Dr. Maya Shankar
Maya Shankar is a cognitive scientist who served as a Senior Advisor in the Obama White House, where she founded and served as Chair of the White House Behavioral Science…
Join Pushkin+
Gain access to ad-free versions of 20+ podcasts from the Pushkin library along with exclusive bonus episodes and other member benefits.
Science writer Florence Williams felt blindsided when her twenty-five-year marriage unexpectedly fell apart. The heartbreak opened her up to a whole range of new and intense feelings, but it also made her sick. Trained as a journalist, Florence set out on an expedition to understand the science of heartbreak and game her way back to health. She tried novel forms of therapy, immersed herself in nature, and consulted cutting-edge research on the science of awe. But her greatest discovery came when she tried an alternative to “hacking” heartbreak.
If you’re interested in hearing more of Florence’s story, listen to Heartbreak: A Personal and Scientific Journey, a uniquely immersive audiobook, narrated by the author and accompanied by in-the-moment diary recordings and interviews. Use code HeartbreakSCP to save 15% when you purchase directly on Pushkin.fm here.
Florence Williams
It was my first day of college. I had just arrived, and he had started this freshman outdoor orientation trip, where we were going hiking in the mountains. And he had rock climbing mussels, and a bandana around his head. And I think instantly, there was a little bit of chemistry there.
Maya Shankar
That's science journalist, Florence Williams. The instant spark she's describing turned into a decades long marriage. But that marriage unraveled, when Florence was 50. The breakup cracked her open, and what followed was an outpouring of new and disorienting feelings.
Florence Williams
When the person you consider sort of your safety net, your primary attachment partner, when they're suddenly gone, it's so disorienting, in a way that's kind of like a deep freak out. And you feel it emotionally. And it turns out, our immune systems and our bodies are really paying very close attention to that sense of freak out. So, I had this tremendous urgency to try to understand it.
Maya Shankar
On today's episode, a science journalist goes on an expedition to try and hack heartbreak. I'm Maya Shankar, and this is A Slight Change of Plans, a show about who we are, and who we become, in the face of a big change. Florence Williams is the author of the book, Heartbreak, A Personal and Scientific Journey. That journey began one night seven years ago, when Florence and her husband were hosting a dinner party.
Florence Williams
I was making a salad, and friends were arriving for dinner at any moment. And my husband was in the next room, and I said, "Oh, how's your dad doing?" And he said, "Oh, I just got this email from my brother." It's on the phone. And he handed me his phone, and on the phone was an email written by my husband, to another woman, talking about how much he loved her. And I was like, "What? What is this?" And it's that feeling when sort of the blood leaves your face, and it leaves your limbs, and you feel your stomach sort of drop a story or two. You're not sure what you've just read, but you think it's bad. And in that moment, you sort of know that your life is not what you thought it was. And then the doorbell rang, and our friends arrived, and I had to kind of smile through this dinner. There was no opportunity to further investigate, for a little while.
Maya Shankar
You see this email on the phone, and the doorbell rings, and he doesn't know throughout the dinner party that you've seen this information?
Florence Williams
Right. He doesn't know.
Maya Shankar
And you have the kind of internal equanimity to move forward. Sorry, I feel like, Florence, I would have had a very different response. The dinner party would've been canceled, at a minimum.
Florence Williams
Well, people were already coming through the threshold.
Maya Shankar
You're a very gracious host. I will give you that. I want to be invited to dinner at your house. Wow.
Florence Williams
I cannot say I talked a lot through that dinner. I think I pretty much sat there, feeling really stunned, and probably staring at my very [inaudible 00:03:33] salad at that point.
Maya Shankar
Yeah. And not looking at your husband, who you're slowly starting to hate.
Florence Williams
Not at all, yep. At one point, I think I did excuse myself to go to the bathroom, and I managed to take his phone, which was in the kitchen. There was no password on the phone. There had never been a reason for me to look at his phone. But I did find that email, and I found a couple of other emails. And it turns out that he had been drafting a series of emails to this woman, that he was kind of emotionally obsessed with.
