Most people have heard the saying: A broken heart or My heart is broken.
It’s a common phrase that people use to describe how they feel emotionally when they have been emotionally hurt, lost someone or suffered something.
It happens to everyone at least once in their life when a relationship breaks up or you lose someone you love.
But where does it come from?
For a while now, researchers have been working to find out if the pain we feel on the inside (what feels like our hearts breaking) is actual physical heart pain, like a heart attack. Their discoveries have shown that people with a broken heart are actually feeling something called “stress cardiomyopathy”.
This causes the sufferer to feel like they are having a heart attack, and it could potentially lead to one.
A recent American study has gone one step further and found that atrial fibrillation (the stressors that cause the heart to start beating irregularly) is highly likely to develop one month after a loved one passes, and remains high for a year after the event. It is also true that the more unexpected the heartbreak, the more chance you have of developing atrial fibrillation.
While it wasn’t proven that the loss caused the atrial fibrillation directly the positive correlation was enough to draw the conclusion.
The evidence has shown that when your mind is suffering, your body takes note, and is heavily also impacted (you may have already noticed this with things like sleep deprivation or tiredness when you suffer from stress).
The deeper and more traumatic the loss, the more stress your physical heart and body will be under. Not only this, but it can also lead to mental health issues and other cardiovascular diseases.
The key thing to remember when facing heartbreak is that you are still in control of the situation.
Breath deeply, find soothing hobbies such as yoga and meditation, and exercise more – these are all ways of telling your body that you are on the road to recovery and stop your heart from actually breaking.
