Wild Ideas Worth Living

Heartbreak with Florence Williams

Episode Summary

In Florence Williams’ newest book, Heartbreak, Williams explores the science of heartbreak after her 25 year marriage suddenly falls apart. She seeks out what happens to our brains and bodies after losing love.

Episode Notes

Florence Williams is a science journalist known for examining the relationship between nature and our mental health. A painful divorce prompted Florence to put her research to the test in her new book, Heartbreak: A Personal and Scientific Journey. She started to investigate the impact of breakups on the brain and body. Florence conducted self-experiments and interviewed experts to explore the questions — How does heartbreak physiologically affect our bodies? How can going outside help us heal?

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Episode Transcription

Florence Willia...: It's ironic, but ultimately the experience of having my heart broken, I feel like opened me up to being more capable of love. The experience of being more authentic leads to greater intimacy with everyone, people you care about in your life and even people you don't care about. You feel more empathetic. I feel like I became a better listener. I became a better friend. I became a better mother. And that's really what it's all about.

Shelby Stanger: Florence Williams is a science journalist and a long time adventure. If she sounds familiar it's because she's been on this show before. Florence is known for examining the relationship between nature and our mental health. Today, she's talking about her new book, Heartbreak: A Personal and Scientific Journey. After going through her own painful divorce, Florence started to investigate the impact of breakups on our brains and bodies. She interviewed health practitioners and scientists to explore the questions. How does heartbreak physiologically affect our bodies and how can going outside help us heal? Her new book, Heartbreak is about adventure, but it's also filled with science, sex and a little bit of drugs, topics that make this episode not so suitable for the kids in your life. Quick disclaimer, this episode contains conversations about drug use in a therapeutic setting. The content shared in this episode is for educational and entertainment purposes and does not constitute medical advice. I'm Shelby Stanger and this is Wild Ideas Worth Living.

Shelby Stanger: Florence is the author of the bestselling books, The Nature Fix and Breasts: A Natural and Unnatural History. She's a contributing editor at Outside Magazine and a freelance writer for The New York Times, National Geographic, Slate and more. On Wild Ideas Worth Living, relationships and romance aren't our usual subject matter, but I love love. Behind the scenes of the podcast I'm always matchmaking or asking people where they met their partner and we all know you can't have love without a little heartbreak. With Florence's background in research and journalism, she approaches this topic in her book through the lens of science and nature. I think what I liked so much about this book that everybody needs to read, Heartbreak: Personal and Scientific Journey is it's the first adventure book I've ever read that has sex, drugs, river rafting and it's fun and beautiful and there's so much scientific evidence. So can we just go back and fill everybody in? What was the inspiration for this book? It's so different than the other books you've written.

Florence Willia...: Well, I think it is and it isn't. As a journalist, as a science journalist, as someone who writes books, I think it, you know, this is my third book and in all of my books, there is a first person narrator, who is me, who is asking questions about why I'm experiencing what I'm experiencing. So and using myself as sort of a proxy for a lot of other people. It's not just like, Hey, I want to ask these questions about myself. It's like a lot of us are facing these kinds of issues. What do they say about ourselves in our world? And so in my first book I found out that there were industrial pollutants in our bodies specifically in my breast milk, as I was nursing my daughter and that launched a whole book about reproductive health and breast health and how modern life has changed our health.

Florence Willia...: But again, I use myself and my body as a proxy for talking about those questions. And my second book, The Nature Fix, was also about why do I feel horrible when I'm in a really busy, dirty grimy city, even though there are a lot of things I like about cities. But definitely I felt the psychological shift and so that was a big book asking the questions about how our external landscapes get reflected in our internal landscapes. So both of those were really about these unspoken or unseen connections between the world around us, these external factors and our bodies. And so in a lot of ways, this Heartbreak book, I think is similar. I mean, I experienced, you know, I'll be at a more dramatic event in my own life when my husband of 25 years decided he didn't want to be married anymore.

Florence Willia...: And in fact, he wanted to look for, in his words, "a soulmate," and to hear that was devastating and shocking and stunning, but and I had never experienced it before honestly because I had met him when I was 18. So I had been in some ways, protected from many of the big emotions of the heart, not having dated in my twenties or whatever, but my body really registered that pain in a way that made the science journalist in me go, what the heck is going on? And what does this say about our immune systems and the way our emotions make our bodies function?

Shelby Stanger: What did you do to research your heartbreak? And is there any specific scientific examples you can share and how our body physically changes and registers things differently? And I'd really be curious if you could talk about maybe some of the studies.

