This thursday Sep 11^th, I’ll be giving a talk on limerence at the Berwin’s North Salon in Harrogate, UK.

These events are a great concept – an old-school approach to sharing new knowledge, by getting interested and interesting people together to discuss ideas.

Each speaker gives a TED-style talk, takes questions from the audience, and then we all have a chat in the intervals.

I’m chuffed to have been invited, and will be talking about limerence from a neuroscientist’s perspective, and how it explains our apparently irrational behaviour when falling in love. I’ll also be signing copies of my book Smitten, in case that is an additional incentive.

There may still be tickets available, so if anyone is in the Harrogate area next week and interested in coming along, you can check out the details here:

Maybe see some of you there…

The post Big ideas in intimate spaces first appeared on Living with Limerence.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/everyday-neuroscience/202508/are-you-left-brained-or-right-brained

The main point of the article was to argue that the notion of individual people being left-brained or right-brained, and that determining their personality type, is a myth.

But, it’s a myth built on something real.

Despite being symmetrical, the two halves of brains don’t just operate as two parallel units, there is uneven distribution of tasks and allocation of resources across the two sides.

This distribution of tasks is not absolute, though. It is a bias, not a complete segregation. A task like language processing shows more activity in the left side than the right, but there is still lots of crosstalk and communication between the hemispheres.

When it comes to limerence, lateralization is most relevant for the reward and bonding systems, given the underlying neuroscience that explains the experience of person addiction.

I talked about reward in the Psychology Today article, but didn’t touch on bonding. That’s really interesting too, because there’s a body of work that suggests that lateralization depends on a crucial period in the early life of newborns, when the interaction between baby and mother is shaping a huge amount of brain development.

Cradling instincts

Cross-culturally, both men and women have a bias towards left-cradling of babies.

This means the baby is orientated to see more with the left eye and hear more with the left ear, and that promotes development of the structures in the right hemisphere of the brain (because each hemisphere regulates function in the opposite side of the body).

Because emotional development is dependent on the baby sensing and learning the mother’s facial expressions, and using them to synchronise levels of arousal, it’s inevitable that those functions of the brain will develop most quickly and efficiently in the right hemisphere. There’ll be a bias towards using the right-hand structures for emotional processing.

You can really go down a rabbit hole of speculation here.

Do we have a left-cradling bias because most of us are right-handed (and instinctively leave our dominant hand free), or are most of us right-handed because we have been left-cradled?

Is the left-cradling bias conserved because it’s useful or because it reproduces itself?

Is the right hemisphere bias for emotion useful, and therefore babies that were left-cradled survived and reproduced more successfully, meaning we all inherited the trait?

Regardless of all these questions about how the bias developed, it’s a great example of how a weird little behavioural quirk that most of us would never notice can have really consequential outcomes that last into adulthood.

Don’t despair

Just in case anyone is reading this and thinking “oh no, I cradled my babies on the right!” or “oh no, my mother didn’t cradle me correctly, I’m doomed to a life of bonding frustrations!” don’t despair.

Brain lateralization is not an unalterable feature, nor an essential feature. Most people with atypical laterlization patterns have happy and successful lives. People who suffer damage to one side of the brain can learn to use the opposite side instead.

Brains can adapt and re-organise their activity to compensate for deficits or damage.

We can learn to overcome attachment problems. We can learn to better regulate our emotions. We can learn new ways of relating to others that improves our future relationships.

Lateralization isn’t fate.

It’s just another interesting aspect of the brain that shows how complex the interplay between our genes, environment, family and childhood experiences really is in shaping our personalities and temperaments.

Humans are complicated.

The post Biased brains and bonding first appeared on Living with Limerence.

It’s not an easy thing to abstain from bliss.

For limerents in a long-term relationship who are suddenly struck by limerence for someone new, the neurochemical high from early limerence is intoxicating. A common way that they cope with this temptation is to tell themselves some variation on the theme of:

It’s alright, I know nothing is really going to happen.

The “thinking” behind this is that you know there is a line that you won’t cross, and so it’s OK to indulge the flirting and fantasising a bit. Just a sip of liquor to give you a nice glow. Ride the wave for a while, to liven things up. Who knows, it might even invigorate your long-term relationship by boosting your libido a bit?

Another way this impulse can manifest is as a compartmentalisation of life. When you are with LO (at work, college, gym, etc.) then you are that version of yourself, but when you are at home, you are totally committed to the relationship and have left all those limerent indulgences behind. Bubble world. 

Laid out like this, it’s kind of obvious how self-serving and delusional this is. Under the mind-altering influence of limerence, however, your critical faculties are too busy rationalising why it’s fine to carry on, to notice the self-evident fact – you are playing with fire. 

In actual fact, it’s worse than that. You are playing with your psychological health. 

The limerence training regimen

I talk a lot about the power of habits, and how much of our lives is actually governed by them. Well, one important aspect of habits is that they form. They take time to develop, through repetitive actions, and we often don’t realise that it’s happening. Slowly, through our choices and actions, we are subconsciously programming ourselves.

When it comes to limerence, there is a master script being written: when I am with LO, or daydreaming about LO, I feel really good. LO is super rewarding. 

The neural circuits regulating reward are an ancient and deep seated part of our brains, and control one of the most powerful forms of motivated behaviour that we have: when we identify something rewarding we seek more of it. So, by indulging in even compartmentalised or demarcated access to LO, we are training our brains into a new habit. Seek LO. 

After a while, that reward-seeking habit becomes our default setting. The urge to seek LO kicks in before we are consciously aware of it, and before we even realise what we’ve done, we’re addicted. 

Habits are hard to break

That leads to the next big problem. You’ve been riding the wave for a while now, surfing the peak, trying not to wipe out, but it’s becoming increasingly obvious that the wave is more powerful than you are. That is when you learn that the line you were so sure you would not cross is rushing towards you.

So, time to break away from the current and paddle back to safety?

Turns out, you’ve left it too late.

For the vast majority of limerents, there is no simple off switch. The habit that you’ve trained yourself into is stubborn. Trying to detach will cause emotional pain. You will encounter profound psychological resistance whenever you make an attempt to distance yourself from LO. As with any other addiction, withdrawal is a struggle, and deprogramming yourself is slow and careful work.

