3 Ways to Mend a Broken Heart
There is that undeniable ache; that wrenching pain in the center of your chest. The feeling that you can’t breathe; some days you feel as if you are going to pass out, in fact there is a sense that a part of you did just die. You are heartbroken. Maybe from the loss of a friend, a family member, or someone’s decision to end a relationship. Your heart hurts, but the doctor says your cardiac labs are normal. You are ‘just’ grieving.
Though there may be no lab markers that show heart damage, there is a distinct effect of extreme emotional stress on the body. The New England Journal of Medicine, John Hopkins University and several researchers have pieced this together in various clinical and historical perspectives. Let’s sum it up in 5 statements:
- Loving Relationships
Loving relationships emphasize certain neural pathways and neurotransmitters. One of which is “brain dopamine”, the neurotransmitter responsible for feelings of reward: pleasure, satisfaction, motivation.
- Loss of Loving Relationships
Loss of a loving relationship creates a void in the emotional brain, similar to addiction withdrawal, as brain dopamine is left wanting.
- Adrenaline
In response to the brain dopamine drop, alarm signals are sent for the body to release adrenaline — the hormone created from “blood dopamine” (blood and brain don’t share neurotransmitters) — along with other stress hormones and protein peptides.
- A Flood of Hormones
In their frenzy, these stress hormones flood and stun the heart.
- Lower Functioning
Temporarily, during this flood, the heart has a lowered ability to function, creating heart attack like symptoms.
In sum, Broken Heart Syndrome (also known as stress cardiomyopathy) is a phenomenon that can occur when an individual is under extreme loss-of-love stress.
Medicine has recognized that heartbreak can be a physical phenomenon. It’s not all in your head, my dear.
The Events That Hit the Hardest
Although many of us have made it through stressful events unscathed, there are some of us whom these events hit harder, for various reasons. In the latter individual, it is quite possible for their feelings to actually create physical pain. A broken heart can manifest in heart attack symptoms, where no physical damage has occurred. There are no long term effects on the heart, but during the time of your emotional helplessness, your heart is literally rendered helpless as well.*
Possibly, the oft analyzed love suicide of Juliet for Romeo that Shakespeare wrote of, is the dagger that demonstrates the helplessness of the heart during tragic love. Maybe those men of olde really knew much more about our how our hearts function than we thought.
The most stressful events in the Holmes and Rahe Life Stressor scale? Death of a Spouse and Divorce. As you take a closer look at the stressors, many of them are based in disappointment or lost love. Broken hearts are the number one source of stress in our society. These sources leave no evidence outside of tears and days of full of chips and Netflix.
Time does heal all wounds it is true, and fortunately stress cardiomyopathy heals as well. But there must be something we can do to mend ourselves in the meantime. We can emerge as bright and resilient lovers, rather than frightened and traumatized soldiers.
Tips to Mend a Broken Heart
Gaia’s [The Yogi’s Heart(/series/yogis-heart) meditation and yoga guide can help you open and heal your heart.
Plus, here are three more tips to mend a broken heart.
1. Take Rhodiola Root
Under the supervision of a Naturopathic Doctor, this is a powerful little herb that grows in the tundra and modulates your adrenaline rushes. So powerful in fact, that it interacts with other medications, so it needs to be monitored by someone who knows herbs and drugs. When the devastating new hits, Rhodiola can help your emotional body digest it slowly, at a pace that your heart can handle.
2. Take Hugs from friends
Ask your friends for hugs. Not the kind where you are crying on their shoulder, but the kind where you both give and receive. Touching another human being whom you feel safe around releases oxytocin, a hormone that can shut down those heart-breaking stress hormones. Realize that touch is part of what you are missing.
3. Take a break on the heart openers
Instead, do 5 power poses every day:
Utkata Konasana – Goddess, or Fiery Angle Pose. Get strong get grounded, build strength in your powerful legs and gluteus muscles. Gain the ability to support yourself.
Adho Mukha Vrksasana – Handstand or Dog on the wall. Flip your perspective. Practice holding yourself up. That is what handstand is all about. Trust your own hands.
