Broken heart? Here’s a tip: take two aspirin, and don’t call me in the morning.

Hey guys, Tara here for Dnews - and anyone who’s ever been through a big breakup, knows

just how awful they can be. You don’t eat, you don’t sleep, everything sucks - but

what can you do?

Well, according to Walter Mischel, a Psychology Professor at Columbia - all you have to do,

is pop a couple aspirin. Seems almost TOO easy. But as controversial as his theory is,

it does have a somewhat solid basis in science.

Multiple MRI studies have shown that the part of your brain that gets activated when you

experience feelings of romantic rejection, is the same area of your brain that processes

physical pain. Which is why Mischel recommends that heartbreak be treated like any other

injury.

It sounds ridiculous, but again - there is evidence that simple painkillers can help

people deal with feelings of rejection.

Scientists at UCLA conducted a study recently, where they asked a group of volunteers to

take either an over-the-counter painkiller, or a placebo pill, for 3 weeks straight. None

of them knew which one they were taking. They were then asked to monitor their levels of

pain caused by social rejection, on a day-to-day basis.

Volunteers who took the placebo pill, showed no change in their daily feelings of rejection

- at all. But by day 9, the volunteers who took painkillers, began reporting a significant

reduction in their daily hurt feelings, which continued to last until the end of the 3-week

period.

A short while after, they repeated that same study, but this time - they put all of the

volunteers into an fMRI machine, and asked them to play a game of Cyberball - which is

a virtual reality game, from which the volunteers were intentionally socially excluded.

Sure enough, the people who had been on painkillers for 3 weeks, showed significantly less neural

activity in the parts of their brain that processes pain.

Of course, not everyone is comfortable with the idea of using drugs to mitigate heartbreak,

but according to Mischel - there are other ways to soothe the pain. His number 1 rule?

Don’t talk about it.

A lot of times, when someone goes through a breakup, all they wanna do is talk about

it. And it CAN be good to get those feelings out in the open. But there’s a limit. And

as Mischel points out, it’s important to step outside of the situation, and view it

from a distance.

“Self-distancing,” he says “allows [people] to get a more objective view, without reactivating

their pain,” and that technique has been shown to lower blood pressure caused by emotional

distress.

So instead of staring at old photos of your ex, he recommends you try to think about the

people in your life to whom you’re “deeply attached.” People you love, who also love

you back. Ruminating on that, he says, makes it easier to overcome the pain that otherwise

keeps you trapped in your past.

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In the meantime, if you guys have any suggestions on how to best get over a breakup, just leave

em in the comments below - otherwise, thanks for watching!