You need to have a good understanding of the psychology of behavioural change, and you need to take strategic action to reverse the reward-training – just winging it and hoping that the limerence will just fade away is likely to go as well as your brilliant “playing with fire” plan.

All that time indulging in limerent thrills was building up a mental debt. It takes time and discipline to pay it off. 

Doubts creep in

Faced with the scenario of accidentally training yourself into infatuation with another person, most limerents also find that their previous confidence that nothing is really going to happen begins to falter. Old certainties about what kind of person you are, what future you want, and what love really means, begin to crumble. After all, it is true that when you are with LO you feel giddy and excited (even if that’s starting to be tainted with anxiety and compulsions), whereas when you are with your long-term partner you feel guilt-ridden, short-tempered and ashamed.

This is the risky point at which devaluation of the relationship begins, and the journey past the tipping points of a limerent affair speeds up.  

As the marriage therapist Joe Beam once observed: the old insult “you’re not the man I first met” at the end of a limerent affair can be literally true, if you have coped with the cognitive dissonance of breaking your promises by breaking your moral compass.   

Compartmentalisation is unhealthy

Finally, the mental gymnastics involved in segregating your mind into different personalities when you are with LO or with SO comes with another cost – the price of your self-identity and mental coherence. 

At an extreme end, this can lead to a dissociative disorder, but even just the everyday discomfort of pretending to be someone you are not erodes your sense of self and your self-esteem. Not many people can  go through life lying to themselves and others without some psychological harm. 

This is basically the opposite of purposeful living. It’s faking life. At best you can try to retain your true self deep inside, while presenting an avatar to the world that says things you know to be untrue. For most people, though, keeping that up for long enough leads to a profound demoralisation and self-loathing.

It’s common that when affairs are finally revealed, the cheater expresses relief – even though their shameful secret is out and wrecking havoc on the people they betrayed, the lifting of the burden of their own dishonesty is a liberation. 

That tells you how big the burden of self-deception had become, and how misguided it was to believe you could play with fire and not get burned.

For those who are in the early stages of this fire-seeking temptation, pay heed to the painful lessons of those who’ve been burned, and put the matches away.

For those deep in the trap, there is help if you are ready to start the labour of deprogramming.

The post Playing with fire first appeared on Living with Limerence.

This week’s YouTube video turned out to be a bit of an epic effort. It’s on the topic of the links between limerence and other mental health conditions, which is a question that I get asked surprisingly often.

The usual query is: is my limerence linked to my ADHD/OCD/borderline (etc.) condition? This is my best answer.

In the video, I go fairly deep into the neuroscience of OCD, ADHD and anxious attachment, and the similarities and differences to the neuroscience of limerence. That became quite an exercise in research, as I wanted to get the details as accurate as I could.

I might even have overdone it a little.

What’s missing, though, is a good account of what it feels like to experience limerence if you have any of these other conditions (or tendencies, if you haven’t had a formal diagnosis).

Because I lack that direct personal experience, it’s hard to go beyond comparisons of the clinical evidence and get to the really meaty reality of having limerence along with another neurodivergent trait.

So, to kick off discussions for this week, I’d like to invite anyone who has any form of neurodiversity or mental health condition to describe their experience of limerence as best as they can.

To stimulate discussion, here’s some things I’m wondering about:

• Does being limerent change the symptoms of your other condition?
• Are some limerence symptoms especially strong for you?
• Does the altered state of mind of limerence resemble the altered state of mind of the other condition?
• Did limerence set in about the same time as your other condition, or did they begin at different ages?
• If you do feel that limerence is linked to another condition, can you explain why you feel that way?

All insights are greatly appreciated!

A second question (boy, I’m being nosy this week) is about UK podcasts. The launch date for my book in the UK is fast approaching, and I’d love to get talking about it on podcasts in the relationship and self-development space.

So, this is a call for suggestions – any podcasts that LwL followers listen to, which might be a good fit for a chat about all things limerence?

Again, all recommendations welcomed!

Pre-order offer!

I’ve just found out that Waterstones in the UK is currently running a promotion for 25% off pre-ordered books. It runs from 22nd to 24th February. Use code PREORDER25 at the checkout. Link to Smitten here:

https://www.waterstones.com/book/smitten/dr-tom-bellamy/9781786789143

The post Coffeehouse: limerence and mental health first appeared on Living with Limerence.

That result suggest two conclusions: anxious attachment is not required for someone to experience limerence, but the two traits obviously correlate strongly.

That’s an interesting result that raises new questions. Which way does the correlation work – does anxious attachment make it more likely that someone will become limerent, or does limerence make it more likely that someone will have anxious attachments?

Is there a common neuroscience mechanism for both traits? Is there one cause, or do the two traits reinforce each other?

Let’s see if we can figure things out.

What causes anxious attachment?

The central principle of attachment theory is that bonding during infancy establishes an attachment style that lasts into adulthood and comes to define romantic relationships.

For people who received predictable, consistent, and loving care during infancy, a secure attachment style is predicted in adulthood. For those receiving unpredictable care, neglect, or abuse, insecure attachments can result.

There are a few different terms and classifications used in attachment research (avoidant, anxious, preoccupied, fearful, disorganised etc.), but a good summary of the theory is available here.

The definition I used for anxious attachment in my limerence survey was:

Some people feel anxious about their romantic relationships. They seek frequent reassurance that their partner still loves them. They spend a lot of time worrying about the security of their relationship. Small disagreements with their partner can feel like a big threat. They seek a lot of intimacy and want to spend as much time as they can with their partner.

It’s easy to understand how a lack of emotional support in infancy could lead to this outcome, and why inappropriate or untrustworthy parenting is the primary cause of anxious attachment.

It isn’t the whole story, though.

We vary dramatically in our intrinsic personality traits. Genes contribute a lot to our temperament at birth. Some infants are emotionally fragile and others are more naturally sanguine. Two children born to the same parents and raised in the same household can have profoundly different “factory settings” when it comes to their sensitivity to distress. Most parents do their best to adapt to this and adjust their parenting style, but with varying degrees of success.

