SOUNDBITE OF NATURE
LAURA STASSI: 00:04
This is Rock Creek Park. It's an unexpected stretch of glorious nature in noisy and crowded Washington, D.C.
SOUNDBITE OF NATURE
LAURA: It's more than twice the size of New York’s Central Park, and it's a great place to spend some time alone thinking, or taking a walk and talk with a friend. Maybe go for a hike or a run.
SOUNDBITE OF NATURE
LAURA: I'm here to meet journalist and author Florence Williams. I've been wanting to chat since I read her book “The Nature Fix.” The subtitle is, “Why Nature Makes Us Happier, Healthier, and More Creative.” And it illuminated the science of why I felt so good post-divorce, exploring my new hometown’s parks, and wooded walking paths.
Florence’s latest book covers a related topic. We'll talk about what she went through, and what we can all learn from it, on this episode of “Dating While Gray: The Grown-Up’s Guide to Love, Sex, and Relationships.” I'm Laura Stassi.
Florence Williams's latest book is “Heartbreak: A Personal and Scientific Journey.” She wrote it after her long marriage came to a sudden end, sparking an emotional and physical health crisis. In the beginning of Florence’s book, she writes that one of the first stages of heartbreak is quote, feeling stunned, even if you shouldn't have been.
FLORENCE WILLIAMS: 01:44
I met the man who would be my husband, my first day of college. So I was 18 years old. We dated for seven years, we got married, we were married for 25 years, two children. And then one day, seemingly out of the blue, he handed me his phone to look at an email from his brother. And -- only there was a different email on his phone. And it was a message to another woman. And it was actually in his drafts folder. And he had been just kind of writing these emails to someone he thought he was in love with, but not sending them. But I didn't realize that at the time. Anyway, it was like, you know, it was yeah, it was this just moment of being really shocked and stunned and what is, what am I seeing? What is this?
LAURA: Yeah.
FLORENCE: And it took, it took a couple of weeks really to sort of, you know, get the story out.
LAURA: 02:44
Do you think it was Freudian on his part? I’m just curious.
FLORENCE: 02:47
Yeah. You wonder, right. I think it might have been, because, you know, the, we did a couple of years of therapy after that. And at one point, he said, “Oh, I'm just so relieved. You know, I feel so much better.” I said, “Well, I'm glad you feel better.”
LAURA: Yeah,
FLORENCE: “I really don't feel so good.”
LAURA: 03:06
Yeah. So he was having an affair.
FLORENCE: It was an emotional affair.
LAURA: Yeah, which I have to say, people do caveat that. And emotional affairs are just as devastating, I think, then physical affairs - or as physical affairs, maybe even more so. Because sometimes I think if they just have sex and get it over with -- you know, that'll end the longing or the yearning that often comes with emotional affairs.
FLORENCE: 03:35
There actually are some studies looking at this, you know, the effects of emotional affairs on a marriage versus physical affairs or sexual affairs. And, you know, it's kind of all over the map. I mean, in general, I -- one study I saw said that men tend to take a sexual infidelity more seriously, and women take emotional infidelity more seriously. But, you know, we all take them both seriously, I think is sort of the bottom line, especially, you know, if you really feel like it's interfering with your, your feelings for each other, and, and your own sort of sense of loyalty and safety.
LAURA: 04:13
So you know, people say affairs are not the problem, but a symptom of the problem. And I wonder if you think your marriage could have continued had you not discovered the emails? Or were you actually not personally fulfilled but thinking growing apart wasn't a good reason to get divorced, and discovering this, you know, email sort of made you made you confront it?
FLORENCE 04:40
I think -- there's no question that we had been through growing apart or where we were in a phase where we were, I think, feeling a little bit disconnected. And I guess I wasn't as concerned about that, because I feel like in a long marriage, there are periods of disconnection. There just are you know, it's like a -- it's like a kind of a waving stream. Sometimes there are periods of connection. Sometimes there are periods of disconnection, you sort of come together and you go apart, you come together and you go apart. And I had many ways of rationalizing this particular disconnection. You know, big new job for him, cross-country move for both of us, you know, demanding times in our lives. It's like, okay, you know, we're sort of doing our own thing for a while. It'll get better. I'm not too worried about it. But I guess I should have been more worried about it.
