Biohacking Heartbreak: How to Move on Faster with Florence Williams | 1154 | Dave Asprey

Interestingly, there is science to back up the idea that having a rebound relationship can be very good for recovering from heartbreak. It can help you regain your self esteem more quickly. It can help you regain your self confidence. It can help you get over your lost relationship more quickly.

You're listening to the Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey. You're listening to the Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey. Today we're going to talk about something that you might not think is in the world of biohacking, but it is, that is heartbreak. Heartbreak, from my perspective, is actually an injury. It's just not a physical injury and it's something that we do need to recover from and it's something that you can study. And if you ignore the effects of that as a part of your universe of things outside of you and inside of you that you can change in order to change your biology so that you're more in charge of yourself, then maybe you're missing an important variable. And by sort of thinking you just have to walk it off or you don't have to acknowledge it, you may be short changing yourself or maybe someone around you is dealing with it.

It.

So you're going to learn by the end of this episode how heartbreak affects human health and how you or people you care about can recover from it and be stronger than they were before. And our guest today is Florence Williams, who's an award winning author, a journalist and has studied this after going through her own painful divorce. And she's like, well, what's going on with this? So she looked at the physiological things that happen after loss and separation. And if you're listening to this saying, I'm in a great relationship, this isn't for me. I promise you that in the people around you, there are quite a few people who are dealing with the effects of heartbreak. And if you don't think that that relationship with little Susie back in, you know, 11th grade, which is usually around the time a lot of people experience their first heartbreak, if you, if you think that's not still affecting you at some way in your relationship, you might be surprised to learn that it can leave deep marks. And I know this from more than 1500 people who've come through 40 years of Zen. I have yet to find someone who doesn't run the reset process on something Maybe that happened 20 or 30 years ago and going, oh, wow, that left a mark. Just like a surgery or an injury can leave a scar, I think heartbreak can as well. With that said, Florence Williams, welcome to the Human Upgrade.

Thank you so much. Dave. It's great to be here.

Tell me about what happened with you. What led you to go down this path?

Well, I've been a science journalist for a long time, and environmental journalist. I've long been interested in how what's going on in our environment affects our bodies kind of psychologically and physically. And I had always written loosely in the first person, just in a casual way, as sort of a guide to the material, but not in a very personal way. But my marriage of 25 years came to a rather sudden end. Not by my choice. And I had been with the man who was my husband since I was 18.

Wow.

So, you know, many decades together. My entire adult life had never really lived on my own or, you know, sort of felt like I was, you know, marching through the world on my own. So when the marriage ended, you know, it really threw me for a loop. And I guess, you know, when my friends had gone through heartbreak before, I had kind of thought, oh, just get over it. What's the big deal? You know, obviously that person wasn't right for you. You know, stop being so melodramatic. But then when it happened to me, I was like, oh, my God. All of those metaphors that you hear about, you know, that you feel like you've lost a limb or, you know, you're floating alone in a deep sea by yourself. You know, there's so much poetry and there's so much drama and there's so much, you know, philosophy and literature about heartbreak. All of a sudden, it all seemed incredibly relevant, and it felt like it wasn't just an emotional event, but that it was actually affecting my body. And that's when the journalist in me was like, why am I feeling this, you know, all over my body? Why do I feel like I've been plugged into an amplifier? Why do I feel like I'm getting sick? Why am I losing weight? Why am I unable to sleep? What's going on in my cells and. And in my brain? And why isn't. Why isn't the science of heartbreak more talked about?

Science journalists are some of my favorite people, and it's because this weird scientific method thing where you observe something which is the start of the. The scientific method, and, oh, here's the hypothesis, and then you go out and you do this broad search to find meaning in something. So some of the most interesting books I've read come from science journalists who dealt with something and said, well, let me apply my craft to myself. That kind of sounds a lot like biohacking. And the deep understanding and the way of explaining it to others is also an art. So I appreciate that you focused your professional work on a question that just came to mind. And I would like for all of us, whether or not we're ever going to be journalists about it, to take. Just take a little bit of. That's what I'm looking for. Take a little bit of inspiration from this. By the way, guys, this is a little side note. I just had to grasp for a word that doesn't happen very often to me. And every time it happens now, I ask myself a question. Why did I have to pause to think of that word? And I do this because as another science, I don't know if I'm a journalist. I just write science books. Not, I guess, 3,000 articles makes me a journalist, but they're all blogs. But u. That's something else that, that I noticed in my own divorce is my working memory. My memory recall went down and as someone who had chronic fatigue syndrome, I used to forget words a hundred times a day, and now once a week even stands out. So I don't have to go into explanations for why, but I know why I couldn't find that word. And I'm like, damn it. Anyway, back to your story. Just, this is why science journalism is so interesting. Just constant curiosity about ourselves. What happened? Tell me a little bit more about your. Your separation. You mentioned physiological things. You mentioned that you were losing weight. I'm guessing your sleep went to hell.

My sleep absolutely went to hell. You know, my stomach went to hell. Some months after the separation, I was actually diagnosed with an autoimmune disease, which was type 1 diabetes, which is typically diagnosed in children. And weirdly, as I went through my reporting, I ran into other people who were divorced and were diagnosed with type 1 diabetes in the wake of their divorce. I talked to a researcher at Stanford who said that, you know, typically a lot of these autoimmune diseases do have a trigger as well as probably a genetic predisposition and, you know, other things going on, but a stress trigger is often there. And, you know, so. So then, you know, someone mentioned the term divorce diabetes. Like, was that a thing? Again, I was very interested in that. There's a psychologist at the University of Arizona who said to me, divorce is a story of inflammation. So I thought that was absolutely fascinating.

Is that just for the heartbreak of divorce or a broken relationship? Or is this also just for grieving in general? You know, loss of a parent?

I think any kind of big emotional distress is going to affect a lot of cellular processes in our body. So I worked pretty closely with Dr. Steve Cole at UCLA. He's a psychoneuroimmunologist. He studies the way. And the way he put it is our cells listen for loneliness, that cells in our immune system are keeping an eye out on how we are feeling about the world. How do we feel about our place in the world? Do we feel safe? Do we feel secure? Do we feel abandoned by primary attachment partners? Do we feel abandoned by our kin group? Which is kind of what happens when you've lost someone in a divorce. And it can also happen when you feel bereft, when you've lost someone you're very close to, you know, to death. When we feel alone in the world, we feel threatened. And that goes back to our deep evolutionary past. And our cells become more hypervigilant to danger, more vigilant to threat in a social situation like that, which was, I thought, unexpected and strange. And we. We went in and in the spirit of self experimentation, Steve Cole measured my own blood cells at various time points past the divorce as I tried different interventions to see if those sort of genetic transcription factors and genetic markers were changing as time went by after the separation.

Did they change?

They did change, which is the good news. They change pretty slowly. So I think a lot of us, maybe after, after we have some kind of emotional earthquake, we think we can fight through it, we can get over it quickly. You know, we try to biohack it fast. Doesn't feel good, you know, to be in that state of grief and anxiety. But, you know, as with. As with many things related to the human heart and, and related to grief, there is no standard time process for treatment or for cure. It's going to go at its own pace. I felt like I did speed it up, and I felt like my transcription factors did change and my genetic expression changed. But it took a while. Took a couple of years, actually. And research shows that on average, it takes our bodies about four years to return to baseline after divorce, which is a lot longer, I think, than most people would like to hear.

I feel like that's something you can pretty rapidly accelerate. And a couple different techniques come to mind, partly because my next book includes this technique as a central core. But the first one is Joe Dispenza's work. You go. You do profound breathwork and meditation for a week, and you go into these altered states where you can go in and almost like talk to the cells in your body and. And change their state. And just like the research you did he has thousands of data points, actually he has millions of data points from thousands of people now that are, are very rigorous around, you know, cytokines and saliva and tears and gut bacteria and blood work showing, huh. A a profound transformational process seems to have really big physiological effects. And then the second one would be this reset process, which is a gratitude and forgiveness process. That's at the core of the first half of people who come to my 40 years of Zen neuroscience brain upgrade program. I did my divorce and a couple other just big betrayals in business. I ran that process on myself and had a really profound shift physiologically, you know, in, in a week. And it feels like there must be like old religious things, old spiritual traditions or old ways that we must know how to do this faster than four years. What is the fastest way that someone could get over heartbreak?

I kind of divide the, the sort of, you know, treatment into three big buckets. You know, the first is that we really need, as you say, to get into a different, a different headspace. But, but really it's a different nervous system shift, right? We have to get out of that state of threat and into a state of calm. So the first bucket is calm. Sounds like you were able to do it with breath work. I think for me, you know, the most effective way is to be in nature. You know, I had written a lot about the psychological benefits of being in the natural world, how that helps lower our heart rate. It helps know, shift our HRV into, into a different nervous system state. So that's the first one is calming down and the second one is connection. So I feel like that also helps us feel safe. It helps us feel like we're not alone in the world. It helps us feel like we're connected to the world around us, you know, which is a terrific psychological state to be in. I also partly found that by connecting to nature, but also connecting to good friends, good family members. And then the third piece was really the sense of meaning. How do you take this tragedy? It feels like a trauma and find meaning in it as you move forward with your life. And that's the post traumatic growth. So how can I take this information and explain it in a way that helps other people? How can I find some purpose in the, in that meaning?