While it is undoubtedly true that some parents are neglectful, incompetent, emotionally cold or narcissistic, it’s probably more common that anxious attachment arises from simple misalignment of child and parent. It’s not that the parent doesn’t care, they just don’t understand how to meet their child’s emotional needs.

Put another way, nature is as much a factor in setting emotional temperament as nurture. Even more importantly, the way that parents nurture their children will depend on the child’s nature – an anxious baby prone to frequent crying will experience a different relationship with their parents to a phlegmatic, even-tempered baby. In an ideal world, both children would get the bespoke care they need, but (as you might have noticed) our world is not ideal.

Finally, not all emotional wounds occur in childhood. Negative early romantic experiences during adolescence or adulthood (emotional betrayal, cheating, abusive behaviour) can cause psychological damage that shapes future attachments.

Anxiety around bonding is partly inherent nature, partly parental nurturing, and partly personal experience. It’s partly physiology and partly psychology. That’s a lot of influences to consider.

One way to make a start is to recognise that all behaviour ultimately starts in the brain.

The neuroscience of anxious attachment

Bonding is all about hormones. The two main players are oxytocin and vasopressin which are neuropeptides that play many roles in the body. For the purposes of early attachment, oxytocin is central to the mother-infant bond.

In adulthood, the neuropeptides directly regulate pro-social behaviour – both increasing trust and affection for others, and ramping up the fear and anxiety response to social rejection. It’s a complex story (of course), but to sum up the role of oxytocin in adults I’d say it’s a sort of amplifier of social rewards and threats.

The influence of these neuropeptides on the brain are not just limited to the short-term, however. Much more profound is their role in brain development, and this is the major factor when it comes to childhood experiences shaping adult attachment traits.

Brains are amazing machines. They are like computers that wire themselves. They are composed of systems that regulate key behaviours (like reward-seeking, bonding, and arousal), but these systems adapt to and are modified by the environment.

We are born with a basic neural architecture and a set of instinctive behaviours (= nature) but the systems are plastic and not fully developed. As we grow, our brain development is shaped by the experiences we have – literally, the size, connectivity and sensitivity of different brain regions change as we grow and mature, in response to the life we lead (= nurture).

There is increasing evidence from animal studies that oxytocin signalling during infancy has a major influence over brain organization during development. Broadly, if young mammals are raised in a socially enriched environment their neural systems become efficiently attuned to social rewards and social threats. They are better able to regulate social grooming, aggression, mating and maternal behaviours.

In human imaging studies there is evidence for changes in volume and connectivity in numerous brain regions involved in emotional processing, empathy and social bonding in people with anxious attachments compared to people with secure attachments.

The connectivity and sensitivity of the limbic system (the broad collection of brain structures involved in emotional regulation) determines how brains integrate social cues into emotional responses. The relative strength of reward seeking, threat detection, anxiety threshold, and motivational drive will be determined by the structure and function of our limbic systems and the regulation of those drives are controlled by connections to the cortical “executive” regions.

Our genes give us a starting point and a basic set of developmental rules, but the social and physical environment directs the development of our brain organization as we grow.

System instabilities

How might this all relate to limerence? Well, limerence is an altered mental state founded in the hyperactivation of reward, arousal and bonding systems, akin to addiction to another person. At it’s heart, limerence is about associating a particular person to spectacular, euphoric reward. Fear of loss for that reward becomes a persistent source of anxiety.

Limerence can be understood as a sort of instability in the reward system (specifically the reward associated with pair bonding), just like many other forms of addiction. Motivation and reward-seeking is natural and healthy, but once a reward becomes so powerful and desirable that the whole neural network becomes sensitized, and cortical feedback systems become inhibited, you end up addicted.

Emotional regulation isn’t just about reward, though. The limbic system integrates reward, fear, anxiety, memory, desire, and more. It is not hard to see how instabilities in this system could also underpin anxious attachment, even if the instabilities manifest more as excessive threat sensitivity rather than excessive craving for reward.

It might be that “limbic sensitivity” is genetic, and hardwired in. Alternatively, disruption of the development of reward, bonding and anxiety systems during critical early life stages could lead both to anxious attachment behaviours and an increased chance of limerence.

Whether it is nature or nurture that most determines development of the social reward/anxiety network hypersensitivity and instability, the combination of both seems guaranteed to result in both person addiction and anxious attachment.

Reinforcement

Instabilities in the limbic system caused by genes and development can also be exacerbated by behavioural reinforcement.

Attachment disorders have been found to correlate with addictive behaviours more generally, suggesting that maladaptive reward-seeking can be used for mood regulation.

For limerents, reverie about the limerent object is often used for mood repair. Daydreams can give fleeting relief from relationship anxiety, but end up reinforcing the behaviours that strengthen limerence.

Given the commonalities between attachment, pair-bonding, romantic desire and relationship anxiety, it’s inevitable that the instinctive behaviours of limerence and anxious attachment would reinforce each other. The ideal of an ecstatic union would be even more appealing. The desire for intimacy more acute. The fear of rejection more distressing.

If limerence is also focused on a person who has avoidant attachment tendencies, then the reinforcement would be even more powerful.

In summary

We’ve covered a lot of ground, some of it quite speculative, so let’s end with a summary:

• Anxious attachment can arise from multiple sources – genetic predisposition, the effects of infant bonding on brain development, and the impact of early romantic experiences – and these factors can reinforce each other.

• There are obvious overlaps in the neural systems that regulate bonding and limerence, so it’s perfectly plausible that disrupted early childhood bonding experiences that lead to anxious attachment also affect brain development in a way that makes limerence more likely.

• While it’s plausible, it’s not yet tested. The fact that people with secure or avoidant attachment styles can also experience limerence proves that anxious attachment is not necessary or sufficient to explain limerence.

• Disruption of infant bonding will cause changes in the emotional regulatory systems of the brain that make romantic attachments more prone to instability, which is likely to promote behaviours that reinforce limerence.

It really is a double whammy.