Maya Shankar
So the dinner party ends, and you have to confront him about the fact that you've seen not only this one draft that he accidentally pulled up on his phone, when he meant to pull up another email, but other drafts. And you talked about that instinctive biological feeling, of the blood rushing from your head, and the stomach sinking. And I'm just wondering, with a few hours of distance, you can at least have, probably equally gut-wrenching, but a more measured response. And I'm curious to know what that conversation was like.
Florence Williams
Yeah, I wanted to know what this meant. And he had explained to me that these were draft emails. And I was like, "What does that mean? You haven't sent them? I don't understand." And the fundamental question was, "Do you still love me?" That's what I really wanted to know. And that's what felt really, I guess, imperiled. And he said, "Yes." He said, "I do." He said, "I'm really confused. I don't want this marriage to end." And he said, "In fact, I'm sort of relieved that you know. Because I've been keeping these feelings secret for, at this point, actually a couple of years," he'd been obsessed with this woman. So, it was really confusing. And I did feel this betrayal of trust, because this had been going on so long.
And at one point, I said, "You need to figure this out. Why don't you go on a camping trip? Why don't you go into the wilderness for a few days, and really think about this?" And he thought that was a great idea, and he did. And he came back, and he said, "Well, I've done a lot of thinking, and..." At this point, we have two kids. He said, "I don't want to upset the apple cart." And I was like, "Well, that's all you have to say? 'I don't want to upset the apple cart.'" Where's the reassurance that he actually loves me, and wants to be in this marriage? And he couldn't say that.
So to me, that was finally the neon sign that I was not going to have the relationship that I wanted. He wasn't having the relationship that he wanted, and there just didn't seem to be a way to move forward from there. We were talking about what we wanted. What do you want out of this marriage? What do you want out of your life? And eventually, he said something like, "Yeah, I just really want to go find my soulmate." And he was telling me these things because we were also such good friends.
Maya Shankar
Yeah, you were a confidant.
Florence Williams
Yeah. There's part of me that understands that. Who doesn't want to go find their soulmate? But when you're the one who thinks you are his soulmate, it's incredibly painful.
Maya Shankar
Yeah. But here's a question, Florence. Did you think he was your soulmate?
Florence Williams
Yeah, I think I really did. And I felt like sometimes, he wasn't a great soulmate.
Maya Shankar
But he was yours.
Florence Williams
But he was mine, and we could make it better. After 32 years together, these two great kids, so many common interests, so many common values. I loved his family. He loved mine.
Maya Shankar
Yeah. So, he asked for a divorce. And one thing that was so interesting in reading your book, is you've said that before all this, you were fairly callous towards people who were enduring breakups. Like, "You'll get over it. That guy is a loser," that sort of thing.
Florence Williams
Right. "Don't be so melodramatic."
Maya Shankar
Yes, yes, exactly. But then when it happened to you, you felt like all those over the top cliches about heartbreak were fully resonating with you.
Florence Williams
Yes. Like "missing a limb," "the ax through the heart," the "adrift in an ocean." Yeah, all those metaphors seemed absolutely, perfectly apt. I just felt like my socks got completely blown off by the power of this grief, and this loss. Claire Bidwell Smith is a psychologist who wrote a book about how anxiety is the missing stage of grief. And that really resonated for me. There's this tremendous sort of anxiety when the person you consider sort of your safety net, your primary attachment partner, when they're suddenly gone, it's so disorienting, in a way that's kind of deep freak out, and you feel it emotionally. And it turns out our immune systems, and our bodies, our nervous systems are really paying very close attention to that sense of freak out.
Maya Shankar
How did this anxiety physically and emotionally express itself in you, in the days and weeks after the divorce?
Florence Williams
Yeah, first up was intense insomnia. The sort of lying awake all night, feeling like you're really on edge. You're trying to kind of calculate everything, your survival odds, and where are you going to live, and how are you going to afford health insurance, and who's going to get the kids, and what am I going to tell my friends, and what am I going to do now. There's a lot of, "What am I going to do now? What am I going to do now?" So, there was that sleeplessness.
For me, there was pretty instant weight loss, too. There was a sense of being so kind of full of adrenaline and anxiety, that I've kind of felt like I was buzzing. At one point, I have the metaphor that I felt like I was plugged into a faulty electrical socket. And then eventually, I started getting sick. I found out that my blood sugars were really weirdly high. And I've always been someone who exercises a lot. I'm fit, no diabetes in my family. And eventually, we figured out that I was diagnosed with an autoimmune type of diabetes, which is type one diabetes.