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Your community, you know, and, and the other thing that happens is when you go through something like this, you become very self absorbed. You know, this is your pain, it's your personal pain. Heartbreak maybe only happens a couple of times in a lifetime. And so at the time you're going through it, your friends are not. You know, I was really the only person I knew going through a divorce at that time. Of my close friends, how Old were you? I was just on the cusp of 50.

And you were the only one of your friends getting divorced. It feels like it's divorce season around then.

I think I was just a little bit ahead of the curve. Okay, but, but you know, I, I think there's this assumption, that sort of misconception that. And in fact, my, my, my ex husband said this to me. He's like, oh, you know, 50% of marriages end in divorce. You know, like, what's the big deal? You know, get over it. But actually in my demographic, which is college educated, professional white woman who's been married for 20 years, 14% divorce rate.

Really? It's that low?

Yes, 14%. So that's why it felt lonely. It was like, where, how, how come I'm the only one I know going through this? You're right. Now in the last few years, I feel like I know a lot more people going through it. Divorce season is upon us anyway, so. So you feel very separate from your community when you're going through something like this. I found that it was. I had this incredibly life changing conversation with a psychologist at the University of Utah. Her name's Paula Williams. She studies the factors that make individuals more resilient to stressful events. And this was very important because already there's a lot of data about how just people who go through divorce are 26% more likely to die young, they're more likely to have heart attacks, they're more likely to suffer from chronic illness. So that data was terrible. So it was very comforting to talk to a woman who said, no, no, there are some factors that make individuals more resilient. She said, what my lab is studying is, and this was totally unexpected to me, the power of beauty and the power of awe to help us get over it and we can actually learn to become more open to beauty, more open to awe. She had been a dancer in a previous life. She was very interested in the way arts affect us emotionally and psychologically. As someone who was already very connected to the natural world, you know, I found talking to her wildly hopeful because I thought, okay, I want to learn how to become more open to experiencing awe through nature. And if I was going to sort of claw my way through heartbreak, I was going to awe my way through heartbreak. And you know, you asked about community, which is why I'm bringing this up, because there's a lot of research on the science of awe. And you know, this. The, the psychological effects we get from experiencing awe. One of the things it does is it does Reduce our cortisol levels. It can shift our nervous system, but it makes us feel more connected to the world around us. It makes us more likely to get along with people around us, more likely to engage in community. Lots of experiments show this. You know that when we're looking at a picture of a jumping whale or a waterfall, we will donate more money, we'll give away more lottery tickets, we'll perform better on teams, we act more pro socially, and at the same time, we start thinking less about our own personal dramas.

That's one of the reasons I go to Burning Man.

Yeah, exactly.

I get a sense of awe just riding my bike around in the middle of the night going, I think I'm in Star Wars. It's hard to put words to it, but I think you did a great job.

Yeah, I mean, so, you know, there are many different ways to experience awe. Nature is one of them. But being part of those collective sort of cultural events like Burning man or a symphony or a flash mob, we know it, like, gives us the goosebumps and it makes us feel tingly and it makes us look around and, you know, just watching the eclipse recently, right. You just feel suddenly very friendly and benign towards your neighbors.

I decided to make it more of an awe inspiring experience because I'm in Austin, which is right in the center of it. So I was out in nature with about 200 people at an event, and we had a well known, like, spiritual musician playing during the. During the eclipse and just turned it into as awe inspiring of an event as possible in community because. Well, why not? In order to deepen that.

Well, there's one of my favorite studies actually out of the University of California during the eclipse in 2017. Researchers analyzed, I think it was about a million tweets and put them through a word algorithm and found that people in the zone of totality used more pronouns like we and us compared to people outside the zone of totality who were using more words like I or mine. And I think that really illustrates the way when we're confronted with this incredible awe, we suddenly feel like we're part of something.

You talked about beauty as being an antidote for grief. And what I've found is the first step of just truly letting go of anything like this is gratitude. And the neuroscience states of experiencing beauty and experiencing gratitude, I believe, are about 99% the same. Like, there's specific shifts in the brain that happen. And so for me, turning on gratitude more profoundly in people's brains as I'm helping them through a process at 40 years interest in my own, it, it feels like there's visualization practices that I teach, but there are also some compounds that really accelerate gratitude. We just are in the very late stages of launching ketamine experiences at 40 years of Zen as a small part of the program, as an add on for people who want to use a medicine like that. The brain waves that come out of that, the, the amount of power behind the gratitude states is, Is meaningfully enhanced. Do you look at any of the plant medicines as a way of dealing with the, the, the problem of grief or the problem of heartbreak?

Yeah, absolutely. You know, I, I underwent a number of interventions during the course of the two years I was writing the book and we were testing my, those transcription factors in my immune system before and after and, and one of them was psychedelics. So, you know, I talk a lot about awe and in fact, one of the mechanisms for transformation that's hypothesized for, you know, why these psychedelics are so effective in helping people is that, is that they make us see God, you know, or we feel this unity with the universe. And so I really wanted to try it. It's. It's like awe on steroids. You know, it's like big awe.

Psychedelics are like on steroids. That's a great quote.

Yeah, you know, absolutely. So, so I worked with a therapist and I actually did what they sometimes call a hippie flip dose.

My favorite.

Oh, okay.

What does it say?

I started with a dose of MDMA, which I had never done before, and then about 30 minutes later, I took a full dose of psilocybin. And I think because of the mdma, the theory was that I was, I would be more open, you know, to the medicine of the psilocybin and feel like it was a more benign experience. I was a little bit afraid of it. I was afraid of kind of losing of myself. And, you know, I'm a very cognitive person, generally science journalist. I didn't really want to lose my sense of self. I mean, I did, but I was afraid to.

Yeah.

So the MDMA helped and then. Yeah, I mean, I had about a, you know, six hour experience with the psilocybin. And I honestly think of all the things I, I tried, you know, to recover from heartbreak, that that was maybe the most effective one.

Wow.

And I think the reason I had the guts to do it was I was interviewing Dr. Dacher Keltner at UC Berkeley, who is, is really, really influential in the studies around awe. And he's a child of the 60s as well. And I said to him, do you think I should try psilocybin for heartbreak? And, you know, he sort of closed his door and he said, yeah, absolutely.

There are now two studies showing that taking MDMA with either LSD or psilocybin reduces the chances of retraumatizing yourself. So when people talk about having a, a bad trip, it, it's not really a bad trip. It's that you went back to a painful place and you, maybe because you didn't have the skills or the knowledge or the safe setting, you instead of doing the work on the space, you just re experienced it. But MDMA in combination with those dramatically reduces the chances of that happening so people can get more healing experiences.

I think that's right. I think, you know, you're going to see potentially scary things, you know, while you're tripping. But, you know, the, I think that, you know, the advice you hear from people is if you see a door, open it. If there's something dark happening, there's probably a message for you in that darkness. And I think taking the MDMA kind of makes you go, yeah, okay, I'm, I've, I'm feeling comfortable with this darkness a little bit more.

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Absolutely.

And now you're in an altered state. And if you look at Stan Grof's work, I had the honor of having him on the show in his mid-90s. This is the guy who pioneered LSD therapy and then holotropic breath work. He talks about how in particular lsd, but probably also psilocybin, take you back to actually experiences that you would have had during your birth process or in the womb. These are very, very deep, you know, subcellular states. And that combination of, oh, now I re experienced that and I felt connected. And you can create the connection without any drugs. And this is not a call for listeners to go just randomly experiment with stuff. It's just saying that if you're working with a. Someone who's certified or trained in facilitating, you might find that there's really deep healing that comes. It's not about going to Burning man and doing LSD to have a sense of awe. This is about going in and it feels like editing your own operating system at some levels. Does that resonate with you?

Yeah, it absolutely does. And again, I think the. I think the mechanism is still awe. And I don't think you need psychedelics to find it. I think it, you know, as people say, it's a little bit of a shortcut, perhaps, or it's a very dramatic, you know, handing over of that emotion. But I think the key principles are that you kind of feel like your own self and your own problems are really not that big, not as big a deal, you know, that they are. I had this very clear vision while I was tripping. But. But people get this who meditate. People also get it, you know, in the face of incredible beauty, that, that our emotions are molecules. They're chemical reactions in our brains, that we are molecules, the universe is molecules, we share molecules. And it's kind of like. And I. I mean, I had this very clear message during my own experience that, you know, these are molecules. Like, it's not that big a deal. We all experience them. They're universal. Suffering is universal. We're all in this together. And your own sense of your own ego is. Is maybe not as important as we think it is.

What's the role of ego when you're going through a heartbreak?

I think it takes on an outsized proportion. You know, all you can think about is yourself and your pain. And your friends get tired of you because you're just talking about it on and on. I mean, my friends were very nice. They didn't tell me they were getting sick of me. But, you know, I know that, you know, you just end up talking about yourself and your pain all the time, and even you get tired of it. So I think it's really important for us to remember that this is a human emotion, and it's okay. It's okay to experience the full range of human emotions. I think as someone who was a science journalist and felt like things should be logical all the time, that I probably was not very comfortable feeling difficult emotions, as many of us, you know, in the Western world are not. Right. We try so hard not to feel discomfort. And I think heartbreak really taught me that to feel alive, you need to feel some pain sometimes, and you need to connect with suffering, and that there's actually a beauty in just embracing the full spectrum of human emotions.

