Can Love Really Make You Sick?

Feelings of lovesickness can be both mental and physical. There’s no clinical definition, but lovesickness usually represents how the body responds to feelings in the mind. “Typically, relationship challenges produce anxiety, depression, powerlessness, and hopelessness, which can cause physical symptoms: no appetite, fatigue, tightness in chest or stomach, headache, and low mood,” says Kennedy.

“Stress makes you sick,” says Lee Phillips, LCSW, EdD, psychotherapist and certified sex and couples therapist in New York City and McLean, Virginia. “Depression makes you sick.” He adds that people don’t always think about how the mind and body are connected. “When we’ve got some mental health issues going on, and we’re dysregulated, our body is going to respond to that,” he says.

A review published in Cardiac Electrophysiology Clinics examined the history of lovesickness and found that it was generally associated with these physical symptoms:

• Fever
• Loss of appetite
• Headache
• Fast breathing
• Heart palpitations

From an evolutionary standpoint, humans developed negative emotional responses to rejection, also described as a “sociometer,” because acceptance in a group improved their survival chances, according to research. This “sociometer” is believed to be mediated by the same parts of the brain that are associated with physical pain, which may help explain why we experience physical symptoms in response to losing love.

Lovesickness can also affect our behavior. One study found that rejection in love can activate parts of the brain associated with cocaine addiction, which “may help explain the obsessive behaviors associated with rejection in love.”