As I probably say at least every other week, if not every week, the human mind is a deeply

social mind wired to connect. Human beings get a survival advantage by connecting.

And if you've ever recently experienced rejection,

abandonment, feeling of being disconnected with the love,

you'll, it'll be fresh in your mind just how painful that experience is.

Psychologist Matthew Lieberman did a test where he programmed a game where people

played remotely against each other to systematically one by one isolate certain players away from the action so they couldn't be involved.

And they found that the same area of the brain that creates physical pain, highlights physical pain for our awareness, is also

responsible for highlighting emotional pain.

That's the right interior singular. And that's why when you've experienced a disappointing

relational event, somebody criticizes you a friend

doesn't call you back a breakup

there's a great deal of difficulty not thinking about it

your mind will be prone to bring your

awareness back again and again and again like it does when we're in physical pain.

Because just as physical pain is a message that we're vulnerable and

it awareness is set up so that we become perennially aware of our vulnerability so that we'll take actions

to instill our security or ensure our security when we're disconnected with people that are important to us, certainly in the bulk of human

history being isolated and disconnected would be a huge survival disadvantage and it would be in our interest to constantly alert us to the negative feelings of sadness or grief or anger that arose as a result of a lack of

secure connections that would protect us. In fact, the great anxiety of adult life is called neurotic anxiety. In childhood, we have separation

anxiety, which is the fear of being disconnected from our caretaker, which provides us with the food and nourishment

and security that we need to survive.

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