There's pretty good evidence that humans have been intentionally seeking out brief, intentional pain for thousands of years.

Yeah.

Because of what you just said.

Yeah.

Right. And the latest incarnation of that would.

Be ice baths and ultramarathons as well.

That's totally true. Or even a CrossFit workout. Right, right. And there's neurochemical reasons for that, because if you experience pain and acknowledge it, your dopamine sensitivity gets reset. But if you wallo in pain for a long time, it has negative effects.

Okay. So here's actually a really interesting thing about that that you just reminded me of with awe. You know, one of the theories about why awe can help make us resilient is that awe makes us a little bit uncomfortable. You know, when we're seeing something we don't fully expect to see, there's like a surprise element of awe. You know, if you think about our ancestors didn't know there was an eclipse coming. Right. All of a sudden, the sky would turn dark and cold, and, you know, the birds would freak out. That's a little bit terrifying. Right. For a moment, there's something in awe that we don't really understand. So when we experience it, it's kind of like the ice bath. It's an inoculation against a little bit of stress and a little bit of discomfort. So that when emotional earthquakes happen, we're better at kind of returning to baseline.

That makes a lot of sense. You talked about ego a little while ago. I. I have come to view ego as the force that keeps your body alive, as if you're not in there. And I believe it emerges from individual cells all Acting together in a distributed consciousness, and that it's a different consciousness from my consciousness. And that came to me over years. But the idea started when I got divorced. I was briefly married in my 20s, and it was a really not healthy relationship, and I own my part of that. And so I went to my first personal development retreat at the end of that, when I just kind of hit rock bottom. I probably could have benefited greatly from your book. And I. I did. I went because I didn't know what to do. And a friend said, go to this thing. And I did holotropic breath work and a bunch of other stuff over. Over 10 days. And like you, I was very rational. And I remember sitting with this very, very wise woman who'd spent 30 years in the field of transpersonal psychology almost since it was invented. And she. She looked at me when I was just really out of sorts, and she said, well, are you feeling anything? I said, yeah, I'm feeling pissed off.

Right.

You know, all this stuff is stupid. Why do you want me to, you know, breathe or, you know, hit pillows and all this stuff that people do at those kind of retreats, all of which, by the way, can work. And she said, well, are you feeling anything else? I said, no, there's. There's no reason to feel anything else. And she said, do you feel it in your body? And I said, well, yeah, I feel something in my stomach. She goes, yeah, there's a name for that. She goes, it's fear. And I looked around, I said, there's nothing here to be afraid of, therefore it's not fear. And she just laughed and she said, dave, fear is an emotion. It doesn't have to be rational. And that was the moment when I. I realized that I can simultaneously be rational and irrational, and that's okay. And that eventually led to this understanding of the. The role of the ego and where it comes from, and that it's actually just not me, but it's in there with me. And. And that's brought me great peace. And it's also allowed some of the. The more advanced biohacking techniques around letting go of things, because instead of, you know, think I'm this mishmash of rational and irrational, I am right. Or at least this body is. But it allowed me to delineate where certain emotions were coming from and to acknowledge them instead of pretending like they weren't real. Did you have to do something like that?

Yeah, absolutely. I. I felt like fear in some ways was a really overriding part of my experience with heartbreak. You Know, there was the grief, you know, over a lost loved one, but so much of it was that I was honestly a little bit afraid of what was going to happen to me. You know, now what was my future going to be like? You know, this totally unexpected future that I didn't think I was going to have. You know, how is I going to, you know, how was I going to move through the world now? Was I ever going to find love again? Was I capable of finding love? You know, was I going to be able to afford health insurance? I mean, there are a lot of deep fears that, that come up from, from an event like this, an experience like this. And I wasn't used to, wasn't used to feeling those things, wasn't used to feeling insecure. And so I had to acknowledge that a lot of this drama and upset and probably what was happening to my body was fear based and threat based. And you're right, I think at some point you have to sort of move through it. You can't just pretend it's not there. The only way to, I think, work on resolving it is to accept it and kind of have a conversation with it a little bit. And I think that's partly what can happen, you know, through some of these therapeutic, you know, experiences. I certainly did a lot of therapy of various sorts, but I think, I think fear is a normal part of being human. You know, it's scary to be a human alive in the world and our, our ego is there to keep us afraid because without it, you know, we don't have the motivation, you know, to, to do what we need to do to stay alive. So I think rather than thinking of it as something other, you know, we need to accept that it's, it is part of our human experience. And then as, as you say, figure out ways to, you know, at least not sit in that nervous system state all the time.

In the world of biohacking, I teach that there's four or five F words that drive our bodies and they're all egoic based, but they, they happen in order before we can really think. And the first one you might guess is fear. Yeah, right. Because it's the strongest one and it's something might kill me, therefore I should be reactive. And then the body goes into all these inflammatory things. A lot of the physiological stuff that you talk about, there's because, well, you felt fear. And then there's food because, you know, being hungry is a bit of a problem for most species over thousands of years. And then it's, well, it's another F word. And you can probably imagine what it is. I'm thinking of fertility, but I know what you're imagining, but I wasn't going to trick you into saying it. And then the fourth one is friend, which is community and connection. And the fifth one is actually forgiveness, because I'll let you go back and reduce fear. And like that's sort of the order of operations for what our body will do if it can allocate resources in the right way. But I want to ask you about that, that third.

Yeah.

F word.

Yeah.

Because in some of the articles I've, I've written, I found research about 20% of people talk about meeting God during a profound orgasmic experience.

Yeah.

And when we go through a heartbreak, we probably aren't with a lover, at least for a period of time. How important is reconnecting intimately with people for the healing process around heartbreak?

There's so many directions to go with this question and there are so many things I can say. I will say that, you know, part of the conventional wisdom after a big heartbreak is don't jump into another relationship too soon. You know, you need to learn to love yourself first or, you know, you, blah, blah. Okay, I, I was not interested in that. Honestly, I, I, I just felt actually very compelled to connect romantically and sexually.

Yeah.

You know, right away. And I don't, I don't really know where they came from except that it was part of my drive, I think, to feel alive and to feel validated and to feel worthwhile, you know, all of those things. But interestingly, there is science to back up the idea that having a rebound relationship can be very good for recovering from heartbreak. It can help you regain your self esteem more quickly. It can help you regain your self confidence, it can help you get over your lost relationship more quickly. And so I was thrilled to find out that there was science there and that the science behind the don't get involved too quickly wasn't necessarily valid. I will say that I would never recommend that people jump out and jump into a rebound relationship. I think, you know, that can be risky. Right. You have to do what feels comfortable. So I think it's a very individual kind of decision for me. I think it was actually very helpful. And then I will also say there's a lot of science around the soothing effects and the stress reducing effects of touch. Right. So we know that oxytocin is a direct counterpoint to cortisol. It doesn't have to come from sex. It can come from petting a Dog. And, you know, it can come from holding hands with a child. It can come from, you know, making eye contact with people, people you're close to. So I do think that human connection, that tendon, befriend, kind of instinct that we have, and women have it more than men, may be one of the reasons women recover more quickly from heartbreak than men. That human connection, I think, is a huge part of getting over any kind of stress. I mean, I think the human organism, you know, we are, we live stressful lives. We are kind of designed to feel stress, but we're also designed to recover from it. And that's, that's where I think a lot of us go wrong in modern life. We don't have the ways to recover from stress as part of our sort of culture. You know, the sort of dancing under the Milky Way, sitting by the fire, singing songs together. These are ways we used to recover from the daily drip of stress. And a lot of us just don't do that anymore.

So much, so much wisdom in that. There's two ways you can go after a heartbreak. One is a rebound relationship, and the other one is rebound, what's called the third F word. So basically you can have sex or you can have a new relationship. Right. And are there benefits to one path versus the other?

Again, I think it's very individual. I was very, I think, aware of not wanting to be in a long term relationship. Yeah, Again, really quickly. I mean, heartbreak in some ways provides a fantastic opportunity in the absence of a partner. Right. And I had been with the same partner for decades and suddenly here was this opportunity to be like, oh, I actually, you know, really like going to bed early, you know, or I like sleeping in, or I like watching this kind of movie, but never liked that kind of movie, so I never did it. And so I think it's really a gift, you know, to be able to take that time to sort of get to know yourself, rediscover, you know, who you are and what you like. I mean, here's, you know, one example is that my partner actually didn't really like physical touch in terms of like PDA or holding hands. And so since I was with him Since I was 18, I didn't really know if I liked that either. And it wasn't until I had sort of some, some shorter term or medium term relationships where I really rediscovered these whole new ways to be with a partner that I just loved.

