Why falling in love is addiction

Unrequited love hits everyone at some point, whether it's a celebrity crush or feelings for a friend. But that doesn't make it any less painful. Intimacy vs Isolation is stage six according to Erik Erikson's model of human development. This stage spans from around age 19 to 40 and is…. Fearing rejection is pretty common, but it can have a big impact on your life when it holds you back from taking risks. An introvert is often thought of as a quiet, reserved, and thoughtful individual.

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The feelings are not always pleasurable. In fact, sometimes they are downright unpleasant and come close to sensations one associate with being ill. In fact, the descriptions of falling in love are the stuff of every other sitcom.

You have got the flu! From a different perspective, falling in love has been described as being equivalent to a cocktail of psychotropic drugs. Something that elevates your mood to dizzy heights, and brings you down crashing again, and puts you through that wringer so many times. One could describe it all chemically and biologically through hormones and other substances and that we are genetically programmed to react in such a manner to prospective partners, and it is really that age-old game of nature playing over and over again.

One could also turn to romantic literature, or even spirituality to understand the whys and the wherefores of this falling in love. Whatever the origin of this falling in love might be, the one undeniable fact is that the experience of falling in love is quite something else. This is when our relationships settle into a feeling more of ongoing contentment and wellbeing.

The love comes of age and matures into a longstanding partnership. Our brain has become more tolerant and used to the heady pleasures that the first flush of love brings.

We start to acknowledge and accept mostly! Some, believing that love can only be associated with the intensity of the combination of lust and physical desire will choose to seek out a new relationship, to regain those pleasurable feelings all over again.

Here we see the person who hops from one relationship to the next in their continuing search supposedly for Mr. Love Hurts. Unrequited love or the end of a relationship causes us pain. We speak of a broken heart, hurt feelings, even feeling gutted. The symptoms are painful, really painful. What we know from social cognitive neuroscience is how social pain and physical pain share common neural pathways, so no wonder it hurts so much. Conversely we ascribe a lot of physicality to our physical pain, whereas in reality we can diminish our pain using our mind.

Studies have shown how taking Tylenol really does diminish social pain to some extent. This is however, not to belittle the real pain we feel with loss. Conversely when we are in the first flush of love, our tolerance to pain is hugely elevated by activating a very old area of the brain called the nucleus accumbens, in the same way as illicit drugs such as cocaine does.

It basically instructs the brain to keep doing this i. Being one-eyed means we are less distracted by other variables in our immediate environment such as physical discomfort or pain. But here's an example of how dark it can get: Me, crying in the shower many a morning and chanting a mantra, "He doesn't love me. He never loved me. He never will. It still hurts.

Every day. Unless I squelch the entire addictive tendency, I'll likely have limerent feelings for this person until a new limerent object comes along.

Some days I tell myself that I'm not going to get over it, and that's fine. I'm a writer; I'm supposed to feel a bit broken, right? Healthy, I know. I get through it by quoting poets and playwrights to myself. Especially things like, "The heart will break but broken live on. I get through it trying to be grateful for my reality, which includes a family who loves me. So, to get on with it, the following signs you may be addicted to love and falling in love are just from me, my own experience which is more complicated than I'm even stating here.

I'm not remotely trained at this head-and-heart stuff. I'm not a therapist. Being a writer is a real "ugh" factor here. I can tell myself stories about the person of my dreams and how they feel the same way. I imagine them saying, "I love you. In short, I can construct whatever world I want and then be crushed when the world isn't as I made it.