Love Relieves Pain: A Study Shows

Editor's note: the original version of this post was truncated mid-sentence during the site's migration. It has been completed as an original summary of the published research.

Love really can be a drug — and in 2010, Stanford researchers showed it can work as a painkiller.

The study, led by pain specialist Sean Mackey with psychologists Arthur Aron and Helen Fisher, recruited 15 Stanford undergraduates — eight women and seven men — who all described themselves as being in the first flush of intense romantic love. Each was placed in a brain scanner and subjected to mild thermal pain, while alternately looking at a photograph of their beloved and a photograph of an acquaintance.

The result: gazing at the beloved significantly reduced the experience of pain — and the brain scans showed why. Looking at the loved one's photo activated deep reward centers of the brain, regions rich in dopamine that are also implicated in addiction. Crucially, the pain relief from love worked through a different neural pathway than distraction did (a word-association task also reduced pain, but via cognitive centers rather than reward circuitry). Love wasn't just taking their minds off it; it was engaging the brain's own reward-and-relief machinery.

Published in PLoS ONE, the study was careful about its limits — fifteen lovesick undergraduates are not a clinical trial, and nobody is prescribing romance for chronic pain. But it gave neuroscientific weight to something poets had claimed for millennia: that intense love changes how the body experiences the world, down to the processing of a burn on the skin.

The researchers' wry takeaway still stands: the feelings of early-stage romantic love engage some of the same neural real estate as addictive drugs. Handle with care — and enjoy the analgesia.