There's a sense of safety that you have when you're in a relationship, even if it's not a great relationship. At least you have a partner there with you. And you talked about fear and safety is one of the opposites of fear. It's not the only one. In fact, peace is probably a better description of the true opposite of fear. But I have found that men and women are fully capable of generating a state of safety from within themselves that creates profound resilience. And working through a divorce or a breakup or any kind of heartbreak or grief, it teaches you, if you do the work right, that you're not going to die, even though it felt like you were going to die. And I've had this conversation with both of my teenage kids, like, look, there's going to come a time where you meet someone you really like, and almost certainly within a few months, there will be a breakup, right? And it's going to feel like you're going to die. And when that happens, you know, let's talk, right? Because even though it feels that way, that's not true, right? And this is something that almost all humans go through. I mean, it's just part of being here. And, you know, when it happens, just know, like, it's a process and you'll overcome it. And that's what friends are for. If you could go back and talk to yourself as a teenager, now that you've wrote a book on heartbreak, what advice would you share with yourself?

That's a really interesting question. I had a therapist who said to me at one point that being alone is like a muscle. It's good to practice it. You know, even if you're someone who likes being in relationships, it's really good to practice being alone. And I think that would be great advice for a teenager, too. There's so much cultural pressure to have a. Have a special, you know, person in your life and, you know, put them on Instagram or whatever it is now. You know, we consider that sort of a success if a person has a sort of visible loved one in their life. And I think that we've really overplayed that. I think that it would be really great if we can also sort of valorize the joys, right, and the generativity and the creativity and the comforts that come from sometimes being on your own.

It feels like you can have the highest and best quality relationship when you're perfectly comfortable being alone, because then there's nothing pushing you into the relationship, and there's nothing making you stay in a relationship other than free choice versus fear. And so I. I would double down on that. You have to be perfectly Safe being single and having your community and having a connection to nature and on beauty and all the things that single people can do. I think before you really step into a new relationship that's likely to be healthier and if you skip those steps because you have a rebound relationship and you let it become a long term relationship instead of doing healing, that seems like a double edged sword. You know, the rebound relationship is your judgment is clouded when you've just gone through a heartbreak. So it's not what you feel might not be necessarily reflective of what you are going to feel when you're healed. Which is why I think your approach was really healthy. So I'll have some shorter medium term relationships with people and see what you like and reconnect and experience the benefits of intimacy. Right. So, but knowing that, okay, these are probably going to end and just being okay with it, how did you get to be just okay with it given that you just experienced heartbreak and now you're getting some level of physical and emotional intimacy with someone but like, this is not a long term thing?

Yeah, I was totally okay with it. I, I, I would have been more afraid of a long term relationship, you know, at that point.

Amen. Yeah.

Yeah. I think there was such room for short term and longer and medium term relationships. That said, I think that even in those relationships you can have a very beautiful, you know, and intense connection with another person. And even though you're suffering maybe and you're still grieving and you're still working on all these things in your, in yourself, you can do that in the context of being in a relationship. So I don't think, you know, waiting until, you know, you have figured everything out is, is necessarily the right step either. I think that sometimes it takes relating to another person to push that growth, you know, and to help you. So I am, I guess I'm a fan of whatever feels right and I think you should honor that feeling. So, you know, sometimes I think you may feel pressured, right, to staying in a relationship longer than you want. And, and I think you can give yourself permission not to do that, you know, and maybe it's where I am in my life. You know, my kids are raised, you know, I feel like I have different expectations from a relationship now. I have a stronger sense of myself. And frankly, you know, as a woman of, you know, born in the generation Gen X, I'm kind of sick of all the cultural, you know, instructions and pressure about what a relationship is supposed to look like. I'm just over it.

Do you think that Some of the newer relationships dynamics that are maybe more public now, things like poly or monogamish or non monogamy or ethical non monogamy. And there's like 50,000 words, all of which I don't even remember. Are those an antidote to heartbreak? Are they a way of dealing with it? Just talk to me about new relationship styles and what you know about heartbreak.

Yeah, interesting question. I don't have a lot of experience of being in those kinds of relationships and I'm reluctant to be judgy about them.

You're a science journalist, you're judgy by definition. Come on.

But it's science based. So I, you know, after talking to physical anthropologist or I guess she's an anthropologist, Helen Fisher, you know, she's written all these books about the neuroscience of love. She has really convinced me that most of us are in fact wired for partnership and that most of us do get pretty jealous, you know, if we have to share kind of a love relationship. Personally, I think I believe that, you know, I think I would have a hard time with poly. But you know, apparently there are people out there who really make it work and they grow from it and learn from it as well.

I feel like jealousy is just unhealed trauma. It's people not feeling safe. And the reason I say this is a while ago I had two well published, well respected leaders in the field of personal development come through 40 years of Zen with me and with his long term wife sitting there. He said, well, I have this, this problem with jealousy and it almost broke us up years ago. He said, I don't know why it happens, but when I see another guy look at my wife or flirt with her or something, I just lose it. And I've had to do a lot of breathing and calming down and I still have this angst about it. And one of the techniques that we teach there at 40 years of Zen specifically deals with this. And I said, well, you know, you've learned a new state. This is the state of awe, beauty and ultimately letting go. And it's a very, you have to do it in order with the right neuroscience states to do this. So I said, well, why don't you just go imagine while you're in the pod doing this, altered states work. Why don't you just go imagine that she's with, that she's cheating on you, actually doing it. And oh, with, with a, with like a soccer player, you know, like a professional athlete. And he's like, well, you see, he like kind of turns red in the face. And he's like, I don't know if I could do that. And I said, no, let's just go all the way the whole soccer team. And she's rolling on the floor laughing, and he's like, oh, my God, I think I'm having a panic attack. So we went and he did the process. And when he was done and he, he did all the steps of the reset process there, he came out going, oh, my God, it's gone. Like, I realized I didn't die when I felt into my feelings with that. So now I don't feel like I'm going to die when someone is flirting with her. And it made a meaningful difference because when the body thinks it's going to die when something happens and it's wrong, that just seems to cause pain. So I feel like jealousy is a manifestation of, of fear. Does that sound accurate?

It does sound accurate. I, I think I would challenge the idea that it's only a result of unhealed trauma. I, I, I think that again, that are, you know, the way our neuroendocrines, you know, and our peptides work in our brain, that, you know, we do sometimes feel unsafe and we long for safety, and I think that's even in the absence of unhealed trauma.

Yeah, that's a very fair point.

I think that people have different thresholds, you know, for feeling unsafe. Absolutely. And I, and I think also there's a lot of individual variation, and they've shown this actually in voles, you know, that there are some prairie voles or, you know, generally monogamous. Right. But, but there are some prayer bulls who aren't. And I think that that's true in humans, that, that we have different receptors in different parts of our brains that encode for attachment. And so again, I think, you know, rather than just being judgy about each other, you know, we should just sort of understand that, that there's variation out there. And yeah, this is going to work really well for some people and, and probably not so well for most of us.

I have some friends who are very unhappy and stressed in poly because of what we just talked about. And I know a smaller number of friends who have secure attachment and are poly and are happy as clams. Right. And it feels to me like it's secure attachment more so than monogamy. That's, that's most important for creating that sense of safety. Talk to me about what heartbreak does for your sense of attachment.

Well, I think it really questions it and, you know, it, it Undermines it. And that's what causes the trauma. Partly, you know, is this broken attachment bond, which is one of the most difficult kinds of pain we are wired to feel. So, you know, humans aren't just social animals, but we are hyper social animals. We are designed to take these attachment bonds very, very seriously. When they're broken, we are kind of wired to freak out about it. So the question is repair, right? How do we regain that sense of trust that these bonds can reappear with a new person? The sad thing is that there's a percentage of people, I think it's about 15% of people who are heartbroken, who really don't get over it. They are not able to form deep new romantic attachments. There's probably, in that case, there probably is some unhealed trauma. And we know that, unfortunately, that's a sizable statistic. 15%. And I think that that's really driving the statistics you see about longevity and morbidity, that these are the people driving the statistics behind early death and disease and this continued feelings of loneliness. I think that's part of the urgency behind why we need to work hard to recover from heartbreak, to rebuild our trust in each other. Why, when we have friends going through this, it's important to help them.

How do you best help a friend who's going through heartbreak?

I think anything we can do to help facilitate those three buckets I mentioned earlier, you know, the calm, the connection, and the sense of meaning and purpose. So for some friends, it might be the connection, the connection piece. You know, encourage them to talk about it with you. Be vulnerable about your own suffering and heartbreak. It was so helpful to me when I would talk to these scientists and, you know, who were studying the voles or studying even bird song. There were, I mean, there were all kinds of lab animals, you know, that I ended up learning about. And in. In almost every case, I would say to the scientist, you know, I'm interested in this because I'm going through a divorce. And they would say, oh, my God, let me tell you about my divorce, or let me tell you about my heartbreak. And that was so helpful to me because, as I said, I didn't necessarily have really close friends who were going through it at the time. Take your friend on a hike, you know, drag them to your meditation class or your breathing workshop. Help them feel like they are in a safe place.

I've noticed that the most important thing I can do with heartbroken friends, even if it's not that recent of a heartbreak, is if, you know, how to really give someone a hug. But a safe hug when where you're actually transmitting safety with your field, like with your cells, sometimes that can just be magical where you don't even have to say anything, just like, hey, just let me give you a hug. And you have the 8 second hug that releases oxytocin. I've done a couple podcasts on that with, with Dr. Love, who's done a lot of oxytocin research, Paul Zach. And it, it feels like that can be good, but it has to, it has to have intention behind it and it can't be like a, a sexually ten tinged hug. It just has to be just an open hearted kind of thing. And, and you can feel someone else's nervous system relax in that. Like, oh, I just had like a taste of safety, like a reminder that that's where they're from and that that's where they're going on their healing journey.

