The dizzy early stage of love floods your body with chemicals that can make you obsessive, anxious and frankly a bit unhinged. Knowing what’s happening is the first step to not letting it sabotage a good thing.
Beyoncé wasn’t exaggerating: love really can have you looking so crazy right now. The early stages of falling for someone subject your brain to a hormone cocktail strong enough to change how you eat, sleep and think. None of it means the relationship is doomed, but unmanaged, these eight effects can quietly smother the very thing causing them.
1. Obsession
Can’t stop thinking about them? Research has linked early-stage love to a significant drop in serotonin, a pattern also seen in obsessive-compulsive conditions. That’s why your brain replays every conversation on a loop. Normal, but worth noticing before it tips into checking-their-socials-hourly territory.
2. Fight or flight
New love spikes adrenaline, the racing heart when their name lights up your phone. The same chemistry powers the ancient fight-or-flight response, which is why intense attraction can trigger an equally intense urge to bolt.
3. Mood swings
To balance the adrenaline, your brain releases phenylethylamine, the dreamy, floaty chemical you can also get in small doses from chocolate. The result is a mood pendulum: euphoric at lunch, inexplicably flat by dinner. It settles as the relationship does.
4. Lovesickness is real
Oxytocin, the bonding hormone released between partners and between mothers and newborns, can also suppress appetite, wreck concentration and keep you awake. If you can’t eat or focus, you’re not broken; you’re bonding. It passes.
5. Post-sex blues
Studies of postcoital dysphoria suggest roughly one in three women, and plenty of men, have felt sadness, irritability or anxiety immediately after sex, even satisfying sex with someone they like. Knowing it’s a recognised phenomenon stops it becoming a verdict on the relationship.
6. Mixed feelings, measurable stress
Health psychology research has found that being around people we feel ambivalent about can stress the body more than being around people we actively dislike, unpredictability is harder on us than certainty. Early-love hot-and-cold is normal, but it has a physical cost.
7. Anxiety
Falling for someone means lowering defences and letting your routines be disrupted, both of which read as threat to a brain that likes safety. A spike in general anxiety during a new relationship is common and usually temporary.
8. Manufactured drama
All those surging chemicals need somewhere to go, and sometimes they get a voice by inventing problems: picking fights, testing loyalty, creating crises that make the internal turbulence feel justified. This one, at least, is within your control once you spot it.
The good news
All of this chaos is the biology of attachment doing its job. Kept in check, named, laughed about, not acted on at 2am, it’s the making of a strong bond. There’s a lot to gain; try not to let the chemistry burn so bright it scares off the very person causing it.
Image Unsplash.
