Physical and Emotional Pain: It’s All the Same to Your Brain

Heartache. Hurt. Crushed. Broken-hearted. Tortured.

We all know the vocabulary of emotional pain. It turns out there is a deeper truth underlying the metaphorical use of terms describing physical injury to describe our emotional injuries. According to a study published this spring in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, our brains don’t distinguish emotional from physical pain. Although we can intellectually identify the source of the “injury” as being emotional rather than physical, the same neural circuitry is fired up by both kinds of pain.

Researchers discovered that areas of the brain heretofore exclusively associated with physical pain were stimulated when subjects were shown photos of romantic partners who had jilted them. The discovery that the pain of rejection registers just as deeply as a literal body blow gives new insight into the complexities of the mind-body connection.

Scientists have long noted the correlation between depression and the onset of physical conditions such as fibromyalgia, arthritis and colitis. A reciprocal connection is suggested by anecdotal evidence that shows that people may even feel symptoms of depression or some nonspecific emotional distress as a prelude to the onset of a physical illness like a cold, or even as a symptom of an undetected cancer.

Understanding how deeply our emotional pain registers in our brains can also give us permission to process our hurt feelings without a sense that we are being weak or indulgent. Emotional injury is as real as physical injury and deserves the same level of attention so that we can heal and move on.

This compelling new evidence of the connection between mental and physical health gives important support for an Inclusive approach to health. By giving our need for emotional self-care the same priority as we do our needs for internal nutritional care and topical skincare, we give ourselves the best opportunity to look and feel our best.