This is 80 seconds, the magic number there.

Just eight seconds or more.

Okay.

Right. And the Heartmath Institute people, I was an advisor there years ago, who have a lot of wisdom, they'll tell you hug heart to heart so that, you know, you basically put your face over their right shoulder instead of their left shoulder so that the fields of the heart are more closely aligned. And there is a field of the heart that we can measure with a magnetometer like this. This is real science and physics, not just, you know, the airy fairy stuff, which also has value. Not saying that just because we believe something, because it's worked a long time and we don't know why it probably still works. I, I don't have any issue with that.

Yeah.

And so that's the safety part. I've also heard actually from a, a friend recently who's going through heartbreak who said, well, every time I, I try to talk about it, everyone else ends up telling me all their stories and then they start crying and, and like it feels like it's never really about me. Like I, I just wanted to share and then everyone's kind of dumping there is because there's so much unhealed relationship trauma. Is it better or was it better for you when someone would share that they had a common experience, or was it better when they just listened?

I think there's a place for both of those. I guess if, if, if you're going to share about your own experience with your friend. Make it short, make it, make it mostly about that. But, but, you know, help them feel like they're not alone in this experience. You know, this reminds me of another sort of, you know, antidote to heartbreak, which is the idea of ritual. You know, we don't really, in our culture have rituals for heartbreak. We have so many rituals for marriage and not necessarily for the end of it. And one of the places I traveled for the book was Croatia, because there is a museum of broken relationships.

Oh, wow.

And I just loved. I loved this experience. People from all over the world have sent in objects representing their broken relationship. And some of them are very funny. And then. And then they'll write one paragraph about sort of how this object describes their broken relationship. And it's really a beautiful experience because you see, right, how universal this is, that this is a shared human experience. But you also see how just the act of sending in an object, writing a paragraph, and then seeing it under glass, you know, in this beautifully lit display, kind of helps encapsulate the whole process, you know, provides a little bit of a. A little bit of detachment, right, that you're able to now tell a story about it. And I think that that idea of being able to write about this, you know, in a paragraph, you know, it's almost like how I felt when I wrote the last page of my book. You know, there's a little bit of closure. You're never going to get full closure from a big heartbreak. You know, as you said in your introduction, that kind of becomes a part of us. But I think it's very important to be able to have a little bit of that distancing. And sometimes that can come from just the active narrat.

I've seen two other things that. That people do that can be really effective. A while ago, I climbed to the top of Mount Shasta, which is a. A challenging climb. You know, you've. You've got to spend the night halfway up the mountain. You go at three in the morning with crampons and an ice ax. And it's, you know, real mountain climbing. It's not Himalayas, but it's. It's substantial. And you get to the very, very top, and there's this metal box that's affixed to the rock, and it's got a heavy lid, and you can open it and you realize how incredibly difficult it was for anyone to carry something that heavy up there, because there's a lot of climbing. Every ounce matters. And in there, you'll see notes or photos from broken relationships where people are letting go. But the mo. The thing that gave me just kind of goosebumps, not just because it was cold, was someone had worn a railroad spike on a necklace, okay, that weighs a couple pounds included, worn it for a long time like they were carrying a burden from a relationship, and they decided to leave it there in a sacred spot. And so that's one thing is sort of, you know, telling the story, doing the nerve, and then doing a hero's journey to let go of something. And the other one that's more common is Burning Man. There's a temple there. And by the time you're at the seventh day of Burning man, there's at least 10,000 stories of heartbreak written on the walls and love notes or photos, both for people who are grieving over people who've passed or grieving over relationships. And you write it there and you. They burn it at the end. Like you let. You physically burn it, you let it go. And in my shamanic training, they. They teach a similar thing where you have a sacred fire or even just a candle, and you write down, I'm letting it go. And something in your cells, I think, knows when you do something like that, because fire is such a primordial thing, that it feels like that can be a part of letting go and healing. Did you do ceremonial stuff like that? You know, little. Little voodoo dolls or anything? What was your primary?

Yeah, I did, actually. At one point I. Pretty early on I kind of wrote a letter, I think it was to my ex about, you know, why I was ready to say goodbye. And then I burned it. But this was at the sort of request of a woman I was doing a workshop with. And I wasn't ready to do it. It was too early. You know, it didn't. It didn't make me feel better. It made me feel worse because at that point I was still sort of trying to grasp on, you know, to the memories of the relationship. I wasn't totally ready to let go of it yet. And then I did it again. About a year later. I was on a 30 day river trip. This was part of my own kind of Heroes Journey. 14 days of it was solo because I felt like I needed to really embrace this metaphor of learning how to row my own boat now, you know, And I wanted to be comfortable being alone. I wanted to access my bravery, stuff like that. And on one of the last nights of that trip, I did it again and I burned it again. And it felt so right. And it was very. It was. And at that point it was very cathartic. And then, you know, also another thing I did was I. I took my wedding ring and I put it in a Little boat made out of lettuce. And I released. It was not an expensive wedding. I released it down the Potomac River.

Wow.

And that was. And I did it with some of my best girlfriends. And that also just felt really powerful. And I sort of, you know, was releasing it to the wat, to the force of the waters also a very, for me, a very beautiful experience. Similar.

So the role of ceremonial release is I think, underappreciated in Western culture. But it, it sure does make a difference.

It sure does.

And part of being able to generate your own feeling of, of safety comes from understanding you won't die when you're alone. And I, I recognized that I had a, a fear of being alone. So I ended up asking a shaman to drop me off in a cave for four days all by myself with no food. Because I also had noticed that if I was feeling lonely, I'd probably eat more. So I said, well, let's just face fear of hunger and fear of loneliness all at the same time. I don't know how else I could have made it worse. You know, fear of a nuclear war or zombies or something. But I did that just to experience it, that, that brief intentional pain. And it was, it was a really important moment for me. I wrote my book Fast this Way about that, the psychological side of fasting and loneliness and emotional eating and all that. But what it did is it helped me understand that that just deep ceiling, that deep feeling of, of safety and that it's something you can generate. And it even inspired Danger Coffee, which is my, my new post bulletproof brand and it's called Danger because who knows what you might do. It's that sense that you know what I can handle anything, even being alone, even the fear of rejection, of asking someone out or starting something new just to understand I've got this. It's a different kind of peace then the kind of piece where I'm so tired and I'm safe because I'm in a jail. It, it's, it's like the polar opposite of that. And there's some nuance there around teaching your nervous system to feel safe. Now when you went down that path, did your type 1 diabetes get better?

So that's the really interesting thing is that we did a blood test before the 30 day river trip and we did one after. You know, it's right after that 14 day solo, my transcription factors did not change. Even though I felt more comfortable being alone and I felt like I had learned how to row my own boat and I felt how to. I Sort of embraced the metaphor, right, of like journeying down this river by myself. But that was a little bit of a story I was telling myself. It may have been a helpful story, but it wasn't actually helpful to my cells. So I think it would be really interesting, Dave, if you had checked your cytokine levels after that fast, because here's what's going on. We're still our primitive primate selves, right? And we are still actually not that safe when we're alone according to our. Right, according to our DNA and our wiring and our nervous system. So, and it's true that I was, I think, a little bit on alert because I was literally in the wilderness by myself. So I really had to be paying attention to, you know, am I going to light the beach on fire? Am I going to time my boat incorrectly? Am I going to like lose a critical piece of gear? Am I going to injure myself? You know, you have to be extra careful when you're alone in the wilderness and your cells know that and they are on alert. Actually, it turns out to me it.

Feels like you're not really being extra careful. You're being extra connected because your awareness has expanded and things that you would have never considered before and you can be aware of them without being afraid of them. Right. And just learning that I've got. This is what happens over a week or two in the wilderness.

It may have helped that you weren't eating and that you were sitting in one place, right. I was actually traveling through the wilderness, so I really did have to tie my knots correctly and stuff like that.

Did you tie them out of wisdom and a knowingness of your competency or did you tie them out of fear?

You know, I was just double checking them because if you lose your, if you lose your boat, you're fucked. Right? So I had to, you know, that's, that's what I mean by like, you're a little bit paying attention and your cells are paying attention. But I, I loved the feelings of connection I got from, you know, I was talking to a great blue heron every day there was like this bird that was sort of following me down the river. I was noticing so many more animals. You know, I was smelling more smells. I, you know, my senses really came alive. And I think that that actually helps put your nervous system in a good.

Place a hundred percent. I remember by the time I was done with that experience, I was just being tormented by these things called sweat bees. And they're bees that don't sting you, but they love the smell of sweat. And I'm in the desert. So they just come into the cave and just buzz around you like way worse than flies because they never land on you. They're just in your face all the time. And I finally just reached this weird meditative state where they would leave if I went into that state, and then if I would stop, say, they'd come back. I'm like, oh, my God, I'm remote controlling bees now. Maybe I was really hungry, but it didn't feel like that.

Yeah.

And there's a connectedness to nature that we're capable of for sure.

