaker 1: lab has shown that it's the people with a personality
Speaker 1: trait of openness, people who are open to new experience,
Speaker 1: open to curiosity, and open to beauty, especially open to
Speaker 1: this sense of awe, sort of what she called esthetic chill,
Speaker 1: which is the idea that you can get goosebumps when
Speaker 1: you're listening to a beautiful symphony or looking at a
Speaker 1: beautiful painting, or looking at a waterfall. And she said,
Speaker 1: not only do we think that open people are more resilient,
Speaker 1: we actually think you could learn to be a more
Speaker 1: open person than you already are. I love that very
Speaker 1: hopeful message. It was so hopeful. I just clung onto
Speaker 1: it like a lifeboat. I was like, I can do that.
Speaker 1: I'm just going to claw my way through a heartbreak
Speaker 1: by aweing my way through heartbreak. We'll be back in
Speaker 1: a moment with a slight change of plans. Florence Williams
Speaker 1: felt blindsided when her twenty five year marriage came to
Speaker 1: an end, so she went on an expedition to try
Speaker 1: and understand the science of heartbreak and ideally game her
Speaker 1: way through it. Florence tried novel forms of therapy, immersion
Speaker 1: in nature, and even visited the Museum of Broken Relationships,
Speaker 1: where she learned rituals to help mark the end of
Speaker 1: her marriage. And throughout it all she kept consulting with
Speaker 1: scientists about the latest research. Florence was especially inspired by
Speaker 1: the idea that she can learn to be a more
Speaker 1: open person and how does one cultivate more of an openness,
Speaker 1: more of an ability to appreciate beauty? I think, like anything,
Speaker 1: you can ask your way into an experience by being present, right,
Speaker 1: like what am I seeing? What am I hearing? What
Speaker 1: am I smelling? What is my sensory body noticing about
Speaker 1: this beautiful place I'm in instead of just thinking about
Speaker 1: your to do list or the conversation that you had
Speaker 1: at work. There are sort of ways we can queue
Speaker 1: ourselves into kind of our sensory bodies that when we
Speaker 1: do that, when we can wake up our sensory bodies.
Speaker 1: It's kind of a shortcut to reducing our blood pressure,
Speaker 1: slowing our respiration, putting us in a better mood. And
Speaker 1: it's really mindfulness. It's just another way of being mindful.
Speaker 1: But it doesn't involve sitting on a cushion, you know,
Speaker 1: it involves actually being present in whatever environment you find yourself.
Speaker 1: But you can microdose AWE. It doesn't have to be
Speaker 1: the Grand Canyon. You know. You can find AWE on
Speaker 1: your block. You can look up at the moon you
Speaker 1: can watch the sunset, you can watch the bees for
Speaker 1: a while. For me, my greatest form off Lawrence was
Speaker 1: looking at the results of the twenty twenty election. Who knew?
Speaker 1: That's collective? Collective all, Yeah, the most profound form of
Speaker 1: pain relief I've experienced in some time. So on this
Speaker 1: topic of AWE, I'm thinking, I'm going back in time
Speaker 1: and remembering the times where I felt like my heart
Speaker 1: had been torn into pieces by another person, and your
Speaker 1: whole world is shaken up, and it's so devastating, and
Speaker 1: it's hard for me to know when you're really in
Speaker 1: the throes of heartbreak. I think it can be really
Speaker 1: hard to even imagine finding things beautiful against the backdrop
Speaker 1: of such pain. But one thing that was so reassuring
Speaker 1: for me is in reading your book, when you are
Speaker 1: in the throes of heartbreak, you describe almost these out
Speaker 1: of body experiences with AWE where you're just overwhelmed by beauty,
Speaker 1: And I mean, that's wonderful that it's possible to feel
Speaker 1: that way when you're just so torn up. Well, here's
Speaker 1: the funny thing. I actually feel like it's more possible
Speaker 1: to feel those things when you're so torn up, say more. Well,
Speaker 1: suddenly you're torn down to your studs. You're going to
Speaker 1: feel the deep abyss of your emotions. You're going to
Speaker 1: feel big emotion in a way that I had never
Speaker 1: really experienced before. And there's something about feeling those big
Speaker 1: emotions that actually extends also to the good emotions. I
Speaker 1: felt like, all of a sudden, I am a feeling animal.
