DR MAXWELL ADEYEMI

THE STRESS of relationship breakdown can be psychologically crippling and emotionally paralysing for some people. In addition, it can adversely affect the body's physiology in many ways that your health can be impaired. Heartbreak can kill people mentally, psychologically and physically.

Withdrawal symptoms

They say love is a drug, and it turns out people do suffer withdrawal symptoms from their partner after splitting up, similar to the craving drug addicts experience for cocaine.

The anguish experienced during a split activates the same part of the brain that is stimulated during addiction.

Analysis of brain scans of the brokenhearted showed similarities between romantic rejection and cocaine craving.

Depression, anxiety and insomnia

After a breakup, people are at risk of suffering depression and anxiety, conditions which can bring on insomnia, and are also in turn made worse by a lack of sleep.

The anguish of a breakup brings back deep-seated memories about being abandoned as a child that everyone holds – even without knowing it.

A human is programmed to need human contact, and to be affected when human contact is withdrawn.

So, a breakup revokes those emotions and makes us feel insecure, angry and sad.

People go through a similar bereavement process during a breakup as when someone has died.

They go through the bereavement cycle, typically shock, denial, grief, anger, blame, self-blame, helplessness, fear of the future, depression and then acceptance.

If people feel abandoned but don’t feel anger, they become depressed, they lose confidence in their ability to have a relationship in the future.

They become anxious, they may relive conversations and the breakup in their minds. They may not sleep, which makes anxiety and depression worse.

Heart attack

After a breakup or a divorce, the body is flooded with stress hormones cortisol and adrenaline.

This leads to the heart beating faster and triggers abnormal heart rhythms.

People start worrying, the adrenaline levels go up, the body goes into "fight or flight mode" and the stress can cause a sudden heart attack and death.

They go pale, the heart starts beating too fast. When it does that, you have a narrowing in the arteries which is not normally significant, but it comes significant when stressed.

Even if you don’t have a heart attack this can cause irregular heartbeat and rapid heartbeat.

For people who have this kind of stress, it's like putting your heart on a hard drug like cocaine. Stress can even bring on the symptoms of a heart attack even if the arteries are not blocked.

Women tend to die suddenly in the short term after a breakup, but more men die of heart attacks in the long term.

Skin disorder

The stress hormones released after a breakup can aggravate the skin. Skin conditions such as psoriasis, eczema, alopecia and acne deteriorate after a breakup, due to a cocktail of hormones surging through the body. A breakup is naturally one of the biggest things that can happen in a person’s life