The post The links between limerence and anxious attachment first appeared on Living with Limerence.

There are aligned research studies – especially in relation to “passionate love”, which in many way overlaps with the concepts of limerence – so it is possible to extrapolate a bit, but you have to sift out the relevant parts from studies that were actually designed to test something else. In recognition of this issue, I put together a Guide to limerence aimed at professionals in the therapy and coaching fields that sets out what literature there is on limerence, and summarise the current evidence base.

Given that sparse starting point, the mainstay of my writing and research has always been drawing on well established principles of basic neurophysiology – arousal, reward, bonding, addiction – and applying them to the reported symptoms that limerents experience. The altered state of mind of deep infatuation has characteristic features, and these can be related to the fundamental drives that motivate us. This approach could be called reasonable inference – applying known principles to a new context. Of course, reasonable inference can turn out to be wrong on closer inspection, but we’d never get started if we refused to countenance any idea that didn’t have decades of dedicated research behind it.

Proposing that limerence is person addiction opens up the fulsome literature on behavioural addiction as an explanatory foundation for understanding this specific use case.

It is a balancing act, though. Sometimes the speculation is pushed too far. Sometimes the evidence base is shaky. Sometimes pop science can cherry pick individual studies and overstate a case.

Other times, pop science can turn out to be based on nothing but a mirage.

The curious case of phenylethylamine

When I first started delving into the neuroscience of love and limerence, a lot of the evidence fitted my expectations. There are some papers on scanning brains for people in love, and finding that the reward and arousal centres were lit up. That’s good to know, of course, but I think most people would have predicted that the parts of the brain involved in reward signalling would be active during limerent euphoria (I’m not being snide, that’s what I mean about a basis in well-established neurophysiology).

However, there was one claim that caught me out – one big surprise that sent me down a rabbit hole of research – and it was the identification of a specific “love chemical” called phenylethylamine (or PEA).

It’s easy to find numerous articles and posts that make a very simple and strong claim: phenylethylamine is released in the brain when people fall in love, and it acts as a natural amphetamine. Here is a random sample from a quick Google search:

Phenylethylamine is the hormone-like substance produced at the early stages of attraction that provokes the dizzy sensation some people feel when they’re falling in love. link

The visual component of the phenomenon of “love at first sight” may be explained by the release of a “feel-good” neurotransmitter, Phenylethylamine (PEA). PEA is a natural form of amphetamine and is released when we are first attracted to someone. link

During the heart-pounding excitement of new love, your brain releases lots of phenylethylamine (PEA). PEA functions like a natural amphetamine, so you really are high on love. link

When we ‘fall in love’ our brains become bathed in a soup of phenylethylamine (PEA) a naturally occurring amphetamine. link

Regrettably, none of these articles provide citations to support the claim, but I’m not really in a position to complain about that, given that I rarely bother myself (because it gets tedious quickly and turns a conversational blog post into an academic paper). Nevertheless, the confident assertions above don’t leave the reader in much doubt that the evidence must exist somewhere. There’s no “a pilot study suggests” or “some people think” or “it’s been speculated” equivocation. It’s stated with the clear confidence of received wisdom.

As I came across more and more of these articles, I began to feel a sense of disquiet. I’d been a jobbing neuroscientist for a quarter of a century, and I’d never heard of PEA having a significant role in the brain.

What does phenylethylamine do?

Although I’d never encountered phenylethylamine in the course of my research, the name suggested it was one of the many trace amines that add to the biochemical soup in the brain. I was sceptical about its role, but the neuroscience literature is vast – far vaster than any one person can keep abreast of – and there’s always that nagging doubt that there is some research niche that I might have missed while focussing on the preoccupations of my own specialism.

Could this trace amine be an unrecognised star? Had I missed something big outside my information silo?

No.

Salving my pride a bit, it turns out there is very little published literature about PEA. There was a burst of interest in the 1970s and then 1990s as people were trying to sift through all the possible monoamine neuromodulators that contribute to behavioural regulation, but nothing conclusive came of it.

PEA does resemble amphetamine, chemically, but it doesn’t simply act like an endogenous amphetamine – in fact artificially stimulating rats with PEA causes aggression, not euphoria. High doses of PEA can act as a stimulant, but this could just as well be caused by PEA overwhelming the breakdown mechanisms for dopamine, serotonin and noradrenaline in the brain and messing with those core neurotransmitters.

Other snippets of research had suggestive outcomes. Urine levels of PEA can be altered by a number of factors – most convincingly, intense exercise can increase it, but there is also some evidence that neurological conditions, depression and ADHD in particular, are associated with lower levels of PEA in the urine of patients.

This smattering of observations is interesting, but it hardly adds up to a case for PEA being “the love chemical”. So how on earth did the idea that PEA was a natural amphetamine released in the brain that causes love come about?

It seems to be a weird story of offhand comments, chocolate marketing and repetition.

Chasing the mirage

It took me a while to find a source for the idea that phenyethylamine is a love molecule. It seems to originate with a psychiatrist called Michael Leibowitz, who mentioned PEA in his 1983 book The Chemistry of Love. He was treating patients dealing with depression after a romantic breakup, and found that a class of antidepressants called monoamine oxidase (MAO) inhibitors helped them. That’s not too surprising, because MAO enzymes break down serotonin, noradrenaline and dopamine – all highly relevant to mood regulation. However, in passing, Dr Leibowitz also mentioned that PEA is broken down by the same enzyme and (as its role in the brain was still being investigated at the time) he speculated that maybe it was involved in the good vibes of love too.

That’s it. That offhand comment seems to have started a snowball rolling.

There’s obviously some appeal to the idea of a “love chemical”, and you can see how it would capture people’s imaginations. Cynically, such a psychologically potent concept makes for a good marketing ploy.

When an enterprising advertiser found out that chocolate contains phenylethylamine, and then half-remembered some connection between PEA and love, he saw an opportunity. Eating chocolate obviously feels good because you get those “love feelings” that PEA delivers. Buy more chocolates on Valentine’s Day!