Florence Willia...: Yeah. So there's not a ton of science on what happens when love ends. There's quite a bit of science on what happens when we're falling in love. I think researchers like to study that, it's interesting and fun. And so there are some brain studies looking at the dopamine and the serotonin and the nice oxytocin flowing between partners. So I did one of the first interviews I had actually just maybe about five weeks after the split, after my husband left was with Biological anthropologist, Helen Fisher. And she's someone who's written a lot and done a lot of those research studies about your brain on love.

Florence Willia...: But she also is one of the few people that's looked at dumped people, people who've been dumped by their beloveds and she's put them in a scanner. And so I ran into her actually at a conference in Aspen and I was like, "Oh my God, Helen. Will you please talk to me because my 25 year marriage just exploded." And she was like, "Of course, honey. I will talk to you. Come talk to me." And she couldn't have been nicer. So it was just really fun to talk to her. She's 20 years older than I am. She's really maternal. She's really warm. She validated-

Shelby Stanger: I love this part of your book.

Florence Willia...: Yeah. She's a character in my book. So she told me that there are certain parts of our brains that light up when we're experiencing heartbreak. And these are specifically the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex and our insular. So what's interesting about that is those are also the parts of our brains that register physical pain. So we hear about heartbreak as a metaphor. It hurts, it hurts, but actually our brains do register it the same way or a similar way. Not exactly the same, but a similar way that they register pain. So she just validated what I was going through and she said, "I can tell you why you're not sleeping. I can tell you why you're losing all this weight all of a sudden that you don't want to lose. I can tell you why you feel so freaked out."

Florence Willia...: And she talked to me a lot about the nervous system and about how humans evolved in group settings, because we feel safe in groups. And so when we're kicked out of a relationship, it feels to us like we have been left out on the velt by ourselves and we're about to be pounced upon by a predator. So that's why the sleeplessness, that's why the anxiety, that's why I felt like I'd been plugged into an electrical socket. Our nervous system doesn't really distinguish between when you're actually alone in the jungle versus when your primary attachment partner of 25 years has taken off, but it's a really similar feeling of being unsafe and being afraid.

Shelby Stanger: There was even something in your book I remember, and I'm going to butcher this, so sorry, but like physical heart attack-

Florence Willia...: Yes.

Shelby Stanger: ... was a symptom of heartbreak.

Florence Willia...: Yeah. So that's a really interesting story. I did not have a heart attack, but I found out about a condition called Takotsubo cardiomyopathy, which is kind of a literal heartbreak. And it happens after someone has experienced a big emotional blow, such as a death or a heartbreak. Their bodies release so much norepinephrine and stress hormones that it stuns their heart in a way that a quadrant of their heart, the left ventricle, balloons out and can't beat anymore. And so I think about five to 10% of all heartbreaks are actually this kind of emotionally driven heartbreak called Takotsubo.

Florence Willia...: And I met a woman who's 41 years old whose boyfriend had left her and gotten another woman pregnant. And she had one of these crazy heart attacks. She's okay. Fortunately, most people do survive this kind of heart attack. Although 20% of people will go on to have some complications from it later on. So that's just one of the many ways. I think there was William Farr who was this 19th century physician. He said, "The tragedies of life are largely arterial." So I mean, he knew that tragedies we experience do get reflected literally in our arteries and our veins and our heart.

Shelby Stanger: Florence felt the impact of her heartbreak, both emotionally and physically. After her husband left, she lost an unhealthy amount of weight and she developed two autoimmune diseases, including Type 1 Diabetes. Her right eye was twitching a lot. And sometimes she even got heart palpitations. There was a part of her book that really stood out to me. A few months after her divorce, Florence visited her acupuncture's Bernie. Bernie could feel the tension in her body and he asked Florence if she was still in shock. She didn't know shock could last that long. What Bernie told her next really stuck with me. "The body doesn't lie." It's so wild how heartbreak is such a big emotion that can result in such big physical changes. I think that's the thing that blew me away so much in your book.

Florence Willia...: Yeah. Exactly. I mean, we tend to think of heartbreak as being a psychological thing. It's sad. Like you're really sad. You're bummed out, it's in your brain, it's all in your head and it just blew me away. Like you said, how much our bodies take this on. And for me, I told you about the sleeplessness and the weight loss, but I also got sick. I ended up in the emergency room. I had this weird blood sugar spike. I got diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes, which is an autoimmune disease. And I talked to people who said, yeah, we think that there is often actually an emotional trigger for this kind of Type 1 diabetes and also other autoimmune diseases. And then so the other thing we did that was really cool for this book is that I worked with an immunogeneticist.

