Many people remember their first love. Beautiful, less beautiful, or even neutral, and it has a profound effect on the rest of your life. It affects the psyche as well as the biological settings. We are talking about love that occurs in the teenage years, between the ages of 13 and 19.
That's all she found out bioanthropologist Helen Fischer in a functional brain imaging (MRI) study to study the brains of people in love.
She studied what happens to the brain when we fall in love. It is released in the body during this period oxytocin, which is considered the love hormone and is responsible for our feelings of attachment and intimacy. He's relaxing dopamine, which gives us a sense of satisfaction. A center in the brain is activated that creates this effect based on the link between motivation and reward - love addiction.
Dopamine-like hormone norepinephrine, is also released in the initial phase of love and becomes known as longing or infatuation, and this is what causes energetic and euphoric behavior.
Levels during sex cortisol, the stress hormone, which is released in tense situations, decreases, and less cortisol means a more relaxed but also vulnerable state.
The level also decreases serotonin, the happy hormone. The conclusion was that falling in love causes a chemical reaction in the brain and recreates a chemical response that leads people to develop deeper in love.
How does this relate to first love?
A breakup is an emotional event. None of them affect a person like the first one, because that's when the hormones went wild for the first time. According to the study, from 2017, 71 percent of people recovered from a breakup within three months. Recovery involved rediscovering yourself and more positive emotions. Of course, some feelings like sadness, anger, and pain can last longer, but for the most part, it's a three-month journey.
Why does a first breakup have such an impact?
When you first fall in love, your brain goes through different processes, from the rise of good hormones and the decline of negative ones. Many studies have shown that the brain experiences something similar to addiction when we are in love. In addition, we usually fall in love for the first time during adolescence, when the brain is still developing.
But regardless of the current relationship to first love, hormonal interactions remain recorded in the sensory areas of the brain during the neurological development we experience during these years.
Psychologist Jefferson Singer, who deals with autobiographical memory, says that most people experience such – first – situations between the ages of 15 and 26.
When such situations are repeated, the memories become more active, because the first situations happened when our memory was actually at its peak. Namely, cognitive activities decline after the age of 25 and slowly change with experience.
In addition, first love affects you psychologically, they say experts.
First feelings become the framework from which we approach subsequent connections and relationships. They are connected to the perception of love that we experienced in childhood and that was influenced by our parents and the people with whom we spent the most time.