Phenylethylamine (PEA), an amphetamine-like substance that has been alluringly labeled the “chemical of love,” makes the best case for the love-chocolate connection since it has been shown that people in love may actually have higher levels of PEA in their brain, as surmised from the fact that their urine is richer in a metabolite of this compound. link

Combining the popular appeal of there being a specific love chemical in the brain with the desire for profit among chocolate sellers seems to have created an idea that was too good to die.

The next stage of the story seemed to be a process of circular referencing. A journalist wrote an article that mentioned the association between PEA and love, tenuous as it was, and then that article became the evidence that another commenter used in their own article. This baton-passing continued until everyone forgot where the idea originated from.

It genuinely does seem to be the case that “scientists say” got repeated by enough journalists and writers, in enough venues that are respected, for it to become received wisdom. Everyone cited the people before them, rather that going back to the original source.

I felt a bit dizzy when I realised this. It was discombobulating to realise the whole thing was a mirage.

There is no meaningful evidence that phenylethylamine is involved in the neuroscience of love. It’s not impossible that it might have a minor role in regulating the effects of dopamine and noradrenaline, but it is not a built-in “love amphetamine”.

On reflection, it’s not hard to see how such things can happen. If you aren’t a neuroscientist, why would you be sceptical about phenylethylamine? It sounds much like 5-hydroxytryptamine or anandamide or any of the other esoteric terms that only a specialist would recognise. You basically have to take it on trust that the author knows what they are talking about, and they put their faith in their own “trusted sources” too. Soberingly, it’s almost inevitable that I’ve repeated common myths when writing about fields I know much less well then neurochemistry.

It’s a useful lesson.

Trust but verify, as they say.

Chasing the Woozle

As a final note, I started chasing this story in earnest a couple of years ago when I was deep in the research for my new book. Because of the frustrating merry-go-round and inconclusive nature of it all, I ended up not including anything about it in the final manuscript. Instead, I thought it might make a good blog post one day. Well, obviously, that day has arrived, but in going back now to check my sources for this post I came across a a new “preprint” article that was deposited in July 2024 by Dr Massimo Conti.

Evidently, Dr Conti has chased the same mirage through popular science articles and newspaper stories as me. Admirably, he has put together a thoroughly cited and authoritative narrative about the curious case of phenylethylamine, and he also used the perfect metaphor for the experience: it’s like chasing the Woozle.

So, for anyone who would like to know more about the history, the circular referencing, the marketing chicanery and the unsettling experience of finding that received wisdom is based on almost nothing except repetition, I’d encourage you to download Dr Conti’s paper and read the full story.

The post On the scientific evidence for limerence first appeared on Living with Limerence.

Limerence is an altered state of mind. That means its ultimate origins must lie in the brain.

When Dorothy Tennov first defined limerence, she came up with a set of symptoms that can be used to identify that altered mental state of intense romantic infatuation (if you’re curious about whether you fit the description, there’s a quiz you can take here). Whilst this list of symptoms is useful for defining the experience of being “in limerence”, from the perspective of a neuroscientist, it looks a lot like an addiction.

Limerence comes with euphoric highs and crushing lows. There are intense cravings, disruption of everyday routines, habitual behaviour, and a reorganisation of life once contact with the limerent object (LO) becomes your central goal. Your mood is destabilised – bliss when you are getting your fix, panic when it seems like your LO is not interested in you romantically. Thoughts and daydreams can start off delightful and intoxicating, but become obsessive.

The progression of limerence mirrors the path of an addiction too. Early on it’s all fireworks and reward, but as time goes on it begins to turn darker – the neurochemical high diminishes, and you need an escalating stimulus to get the same pleasure. That often prompts the limerent into taking more risks, being less cautious, pushing harder at emotional boundaries, and oversharing their secrets and dreams to try and get ever closer and more intimate. Ultimately, there usually comes a realisation that limerence has become detrimental to your life, but you also know you can’t give LO up without significant withdrawal pains. Heads you lose, tails you really lose.

Then there are the other ways that limerents can behave like addicts: lying about their conduct and their motives, concealing their limerence habit, being secretive.

The parallels are obvious, but is it fair to go beyond analogy and claim that limerence is actually a behavioural addiction?

The neuroscience of addiction

Most of what we know about addiction comes from the study of drugs of abuse – heroin, cocaine, alcohol, and so on. Although the details of the mechanisms of action vary from drug to drug (and from person to person – our propensity to become addicted to a given drug depends on our individual physiology), the broad principle is the same in all cases.

The brain’s reward system becomes “sensitized” to seeking the drug that it has learned is so pleasurable, while the executive brain’s feedback control – which should moderate reward-seeking behaviour – becomes desensitized.

It’s flooring the gas while releasing the brake.

Some drugs (like heroin and cannabis) work by overactivating the pleasure centres of the brain (the hedonic hotspots that make us “like” things), others like cocaine and amphetamine overactivate the motivation and arousal systems, making us want the reward with intense craving. I’ve discussed this key distinction between wanting and liking a few times before, and it’s central to addiction.

You could simplify addiction down to irresistible wanting, and that’s actually a pretty good description of the underlying neuroscience. Later on, things get a bit more complex with tolerance, dependency and antireward, but let’s not get too bogged down in the details.

An important point about drugs of abuse, though, is that they directly disrupt the biochemistry of the brain. They activate receptors or block clearance mechanisms, and disrupt the levels of dopamine, noradrenaline, serotonin, endorphins and endocannabinoids in key brain regions that regulate all those reward-seeking behaviours. You’re literally screwing with the circuitry.

That can’t be happening in limerence. Taking a stimulant deranges the proper functioning of the brain, and so it’s easy to see how that could cause long term changes in the circuits that lead to addiction. For limerence, the process is entirely psychological. There is no pharmacological element.

Behavioural addictions

This distinction between chemical and behavioural addiction has long been a point of controversy in the research community. It’s known that there is a major psychological component to addictive behaviour – the environment and paraphernalia associated with drug taking can cause powerful craving – but the concept of a purely behavioural addiction has prompted a lot of debate over the years.

My reading of that debate is that it is increasingly leaning toward accepting the validity of behavioural addictions. The term “process addiction” is increasingly being used to capture the idea that it is possible to become addicted to the feelings caused by an experience rather than a substance, and that the neurobiological basis is essentially the same.