Shelby Stanger: Oh, immunogeneticist.

Florence Willia...: Immuno... Say that-

Shelby Stanger: That's a cool word.

Florence Willia...: Ten times faster.

Shelby Stanger: Immunogeneticist.

Florence Willia...: And sometimes he calls himself a neuro-immunogeneticist. So I don't know how many letters that has in it, but it's a lot. Anyway, his name is Steve Cole. He works at UCLA and he's made his career by studying people who consider themselves lonely. We know that lonely people, people who say they're lonely have a higher rate of early death. They have higher rates of a bunch of diseases, including things like Alzheimer's and dementia, cardiovascular diseases. And so he has wanted to figure out why. Like what's going on actually in their immune systems that makes them more likely to get sick and then get sicker. So I told him about my heartbreak and he said, "Why don't you come into my lab and we'll check your blood. We'll go ahead and analyze your white blood cells now and five months from now and 12 months from now and we'll see how your white blood cells look and if they're going to get better over time as you move through this experience that you've had in heartbreak."

Shelby Stanger: So let's talk about that. What are some of the things you did to alleviate your own heartbreak?

Florence Willia...: I wanted to try things that had some scientific evidence behind them. So the book was definitely still evidence driven, but I also found that there were so many prescriptions that you hear in popular culture for heartbreak, that I also found weren't really helpful, you know. So I wanted to bust some myths about that. Yeah. So I undertook a bunch of interventions that were science based to try to configure my own recovery from heartbreak. I went on this long river trip, a wilderness trip. I tried to spend a lot of time in deep relationships with my friends.

Florence Willia...: I experimented a little bit sexually and romantically, also known to be good for one's mental health. I spent some time with other people who were undergoing their own emotional trauma to learn about what they had to teach me. And finally, I worked with the therapist in what felt like a very safe setting to use psychedelics for trauma healing. And there's one other thing, which is that I participated in an EMDR workshop for people who were going through divorce. An EMDR is a kind of psychotherapy treatment that uses bilateral tapping to try to decouple emotions from memory.

Florence Willia...: And then of course with Steve Cole at UCLA, we were able to actually go back and check to see if some of these things that I doing were going to be helpful for my immune system. So that what's really cool about this book. You and your listeners, it's not like you can just go to your doctor and you can say, "Hey, can you check my white blood cells for loneliness?" These aren't readily available tests, but I was able to do it and then tell the story in a way that I hope will be helpful to other people.

Shelby Stanger: It would be cool if you could actually go to the doctor and test your white blood cells-

Florence Willia...: It would.

Shelby Stanger: ... for loneliness.

Florence Willia...: Someday.

Shelby Stanger: Maybe we will get there.

Florence Willia...: I think we will.

Shelby Stanger: So what are some myths you busted, real quick.

Florence Willia...: Okay. Well, here's a funny one. Often when you've just gotten divorced, people will tell you, don't rush in to another relationship. You need to work on yourself, you need to heal, you need to love yourself. You hear all this stuff. And I was like, oh, I've kind of rolled my eyes and be like, yeah. I mean, oh, and then one of the podcasts I listen to repeated this and this is piece of advice that you often hear, like for every one year of a relationship, you should wait six months. And I was like, come on. That would be 12 years for me. I will be literally like being spoonfed by then. Like, no, I'm not going to wait. So then I was like, well, where's the science, where's the science that says you shouldn't go have a fling or a rebound or another relationship?

Florence Willia...: And in fact there was no science saying that, and there was science saying the opposite that people who have been dumped in a relationship, if they go off, if they go out and they have a rebound and it's a rebound that feels safe, with someone trustworthy, let me emphasize that it can actually be great for their self confidence. It can be great for their self-esteem and it can be really good for their psyche because it's a distraction and it's comforting. It's comforting to be in someone's arms who is warm and loving and can help you release the happy hormones instead of just the stress hormones.

Shelby Stanger: So you had some rebounds.

Florence Willia...: I had just, for the sake of science, Shelby, I had to go try this out. Yes.

Shelby Stanger: Okay. And people, you have to read her book because she doesn't have just like boring rebounds. They're pretty exciting. They're more exciting than most of my dates, Florence.

Florence Willia...: They were more exciting, let's just say than I expected or intended, in some cases.