Speaker 1: I'm feeling things I've never felt before, and I'm also
Speaker 1: feeling joy. Well, that's unexpected. I'm feeling beauty, I'm feeling love,
Speaker 1: I'm feeling lust like, I'm feeling just these big, big things,
Speaker 1: and in fact that's normal. You know. I think it
Speaker 1: seems counterintuitive, but we are capable, fully capable of feeling
Speaker 1: two things at once, and even feeling conflicting things at once.
Speaker 1: It's just that so many of us are uncomfortable with
Speaker 1: big feelings that we don't go there very off. I see. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So what you're arguing is that you're forced to open
Speaker 1: the lid on all of your emotions, and maybe that
Speaker 1: makes the feeling of all even more accessible because it
Speaker 1: requires a certain depth of emotion to feel those things
Speaker 1: in the first place. Is that right? I think? So
Speaker 1: it's like all the guardrails have now busted open, shattered
Speaker 1: and shattered, and all of a sudden you feel terrible,
Speaker 1: but you kind of feel alive, and then all of
Speaker 1: a sudden the beauty comes in too. Yeah. I spent
Speaker 1: quite a lot of time in nature. You know, this
Speaker 1: was something I was quite invested in believing was helpful.
Speaker 1: I had already written a book called The Nature Fix
Speaker 1: on how nature can make us happier and healthier. So
Speaker 1: I thought, Okay, this is a big heartbreak. I need
Speaker 1: to spend a lot of time in nature. So I
Speaker 1: started going for more walks in the woods. I just thought, Okay,
Speaker 1: I need more of this, I need more awe. I'm
Speaker 1: going to go into the wilderness and I need to
Speaker 1: learn how to be more self sufficient. I need to
Speaker 1: learn how to be comfortable alone. And I eventually ended
Speaker 1: up embarking on a thirty day wilderness river trip in Utah,
Speaker 1: and about half of that was solo trip. I thought, Okay,
Speaker 1: I'm scared of being alone. I need to learn how
Speaker 1: to be alone. So here I go. I'm going to
Speaker 1: paddle my own boat. Now I'm going to do it alone.
Speaker 1: I am going to nature fix my way out of heartbreak. Right,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna cure this thing. I'm gonna cure this thing.
Speaker 1: So tell me how that trip unfolded in how things
Speaker 1: turned out. I think I had sort of romanticized the
Speaker 1: idea of being alone in the wilderness, that it would
Speaker 1: be this experience of solitude, you know, not loneliness, but solitude,
Speaker 1: that I'd be able to really spend time thinking things
Speaker 1: through and looking at beautiful light on the rocks and
Speaker 1: talking to the great blue herons. And there was some
Speaker 1: of that, but there's also this sense of, oh shit,
Speaker 1: I'm alone. Yeah, I'm actually suddenly feeling even lonelier because
Speaker 1: I am alone out here. Yeah, I can see that. Florence,
Speaker 1: what do you think are some of the greatest misconceptions
Speaker 1: that we have about heartbreak? I think we have a
Speaker 1: lot of kind of easy pablem about how to get
Speaker 1: over it. And you know, one of the things you
Speaker 1: hear a lot is, oh, you shouldn't jump into another relationship.