Vrksasana – Tree. Root down and rise up. Balance. If you want to grow from this experience, you’d best find your roots, and grow some new branches.
Virabhadrasana II– Warrior II. Take up more room, allow yourself to be pulled in several directions, while you stay steady, holding upright in the center.
If you really want to do a backbend/heart openers, make it one of these two only:
Setu Bandhasana (Bridge) or Wheel (Urdhva Dhanurasana) with this particular focus: The strength in your arms and legs is more valuable right now than the bending of your back. Try to lengthen rather than curve your back. In Wheel, only if you are steady, bend and straighten your elbows like upside down push-ups.
Then, always. Breathe.
- Note: If you are experiencing chest pain that resembles heart attack symptoms, please go to a hospital before diagnosing yourself with Stress Cardiomyopathy.
About the Author
7 Tools for Managing Overwhelming Emotions
Let’s face it – sometimes emotions get the best of us. Once we are triggered, it is tough to be in pain and not do something that essentially makes it worse. It’s much easier to numb the pain temporarily, but unfortunately those coping methods tend to have negative consequences. Basically, we get into the habit of choosing short-term symptom relief rather than addressing the core issue. You know what I’m talking about. How many of you have used alcohol to cope with your feelings of stress or sadness? How many of you ended up in much worse pain the next day or, worse, by the end of the night in tears in front of people you don’t quite trust?
Other popular unhealthy coping methods include: TV, drugs, sex, cigarettes, food, gambling, prescription pills, and the ever so popular sweeping-it-under-the-rug method. I must admit these methods are very tempting, but we all know how they end. What’s worse is that we still engage in these behaviors. Why?! Well for one, these unhealthy solutions work very well in the immediate. The second reason is that they are much easier to engage in and usually come with pleasure.
What are we hiding from, though? It’s funny, but when you think about it, we are only hiding from negative emotion. What’s an emotion? Is it going to kill us? Is it going to last forever? Sometimes emotions can feel that they are going to last forever, but the answer is no. All emotions crescendo and then dissipate. They imitate movement like a sign curve. Keeping this in mind would make it a lot easier to navigate our emotions. In order to deal with overwhelming emotions it is helpful to have a tool belt to reach for in times of distress. Here are a few of these less dangerous, and unfortunately, less fun, ways of dealing with these pesky negative emotions:
- Put it in perspective
Sometimes when you take a step back and think about what is really important to you, the problem that you think you are experiencing becomes very small. Ask yourself, “Will I still be in this much pain in one week? A month? One year from now? Will I remember this as significant? When I die do I want to remember this as something I spent a lot of time on?
Death is the ultimate teacher. Life is precious because it is limited. Nothing is worth sacrificing our happiness for. Nothing. It is impossible to control outside events that cause disturbance within, but it is completely in our control to either hang on or let it go. When we cling or feed the negative emotion, it robs us of our limited time on this planet. You are not your thoughts, your emotions, your body, or your things. Do not let death teach you this at the last minute.
- Engage in an act of self love
Many people understand being physically ill and respect it as painful. If you get sick, oftentimes your loved ones will tell you, “You poor thing. Go home and take a hot bath!” But there is a double standard when it comes to being in pain from emotions. If you don’t feel well emotionally, it can be tough to find an empathetic ear. We all get scared to share our emotions at times. We are ultimately afraid to hear, “Suck it up or get over it.” These words do more harm than good. If you are not feeling well emotionally, I challenge you to engage in acts of self-love as if you were physically ill. Go home. Take a hot bath. Sleep. You never know, it might make you feel a little better to take care of yourself. The idea would be to soothe with the 5 senses. Find activities that are soothing to your each of your senses:
- Sight: Look at the sunset
- Sound: Listen to relaxing music
- Touch: Get a massage or go to yoga
- Smell: Aromatherapy in a nice hot bath
- Taste: Eat something that brings up good memories or give yourself that treat you love!