Shelby Stanger: So I have just a real quick question, because the last time you dated, my mom was widowed. So she started dating again in her forties, in her late forties. And she just said, "The last time I dated, I was like 1920. So she basically had the mentality of a 20 year old when she dated." So did you have the mentality-

Florence Willia...: Yeah. I totally did.

Shelby Stanger: ... of a 18 year old when you dated?

Florence Willia...: I totally did.

Shelby Stanger: That's kind of awesome.

Florence Willia...: I was like, who was I before in my marriage and who I was was a 17 and 18 year old girl. And I wanted to reaccess her, because she was the last person I was before I changed to conform to this marriage, which is what we all do. I mean, we all sort of co-create our relationships together, but it means leaving little pieces of us behind. So I felt like it was this wonderful opportunity in some ways, although of course a difficult opportunity to rediscover parts of myself that maybe hadn't been expressed in my marriage. And that's a beautiful experience, really.

Shelby Stanger: Even though Florence's marriage was ending, in many ways, it was a beginning of a new life. Being on her own again and writing a book about it, give her an excuse to dig into research and spend time in nature. In the process, she rediscovered parts of herself that had been lost over the years. When we come back, Florence talks about why she decided to paddle down a river for 30 days and she even spills the tea about one of her wild dates. She also leads us through the many science based therapies that helped her heal from her divorce.

Shelby Stanger: In Florence's book, The Nature Fix, she writes about how nature is good for us. It's not just that we feel calmer and happier outdoors, her research showed that being outside slows our heart rates and blood pressure and calms our nervous systems. She also knew that spending three days in nature can have a profound effect on the brain. Shortly after her divorce, Florence was giving a talk at a high school when she met a teacher named Julie Barnes. Julie runs an outdoor program, which includes a three day solo wilderness trip for high school seniors. Here's an excerpt about Julie Barnes from the book.

Florence Willia...: She told me about how power powerful the experience is for kids who are about to leave home for the first time. "It strips away their usual distractions and supports and homes in on what they want to claim in their lives as they go through this transition," she said. Who do they want to be? As they step across this threshold? And then step back into the world. She said, kids age are wired for deep challenges that match their energy. It's how their brains mature and learn. Without some sanctioned hardships, they risk becoming overly infantalized, delaying growing up and assuming responsibility for themselves and their communities, or they may take inappropriate truly dangerous risks instead. Women, my age too, are wired for transition. Everything about us is changing. Physically, hormonally, emotionally are shifting roles in culture work and family append our identities even without divorce. I told Barnes about my own reluctant transition and my desire to market recover from it and figure out what the hell comes next.

Shelby Stanger: Okay. So what did work? What are some of the things you did that really changed your chemistry?

Florence Willia...: Yeah. So one of the first big interventions that we tried was I knew having written The Nature Fix, I knew that I found a lot of comfort and peace being outside and in The Nature Fix book, I only talk about the science up to three days, like what happens to our brains when we're outside for three days, the so-called three day effect, but I was like, this is such a big heartbreak. Like I need way more than three days. Why don't I try 30 days? Why don't I go down this river for 30 days?

Florence Willia...: And so I did, I went on this river trip on The Green River in Utah and I did half of that trip with friends and family, which was really great, including my kids. And then I did half of it solo in a canoe through Canyonlands National Park. So I gave Steve Cole, my blood sample before and then we did a blood sample after. And the big reveal here is that the trip was really good for me in a lot of ways, gave me a lot of time to think, a lot of time to practice my meditation skills.

Florence Willia...: I did access some bravery and I did learn this incredible metaphor that I could indeed paddle my own boat. I could be self-reliant, I would be okay. But when we analyzed the blood, it wasn't that different from the sort of lonely blood that we saw before the river trip. So that was a surprise. I was hoping the wilderness would heal me and it started to and it was helpful, but it wasn't the whole [inaudible 00:23:10] and I think it's because of the solo piece actually, because I was alone in the wilderness, which is a lot of great things, but it's not actually that relaxing because you have to just be on high alert all the time.

Florence Willia...: You can't screw up. There's no one who's going to rescue you except yourself. So you can't cut your foot in camp and you can't light the beach on fire and you can't tie your boat in badly and you can't really even spill out of your boat. You can't flip over. It's just you taking care of yourself. And so there's a state of hyper alertness there that is, your nervous system's paying attention, let's just say.

Shelby Stanger: I didn't realize what a badass adventure you are. Like 30 days on a river is no joke.