The best studied examples are probably gambling addiction and shopping addiction, but recent social and technological changes have caused other persuasive candidates to emerge: pornography addiction, social media addiction, gaming addiction, exercise addiction.

Again, the neurochemical basis of these addictions is progressive sensitization of the wanting drive and weakening of executive feedback control. The same fundamental changes occur in the brain, even though the driving force is reinforcement of behavioural habits rather than drug-induced disruption of physiology.

Limerence as person addiction

These advances in our understanding of how psychological stimuli can be sufficient to cause reward dysregulation suggest limerence could fit within an addiction framework, but what exactly is it that limerents become addicted to?

Sex addiction and love addiction are obvious parallel phenomena, but while there is some overlap, there are also fundamental differences that make limerence seem to be a separate category. In particular, those other addictions are focussed more on the compulsive behaviour than the other party (or parties) involved.

Sex addiction involves compulsively seeking physical gratification, even after it stops being gratifying. The partner is a secondary concern. Similarly, love addiction involves seeking the giddy feeling of falling in love, but the object of that love is not as important as the romantic ideal.

Neither of these conditions capture the central quality of limerence: feeling desperately drawn to another person, entering an altered state of mind of romantic intoxication, and wanting to form a uniquely special bond with them.

That’s the most important point. As David Perl puts it at limerence.net: “limerence is addiction to a person.” That really crystallises the phenomenon: addiction to another person. LO is the drug. It’s not romantic love or sex per se that is craved, it’s them, specifically. It has a nice clarity of focus; good explanatory power.

For whatever reason – whatever combination of your own emotional state and unmet needs and their particular recipe of personality traits – the company of this person gives you an emotional and physiological high. You seek reward until addiction has set in, and then your behaviour becomes erratic and irrational, and withdrawal becomes painful.

Limerence recovery

The “LO is a drug” perspective also helps make sense of how to manage limerence. You are probably not going to be able to be friends with your LO, just like an alcoholic will never be able to be a social drinker.

This is especially true if your LO is manipulative or narcissistic or limerent for you too, because those guys will be enablers. They’ll be your drinking buddies, egging you on, telling you how boring you’ve become since you stopped hanging out so much, or how much they miss you – and can’t we just go back to how things were before you got so uptight?

Friendship will be impractical, but there are strategies and tactics for recovering from behavioural addictions, and limerence is no exception. While limiting contact is going to be a key part of that plan, it’s not necessary to go cold turkey. There are ways to manage contact, and ways to deprogram yourself out of the altered state of mind.

To return to my perennial theme: your road out of any behavioural addiction is self-awareness, honesty, and the determination to live a purposeful life. The same principles apply for limerence.

Act decisively, and work towards the future you want to live.

The post Person addiction first appeared on Living with Limerence.

Many people related to that experience. It really is a peculiar sensation of feeling like a different person with suspended impulse control. A quiet, distant intellectual voice urges you to stop acting so recklessly, but in the moment you just, fundamentally, don’t care. You just want.

As some of the commenters put it:

“…there is a right old flood of the brain chemicals in these situations that has us acting almost outside of ourselves.” Lim-a-rant

“I think very rationally and take a long time to weigh decisions. So I do that and decide there is something I have to say no to, for a host of excellent reasons. I go to my LO, she asks me about it, and I say yes. It’s especially annoying that she doesn’t have to insist at all, and no amount of convincing myself before seems to help.” Anon

It’s as though the executive authority of the brain has been suspended.

As I mentioned in that post, I’ve struggled a bit to come up with a way of describing this phenomenon. With more reflection, I think that the authority isn’t so much suspended as sidestepped. So, I’ve decided on a new term to describe this state of mind: Appetite Supremacy.

Appetite supremacy is at the heart of much of the ridiculous behaviour that limerents exhibit. Sending fruity texts and emails. Outrageous flirting. Oversharing intimate hopes and secrets. Exaggerated praise for LO. Paying for lavish gifts. Jumping into action whenever LO calls – those actions that limerents look back on with queasy embarrassment after they’ve come to their senses, knowing that duty, shame, pride or plain good sense should have stopped them. 

So, why do we do it? What’s happening in the brain of limerents that makes doing something stupid and disruptive feel irresistible?

Too much wanting

I’m a big advocate for the concept of limerence as addiction to another person, and the phenomenon of appetite supremacy is obviously relevant to addictive behaviour.

All self-aware addicts report a moment of realisation when they recognise that they can’t resist temptation through simple willpower – that having an opportunity to indulge their addiction will inevitably trigger drug use, regardless of the negative consequences for their lives. 

One of the leading theories for addiction is known as “incentive salience“. I’ve written about some of the implications before, principally that wanting and liking are distinct systems in the brain and can become uncoupled.

During addiction, the wanting system (driven by dopamine) becomes highly sensitized to the addictive stimulus. The dopamine system initiates reward-seeking behaviour and so being exposed to cues that remind you of your addiction causes a massive motivational drive.

Unfortunately for addicts, the sensitization of these “wanting circuits” is robust and long-lasting. Even worse, it correlates with a suppression of the cortical feedback pathways that moderate reward-seeking – the executive system that governs impulse control.

Addiction deranges our wanting circuits, so that the gas pedal is floored at the same time as the brakes are released.

Importantly, this isn’t a generalised hyperactivity of the wanting system. It is triggered by cues that are associated with the addiction – and for limerents, being in the company of the LO is clearly going to be the most powerful cue.

In moments of calm, away from the stimulus, it is perfectly possible for addicts to rationally analyse their behaviour, agree it is destructive, and express a purposeful intention to break the addiction and recover.

That determination lasts right up until the next exposure kicks them back into the mental state of appetite supremacy.

What can be done?

If appetite supremacy in limerence comes from hyperactive wanting plus suppressed impulse control, and it’s predictably triggered by exposure to LO, then there are some constructive steps that can be taken to tackle the problem.