LAURA: 05:32
Well, what can we do though? Shoulda, woulda, coulda. You know, we all look back. But …
FLORENCE 05:37
I had faith that we could put it back together. And I think he had sort of lost that faith, it turns out.
LAURA: 05:43
Yeah. And I -- you, you said a very descriptive thing in the book, something about you thought the puzzle pieces could go back together. But he was already packing up the puzzle pieces in the box to put it away.
FLORENCE 05:53
Yeah. He, he was kind of happy to look at the next toy, I think.
LAURA: 05:56
Oh, okay. But so you almost immediately felt physical symptoms, with this discovery.
FLORENCE 06:05
Yeah, I did. You know, immediately I sort of, I think I felt like my stomach, you know, sort of fell through the floor, this intense, you know, stress response, where you become suddenly very aware that you're imperiled. I, you know, over these, especially these first few months, I mean, I really had trouble sleeping, I lost a lot of weight. I felt really hyper-vigilant and anxious, and sort of jittery. You know, I burst into tears all the time. I was acutely sort of freaked out, I was really freaked out about not just about the loss, you know, and the grief, but about what the hell is gonna happen now?
LAURA: Yeah.
FLORENCE: What comes next? And I think that that's, that's actually a stage of grief that isn't often acknowledged. Some people call it, you know, the sixth stage of, of grief, and it's anxiety.
LAURA: 07:01
I'm wondering, is it the negative emotions that lead to the physical issues – like, negative emotions leading to lack of sleep and feeling anxious, and does that then lead to, you know, changes in your blood pressure and your heart?
FLORENCE 07:17
I think that can happen, you know, if you look at an emotion like rage, but I actually think what I was experiencing, and what many of us experience, is something more deeply evolved than that. And it's just literally this feeling like you've been left alone kind of on the savanna, right. So our bodies don't really make the distinction between being abandoned by love, and being abandoned, you know, by your close kin, or by your family, or being sort of cast out -- in which case in our, you know, in the Pleistocene, if you were cast out, you know, you really were at much higher risk of getting attacked, or of injury. And so our bodies respond to that on a just very, you know, basic cellular level of “Look out, you're about to be attacked!” Because you've been abandoned.
LAURA: Wow.
FLORENCE: So we're going to pump out a lot of extra inflammation in your immune system, the genetic markers, and your white blood cells literally change the types of blood cells -- the types of immune cells your body puts up, change in response to preparation for attack. And the nervous system kicks into really high gear, because we're afraid and we're anxious, and so that, you know, all this is happening sort of subconsciously, regardless of how, you know, angry or understanding, you know, you might feel in the moment. On some level, you feel really unsafe.
And so that's what your body's responding to. It's not even really emotional, it's much more sort of deep, deep, primitive parts of our brains responding, and that in turn, turning on the cellular processes and our immune systems, and those in turn, are likely to make us more sick. And this is something we see in people who consider themselves lonely.
LAURA: Yeah.
FLORENCE: You know, chronically lonely people, we know die sooner. We know they suffer from chronic diseases. And this happens, and unfortunately, it can happen in people who get divorced. You know, they have a higher rate – 26 percent increased risk of death, you know, at least for a while. And it takes about four years for our bodies and our immune cells to kind of even just return to baseline, if we're lucky. And some people, unfortunately, don't return to baseline. And that's what's driving the higher death rates.
LAURA: 09:40
Yeah. And it sounds like we have to work at it, too. It doesn't just happen -- that we have to make a conscious effort to make ourselves feel better. Yes?
FLORENCE 09:50
I think so. Because heartbreak is not -- it's not just a sort of dramatic emotional response. It's actually as one immunologist told told me, he said this is a hidden landmine of human existence. And it puts our health very much at risk. And so it is absolutely imperative, I think, to take it seriously. If it's happening to you, if it's happening to your friends, take it seriously. Do everything you can to get better.
LAURA: 10:23
Feeling better, we'll hear from Florence about that. Plus, Dating While Gray listeners share their experiences, and no surprise, nature takes center stage. That's after the break.