Maya Shankar
I'm just thinking in this moment, we can work to control our mental states. But it seems like something like an autoimmune condition, or the inflammatory markers in our blood, that feels so out of reach, in terms of our ability to control it. Even though, by the way, this might be all illusory, and the mental states are just as hard to control as the physical manifestations in our blood work, for example. But certainly, I would feel so daunted by the physical expression, like this whole thing had just run away from me.
Florence Williams
Exactly. And that creates more anxiety.
Maya Shankar
Exactly. There's a meta level of anxiety
Florence Williams
Right, and what's the next shoe that's going to drop? And if my body is registering this pain, I need to fix it. And of course, I am sort of a fixer. I didn't want to get sicker. It didn't seem fair to be heartbroken and sick at the same time. So, I had this tremendous urgency to try to understand it. I wanted to understand what was happening to me. The science journalist in me wanted to go talk to the experts, not only to try to understand what was happening to my immune system, but also how I could kind of game it, if there was a way to game it, to sort of speed it up.
Maya Shankar
It sounds like it was a journey motivated by survival. You are a science journalist, but this had so many personal undertones. It was kind of like, "The things that I find out from this expedition will have a direct impact on my ability to live through this."
Florence Williams
That's right. But it was really survival on two fronts. It was the sort of physical survival. I want to understand what's happening, so I can get better. But it was also like, "You know what? Journalism is what I do. It's who I am, and this is what's going to help me feel like I'm surviving in a more metaphysical way. This is who I am."
Maya Shankar
I love that. Retaining your own sense of individual purpose, and fulfilling a mission on your own. So, where did you start? How did this expedition begin?
Florence Williams
Well, I think so many journeys, it starts out somewhat accidentally. I ended up at a conference, and I was a speaker there, and I saw another speaker there was Helen Fisher, who's a biological anthropologist, who's written a lot about what happens to our brains when we fall in love. And I send her an email, and I said, "Can I talk to you?" And she said, "Sure, honey. Come on over." And I just said, "Okay, look, this is what's happened. My husband of 25 years just moved out, a few weeks ago. I can't sleep." And she said, "Oh, are you having trouble keeping weight on?" And I said, "Yes." And she said, "Do you feel really anxious?" And I said, "Yes." She said, "Okay, I can tell you everything that's happening." And I was like, "Please tell me. Tell me what's happening."
And it was so reassuring. It was so helpful for me. And maybe because I'm a science journalist, but I found it reassuring to know that there was a reason for feeling what I was feeling, for my brain to be kind of in this high alert zone. And she was also just reassuring in herself, because she said, "You know what? We know this, because we have put heartbroken people in a brain scanner. Many of them have these exact same symptoms. You're not alone in the world. This is what the brain does. Our brains are built for attachment. And because of that, they're also built for heartbreak." And she was so sweet about it, and she said, "I've been there. Let me tell you about my heartbreak." Finally, that's what almost all the scientists I spoke to said. They said, "Oh, let me tell you about my heartbreak, too." And that alone is very comforting and sort of humanizing, and makes us realize that even though this feels like such a singular and lonely experience, of course, it is a universal experience.
Maya Shankar
Yeah. So you meet with Helen Fisher, and she helps ground you, by at least sharing, "Look, you're not alone in this. Let me also share my own personal experiences with heartbreak. And here's why all this stuff is happening to you." Where do you go from there?
Florence Williams
I went to talk to Steven Cole, the immunogeneticist, who was analyzing blood markers. So, transcription factors in our white blood cells that change the way we regulate different immune responses, based on... This is so interesting to me, based on our social state. So he has for a long time, been researching how people who rate themselves as lonely get sicker, and trying to figure out why that is. Why would your immune system care if you're lonely? He has found that these transcription factors really change a suite of about 200 transcription factors in our white blood cells. So we decided to do an experiment, where we took samples of my blood every few months, during the course of my hopefully recovery, from the heartbreak.
Maya Shankar
And what did they find in those early tests?
Florence Williams
Well, he told me at one point, "Yeah, you have the blood of a lonely person." And what that meant for me was that my inflammation markers were really high. And at the same time, there were cells that fight viruses, that were not getting expressed.
