Study: Breaking Up Hurts Like as Bad as a Punch
We’ve all heard that breaking up is hard to do, but who knew that feeling of rejection can feel the same as a punch to the face? A study that appear in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences — we read it so you don’t have to — found that the brain activity of test subjects subjected to physical pain was very similar to their brain activity when they felt the emotional pain associated with rejection. Since researchers didn’t discuss corresponding degrees of emotional and physical pain, we created this helpful chart to compare different types of anguish and injury.
| EMOTIONAL PAIN | PHYSICAL PAIN |
|---|---|
| You approach an attractive woman in a bar. You get as far as “Hi, I’m — ” before she tells you to get lost. | Your thumbs cramp after playing 37 consecutive hours of World of Warcraft. |
| A woman you recently started dating calls you the wrong name during sex. | A cranky little person bites you in the back of the knee. |
| When your girlfriend accidentally butt-dials you, you overhear her telling friends about the affair she’s having. | Jean-Claude Van Damme delivers a roundhouse kick to your groin. |
| Your fiancé tells you it’s over … on the same stadium JumboTron on which you proposed. | You jump out of a second-story window onto a bike that has no seat. |
| Just like in a porn movie, you catch your wife with the pool guy. And the pizza delivery guy. At the same time. Because she is, in fact, filming a porn movie. | You swallow several fire ant larvae, which then become full-blown fire ants inside of you and proceed to slowly eat and sting their way out of your body. Mainly through your urinary tract. |