Speaker 1: You have to learn to love yourself. There will be
Speaker 1: no happiness until you can love yourself first. And that
Speaker 1: just didn't ring true for me, and I just felt
Speaker 1: like I'm not gonna figure everything out, and I don't
Speaker 1: want to like stay away from other relationships. And I
Speaker 1: was like, well, where's the science. Is there any science
Speaker 1: that really says we're better off if we don't have
Speaker 1: any relationships for a while, And it turns out there
Speaker 1: was no science suggesting that, and in fact, there was
Speaker 1: some science suggesting that people who have rebounds after a
Speaker 1: breakup actually do better. That they end up with more
Speaker 1: self confidence, more self esteem, They're able to more quickly
Speaker 1: separate themselves from their ax and distract themselves in kind
Speaker 1: of a good way. So I went for that. I
Speaker 1: had some rebounds. I thought they were, well, it was
Speaker 1: a mixed bag. If you read the book, it's definitely
Speaker 1: a mixed bag of I wouldn't recommend that people necessarily
Speaker 1: jump out and find a rebound, obviously, it's, you know,
Speaker 1: got to feel right for you, and it's got to
Speaker 1: feel safe. Yeah, but in your case, what did you
Speaker 1: feel with some of the benefits. In my case, you know,
Speaker 1: I was fifty when my marriage split up, and our
Speaker 1: culture does not really make us feel super sexy and
Speaker 1: desired when we're fifty, especially when our husband has dumped us.
Speaker 1: And so for me, actually, the rebounds were great. They
Speaker 1: made me feel desirable. They made me feel like, Okay,
Speaker 1: maybe maybe I have some life left in this body,
Speaker 1: and I kind of like this. Actually it was another
Speaker 1: way for me to wake up my sensory body and
Speaker 1: just frankly, to calm down my nervous system. I mean,
Speaker 1: we know that human touch and there's a lot of
Speaker 1: science showing this releases oxytocin, which is a direct counter
Speaker 1: to stress hormones like cortisol. Yeah, but I think one
Speaker 1: of the biggest surprises in the book for me when
Speaker 1: I spoke with the scientists who is analyzing my blood.
Speaker 1: He's done a lot of large studies looking at the
Speaker 1: blood of lonely people and trying various interventions and seeing
Speaker 1: what makes their genetic markers healthier. And what he's found
Speaker 1: is that it's not necessarily interventions where people hang out
Speaker 1: together or become more social that is not the antidote
Speaker 1: to loneliness. What he has found is that it's people
Speaker 1: who have this deep north star of who they are
Speaker 1: and what they want to do, why they believe what
Speaker 1: they believe. These are the people who have a lot
Speaker 1: of meaning and purpose in their lives, and if they're lucky,
Speaker 1: that purpose will find some common ground with other people
Speaker 1: that's the best scenari but these are the people who
Speaker 1: end up having the healthiest immune systems and the healthiest
Speaker 1: genetic profile. So that was really interesting to me, and
Speaker 1: he really talked to me about these two different kinds
Speaker 1: of happiness, you know, hedonic versus udmonic hedonic being I think,
Speaker 1: you know what, so much of our culture drives us towards,
Speaker 1: which is sort of entertainment and amusement and being mirthful
Speaker 1: and having a celebratory time. Eudemonic, on the other hand,
Speaker 1: is this kind of deeper purpose that is not necessarily
Speaker 1: associated with anything mirthful. Like you can be really tired
Speaker 1: and kind of grumpy because your workings are or because
Speaker 1: you're caring for someone or caring about something, But those
Speaker 1: are the people who are actually going to live the longest. Yeah,
Speaker 1: in full Florence, how long was the entirety of your
Speaker 1: intervention period, as we'll call it. Well, I was hoping
Speaker 1: it would only be a year and then I'll be
Speaker 1: all better. But you know, I did the wardship at
Speaker 1: about a year out and I was like, damn it,
Speaker 1: I'm still not better. I knew I wasn't better, and
Speaker 1: that was something we found out after doing, you know,
Speaker 1: some of my evidence based interventions to try to get better,
Speaker 1: it was really disappointing that they didn't instantly cure my
Speaker 1: heartbreak or my immune system. Yeah. I wonder how you
Speaker 1: reckoned with the limitations of science and what it could
Speaker 1: offer you, because you know, you adopted an interesting mentality, right,
Speaker 1: which is that maybe you could hack your way through
Speaker 1: heartbreak or as you said, gain your way through heartbreak.