Florence Willia...: I grew up on rivers. Well, it's weird actually. I grew up in New York City. I grew up on the upper west side, but my parents were divorced from an early age and every summer my dad would throw me in this van and we'd put two canoes on top and we would drive out west. And so running rivers, running wilderness rivers is something that is in my DNA from an early age and in my marriage, my husband and I continued to do a lot of river trips and we did them with our kids. And part of what I was going for was that I wanted to reclaim that as something that I did. And that was important to me and not just something I did in my marriage. So I talked to a neuroscientist-

Shelby Stanger: Patient.

Florence Willia...: The University of Kentucky, his name's Nathan DeWall. He also looks at loneliness and addiction and grief and things like that. And he said, "The great thing about planning an expedition is that you're engaging your frontal cortex, you're engaging your executive network. So you're actually forcing your brain out of the crazy emotional chaos and into something that requires you to use your more evolved brain." So there are psychological benefits in planning an expedition and this trip required a lot of planning obviously. And also I would say that while I was in the middle of it, I mean, there were certainly incredible moments of joy and happiness and peace.

Florence Willia...: Well, one thing about being alone is that you really hear the sounds better and you start kind of making friends with the wild belief. So I would see these great blue hear ins every day and I would talk to them and I was like, oh, I felt like I almost had this like call and response with these animals. So that sounds a little kind of Woo hoo, but you you're able to connect to it.

Shelby Stanger: I believe it.

Florence Willia...: You're able to connect to something and feel in some ways that you're not alone, even when you are.

Shelby Stanger: Florence felt a deep sense of joy and comfort during her time on the river. While she could feel some big changes taking place, her blood test said otherwise. Regardless of the results, she was determined to keep trying different interventions in pursuit of healing her broken heart. Some of her methods were tried and true, like a good old fashioned rebound. Some of them were a little bit more off the beaten path.

Florence Willia...: So by the third time point after which I had done some other things, in addition to the wilderness, I did some other interventions, including I actually, with a therapist, did some psychedelics. I did a psychedelic experience, which is also, there's a lot of science now or emerging science that can be really helpful for emotional trauma. And that was actually super helpful for me. And I actually envisioned my ex-husband as sort of part... I envisioned myself as a tree and that he was this sort of vine wrapped around the trunk in a way. And so he was part of my trunk, but I also wanted him not to be strangling my trunk anymore. Under the influence of these substances, I was able to say, "Can you please unwind, can you please not be strangler fig and you can go down to the roots a little and you can hang out there, but I don't want you to restrict my treeness.

Florence Willia...: It sounds so hokey to talk about it, but it was a really powerful experience for me. And I was able to sort of better, I think, separate myself from the marriage after that experience. And also to feel just less scared about the future. I just was in a place where I was like, whatever happens, happens and I can handle it. And in fact the dramas of my heartbreak and sort of my personal experience are not that big a deal in the scheme of the cosmos, like it just helped put things into perspective for me and gave me, I think some more bravery, so it was a win.

Shelby Stanger: I think that's so true. And I think that's kind of why we go outside in nature. If you look up-

Florence Willia...: Exactly.

Shelby Stanger: ... the rest of the world feels big and you can feel small, you can be like, okay, this isn't such a big deal.

Florence Willia...: There was the rebounding and I think that was super helpful for me too. With one man, we paddled out to an island in the middle of the Potomac River and we spent the night there and I'm not even sure which state this island is in. I don't think we were really supposed to be on that island, but it was a really cold night and we ate a lot of peanut butter. And I would say that was an unusual romantic date. There was hanging out with friends, being social, spending time in nature with friends, which I did sort of on a daily basis practically.

Florence Willia...: So that the point, I think our last blood draw was like two years after the split. And by that time, actually my immune system was looking much better. I'm really happy to say. So I was putting out less inflammation, which is related to all these chronic diseases. And I was putting out more white blood cells that fight viruses and actually it was like maybe a month or two before the pandemic started that we did that last blood draw. So I felt very reassured that I was now perhaps in a better place to fight viruses than I was right after the split.

Shelby Stanger: How did you negotiate all this with the kids? It's one thing, if you don't have kids, it's another thing when you have kids. I know when my mom started dating, it's different because my dad had died. Some ways that was easier because he was gone. So but in other ways we were like, I don't know how old your kids are, but I was 11 to 13. And so I was like, you know.

Florence Willia...: You're like, who are all these strange men, mom?

Shelby Stanger: Yeah. I wanted my mom to date someone cool. Eventually she found someone cool. I'm like, yeah, that one. He can stay around.