I recommend solo time, you know, in the wilderness, regardless of what it's doing, you know, to your immune cells. I just. I do recommend it for everyone because I think it's an incredible experience.

You've given that experience meaning. How do people who've gone through heartbreak find meaning in it?

Well, I think one of the most interesting things that happens is that you become better able to listen to other people's pain. Right. And that alone is an incredible gift. This acknowledgement that we are all suffering beings. Now that I've been through this, I can recognize it more easily in someone else. I can identify with it more easily in someone else. I feel this kind of innate instinct, you know, to want to. Want to tend and befriend and do that. I know it's made. The experience has made me a better friend. I feel like it's actually opened my heart and made me more capable of love. I think if there's a way to intentionally look for those kinds of openings in your own experience, however fleeting they may seem at first, you know, to sort of have the confidence that. That your heart may end up a little bit softer, a little bit more permeable, a little bit less armored after this event. You'll be a better person in the lives of the people you care about.

Something I experienced when I was divorced around age 30 was that about half my community was supportive. I remember when my friend Lance called up and just said, dave, like, I don't know if anyone said this to you, but, like, I. I think what the way you're being treated right now is. Is. And I just wanted to let you know, like, you're. You're not all crazy here, you know, and it was just this. This sense where I was like, maybe I am crazy. I don't know what's going on. A lot of people feel that as they're going through, especially if there's codependency. And that was just so, so meaningful. But about half of my friends, they looked at, like, my heartbreak like it might be contagious, and so they would pull away. And a lot of divorced friends have told me that they lost some of their friends because it just shined a light on weaknesses in their own relationships. What was your experience of going through heartbreak? Did you lose friends who were threatened by it?

Yeah, I think it's similar. I think you. You kind of learn who your friends are. There are some people who really show up for you, and then there are some people who really don't. And it's. It's hard to know what's behind that. But I think the contagion theory is real. I have a friend whose husband died really young, and she told me the same thing, that her. Her friends didn't really want to be around her anymore, that. That she, you know, kind of represented the possibility, right, that this could happen to them. And it wasn't a possibility. Some of them wanted to sit with and spend time with, so. But I think, again, it probably reflects the fact that those friends hadn't themselves become empathetic, you know, through some kind of reckoning. Right, with their own life events and difficulties. And in a way, if we're all heartbroken and we own up to it, I think we can be there for each other a little bit better.

You mentioned empathy. When a friend of yours is going through a new heartbreak and you're feeling empathetic, how do you stop that from reactivating your own experience?

You know, I'm not really afraid of that. I think if my friend is going through a hard time for any reason, you know, I often do start crying with them, you know, that doesn't. That doesn't worry me. I don't. I'm not afraid of that kind of suffering, you know, my own for a little while. I don't know if it's helpful to them. It's just what naturally comes up. Because I'm no longer, I think, trying to control my emotions as much as I used to.

It may come down to the fact that you've done enough healing so that. That you're. You know, that you're safe. Even if you briefly experience your friend's suffering, that it. It's not yours.

I think that's true. I think I have enough distance now, you know, from the pain that I'm. I'm able to go back. Go back into the cave, you know, for a little while.

One of the. The chapters in your book is called your cells know everything, which is totally Core to the way I see biohacking today. And that's your explanation for how the autoimmune type 1 diabetes happened. Can you talk about some of the other physiological manifestations of heartbreak? Just give me a list.

Yes. Well, one of the most fascinating is what's sometimes called. Well, it's takotsubo cardiomyopathy, also known as heartbreak syndrome. This is a literal cardiac event that happens to people who have experienced a big emotional blow. So it represents about 4% of all cardiac events in the hospital. Fortunately, it has a relatively low fatality rate. But I think about 20% of people go on to have some heart damage afterwards. It's not a conventional heart attack. It's not caused by a blockage in the artery. It's really caused by these stress hormones freaking out the left ventricle of the heart, causing it to balloon out in the presence of these stress hormones and stop beating. And so people feel like they're having a heart attack, and in fact, their heart is not working correctly. But when they get imaged, you know, in the er, there's no blockage. So it often happens, especially in postmenopausal women. So there seems to be some protective effect of estrogen. And sometimes it will happen after the death of a loved one. Sometimes it happens after the death of a pet, for example. I've talked to some women who have experienced it. You know, when they get, like, sued, you know, by someone, you know, there's like, a very stressful kind of sudden event that's happened. And, you know, we know that when one partner dies, the remaining partner has a much higher rate of death, you know, in the subsequent year following. So the immune system absolutely records this emotional weather going on in our. In our hearts and shows up.

I've had myocarditis a couple times before it became popular in the last three years for some mysterious reason. And this is as a younger person. And there's a feeling around. Around your heart. And there's a reason we call this heartbreak because it feels like that. And one of the times it was probably related to mold or, you know, toxic mold exposure. The other time, I. I did some really just profound, deep healing work, probably healing anyway. And it was like I almost got to a heart opening, but I didn't. So it felt like there was this. This shell. I mean, the heart was beating differently, and there was inflammation around the heart. And I would attribute that to having gone to some very deep, you know, shamanic type of places and not quite emerged all the way. We'll call it the cardiac equivalent of blue balls. For if that's not too crass, you're like, man, there's a lot of pressure in there. And like, if the pressure can't go anywhere, it creates just the sense of unease. And it took about almost a year for that to subside just from intense spiritual or meditative practices. I don't think I've ever talked about that on the show. And that's maybe the downside of meditation or doing spiritual work with people who aren't fully qualified for the states that you're going to go into.

Yeah.

And I think that risk is also present, especially with ayahuasca. But some of the other psychedelics, the same thing could happen. How do you stop it? I mean, could we just take rapamycin, which is an anti aging immunosuppressant for the year after we go through a heartbreak to make sure we don't get it? Like what? Give me some hacks here.

I think the best hack is to try to get out of a state of threat. Right. So, you know, however it is again that we sort of find these states of calm.

So electing different politicians, is that.

Not reading the news? Maybe not scrolling through Instagram first thing in the morning?

Yeah. Getting rid of your social media or taking a break and certainly watching the news is, it's hard to heal from a heartbreak if you're watching CNN or Fox or whoever that calls you. I can't even list all the news networks anymore because I don't care.

That's a great point. I mean, there's so much anxiety, you know, and depression going around everywhere now, even without the heartbreak. But ultimately, you know, I believe that we need to be engaged with our community. We can't just totally turn it off forever. You know, I talk to young people all the time who are devastated by climate grief, for example, and they're so, they're so devastated that they feel defeated. You know, they don't necessarily have the health and the energy to get out of bed in the morning and fight the fights. Right. And so I think that's really sad. And I worry very much about their future immune systems because we know this kind of stress and anxiety they're living through now in 30 years is going to manifest as autoimmune disease. And so, you know what I, what I tell everyone, these young people, but also anyone going through heartbreak is this is why it's all the more important to be able to access the gratitude, access the joy, find the beauty. Right. Because these are things that are going to kind of refill the tank, help you sleep better, help you be able to wake up and do the hard work that we all need to do in this crazy world.

I look at climate stress as entirely immediate generated phenomena. It, it's traumatizing. And it's not to say that we don't have a problem with especially chemical pollution that's disrupting your endocrine system, that lowers your testosterone, that lowers your dopamine levels, so you're more susceptible to stress. That's all absolutely happening. But if you're in an existential Crisis and you're 18 because you're worried about what is a 60 year problem? Look at what happened over the last 60 years, you have no idea. But I've met personally with people who look me straight in the eye. These are the most competent people who know what's going on and said, oh no, we have the fusion thing solved, we're three years from rolling it out. And I wrote the first small check that eventually became Elon Musk's hundred million dollar carbon capture X prize. There are so many things you don't know about. And to focus on doom and gloom, it just means that you are programmable instead of free. And the biggest thing about Biohack is that you're in charge of your own biology, including the state of your nervous system. And you can deal with climate stress, you can deal with relationship stress or heartbreak if you know how to generate safety in your own self. So, okay, there's a problem, I'm safe, I'm going to deal with this problem versus there's a problem, it's the end of the world. People get stuck on rumination. According to a recent expert on memory who was on the show, a guy from UC Davis who runs the memory lab there. And we had a fantastic conversation about the toxicity of ruminating on a trauma or a stress. So how do people have gone through heartbreak, stop ruminating about it.

You know, I think that again, some of us are, we're just, there's a lot of variability in how we're wired. Some of us tend to be ruminators more than others. I don't think we can necessarily say to ourselves just stop ruminating.

No, it's like saying stop feeling. It doesn't work.

Exactly, exactly. I mean some of us are just ruminators, we just are. And there are a lot of gifts that actually associated with that. You know, we tend to think things really deeply and we tend to think through problems really deeply and we tend to be more Empathetic in some ways, we're the ones who really do try to work very hard to make the world better because we feel the pain. But again, I think it's not so much a question of avoiding the stress or avoiding the rumination, it's letting that happen but then resolving it, working to find some relief. We're going to feel stress, but we also have to figure out ways to de stress at the end of the day. And that's where I think the magic can really happen. And it's, you know, again, it's going to be different for different people. For me, I know if I go out and I look at the sunset, if I am paying attention to what the moon is doing, if I can hang out with my dog, find these. And I love this phase. Micro dosing stress or sorry, microdosing awe. If we can learn how to microdose off. Wow, then we can help resolve these, you know, daily kind of miseries that we put ourselves in.

