Every other Friday, the Outside/In team answers a listener question about the natural world. This weeks question comes from Jenna in North Carolina.
"What's the best outdoor activity to help heal from heartbreak?"
Producer Marina Henke looked into it.
Transcript
This has been lightly edited for clarity.
Marina Henke: Answering the question of how to heal from a breakup can feel like a near spiritual task. Love, heartbreak… they’re all pretty squishy feelings.
Sandra Langeslag: What I study is how can people use the way they think or what they do to feel better after a heartbreak.
Marina Henke: Not for Sandra Langeslag. She’s an associate professor of psychological sciences at the University of Missouri in St. Louis. In order to figure out how to recover from heartbreak, Sandra starts with what goes on during heartbreak.
Sandra Langeslag: It changes your emotions… so you may get what's called sympathetic nervous system activation, which is fight-or-flight response.
Marina Henke: There’s different theories about why this happens, but a centralizing idea is when a breakup occurs you lose a ‘core attachment figure.’ Leave the psychology language behind, and the phrase that comes to mind from personal experience? Lost at sea.
Now, there’s lots of ways to heal from heartbreak, and probably just as many articles about it online. But Sandra’s particularly interested in something called ‘negative reappraisal.’ I know, this sounds pretty ruthless, but the idea is to focus your attention on the parts of the relationship that didn’t make sense.
Sandra Langeslag: So what’s the mean thing that they said? What is that hobby that you didn't like?
Marina Henke: Sandra found that negative reappraisal can help people feel less in love. But when she tested it in a lab, it didn’t make her participants feel any happier.
Sandra Langeslag: And that was, of course, not my intention because I was like, "I’m going to make these people feel better, but I made them feel worse."
Marina Henke: Which gets us to those outdoor activities. Sandra told me that distracting yourself after a breakup does tend to make people feel better, especially when paired with reflection. And what is more distracting than the great outdoors? Now, Sandra wasn’t going to declare whether rock climbing or kayaking would do the job better. But, according to the research, nearly 100% of adults have felt heartbreak in some way. So I put out a call, asking people on the internet how they handled their breakups.
Listener Voices: I’m going through a breakup right now and one of the only things that genuinely helps is going for a walk… I’d just moved to a new city and there was a very lovely trail near my apartment… I try not to let myself listen to anything… and I would go on runs every morning and I was not a runner… no podcast, no music, and just hear the birds, it’s like the only thing that gets me out of this anxious, very sad headspace.
Marina Henke: The listener who reached out with this question told me that she’d signed up for a watercoloring and backpacking trip after a big breakup. The painting had forced her to concentrate on exactly what was in front of her and the backpacking, in her words, helped her “embrace the suck.” It seems that moving in nature, in any way, helps. And that, Sandra could agree with.
Sandra Langeslag: Even though your mind will still have a chance to maybe think about your ex-partner, I do think those can be very valuable to help people feel better.
Marina Henke: I noticed that many people gave examples of being alone in nature. One listener had never been to her local park before… that is, until her divorce.
Listener Voices: But now, I would wake up at six in the morning. I'd walk two miles in, I'd walk two miles back out to my car.
Marina Henke: Eventually, she started inviting friends on those walks. That can also be an important part of the healing process. Outdoor activities may be especially promising if they involve spending time with people; social support has shown really positive outcomes for breakup recovery when tested by psychologists. Whether it’s water coloring or running for the first time, there’s a core idea here: you can help yourself heal.
Sandra Langeslag: Sometimes people will say ‘Love is a natural process. You shouldn't mess with it!’ And sometimes people even think they shouldn’t! But, you know, depression is a natural process, cancer is a natural process. We're definitely trying to mess with those.
Marina Henke: Repairing heartbreak isn’t just a matter of time. It’s also what you do with that time.
Special thanks to Emily Lovett, Abby Foy and Evelyn Olmos.
If you’d like to submit a question to the Outside/In team, you can record it as a voice memo on your smartphone and send it to outsidein@nhpr.org. You can also leave a message on our hotline, 1-844-GO-OTTER.
