Love Chemicals

When you fall in love, your bodily chemicals go haywire. The exciting, scary, mysterious and unpredictable elements of love stem from hyperstimulation of the limbic brain's fear center known as "the amygdala". Hyperactivation of the amygdala gives rise to a physical stress response in your body.

Hans Selye, a Canadian endocrinologist, was the first to apply the word "stress" to physical and emotional strain. Before that, "stress" was just an engineering term. Selye, who did the bulk of his research in the 1930s, discovered that the stress hormone cortisol has detrimental health effects in rats. Together with other adrenal gland hormones such as adrenaline and noradrenaline, cortisol prepares the body for a "fight or flight" response.

Stress hormones are secreted in situations of perceived danger. They can be present, even when the danger isn't real. For example, they are present in generous amounts in people with fear of public speaking. They are the little bastards that make your heart break dance, your skeleton turn to gelatin and your new Mickey Mouse voice implant make little noises the first time you stand in front of a 100-person audience.

Falling in love then goes like this. Unpredictability, mystery and sexual attraction make the amygdala go into hyperactivation. This signals to the adrenal glands that something exciting, scary, mysterious and unpredictable is going on. This, in turn, results in the adrenal glands pumping a surge of adrenaline, noradrenaline and cortisol into the bloodstream. Via the bloodstream, adrenaline increases heart and breathing rates, noradrenaline produces body heat, making you sweat, and cortisol provides extra energy fuels for muscles to use.

Love is stressful. Can you quit it? Not easily. When you fall in love, your dopamine levels increase. This motivates you to continue to perform the activities that generated the elevated dopamine levels in the first place.

Love is stressful and highly addictive. It also makes you feel bad, at least periodically. Increased amygdala activation is correlated with a heightened breakdown of extra-cellular serotonin. Serotonin makes you feel good. When your serotonin levels go down, you feel bad. You become depressed or anxious. This is what happens to people in love. They feel good when they are together and horrible when they are apart.

You can now see why one-sided love makes you miserable. Since you are never together with wonder boy or wonder girl, your serotonin-levels are constantly suppressed, your body wants the dopamine-high and your adrenaline glands pump huge amounts of stress hormones into your blood vessels. When you suffer from unrequited love, you are literally at your wits end.

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Compassionate Love

Photo: People at oxytocin party taking tablets of the love and trust hormone oxytocin. http://blip.tv/file/1624462/.

Whereas passionate love is fueled by low levels of "feel good" chemicals like serotonin and high levels of "reward" hormones like dopamine, the calm bonding effects of compassionate love are in part due to increased levels of serotonin, vasopressin and oxytocin. This package of chemicals is associated with increases in well-being, calmness, self-confidence and willingness to trust others.

The prime function of the neurotransmitter vasopressin is to regulate the body's retention of water, but vasopressin also has been found to increase pair-bonding. It makes males become more aggressive towards other males and more protective of their mates. It also has proven to have positive effects on memory.

Originally known to stimulate labor and milk ejection, oxytocin has been found to increase pain thresholds and decrease the anxiety we feel toward strangers. It has also been shown to improve the symptoms of asperger's syndrome and autism.

Oxytocin suppresses the activity in the part of the brain that processes fear. It is responsible for spontaneous erections and is released during female and male orgasms, during touch, and during the ingestion of food.

Oxytocin continually increases in popularity. You can now buy oxytocin sprays online. Though it hasn’t been proven scientifically, oxytocin sprays are advertized as trust sprays. Give your client, customer or sex buddy a few sprays of oxytocin in their nostrils, and they will trust you like the patient trusts his surgeon.

In Manhattan oxytocin parties are now all the rage. Oxytocin makes us warm and fussy inside. It creates smiles that stick to our faces like barnacles. Ideal for your uptown cocktail party.

Chemically, passionate love and compassionate love have contrary physiological profiles. Compassionate love is similar in its physiological profile to states of sleepiness and nutritional fulfillment.

Passionate love, on the other hand, is physiologically akin to obsessive-compulsive disorder, generalized anxiety disorder and stressful body states such as hunger. Chemically speaking, it’s no wonder that passionate love, unlike compassionate love, involves intrusive, obsessive thoughts about the object of affection.

However, while being in love may make you high, being high does not make you fall in love. Spraying your long-term partner’s big nostrils with condensed oxytocin while he is sleeping may make him trust you, but dumping the content of fifteen bottles of oxytocin in your new hottie's chocolate martini won’t make him fancy you (it's a bit like filling his coffee maker with decaf for three weeks and then switching to espresso).

Irrational Love as a Psychological Disorder

In my first post I introduced the idea of irrational love. Like other emotions, love can be rational or irrational. Love is assessable for rationality. One of my views of love is that irrational love is unhealthy. It is a mental disorder.

Though unhealthy irrational love is not included in the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, it satisfies the criterion for being a disorder.

The obsessive phases of roller coaster relationships and intense love affairs tend to be irrational. In fact, their chemical profile resembles the chemical profiles of generalized anxiety disorder and obsessive compulsive disorder.

Science tells us that the excitement of sexual and romantic love are due in part to increased levels of the neurotransmitter dopamine and low levels of serotonin.

Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that motivates us to continue to perform certain activities by causing a feeling of profound enjoyment in response to those activities. For example, dopamine helps to motivate us to continue to have sex by causing feelings of extreme pleasure in response to the activity.

It is commonly thought that people who are severely addicted to nicotine, amphetamines and cocaine have altered dopamine pathways that make the pleasure from the drug significantly stronger for them compared to non-addictive personality types.

Serotonin in the stomach regulates intestinal movements. In the brain it regulates mood, appetite, sleep, muscle contraction, memory and learning. Serotonin reuptake inhibitors inhibit serotonin from being absorbed by the body.

Inhibiting the reuptake of serotonin increases the serotonin levels in the brain. This has been found to enhance mood and decrease anxiety. Serotonin reuptake inhibitors have been used successfully for many years in the treatment of depression, generalized anxiety disorder and social phobia.

Love can be as addictive as cocaine and speed. A particularly severe form of love obsession is obsessive love disorder. When parents are unable to satisfy a child's emotional needs, he will continue to long for the parent's emotional attention. Consequently he will tend to become attracted to and fixated on unavailable and emotionally inaccessible partners because they are implicitly seen as the parent whose love the sufferer is longing for.