5 Dangerous Things That Happen To Your Brain When You Fall In Love — Especially With A Toxic Person
By Shahida Arabi
It is empowering to know how our brains are affected by love — especially toxic love. Understanding these effects can help us to better distance ourselves from people who are detrimental to our self-care. If we are in an unhealthy love dynamic, we can then learn to substitute our unhealthy addiction with healthier outlets that feed into self-empowerment. We still have the agency to make better choices and to move forward in healing — the brain can always be ‘rewired’ to fixate on what helps us rather than what hurts us. Here are five ways your brain is affected by love, especially with a dangerous partner:
1. Love lowers your serotonin levels to a similar level as people with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. As a result, we become fixated on our partners to the level of obsession.
Psychiatrist Donatella Marazziti discovered that people in love have around the same levels of serotonin as those with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. Serotonin is known for its role in regulating mood (especially anxiety and depression) and people with OCD tend to have unusually low levels of this neurotransmitter which…