- Put a time limit on it
When we are hurt it is so easy to get lost in the rabbit hole. In the rabbit hole we become the emotions and thoughts that are plaguing us. We ruminate and get lost in trying to solve a problem that is unsolvable. We feed the emotion by believing the catastrophic thoughts that come up like, “I hate him and myself for trusting him. He never liked me and was just using me the whole time. I never want to see him again. I am going to call his parents and tell them what a bad person he is.”
Instead of letting these thoughts come and go we might actually act on them. We feel so horrible that we avoid people, stay in bed for weeks at a time, drink too much, or eat too much. In order to avoid this, put a time limit on it. Tell yourself that you are going to think or talk about this problem for only one hour a day until it is resolved or you come to acceptance. Once the hour is over, choose an activity that is the opposite of the emotion you are feeling to change your mood.
If you are sad, listen to happy music. If there is anger, watch a comedy on TV. If you are stressed and tense, go take a yoga class. Everyone deserves a break from time to time. Do not let one area of your life that is causing you pain engulf your entire world. You have the ultimate control over your happiness.
- Let the negative energy pass through you
Negative emotion is just negative energy. It does not help to squash it down, numb it or avoid it. The only way, is to face it head on and allow it to pass through you. This takes some bravery on your part. You must allow yourself to feel the pain. There are some tools that can help while you do this. You can allow yourself to get the support you need. Oftentimes, it is very difficult to be vulnerable and admit to others that you are having a hard time. In order to move the negative energy through your body it helps to talk to another trusted person. You can also release the energy by exercising, writing in a journal, or simply relaxing your body and letting your preconceived notions of how it “should” be, go.
- Observe the emotion
You are not the emotion or your thoughts. You can take a step back and witness what your thoughts and emotions do when there is a disturbance. Watch the thoughts or self-talk get faster as they ask you to fix them before they become abusive. Watch the emotion crescendo and dissipate. Do not avoid. Avoidance makes the emotion and the thoughts louder. Allow yourself to have the emotion, don’t fight it, and don’t escalate it by falling down the rabbit hole and attaching to the thoughts. Eventually it will pass. You do not really need to do anything for the pain to subside. It will on its own.
By this, I do not mean that you should not deal with your problems. By all means take care of yourself and your responsibilities. Just do not make decisions when you are in a heightened state. Wait until the emotion passes and then solve the problem. You will be able to see much clearer once the intensity has lessened.
- Delay, distract, and then decide
This tool, created by Marsha Linehan, is useful in order to inhibit negative reaction to a negative emotion. Many times, if we make a decision in the emotion it will make it worse. Basically, any negative urge or craving lasts for about 20 to 30 minutes. Help yourself by delaying your reaction and any subsequent actions for 20 to 30 minutes with a distraction.
You can go to work, help someone else, go for a walk, take a break from the trigger, read, or watch a movie. Once the time is up, make a pros and cons list as to whether your reaction is worth doing. Usually you will decide not to react the original way you had planned. For instance, slashing your boyfriend’s tires out because he lied to you probably won’t seem like such a good idea once some of the anger has passed.
- Become aware of your physical and emotional vulnerabilities
Sometimes our emotions can get the best of us when we are not feeling well. Become aware of your triggers. Ask yourself if you have any physical or emotional vulnerabilities that are getting in the way of managing your emotions. Some of these vulnerabilities are: hunger, lack of sleep, injury, illness, stress, lack of support, crisis, past trauma, negative core beliefs, etc. If you notice that the current problem is escalated due to one or more of these factors you may want to try to take care of the vulnerability first in order to prevent and manage the escalation of your emotion.
Embrace Your Emotions
My wish for us all is to start viewing negative emotion as an opportunity to practice these new skills rather than allowing the emotion to be a threat to our self-concept or survival. We do not have to fight and we do not need to flee (run or avoid). I hope that one or more of these resonates with you, and the next time you are in the emotion, you can remember to pull this list out of your wallet. Remember that it will pass, it is ok to have the emotion, and above all else you don’ t necessarily need to do anything. Let go and let it pass through you, because it will!
If you would like to learn more please visit or contact me at Good Therapy San Diego.
This article was inspired by The Untethered Soul by Michael Singer
