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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?
After 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…