BREAK
CARRIE: 10:47
You can call me Carrie. It was over a year and a half, it was about 19 months we went out. We were supposed to have left in the first part of April to go on a -- we were going to Utah to do some hiking. And when we broke it off in March, I had hoped maybe we could still go as friends but obviously, we couldn't. And so I didn't want to give that time back to work. So I had this, this like 12-day span that I was going to be off. And I was writing in my journal and I said, if I could do anything, I'd want to go to a beautiful place for a writing retreat -- because I love to write.
I Googled and I found, it was like the second thing that came up -- this Himalayan writing retreat, in the Himalayas of India, exactly the dates that I would have been gone. And so in three weeks, I plan this trip to India. I truly believe that it was meant to happen. It just completely, like, brought down the curtain on the old. It was like a portal to me. And I believe I'm still walking in that portal, and maybe it's best that that friendship be gone because maybe that would have been a little energy leak or drain, or whatever, that keeps you -- you know, kind of tied back. So I'm, I'm just kind of walking forward and what happens, happens.
HUNTER: 12:29
My name is Hunter. I am a nurse, and I live with my husband, John. When I moved to San Francisco, I somehow hooked up with the gay and lesbian Sierrans, and I took my first trip to Yosemite. And it was just -- I don't know, it was like a whole new world opened to me. The Sierra, the drama of the mountains and everything, is just, it's awe inspiring. And I remember when I first saw Half Dome for the first time, I was sitting on Glacier Point across from it, looking at it. And you know, just seeing the whole wide Sierra – I just, just started crying. And I knew then that I just had to be out in nature, and that had to be a big part of my life. And it has been. In the mountains, in the Sierra, and you know, there's nothing around, there's the sound of the wind in the trees that just calms me down.
JOHN: 13:30
Every time I think back to my childhood, I was outside running around somewhere and you know, at 5:30 or 6 o'clock, I might hear my mom calling from the front porch -- you know, “Johnny, come home!” Later, I started more hiking. You know, when I was on my own hiking and in my twenties backpacking, I kind of learned that the more time I spent in the city, the more time I would need to spend away from the city. So getting out -- camping or hiking or backpacking -- was my way of releasing that pressure.
If I spent a lot of time in the city, I kind of like feel this pressure of humanity, that there's a lot of people. And if I can go somewhere where I know there was nobody else within a mile of me or two miles or 10 miles, or even 100 miles, it feels different. And I feel like I can relax a little bit. I have a tough time with social situations. So for me, that release of pressure really helps a lot.
I was up to the top of my head with stuff and took the dog and went out into the backcountry for six days by myself. And it was a really tough hike, but it was really worth it.
HUNTER: 14:45
I wanted to add, you know, I know this about John -- and I think we've struggled a little bit to get him out in the back country every year. I think he was much more consistent with it before he met me. And what we've discovered in our relationship is that he has to get out there alone, without me. And I have to really find a way to help him make that happen. And I think it's been a challenge. And for us to kind of discover that --and I'm really glad we did. He's a different person. All that tension has drained away. I see it as soon as I see him.
LAURA: 15:25
Was that threatening to you when he said, “I need to be by myself”?
HUNTER: 15:28
No.
JOHN: There was a year when you wanted me to get a GPS so you could know where I was all the time and be able to check in.
HUNTER: 15:36
Yeah, that's true.
JOHN: But …
HUNTER: I'm not gonna lie. I worry.
LAURA: 15:45
Thank you, Hunter and John. You'll hear more of their story later in the season. Thanks also to Carrie. You heard her story of pandemic love in the first episode of this season.
Heartbreak isn't only a miserable feeling, it's a health risk. So I asked Florence Williams, how can we recover?
FLORENCE 16:10
I kind of divide it into three major buckets. And the first is that we need to do whatever we can to sort of calm down, you know, to get out of that acute state of anxiety, that fight-or-flight state. Because when we're in that state, there's no other healing that's really going to happen. You know, for me, it was going outside into nature. It was hanging out with my friends, it was moving my body, and so on. That's the first bucket, the sort of calm piece, calming down.