I think I'm already awe inspired. I just got my microdose by that idea.

So yeah, I love, I just, I love that term microdose. You know, today we're not going to find an eclipse right every day, but maybe we can find a beautiful blossom down the street or you know, a beautiful plum in our fruit bowl.

Would it be a reasonable approach to just take mushrooms every Friday night?

I think you're the expert on that more than I am. No, I, I know a lot of people who love the idea of microdosing psilocybin. I, maybe you're aware of this. I'm not aware of a lot of science showing that that's a great idea.

There's a, a meaningful amount of science for microdosing LSD and psilocybin because it increases neuroplasticity via a compound called BDNF and likely ngf, nerve growth factor. If you are dealing with heartbreak and you're going through a process, would having a younger, more neuroplastic brain make it easier to re pattern your nervous system? Well, yeah, it would, but most people who think they're microdosing are not doing it right. I'm in Austin and it feels like there's microdose chocolate bars all over the place. Like, that's not a microdose, man. That's a quarter of a dose. A microdose is 5% of a dose and you can barely feel it. You don't feel trippy at all. You might feel slightly more creative or energized, but it's very subtle. Like, less subtle than coffee. So understand, though, even a full dose or a micro dose does make change easier in the brain. That's why we're using ketamine at 40 years in, because for 72 hours afterwards, there's a profound increase in BDNF and nerve growth factor, right when people are doing their deepest work, maybe of their entire life. So it provides an unfair advantage for personal transformation. So that would be the argument for it.

You know, we can get a lot of those BDNF effects and sort of plasticity effects from experiencing exercise, you know, from experiencing awe as well.

I absolutely agree. Nature also can raise bdnf. There's lots of things I'm. Because I'm a biohacker, the algorithm I learned is I'm going to do everything at once that brings about an effect. Because the most important thing for me is knowing I got the effect, not which of the five things I did created the effect. And I just realized, even if I live for 180 years minimum, which is my current goal, if I tried a different single variable every month for the rest of my life, I wouldn't try everything, much less the combinations of two or three things. So to get the results you want, like, well, why don't you do wilderness, do some microdosing, do some neurofeedback, and do everything else that might work all at once and just go deep, but that may be a personality defect.

No, I. I think that's great advice because there is an urgency to recover quickly, you know, and if you can speed up your recovery process, you know, by a third or by a half, by all means, it's worth trying.

We've also both. Both relied on a technology called EMDR at various phases. Walk me through what it is and how you used it.

EMDR has become quite popular lately as a treatment for trauma. And it stands for eye movement desensitization, reprocessing. And the idea behind it is that if we can engage in some kind of bilateral motion, for example, moving our eyes back and forth, that's kind of how it was originally used in therapy, that we can help take some of the storm energy out of our trauma memories. You know, a lot of people who are going through PTSD kind of feel like they're still living in the traumatic memory. And if we can take that memory and just make it kind of a memory that's decoupled, you know, from the huge emotionality, decouple it from our nervous state reaction, then we can help resolve the trauma So I did undergo. I participated in a workshop for people going through divorce. And, you know, it was kind of neat because there were maybe 10 of us, you know, in a room together. And what we did, instead of the eye motion back and forth, we did tapping. We sort of crossed our arms over our torso and did this tapping on our collarbones.

Yeah. Eft.

Right after we had recalled a painful memory, you know, from. From the relationship or from the divorce. And we did this for, I guess, all day, really. And there were a lot of tears, you know, there.

Did you feel stupid as a science journalist tapping your collarbones for a whole day?

A little bit, yeah. You're like, really? Like what? Really? But, you know, there are studies, right? There are some studies out there showing that it's more effective than a lot of other kinds of therapy.

I don't like it that tapping works. And I've had a couple big experts. Nick Ortner was on the show, who wrote the tapping solution, Dawson Church, who's a leader in epigenetics. And I've worked with therapists and I. I've just come to understand my cells listen to tapping a lot more than my logical brain. So I. I use tapping regularly when it's called for, either in myself or others. And I've seen profound effects from it. I just like, come on, is my body really that dumb? And the answer is, yeah, it kind of is. It does a lot of good stuff too. So tapping is independent of emdr, though, with the eye movement stuff that you did, I found it to be really effective in some situations, almost for any trauma. But when you're dealing with heartbreak, there's two associated emotions. Where I've seen EMDR or the reset process at 40 years then, which is. Is a different vibe, but it ends up in the same neighborhood. And they are injustice and betrayal, and they're independent traumas that oftentimes are layered on heartbreak. What's your experience with the sense of betrayal and the sense of injustice?

Well, I've certainly felt those both acutely. We all do in my own divorce experience. The cool thing about EMDR is that the underlying concept is the bilateral motion. And I am someone who walks all the time. And then when I was on my 30 day river trip, I was paddling, you know, and so I really took a lot of comfort in knowing that this kind of bilateral motion is also really good at taking some of that storm energy out of these painful memories. You know, there's a reason why a lot of veterans with PTSD are walking the Appalachian Trail. You know, or they're walking the Pacific Crest Trail. These long walks help us heal. And I think the bilateral motion may be sort of an under recognized mechanism for why it can be so effective.

Oh, wow. So you think walking just because you're activating right, left, right, left.

Yes.

In addition to lymphatic drainage and the meditative aspects, that it might actually just be working because of that. That's interesting. I've never heard anyone say that before.

Yeah. And I feel it paddling too, and, and probably bicycling, you know, cross country skiing. Yeah.

And it's also rhythmic, which is different. One of the ways of increasing connectivity across the brain is almost any exercise that causes you to cross over the midline of your body. Which is why my dear friend, Dr. Daniel Amen from Amen Clinics, who read one of the, the mini books that's, that's profoundly change me. He said, dave, get a, get a ping pong table. Like you want to live a long time, just do that because it's going to activate your brain. So when I had space for it in my barn in Canada, I probably from my son was 5 till 12. We played many times a week. And I, I think it really did help, help my brain. And I never thought about whether that crossing over the midline also had trauma effects, like trauma visual effects, but wouldn't surprise me. That's cool thinking. See, this is why science journalists are fun to talk to.

Glad I told you something you hadn't thought about. That's hard to do with you, but.

Well, thank you. It feels like sometimes injustice or betrayal can create heartbreak, even if you're still okay in your primary relationship.

Yes.

Like if there's someone you trusted who, you know, steals from you, embezzles money, tries to steal one of your, fires you from the company you found it. I'm just going through my own list here, but you know, all those things.

That'S just last week.

Yeah. Or. Or if Joe Rogan, for no good reason other than finance, financial considerations, you know, tries to come after you for a year. By the way, I did the reset process and EMDR to figure out the reason that, that pushed my buttons. Instead of just laughing and be like, joe, could you say my name again? What I realized was it was pushing an unresolved trauma from first grade. It was pushing that button. It's a bullying type of behavior.

Yeah.

And so many people were bullied. Usually girls are bullied emotionally, more so than boys who are bullied physically. But we both experience it in different ways. And sometimes can be emotional or physical in either direction. But if people went through that, adult situations, that could be a relationship or could be some other trusted relationship that's not your primary relationship, it can also cause something similar to heartbreak. And sometimes that first button is injustice or betrayal. Similar to someone cheating on you. If someone trusted, you know, steals a bunch of money, like, well, how could they do that? To me, it feels like your spouse cheated on you even though they weren't your spouse. Any insights from your book on heartbreak around what people can do when their heart's broken, maybe not by their primary partner?

Well, I think there, there are some interesting insights. I'm not sure how much I totally believe them, but there are some interesting insights into how betrayal affects men and women differently. So, for example, if there's cheating in a relationship, women tend to be more upset by emotional betrayal. So if there's the sense that your partner has really fallen in love with someone else, whereas with men, there is more of a reaction to sexual betrayal and the emotion isn't as important, you know, and there are sort of perhaps evolutionary reasons for both of those. Right. So, you know, I think that if you're in a relationship where there has been cheating, that it's important to sort of recognize that because your partner may be like, hey, you know, I didn't sleep with her, what's the big deal? Or it was just sex over, you know, and yet men and women may really experience that very differently. So I think there needs to be a little bit of respect and understanding there. And then I think you have to work really hard to rebuild the trust whether your relationship remains intact or not. Betrayal sort of gets. It cuts to core values, right, about trust and safety. And so there's a lot of rebuilding that has to happen after that. And I know certainly a lot of people who've gone through painful breakups and they have never really gotten over it. And I think that that's also a problem.

It really is a problem. And you brought up something that we haven't talked about much, and it's trust versus safety. You can feel safe, but not trusting. But not trusting is also a sense of not being safe, right?

Absolutely.

How do you go about rebuilding trust if your heart was broken?

Very slowly. I think part of it is, you know, that post traumatic growth, it's like this bad thing happened and I will never really forget it, but I don't need to experience it every moment of my waking life. Right. It's something that happened in the past. Uh, it's not Something that is ongoing. It's not something that every partner is going to inflict upon me going forward. Um, I think a lot of it has to do with just get, you know, exactly that. Getting over the trauma and whatever way you need to do it.