Maya Shankar
Wow. So, what were some of the interventions that you tried? You get this blood work done, you understand there's going to be a baseline. Tell me about the kinds of things that you tried out.
Florence Williams
One of the places I visited on this quest was the University of Utah. There's a researcher there who studies the kind of salubrious effects of being in close marriages, how great that is for your health. And then, of course, he had this litany of kind of bummer trivia about what happens after you've been divorced, how you're more likely to get sick, etc. That really bummed me out. As one immunogeneticist told me, he said, "Heartbreak is one of the hidden landmines of human existence. And we don't really take it seriously enough, but it does make us sick." And in fact, it increases our risk over early death. It increases our risk of metabolic disease, all these chronic diseases. And most of them are really mediated by inflammation, which is what your immune system is responding to, with this kind of anxiety. But then I went down the hall, to visit another psychologist, named Paula Williams, who said, "Yeah, we know the statistics are bad, the health statistics after a divorce. But we know that there are some people who can be really resilient."
And I sort of leaned forward, and I was like, "Tell me more. Who are those people, if I want to be that?" And she said, "Well, our lab has shown that it's the people with the personality trait of openness, people who are open to new experience, open to curiosity, and open to beauty, especially open to this sense of awe," sort of what she called aesthetic chill, which is the idea that you can get goosebumps when you're listening to a beautiful symphony, or looking at a beautiful painting, or looking at a waterfall. And she said, "Not only do we think that open people are more resilient, we actually think you can learn to be a more open person, than you already are."
Maya Shankar
I love that. Very hopeful message.
Florence Williams
It was so hopeful. I just clung onto it, like a lifeboat. I was like, "I can do that. I'm just going to claw my way through heartbreak, by awing my way through heartbreak."
Maya Shankar
We'll be back in a moment, with a slight change of plan.
Florence Williams felt blindsided when her 25-year marriage came to an end. So she went on an expedition to try and understand the science of heartbreak, and ideally game her way through it. Florence tried novel forms of therapy, immersion in nature, and even visited the Museum of Broken Relationships where she learned rituals to help mark the end of her marriage. And throughout it all, she kept consulting with scientists about the latest research. Florence was especially inspired by the idea that she could learn to be a more open person. And how does one cultivate more of an openness, more of an ability to appreciate beauty?
Florence Williams
I think, like anything, you can ask your way into an experience, by being present. What am I seeing? What am I hearing? What am I smelling? What is my sensory body noticing about this beautiful place I'm in? Instead of just thinking about your to-do list, or the conversation that you had at work. There are sort of ways we can cue ourselves into our sensory bodies, that when we do that, when we can wake up our sensory bodies, it's kind of a shortcut to reducing our blood pressure, slowing our respiration, putting us in a better mood. And it's really mindfulness. It's just another way of being mindful, but it doesn't involve sitting on a cushion. It involves actually being present in whatever environment you find yourself. But you can microdose awe. It doesn't have to be the Grand Canyon. You can find awe on your block. You can look up at the moon. You can watch the sunset. You can watch the bees for a while.
Maya Shankar
For me, my greatest form of awe, Florence, was looking at the results of the 2020 election. Who knew?
Florence Williams
That's collective awe.
Maya Shankar
Collective awe, yeah. The most profound form of pain relief I've experienced, in some time. So on this topic of awe, I'm thinking... I'm going back in time, and remembering the time where I felt like my heart had been torn into pieces by another person. And your whole world is shaken up, and it's so devastating. And it's hard for me to... When you're really in the throes of heartbreak, I think it can be really hard to even imagine finding things beautiful, against the backdrop of such pain. But one thing that was so reassuring for me, is in reading your book, when you are in the throes of heartbreak, you describe almost these out of body experiences with awe, where you're just overwhelmed by beauty. And that's wonderful, that it's possible to feel that way, when you're just so torn up.
Florence Williams
Well, here's the funny thing. I actually feel like it's more possible to feel those things when you're so torn up.
Maya Shankar
Say more.