1. Hit the emergency brake

One ray of light in this rather bleak picture of deranged wanting is that the “suspension of executive authority” is imperfect. There does seem to be a higher, ultimate authority that can step in at the last moment and pull the limerent back from the brink.

To take the common scenario of a married limerent who has become infatuated with a co-worker, appetite supremacy may drive them to flirtation, inappropriate intimacy, even an emotional affair, but many limerents stop themselves before crossing the tipping point of starting a physical affair.

Appetite supremacy can encourage wild boundary-testing, but many people do seem to have a psychological emergency stop that averts disaster.

We can argue about the origin of this emergency stop (obligation, guilt, fear, integrity), but it proves that the situation isn’t hopeless. Willpower can triumph over temptation.

Indeed, the emergency stop can kick in sooner. That was my saving grace. I was aware enough even in the face of appetite supremacy to erect a kind of final executive barrier – a last line of self-control that prevented me from disclosing or crossing any red-lines of impropriety. Even in the haze of wilful recklessness, I knew deep down that I didn’t want to do anything, I just selfishly wanted to play. To get some delicious limerence liquor, consequence free.

Of course, it wasn’t consequence free. I was training myself into a habit of secrecy and deceit. Even if I thought I could handle it, every time I was in that state of wilful recklessness I was playing with fire and reinforcing the limerence.

2. Stop reinforcing the limerence

The obvious next step is to avoid the circumstances that you know will trigger your wanting circuits.

No contact is the most consequential choice you can make, but there are other, subtler tactics. For one thing, you can modify your environment to try and eliminate cues that make you think of LO. This can be hard when limerence is well advanced and everything reminds you of LO, but changing your living space and introducing novelty, can be a potent force for rebooting your mindset.

One of the confounding factors in the study of addiction neuroscience is that the context of a test has a big impact on the results. By putting addicts into labs and MRI scanners, researchers developed lots of ideas about the mechanisms of addiction, only to later find out that the neural systems they were studying behaved differently in the home environment (or in another environment associated with drug taking).

Context matters.

Other tactics for breaking reinforcement are getting rid of gifts, getting rid of photos, blocking LO on social media – anything that disrupts the daily habits that keep LO in mind.

Habits kick in during moments of inattention. Like the smoker who has a lit cigarette in their mouth before they consciously realise what they’ve done, the impulse to contact LO is a reward-seeking habit loop that is running on autopilot in the background.

Become attentive to when your LO-seeking habits kick in and devise ways to disrupt the behavioural loop.

3. Deprogram the wanting circuits

The next stage is trying to desensitize your hyperactive wanting system. This is what I call “emergency deprogramming”, and what my online course is designed to achieve.

The idea is to use psychological tricks to overwrite the old association between LO and reward, and introduce a new association linking LO to discomfort. By deliberately spoiling limerent reverie and LO contact, you can accelerate “extinction” of the reward memories and undermine the wanting impulse.

Done in isolation, this approach can be demoralising, so it should also be coupled to finding new rewards and new sources of emotional nourishment.

One of the best strategies for gaining that positive outcome is to focus on self-improvement.

4. Exercise the executive feedback circuits

The ideal scenario for beating appetite supremacy would be to simultaneously weaken wanting and strengthen impulse control. Happily, purposeful living achieves both outcomes.

Self-discipline is the ability to do what you know you should do, even if you don’t want to do it. That skill can be learned and strengthened through practice.

The neuroscience of self-discipline is complex, and there are arguments to be made about whether addicts suffer more because of the strength of wanting versus the weakness of impulse control, but it’s undeniable that practicing discipline in one area of life has benefits in all areas of life.

This is most obviously true for the so-called keystone habits, of diet, exercise and sleep. Get those right and a lot of gains follow. If your core habits are purposeful, life quickly becomes more enjoyable and manageable.

Appetite supremacy is a destructive state to experience, but like most psychological trials, it can be overcome. There’s a philosophical debate to be had about whether addiction is a disease, a failure of character, or (as most people intuit) something in between. Regardless, if you do fall into that state of impaired self-control you are going to have to develop coping strategies to manage it.

All of us have some quirks and instabilities in our brains that need to be adapted to and compensated for. I’ve stated before that I wouldn’t want to lose my capacity for limerence, as it provided unparalleled joy when I experienced it in the context of a open, honest relationship. But, it is a handicap when it arrives unexpectedly.

The purposeful choice is always to accept your fundamental nature as it is, recognise that your limitations will make some trials difficult for you, but strive to be the best version of yourself that you can be.

The post Why limerents behave irresponsibly first appeared on Living with Limerence.

I appreciate this is might seem a pedantic point to get hung up on (and Lord knows I like exploring a good academic rabbit-hole), but I do think it’s important.

I think most people’s experience of limerence is that it’s an altered mental state – a distinct period in life when you feel like a different person, when your whole emotional being is hijacked by a single focus and overwhelming desire.

I’ve no doubt that people manage those feelings differently, that the intensity of the sensation varies between limerents, and that the difficulty of recovery depends on lots of factors that are highly individual and personal. But, if Tennov is right and limerence is a sort of neural algorithm that is either operational or not, then people really are either limerents or non-limerents. The sorting is as simple as “have you ever experienced that altered state of mind?”.

Simple answers are tidy, but also problematic. As soon as you start to set boundaries on this sort of issue, the exceptions begin. What if someone had a really intense crush during adolescence, but since then have had stable, loving attachments without the limerence madness? Are they a limerent or not? What if they are destined to have a big limerence episode in the future, does that mean they are a “dormant” limerent? What if someone had experienced the altered state of mind, but it had never had a negative impact on their life? Does limerence have to include the more costly, addictive aspects of the experience in order to qualify?

How altered does your state of mind need to be? Do you have to get properly deranged, or is a giddy fix of “new relationship energy” enough? We’re back to a spectrum now – is limerence defined by the intensity of the “altered state” or the impact on your life?

Part of the reason I’m currently obsessing about this is that I am working on a book about limerence and one of the key chapters is about how common limerence is, and what kinds of people experience it.

Previously, from expert estimates and indirect measures, we’ve ended up with a figure of 5% of the population being limerents, but intuitively that feels low, based on my own conversations with friends and colleagues.