And then the second piece is really connection. So this, we know, is kind of an antidote to loneliness. It's also an antidote to heartbreak. So we think when we're heartbroken, we feel like it's a very singular event. We feel that we're going through this alone. And even though heartbreak is a sort of universally felt experience, it's not very common. You know, we may only go through it a couple of times in a lifetime. And so at least, you know, from a relationship, and so we don't necessarily have friends going through it at the same time.
So I think it's really important to connect with the friends you do have, you know. If you need to ask for help, that's really important. Be vulnerable with your friends, so they can be vulnerable back. Reach out to other people who may have gone through this experience. Connect to people you don't know so well. Make new friends who you can identify with. For many of us, connecting to nature is also actually a surprising antidote to loneliness.
The third piece is kind of a surprising one. And it's actually purpose, purpose and meaning. So what can we learn from this event going forward? What lessons can we take away to help other people? This is where really interesting things start happening to your immune system. And we know this, because for the book, I did this experiment where I worked with a researcher at UCLA, when we tested my sort of genetic markers, and my white blood cells, my transcription factors sort of determining which, which blood cells I was making. And he's been studying this for decades. And he knows that, you know, lonely people have different sort of blood profiles than people who aren't lonely. He'd never actually worked with a journalist going through heartbreak before.
So that was kind of fun. We did it in real time, you know, pretty close after the split and then, you know, for a couple of years after. And what he's found in his research over the decades is that it's not necessarily lonely people who start hanging out with other people, you know, in volunteering, or whatever, who are joining a church group or what we know, whatever. Those things are helpful, but they don't necessarily change your immune markers. What actually makes you healthier is finding purpose and meaning in your life.
LAURA: 19:05
Yeah. You talked about being in nature. And we mentioned “The Nature Fix,” your previous book -- one of your previous books -- and I really loved it.
FLORENCE: 19:14
It's something I am passionately sort of advocating for people, that when we feel connected to nature, it really does calm our nervous system. We know this from lots of studies, measuring people's kind of cardiovascular responses to different environments, measuring their stress hormones, measuring their moods, and sort of general states of optimism and so on. And all this stuff really improves even just after 15 minutes of being in a pleasant natural environment.
LAURA: 19:43
Fifteen minutes - that's easy to do.
FLORENCE: 19:45
Fifteen minutes, it's easy to do it. You don't even have to sort of exercise through it. You can sit, sit under a tree, and drink a cup of tea or you know, whatever it is where you can sort of hear the birds and take some deep breaths. It's very profound.
LAURA: Yeah.
FLORENCE: Lots of changes.
LAURA: Although I have to say, for people who aren't familiar with you, you are a nature badass. I mean, running the rapids. How -- you did like a what, 30-day camping trip or something?
FLORENCE Yeah, well, after I wrote “The Nature Fix,” I was really convinced that being in nature can help us heal, you know, from many, many things in life. But I in that book, I only sort of look up to the three-day effect, like what happens to our brains and our bodies after three days outside. And I was like, Oh, this, this is such a whammo, this divorce, I need 30. I'm gonna try 30 days in nature. So yeah, I undertook this 30-day river trip, which I don't necessarily recommend for everyone. And it didn't even necessarily help on every level because it was, it was still kind of a big enough adventure that my nervous system was still pretty amped up. It wasn't always relaxing.
LAUGHTER
LAURA: 21:01
You do mention the feeling of awe, which is interesting, because it sounds like you used -- I'm not judging, but you used psychedelics to achieve this feeling of awe. Which I guess, does that make it easier to feel awe as opposed to, I don't know, meditating or doing yoga?
FLORENCE: 21:21
Well, I tried to do a lot of things to feel awe. So one of them was influential to me, psychologists I talked to early on, said, you know, yes, people who get divorced have worse health outcomes in life. But we know that there are some people who are more resilient. And I was like, “Tell me, what's the secret? I want that resilience.” And she said, “Well, we think it's actually the people who are the most open to beauty, most open to art, or, you know, however, it is that you start to feel goosebumps.” Goosebumps is kind of a sign of awe, right? Sensing awe. The people who are most prone to awe, beauty, are the ones who actually tend to kind of, you know, bounce back really, really well. And I thought, okay.