It's too expensive not to trust.

Yes.

Just like it's expensive to hold on to hate or resentment or bitterness or any of the things that oftentimes are a side effect of even a relatively good breakup because they cost you every single day. And that's why forgiveness is the final F word in the hierarchy that I use. Because for me, that's the easiest, although it's hard, but the easiest way to permanently reestablish your ability to trust the world and to trust yourself and then to feel safe in the world and even to generate safety in yourself.

I think that's a really good point.

Oh, thank you. Is there some technology or technique we haven't talked about that helped you do that?

Again, a lot of it had to do with journaling.

Journaling. We haven't talked about that so much. Okay. How much did you journal?

I journaled a lot, but in terms of these, like, just very discreet exercises, you know, like the writing the letter to my ex about the things that I am grateful to him for and also the things that I am sort of mad at him for. And I guess, ultimately, ideally, you would switch that. Right? First, write about the ways in which you know this person hurt you, but then write about the ways in which this person, you know, helped you grow or helped you, the things you loved about that person, as well as the things that you are sort of happy to let go of. Right. And I think so. I think it's perspective. You may still be sort of mad, you know, about the pain that was inflicted, but you can also recognize the gifts, and that's okay. You know, I don't think it has to be this unqualified. Like, your ex is actually a great person. It's not like your ex was a complicated person. You had a complicated dynamic. You know, both of you are responsible for that dynamic. It's this kind of understanding that there's room, I think, for a lot of different emotions, including the ones that enable you to be more optimistic.

And I've got two more questions for you because we're coming up on the end of the interview. The first one is, other than your own book, which is called Heartbreak A Personal and Scientific Journey, what is the other single best resource you've found or book to read about heartbreak?

Good question. Well, I love music. Right. So for me, I. I already mentioned I'm Gen X, and I. There's just certain music, you know, that I really loved listening to.

Smells Like Teen Spirit, huh?

Exactly. You know, I mean, we all have our favorites, right? And. And a lot of music is based on big emotions, right? A lot of it's based on. On love and broken hearts. You know, I would encourage you to go for it, like, listen to that music. You know, do it up. For me, it was Liz Fair, you know, and she actually made an album, I think. I think she's got a song called the Divorce Song. I don't know why that became the soundtrack to my divorce, but it really did. Also a lot of rem, you know.

Oh, yeah, that's a neat piece of advice. Make a soundtrack for your heartbreak or for your separation or divorce. I like that a lot.

Great.

Final question here. If you could feel and look as good or better than you do now, how long would you want to live?

I think I'd go a little bit against the grain right now. I'm not so much interested in longevity. I'm more interested in health span, and maybe that's because I have a chronic illness. The priority for me is in feeling great.

That was the precondition to feel as good or better than you do now. And healthspan is kind of like, well, duh, no one wants to be sick before they die. But if you don't have to get sick, how long would you want to live?

I would love to live long enough to get to know my grandchildren.

That's a good answer.

I do not know that I will have grandchildren. It's too early to tell, but I. Of course, I hope I would, and I would love to live long enough to get to Nanham.

Beautiful. Thank you, Florence, for writing a really interesting mix of emotion and science. And that's right where science is right now in the world of biohacking is let's study emotions and figure out what's going on in there, including at the cellular level, the genetic level, the inflammation level. And I think you've done original thinking in the space, and I appreciate you.

Well, thank you so much for having me. It's really been a pleasure.

Again, guys, the book is Heartbreak, A Personal and Scientific Journey. And you can buy that anywhere you like to buy books, and you can listen to the show anywhere you like to listen to shows. Make sure you Click subscribe on YouTube or that you're following this on whatever the heck podcast platform you're using right now. And As a bonus, if you come to the biohacking conference, which is happening at the end of May, beginning of June in Dallas, Texas, go to biohackingconference.com we will have one of the leaders in the field showing what meditation, breath work and visualization does to your genetics. And that's Dr. Joe Dispenza, who will be on stage along with other leaders in the field of longevity and biohacking, and of course, me sharing the latest and greatest. I hope to see you there. And by then, I hope you've read Florence's book, because it's really good. You're listening to the Human Upgrade with Dave Aspect Free, who's going through heartbreak, you said. Well, every time I, I try to talk about it, everyone else ends up telling me all their stories and then they start crying and, and like, it feels like it's never really about me. Like, I, I just wanted to share. And then everyone's kind of dumping theirs because there's so much unhealed relationship trauma. Is it better or was it better for you when someone would share that they had a common experience, or was it better when they just listened?

I think there's a place for both of those. I guess, if, if, if you're going to share about your own experience with your friend, make it short. Make it, make it mostly about them, but, but, you know, help them feel like they're not alone in this experience. You know, this reminds me of, of another sort of, you know, antidote to heartbreak, which is the idea of ritual. You know, we don't really, in our culture have rituals for heartbreak. We have so many rituals for marriage and not necessarily for the end of it. And one of the places I traveled for the book was Croatia, because there is a museum of broken relationships.

Oh, wow.

And I just loved, I loved this experience. People from all over the world have sent in objects representing their broken relationship. And some of them are very funny. And then. And then they'll write one paragraph about sort of how this object describes their broken relationship. And it's really a beautiful experience because you see, right, how universal this is, that this is a shared human experience. But you also see how just the act of sending in an object, writing a paragraph, and then seeing it under glass, you know, in this beautifully lit display, kind of helps encapsulate the whole process, you know, provides a little bit of, A little bit of detachment, right, that you're able to now tell a story about it. And I think that that idea of being able to write about this, you know, in A paragraph. You know, it's almost like how I felt when I wrote the last page of my book. You know, there's a little bit of closure, and you're never going to get full closure from a big heartbreak. You know, as you said in your introduction, that kind of becomes a part of us. But I think it's very important to be able to have a little bit of that distancing. And sometimes that can come from just the active narrative.

I've seen two other things that. That people do that can be really effective. A while ago, I climbed to the top of Mount Shasta, which is a. A challenging climb. You know, you've. You've got to spend the night halfway up the mountain. You go at three in the morning with crampons and an ice ax, and it's, you know, real mountain climbing. It's not Himalayas, but it's. It's substantial. And you get to the very, very top, and there's this metal box that's affixed to the rock, and it's got a heavy lid, and you can open it, and you realize how incredibly difficult it was for anyone to carry something that heavy up there, because there's a lot of climbing. Every ounce matters. And in there, you'll see notes or photos from broken relationships where people are letting go. But the mo. The thing that gave me just kind of goosebumps, not just because it was cold, was someone had worn a railroad spike on a necklace, okay, that weighs a couple pounds included, worn it for a long time, like they were carrying a burden from a relationship, and they decided to leave it there in a sacred spot. And so that's one thing is sort of, you know, telling the story, doing the nerve, and then doing a hero's journey to let go of something. And the other one that's more common is Burning man, that there's a temple there. And by the time you're at the seventh day of Burning man, there's at least 10,000 stories of heartbreak written on the walls and love notes or photos, both for people who are grieving over people who've passed or grieving over relationships. And you write it there, and you. They burn it at the end. Like, you let. You physically burn it. You let it go. And in my shamanic training, they. They teach a similar thing where you have a sacred fire or even just a candle, and you write down, I'm letting it go. And something in your cells, I think, knows when you do something like that, because fire is such a primordial thing that it feels like that can be a part of letting go and healing. Did you do ceremonial stuff like that? You know, little, little voodoo dolls or anything? What was your practice?

Yeah, I did actually. At one point I. Pretty early on I kind of wrote a letter, I think it was to my ex about, you know, why I was ready to say goodbye. And then I burned it. But this was at the sort of request of a woman I was doing a workshop with. And I. I wasn't ready to do it. It was too early. You know, it didn't, it didn't make me feel better. It made me feel worse because at that point I was still sort of trying to grasp on, you know, to the memories of the relationship. I wasn't totally ready to let go of it yet. And then I did it again about a year later. I was on a 30 day river trip. This was part of my own kind of Heroes Journey. 14 days of it was solo because I felt like I needed to really embrace this metaphor of learning how to row my own boat now, you know, And I wanted to be comfortable being alone. I wanted to access my bravery, stuff like that. And on one of the last nights of that trip, I did it again and I burned it again. And it felt so right. And it was very. It was. And at that point it was very cathartic. And then, you know, also another thing I did was I. I took my wedding ring and I put it in a little boat made out of lettuce and I released it. It was not an expensive wedding. I released it down the Potomac River.

Wow.

And that was. And I did it with some from my best girlfriends. And that also just felt really powerful. And I sort of, you know, was releasing it to the force of the waters also a very, for me, a very beautiful experience. Similar.

So the role of ceremonial release is, I think, underappreciated in Western culture. But it, it sure does make a difference.

It sure does.

And part of being able to generate your own feeling of. Of safety comes from understanding you won't die when you're alone. And I. I recognized that I had a. A fear of being alone. So I ended up asking a shaman to drop me off in a cave for four days all by myself with no food. Because I also had noticed that if I was feeling lonely, I'd probably eat more. So I said, well, let's just face fear of hunger and fear of loneliness all at the same time. I don't know how else I could have made it worse. Fear of a nuclear war or zombies or something. But I did that just to experience it. That brief, intentional pain.