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Untangling Love Addiction in the Brain

If love follows a similar cycle to addiction in the brain, how can the pattern be broken?

Kate Green Tripp
Elemental
5 min readMay 30, 2019

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Photo: d3sign/Getty Images

AAfter years spent studying the brains of people newly in love, rejected in love, and in long-term love, renowned biological anthropologist Dr. Helen Fisher doesn’t hesitate to equate love and obsession.

“I have come to believe that romantic love is an addiction — a perfectly wonderful addiction when it’s going well and a perfectly horrible addiction when it’s going poorly,” says Fisher. “And indeed it has all the characteristics of addiction: You focus on the person, you obsessively think about them, you crave them, you distort reality.”

Fisher also believes there’s a biological reason people become hopeless romantics. This particular addiction “evolved millions of years ago to drive us to form a pair bond and send our DNA into tomorrow,” she says. Human beings possess, as a species, an inherent drive to procreate. But whatever the reasons behind why people become stuck on love, experts say the underlying mechanisms operate similarly in the brain as in other kinds of addictions.

“Getting hooked is really what our brains are about,” says Dr. Judson Brewer, director of Research and Innovation at the Brown University Mindfulness Center. A psychiatrist and…

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Elemental
Elemental

Published in Elemental

Elemental is a former publication from Medium for science-backed health and wellness coverage. Currently inactive and not taking submissions.

Kate Green Tripp
Kate Green Tripp

Written by Kate Green Tripp

Writer / Editor / Strategist. Comms Director, Stanford Impact Labs. I chase ideas & shape stories about science, society & innovation. Mostly, I belong outside.

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