Florence Williams
Well, suddenly you're torn down to your studs. You're going to feel the deep abyss of your emotions. You're going to feel big emotion, in a way that I had never really experienced before. And there's something about feeling those big emotions that actually extends also to the good emotions. I felt like all of a sudden, I am a feeling animal. I'm feeling things I've never felt before, and I'm also feeling joy. Well, that's unexpected. I'm feeling beauty. I'm feeling love. I'm feeling lust. I'm feeling just these big, big things. And in fact, that's normal. I think it seems counterintuitive, but we are capable, fully capable of feeling two things at once, and even feeling conflicting things at once. It's just that so many of us are uncomfortable with big feelings, that we don't go there very often.
Maya Shankar
I see. Yeah, so what you're arguing is that you're forced to open the lid on all of your emotions, and maybe that makes the feeling of awe even more accessible. Because it requires a certain depth of emotion to feel those things, in the first place. Is that right?
Florence Williams
I think so. It's like all the guardrails have now busted open.
Maya Shankar
Shattered.
Florence Williams
Shattered, and all of a sudden, you feel terrible, but you kind of feel alive. And then all of a sudden, the beauty comes in, too. Yeah, I spent quite a lot of time in nature. This was something I was quite invested in believing was helpful. I had already written a book, called The Nature Fix, on how nature can make us happier and healthier. So I thought, "Okay, this is a big heartbreak. I need to spend a lot of time in nature." So, I started going for more walks in the woods. But I just thought, "Okay, I need more of this. I need more awe. I'm going to go into the wilderness, and I need to learn how to be more self-sufficient. I need to learn how to be comfortable alone." And I eventually ended up embarking on a 30-day wilderness river trip, in Utah. And about half of that was solo trip. I thought, "Okay, I'm scared of being alone. I need to learn how to be alone. So, here I go. I'm going to paddle my own boat, now. I'm going to do it alone."
Maya Shankar
I am going to nature fix my way out of heartbreak, right?
Florence Williams
I'm going to cure this thing.
Maya Shankar
I'm going to cure this thing. So tell me how that trip unfolded, and how things turned out.
Florence Williams
I think I had sort of romanticized the idea of being alone in the wilderness, that it would be this experience of solitude, not loneliness, but solitude, that I'd be able to really spend time thinking things through, and looking at beautiful light on the rocks, and talking to the great blue herons. And there was some of that. But there's also this sense of, "Oh, shit. I'm alone." I'm actually suddenly feeling even lonelier, because I am alone out here.
Maya Shankar
Yeah, I can see that. Florence, what do you think are some of the greatest misconceptions that we have about heartbreak?
Florence Williams
I think we have a lot of easy pablum, about how to get over it. And one of the things you hear a lot is, "Oh, you shouldn't jump into another relationship. You have to learn to love yourself. There will be no happiness, until you can love yourself first." And that just didn't ring true for me. And I just felt like I'm not going to figure everything out, and I don't want to stay away from other relationships. And I was like, "Well, where's the science? Is there any science that really says we're better off, if we don't have any relationships for a while?"
And it turns out there was no science suggesting that. And in fact, there was some science suggesting that people who have rebounds after a breakup actually do better, that they end up with more self-confidence, more self-esteem, they're able to more quickly separate themselves from their ex, and distract themselves in kind of a good way. So, I went for that. I had some rebounds. I thought they were... Well, it was a mixed bag. If you read the book, it was definitely a mixed bag. I wouldn't recommend that people necessarily jump out, and find a rebound. Obviously, it's got to feel right for you, and it's got to feel safe.
Maya Shankar
But in your case, what did you feel were some of the benefits?
Florence Williams
In my case, I was 50 when my marriage split up. And our culture does not really make us feel super sexy and desired when we're 50, especially when our husband has dumped us. So for me, actually, the rebounds were great. They made me feel desirable. They made me feel like, "Okay, maybe I have some life left in this body. And I kind of like this, actually." It was another way for me to wake up my sensory body, and just frankly, to calm down my nervous system. We know that human touch... And there's a lot of science showing this, releases oxytocin, which is a direct counter to stress hormones, like cortisol.
