Scientists from the University of Colorado Boulder have found that the pain of a broken heart can be eased by the placebo effect.
As per reports in HuffPost Canada, the researchers recruited 40 volunteers who had experienced an ‘unwanted romantic breakup’ in the past six months.
Earlier studies had revealed that placebos – treatments with no active ingredients – can ease pain in a variety of conditions including depression, this is the first to measure the effect of a placebo on emotional pain caused by a heartbreak.
As part of the experiment, volunteers were asked to bring two images – one of their ex, and the other of a good friend the same gender as them to a brain-imagine lab. Here, the volunteers entered a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine to track brain activity before being shown images of their ex and asked to recall the breakup.
They were next shown images of their friend, and then subjected to physical pain, which involved a hot stimulus on their left forearm.
Results showed that although not identical, the brain regions activated during physical and emotional pain were similar, which senior author Tor Wager believes sends an important message to the broken-hearted: "Know that your pain is real — neuro-chemically real."
Outside of the fMRI machines participants received a nasal spray, with half being told that it was a "powerful analgesic effective in reducing emotional pain," and the other half that it was a simple saline solution.
Back inside the machine, participants were exposed to the same stimuli. However, this time the results were different.
Not only did the placebo group, who believed the spray would ease heartache, feel less physical and emotional pain, but their brains actually responded differently when shown the photo of an ex.
The team found that activity in the brain's dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, an area involved with modulating emotions, increased sharply, while areas across the brain associated with rejection showed less activity.
There was also increased activity in an area of the midbrain called the periaqueductal gray (PAG) which is important in modulating levels of the brain's pain-killing chemicals, opioids, and feel-good neurotransmitters like dopamine, leading the participants to feel better after they had taken the placebo.
The team suggest that just doing something you believe will help you get over your ex can be powerful enough to influence brain regions associated with emotional pain and help you feel better.
