How Your Brain Rewards Love Is a Double-Edged Sword

Not all love is the same, says psychiatrist Dr. Gail Saltz. When your brain experiences romantic love, as opposed to maternal love, it exhibits signs of obsession, depression, and emotional stress.
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Transcript - Not all loves are created equal as far as the brain is concerned. Studies have looked at activity in the brain when recalling passionate or romantic love versus say maternal love and finds that different centers definitely are more active. In other words they put people into the functional MRI and they said think about your partner or think about your lover and certain areas lit up. Or they said think about your mom and different areas lit up which is important because different areas are responsible for the release of different neurotransmitters which then come to affect your future feeling states and future behaviors. So during romantic or passionate love what happens from a neurotransmitter standpoint, those chemicals that are released when you have that particular experience? Dopamine goes up. Dopamine is essentially the neurotransmitter of reward. So it is a neurotransmitter that’s released when you have new or novel experience but particularly experiences that are reinforcing like gambling or something that is really addictive. In fact literally addictive it’s the neurotransmitter if you snorted cocaine that is most responsible for wow, that was great and I totally want to do it again. So that is a neurotransmitter that definitely goes up when you are in the throes of romantic or passionate love. And what does that mean for you?
It means that you’re going to feel the sense of being addicted to your partner. And in fact it’s also the neurotransmitter that goes up for people who have obsessive compulsive disorder. Does that mean you’re going to develop OCD? No. But what it does mean is you’re probably going to obsess over your partner. In comes another neurotransmitter that’s called serotonin. It is definitely a neurotransmitter that is active for obsessive compulsive disorder and it means that you’re probably – and for depression. Do you become depressed? No you really don’t but what you do do is a feature of depression called rumination. So you think about your partner over and over and over again in this really obsessive manner. And if your partner is separated from you you’re going to have this longing where you’re, you know, wanting to be with them kind of like you’d want to be with a drug if it was taken away from you and you were already addicted to it. There are changes in other neurotransmitters as well. So if you’re physically with your partner the neurotransmitter oxytocin which is kind of known as the cuddle neurotransmitter and that makes you feel like warm and snuggly and intensely bonded to this person. It is particularly released following orgasm so, you know, if you’re having sex with your partner and things go well you’re going to feel very attached to them, exceedingly intimate with them partially because of that neurotransmitter. Read Full Transcript Here: .