But I think one of the biggest surprises in the book for me, when I spoke with the scientist who was analyzing my blood, he's done a lot of large studies, looking at the blood of lonely people, and trying various interventions, and seeing what makes their genetic markers healthier. And what he's found is that it's not necessarily interventions where people hang out together, or become more social. That is not the antidote to loneliness. What he has found is that it's people who have this deep north star of who they are, and what they want to do, why they believe what they believe. These are the people who have a lot of meaning and purpose in their lives. And if they're lucky, that purpose will find some common ground with other people. That's the best scenario. But these are the people who end up having the healthiest immune systems, and the healthiest genetic profile. So, that was really interesting to me.
And he really talked to me about these two different kinds of happiness, hedonic versus eudaimonic. Hedonic being I think what so much of our culture drives us towards, which is sort of entertainment, and amusement, and being mirthful, and having a celebratory time. Eudaimonic, on the other hand, is this kind of deeper purpose, that is not necessarily associated with anything mirthful. Like you can be really tired, and kind of grumpy, because you're working so hard, or because you're caring for someone, or caring about something. But, those are the people who are actually going to live the longest.
Maya Shankar
Yeah. In full Florence, how long was the entirety of your intervention period, as we'll call it?
Florence Williams
Well, I was hoping it would only be a year, and then I'll be all better. But I did the river trip at about a year out, and I was like, "Dammit, I'm still not better." I knew I wasn't better, and that was something we found out after doing some of my evidence-based interventions to try to get better. It was really disappointing that they didn't instantly cure my heartbreak or my immune system.
Maya Shankar
Yeah. I wonder how you reckoned with the limitations of science, and what it could offer you. Because you adopted an interesting mentality, which is that maybe you could hack your way through heartbreak, or as you said, game your way through heartbreak. But because the science is relatively underdeveloped in this space, I imagine it's hard to find satisfying answers, and even harder to find the right answers for any given person. So on the one hand, it's kind of an intoxicating mission, to be like, "I'm going to figure this all out." But then sometimes you realize, "Oh darn, the science is not at a place where I can just write my little recipe down. And okay, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Here are my seven steps." We're so far away from that, if ever.
Florence Williams
Yeah, I thought everything I tried, frankly, was a little bit disappointing. It's like, "Ah, darn, that didn't work." Ultimately, yes, I had to reckon, we all have to reckon with the fact that science does not supply every solution. But also, with the basic humility that we can't always hack our way out of our own situation. That we do have to be more comfortable with ambiguity, more comfortable with the ambiguity of grief. Grief is... It's such an idiosyncratic kind of beast. It's different for everybody, but it rarely gets neatly tied up. We don't go back to being the person we were. And that's okay, but I had to rejigger my expectations. I had to realize that instead of being someone who was so kind of eager to find closure, I had to learn how to become the sort of person who didn't need closure.
And I was able to reframe that, after talking to these awe researchers, that if you're a person who doesn't need closure, you're a more resilient person, and you're likely to be more open to curiosity. You're more likely to look at the world in terms of modulated tones of gray, and not just black and white. You don't look for authority figures to tell you what to do, and what the solutions are. So it's like, "Oh, maybe this is a win." The great happy ending of heartbreak is not necessarily finding the new life partner, because not everyone's going to do that, and there isn't always a perfect life partner waiting. There's so many of these post-divorce books, where there's some handsome hunky guy at the end, and that just didn't happen in my book. The fact that there is no closure, and I could be comfortable with that, is a win. I can try to be someone who doesn't need everything to be so predictable.
Maya Shankar
Hey, thanks so much for listening. Join me next week, when I talk to psychologist Jamil Zaki, an expert in empathy. Jamil argues that empathy is something we can and should cultivate. And once we do, we can actually choose where we direct it.
Jamil Zaki
Empathy is like a spotlight. The thing that I think is really important to remember is that we are the ones pointing that spotlight. And that we have agency, we have autonomy to align our emotional experiences with the people we want to be.
Maya Shankar
A Slight Change of Plans is created, written, an executive produced by me, Maya Shankar. The Slight Change family includes our showrunner, Tyler Greene, our senior editor, Kate Parkinson-Morgan, our sound engineer Andrew Vestola, and our associate producer, Sarah McCrea. Luis Guerra wrote our delightful theme song, and Ginger Smith helped arrange the vocals. A Slight Change of Plans is a production of Pushkin Industries, so big thanks to everyone there. And of course, a very special thanks to Jimmy Lee. You can follow A Slight Change of Plans on Instagram, at @drmayashankar.
The Host