Speaker 1: But because the science is relatively underdeveloped in this space,
Speaker 1: I imagine it's hard to find satisfying answers, and even
Speaker 1: harder to find the right answers for any given person.
Speaker 1: And so on the one hand, it's kind of an
Speaker 1: intoxicating mission to be like, I'm going to figure this
Speaker 1: all out. But then sometimes you realize, oh darn, the
Speaker 1: science is not at a place where I can just
Speaker 1: write my little recipe down and okay, boom boom boom
Speaker 1: boom boom, here are my seven steps. Right, We're so
Speaker 1: far away from that. If ever, Yeah, I thought everything
Speaker 1: I tried, you know, frankly was a little bit disappointing.
Speaker 1: It's like, oh darn, that didn't work. I mean, ultimately, yes,
Speaker 1: I had to reckon we all have to reckon with
Speaker 1: the fact that science does not supply every solution, but
Speaker 1: also with the basic humility that you know, we can't
Speaker 1: always hack our way out of our own situation. That
Speaker 1: we do have to be more comfortable with ambiguity. More
Speaker 1: comfortable with the ambiguity of grief. I mean, grief is
Speaker 1: it's such an idiosyncratic kind of beast. It's different for everybody,
Speaker 1: but it rarely gets neatly tied up. We don't go
Speaker 1: back to being the person we were, and that's okay.
Speaker 1: But I had to rejigger my expectations. I had to
Speaker 1: realize that instead of being someone who was so kind
Speaker 1: of eager to find closure, I had to learn how
Speaker 1: to become the sort of person who didn't need closure.
Speaker 1: And I was able to reframe that after talking to
Speaker 1: these AWE researchers that if you're a person who doesn't
Speaker 1: need closure, you're a more resilient person, and you're likely
Speaker 1: to be more open to curiosity. You're more likely to
Speaker 1: look at the world in terms of modulated tones of
Speaker 1: gray and not just black and white. You don't look
Speaker 1: for authority figures to tell you what to do and
Speaker 1: what the solutions are so it's like, oh, maybe this
Speaker 1: is a win. The great happy ending of heartbreak is
Speaker 1: not necessarily, you know, finding the new life partner, because
Speaker 1: not everyone's going to do that, and there isn't always
Speaker 1: a perfect life partner waiting. You know, there are so
Speaker 1: many of these post divorce books where there's some handsome,
Speaker 1: hunky guy at the end, and that just didn't happen
Speaker 1: in my book. The fact that there is no closure
Speaker 1: and I could be comfortable with that is a win.
Speaker 1: I can try to be someone who doesn't need everything
Speaker 1: to be so predictable. Hey, thanks so much for listening.
Speaker 1: Join me next week when I talk to psychologist Jamil Zaki,
Speaker 1: an expert in empathy. Jamiel argues that empathy is something
Speaker 1: we can and should cultivate, and once we do, we
Speaker 1: can actually choose where we direct it. Empathy is like
Speaker 1: a spotlight. The thing that I think is really important
Speaker 1: to remember is that we are the ones pointing that spotlight,
Speaker 1: and that we have agency. We have autonomy to align
Speaker 1: our emotional experiences with the people we want to be.
Speaker 1: A Slight Change of Plans is created written an executive
Speaker 1: produced by me Maya Schunker. The Slight Change Family includes
Speaker 1: our showrunner Tyler Green, our senior editor Kate Parkinson Morgan,
Speaker 1: our sound engineer Andrew Vastola, and our associate producer Sarah McCrae.
Speaker 1: Louis Scara wrote our delightful theme song, and Ginger Smith
Speaker 1: helped arrange the vocals. A Slight Change of Plans is
Speaker 1: a production of Pushkin Industries, so big thanks to everyone there,
Speaker 1: and of course of very special thanks to Jimmy Lee.
Speaker 1: You can follow A Slight Change of Plans on Instagram
Speaker 1: at doctor Maya Schunker