So that determined the course of my next two years of writing the book, I was determined to just cultivate beauty everywhere I knew how, find some awe. And at one point, you know, about two years in, I talked to another psychologist, Dacher Keltner, who's -- he's kind of like one of the primary researchers studying awe and the science of awe. And he was the one who said, you know, “You might want to look into taking psychedelic mushrooms, because it's, it's like awe Technicolor.”
LAURA: Mmm.
FLORENCE: And I thought, okay, that's what I want. I want to do like, next-level awe. So I did and tried it, I had never done them before. And I worked with a therapist. Again, I wouldn't necessarily recommend this for everyone, because there are a lot of risks associated with these substances. And it's very important sort of how you take them and in what context, and so on. But for me, it was actually a surprisingly helpful sort of modality. I had these really interesting visions of, of how my future could be beautiful …
LAURA: Oh.
FLORENCE: You know, and not scary. And I think it helped me kind of separate, more easily and kind of more finally, from my marriage, and from being so attached to kind of who I was in that marriage.
LAURA: 23:25
You want to talk a little bit about sex?
FLORENCE: Sure, yeah. Oh, boy, let's see where to start. I guess, you know, I, I was 50 when my marriage, you know, finally fell apart for good. And I definitely was feeling bad about that, like, oh, I am too old to really do this again, and no one will ever find me attractive, and blah blah blah -- big self-esteem issues going on there. Not just feeling -- not feeling attractive. And I didn't, I wasn't looking, you know, for an immediate kind of, I guess rebound, you know, or fling. But it actually just kind of happened. And I was so knocked over by how good that felt, just to kind of feel lusty, and to feel desirable and to feel that desire. It -- for me, that felt very alive-making in a way that was very just self- affirming on sort of every level.
It's not necessarily going to be like that for everyone. And I think that it's important to, you know, if you're going to have a rebound, it's important to find someone with whom you feel safe and yes, that you're not you're not going to feel like sort of instantly betrayed again right away because that is really hard. And turns out, you know, my first sort of go out the gate was not really a successful pairing on kind of -- on any level, aside from, you know, how good the desire felt.
But then I sort of got back in the saddle, as it were, and found that the physical touch and the physical intimacy was very healing. And certainly, there is some science, of course, about how physical touch does directly calm us down. It releases oxytocin, it inhibits stress hormones like cortisol. It can feel really safe and wonderful to do that if it's, again, someone you feel is not going to kind of be threatening or horrible.
LAURA: Yeah.
FLORENCE: Where's the science showing that rebounds are a bad idea? And in fact, there wasn't any. And what there was, was, there was some science indicating that having a rebound could be really good for your self-esteem, could help you put more distance between you and your ex, could give you sort of more optimism about the future and about your own sort of attractiveness. So yeah, it was great.
LAURA:
Is there anything else I need to know?
FLORENCE: 26:05
Boy, let's see -- lots to talk about. You know, I guess I would just tell people to be patient with their trajectories of healing. You know, I think I -- many of us think it should take a year, you know. After a year, I should feel great. I should be totally back on my feet. And unfortunately, you know, it's usually not that fast. Like I said, the research seems to suggest that it takes about four years for our bodies to return to baseline. And some people take longer. So be patient with yourself, you know, don't feel terrible if you still feel sad and angry and all that stuff, you know, for a long time.
Yeah, be patient. And again, work hard, though. Be patient, but also work hard to try to do what you can to recover, because your health depends on it.
LAURA: 27:06
My thanks to Florence. She's now five years post-split and says she's feeling great. Her youngest child just left for college, and she recently sold the marital home. She's figuring out where she wants to live next.
And she's in a long-distance relationship. They met after Florence sent an email to a group of folks she describes as loose acquaintances, letting them know she was ready for romance, and did they know anyone who was available?
An email, what a great idea! But I think what's more important to remember is something else Florence told me: While it's scientifically proven that romantic relationships can be great for our emotional and physical well-being, we don't have to be in one to reap the health benefits. There are other ways to love and to be loved. And in the end, it's love that really matters.
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Dating While Gray is produced in partnership with North Carolina Public Radio. For more on the show, check out datingwhilegray.com That's also where you can find links for sending voicemails and emails. I'd love to hear from you. I'm Laura Stassi. Thanks for listening