Anecdotes are not data though, so I would like to try and answer the question more directly. I have a plan:

1. Come up with a short description of the limerence experience
2. Survey a large number of people (at random) and ask “Have you ever experienced this?”
3. If possible, get some sort of breakdown on their demographics – age, sex, sexual orientation would be ideal – to see if the prevalence varies between groups

That forces a binary decision on the survey respondents, but it does also mean that the question we ask is absolutely critical. If I ask, “Have you ever experienced X, Y and Z symptoms,” and the respondent thinks “well, I have had X and Z, but Y doesn’t sound quite right” then it will be hard for them to answer. So, we need a really clear and unambiguous description that captures limerence in a concise and accurate way.

That’s today’s goal.

Here’s my best first effort:

I have sometimes felt a romantic infatuation so powerful that it overwhelmed all other concerns in my life. My emotions swung between extreme highs and lows, and my thoughts and dreams were dominated by the other person. It almost felt like I was addicted to them.

I suspect that can be improved upon. So, I have two questions for the community:

1. Can you think of a better summary of the limerent experience?
2. Do you have experience of any big online market research/survey platforms that can target this question to people based on the age, sex and sexual orientation demographics?

Thanks all!

Let’s get this question answered once and for all…

The post More on the limerence binary first appeared on Living with Limerence.

Is limerence a specific condition, or is there a spectrum of limerence?

In one case, limerence would be the altered mental state defined by Tennov, and you are either in limerence or not in limerence at any given time in life. As she put it “either the algorithm is operational, or it is not”. This would be limerence as a binary state that is either on or off.

The alternative case is that limerence is just an intense form of a more universal emotional phenomenon. This obviously has some merit because most people have some experience of feeling romantic infatuation, even those who do not relate to the concept of limerence and are sceptical of its existence. The reaction of most “non-limerents” to Tennov’s criteria is to recognise and relate to some of the symptoms, but have difficulty believing they could become an overwhelmingly disruptive force in life.

So, is limerence a real “thing” or is it just a term applied to people who struggle to manage more intense than average romantic feelings?

This sort of issue plagues the field of social psychology. Humans have a tendency to take a phenomenon that exists on a spectrum, draw an arbitrary threshold, and split people into categories based on whether they are above or below the threshold. When does stress become mental illness? When does cleverness become genius? When does sensitivity to arousal make one Highly Sensitive? When does enjoying gambling become a behavioural addiction?

Now, to an extent, this is all academic. There is value in identifying the top few percent of the population on any given personality or emotional trait and classifying them as a special case. Being at the tail end of a bell-shaped curve does make you unusual, after all. For those familiar with Elaine Aron’s concept of the Highly Sensitive Person she is completely upfront about this being her approach. Everyone finds the world arousing, but the top 15-20% most sensitive people will have a different experience to other people and so need to understand their vulnerability (and/or gift) to be able to thrive.

In other cases, though, it does matter if there is a distinct category difference.

Many people enjoy a drink, and the feeling of intoxication that alcohol causes. Desire for alcohol exists on a spectrum, with some who hate the stuff and others who drink daily, but there is good evidence that alcoholics aren’t simply the top 5% of a bell-shaped curve. There is a physiological basis to their addiction (gene mutations for some neurotransmitter receptors and metabolic enzymes cause alcoholics to have a heightened reward response to alcohol). Physiology is not the whole story – environment is just as important in promoting addiction – but the point is that for alcoholism there are additional factors in play beyond ordinary variation in taste or willpower. Alcoholics can rightly be considered a separate class from non-alcoholics. 

So where does limerence fit into this binary versus spectrum debate? Well, social psychologists have developed a range of tools over the years for quantifying love, and trying to put a number on how “in love” people are. This field is of course bedevilled by the problem of what love is but, in terms of limerence, the most relevant test is probably the Passionate Love scale developed by Elaine Hatfield and colleagues. This questionnaire asks people to rate their agreement with various indicators for passionate love feelings (as distinct from companionate love), and serves as a pretty decent list of the symptoms for what we call limerence.

The passionate love scale has been tested across many cultures and many demographic groups and the results suggest that passionate love is a human universal. I’ve struggled to track down the original data, but the average (mean) score on a scale of 0 to 9 is around a 7 (note that a confounding factor is that the test is often applied to people who have self-reported being “in love”). As with my own analysis of the LwL-refined limerence survey there is likely to be a wide range in the scores reported by individuals, but a key question is whether the distribution of these scores is a simple “normal” bell-shaped curve or if there is more complexity to the distribution. I can’t answer this for the passionate love scale, but for my own data it does look like a normal distribution, albeit with a decided skew towards higher scores:

There’s more than one way to interpret these data. The first is that it shows there is variation in the intensity of limerent feelings among self-selecting people who have taken this survey.

Another way to interpret it is that as a blend of results from a majority limerent people (who score higher) and a minority of non-limerent people (who score lower). For the latter case, you’d probably predict a binomial distribution (the sum of two bell-shaped curves), but a significant problem for interpretation of the data is that the survey is anonymous so we have no idea what the individual circumstances of the participants are (I set it up as a tool to help people understand their own situation, not a formal research project).

So what does all this add up to? I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that the contribution from non-limerents to the data is minimal, and dwarfed by the large preponderance of limerents seeking help. For these people there is clearly a spectrum of intensity in their symptoms, varying around an average score of 70-75%.

However, the self-selecting nature of this survey still has the same issue that comes up for the passionate love scale: people from all cultural backgrounds distinguish being “in love” from loving someone. We love friends and family, but are usually “in love” with a romantic, sexual partner for a definable period of time at the beginning of a relationship. It’s recognisable as a distinct mental state that isn’t like ordinary life.

Limerents then, are people who score very highly on these psychometric scales of infatuation when they fall “in love”. They skew so powerfully towards the maximum intensity of feeling that their mental state when in love is usefully distinguished as “limerence”.

In other words, the state of being in limerence is binary, but the intensity of limerent feelings is a spectrum.

The post Is limerence binary or a spectrum? first appeared on Living with Limerence.