Florence Willia...: Well, so these days most parents share custody, 50-50. So my kids were teenagers. They were 13 and 15 when we split a up. So I would have seven days to myself and I would have have seven days as sort of a full-time single mom. And at first I was really, really sad about that arrangement because I really missed my kids when they were gone. I didn't want to miss half of the holidays and the birthdays and the celebrations and the just time with them. But there was also this feeling when everyone left the house of like, oh, I have all this free time that I have not had in like a decade to go do some things I want to do, then I don't get to do, and some of that's just like sitting in the bathtub and reading, which I love. And some of it's like going out and exercising and having more time to do that and having more time to be with my friends and yet, so there's some time for dating. Let's just say, yeah, there is.

Shelby Stanger: I had a mom who remarried the best guy ever. And for me, I saw that growing up and it was so positive and had my dad not passed away. I think my parents wouldn't have been divorced and it would've been really ugly. But I think the point is that with a new partner, you can have a new life.

Florence Willia...: Or even, let's be honest, without a new partner you can have-

Shelby Stanger: Or without a new partner. Exactly.

Florence Willia...: I don't think the prince charming narrative has to be the only one. And I'm pretty resistant to that. I mean, when I was writing my book, people kept saying, "Oh, you've got to go end it with some great new relationship." And I'm like, "No, I don't. I don't have to end it that way." Not everyone's going to find that. I don't know if I'm going to find it when I was writing the book and I feel like there are a lot of ways to love and there are a lot of ways to be loved and it's not always going to be a romantic love.

Shelby Stanger: Any advice? There's going to be a lot of people dealing with heartbreak or loneliness. I know they're different, but they can be somewhat similar.

Florence Willia...: Yeah. They can.

Shelby Stanger: Grief, rejection, loneliness. I know they all affect us.

Florence Willia...: I mean, loneliness in our cells does look a little bit like a threat state. So I have this three part kind of plan for recovery, which I could summarize. And the first is just, you need to kind of get calm because if you're in a fight or flight state, you're not really going to be able to heal and you're not going to be able to do all these helpful things. So first you need to figure out how to kind of just calm down and for me, and for a lot of people, that is being outside and it's moving our bodies, doing things like engaging our executive network, so planning something or even just asking yourself what colors you're seeing or what patterns you're seeing, or what birds you're hearing. All of those things can help you get out of your look, deep, emotional place.

Florence Willia...: So calming down is number one. And then two, is the connection piece. So whether you're connecting with nature or with art or with beauty in some way, I mean, there's a lot of science actually that I get into in the book, showing that beauty can be part of the recovery cure. And then the third piece is purpose. So if you can try to figure out how to make some meaning from this tragedy you've been through, like how has it maybe helped you think about yourself in some ways that are constructive and not just destructive. How can you help other people going through pain like this? What can you take moving forward from your heartbreak that can provide some purpose and some meaning.

Shelby Stanger: Wait, what were the three again? You tell me one more time.

Florence Willia...: Yeah. So the first one is calm and then connection and then purpose.

Shelby Stanger: Florence managed to turn the trauma from divorce into a new source of meaning in her life. It took her three years to write Heartbreak. And in that time she learned a lot. She loves alone time, she's more comfortable with uncertainty and she's able to see the beauty in the every day. Breakups are painful, but we can all get through them by finding a sense of calm, connection and purpose. Florence, I love this interview. Thank you so much for being such a joy to interview. I love your research. I love your book. I loved hearing about your experiments and your adventures. Please, please, please do yourself a favor and get Florence's new book, Heartbreak: A Personal and Scientific Journey.

Shelby Stanger: There's also an incredible enhanced audio book. It uses tape from the interviews she conducted during her research and has the actual voices of her therapist, her best friend, her sister-in-law, and even a couple of boyfriends. You can find Heartbreak at your favorite brick and mortar bookstores and online. If you want to be in touch with Florence, go to her website, Florencewilliams.com. That's F-L-O-R-E-N-C-E W-I-L-L-I-A-M-S. You can also follow Florence on Instagram at florence999 to see what she's up to.

Shelby Stanger: Wild Ideas Worth Living is part of the REI podcast network. It's hosted by me, Shelby Stanger, written and edited by Annie Fassler and Sylvia Thomas of Puddle Creative. And our senior producer is Chelsea Davis. Our executive producers are Paolo Mottola and Joe Crosby. As always we love it when you follow the show, rate it and review it wherever you listen. And remember some of the best adventures happen when you follow your wildest ideas.