Why Heartbreak Feels Physical (It’s Not Just in Your Head)

In this episode of Health Recoded, we talk about heartbreak, breakups, and how they affect the brain, body, and nervous system.

If you’re going through heartbreak and it feels physical—like anxiety, rumination, or even pain in your body—there’s a reason for that. This episode breaks down the science of heartbreak, why it can feel like withdrawal, and how to start moving through it.

We cover:

• The difference between breakups vs heartbreak
• The neuroscience of heartbreak (and why it can feel like addiction)
• How heartbreak impacts the nervous system and emotional regulation
• How long it actually takes to heal and “process” heartbreak
• Common breakup advice that can slow your healing
• Tools to reduce rumination and support emotional recovery

If this resonates with you, you’re not alone—and there is a way through it.

Subscribe for more conversations that help you understand your body and mind on a deeper level. New episodes weekly.

Chapters

00:00 Intro

00:47 Breakups vs Heartbreak

03:37 The Science of Heartbreak (Brain + Nervous System)

08:13 Different Types of Grief

13:00 How Long Does It Take to Heal from Heartbreak?

16:38 Myth busting - common break up advice misconceptions

20:36 Tips for self-acceptance and moving through heartbreak grief

25:02 How to Stop Rumination & Start Healing

32:44 Key Takeaways

This content is for educational and informational purposes only and is not a substitute for guidance provided directly by your own medical practitioner.

Research & Resources:

• Kross et al., 2011 — Social rejection & physical pain overlap
• Fisher et al., 2010 — Love, rejection, and addiction pathways
• Eisenberger & Lieberman, 2004 — Neural basis of social pain
• O’Connor et al., 2008 / 2019 — Grief and brain function
• American Psychiatric Association — DSM-5-TR (Prolonged Grief Disorder)
• Bonanno, 2009 — The Other Side of Sadness
• https://houstondbtcenter.com/healing-after-heartbreak/

Topics covered: heartbreak healing, breakup recovery, nervous system regulation, emotional processing, and mental health education.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

If you're navigating heartbreak and your heart and your body are physically hurting, this episode may help. Hi, I'm Alex. I'm your nurse. And today's topic is one that is very close to my heart heartbreak and how it affects the human body. I have personally been dealing with heartbreak for the past year and a half, and this is a conversation that I wish I had had access to when I first got started. I have personally learned so much through this journey, though, and I wanted to share it in the hopes that it helps somebody else through their experience. So today we're going to talk about heartbreak, how it affects the human body, because there is a physiological process behind it, the difference between heartbreak and breakups, and some tips for moving through your experience. Hopefully, this episode will help you feel seen, if not find a little peace. So, what is the difference between heartbreak and breakups? Most everyone will experience a breakup in their life. This is the end of a relationship. Two people part ways, a connection ends, they may or may not stay together, but ultimately this connection, this relationship has run its course. Heartbreaks are completely different. This is the subjective experience of an individual, and it can look different for everyone, but ultimately it is grief, it is loss, and it is the body metabolizing rupture and severance of a connection and a source of safety. Heartbreak is not just a breakup, it is a full-body neurological, psychological, and physiological experience. When my ex broke up with me a year and a half ago, he was verbally and emotionally abusive when he broke up with me. And I'm still working through what happened. What made it difficult wasn't just the loss. It was trying to make sense of what happened while also feeling unsafe, confused, and ultimately responsible. Unfortunately, it is easier for someone to blame you than it is for them to turn the mirror back around on themselves and reflect or take any onus in the situation. And this makes it more complicated because the brain isn't just working to come to terms with what is happening, but it's also working to repair the rupture as you heal, as well as the trauma and the perceived unsafety and blame from the situation. And so this is where heartbreak becomes different than just a breakup. Alanda Botan speaks a lot about heartbreak, and he says that if you break someone's heart, you have just cost them one to three years of their life. He says it should be considered a medical condition and you should get time off work because of how much time and effort it takes for you to process, but also for your body to metabolize. And I think this is where it gets really tricky because it's not something that you can always physically see, such as with cardiovascular, like a heart attack per se. I think people have a hard time with conditions such as mental health or chronic fatigue, because so often they present in ways that we don't physically see what is happening. And then it becomes easy to judge and say that nothing is wrong with the person and they should just get over it. But this is where this conversation is so important because raising awareness of what is happening in the body, but also in the mind psychologically, can, well, physiologically and psychologically, but how the two are interconnected will hopefully help to improve understanding of what is happening mentally as well as reduce the stigma around the topic. So let's talk about the anatomy of the heartbreak on the body and the nervous system. So there's multiple different um pathways and brain regions that are activated during a heartbreak. And I do want to preface and say that heartbreak is not just romantic, right? It could be from the loss of a loved one or a pet or a situation in your life. It's ultimately a grief process. It's just today we're talking specifically about romantic relationships, and so that's the context that I just wanted to highlight here. But brain regions that are activated during heartbreak, it's not just emotional, it activates pain circuitry in the brain. So the anterior cingulate cortex and insula are activated, and these are the same regions involved in your brain for physical pain. So this is why heartbreak can literally feel like your heart is broken, chest tightness, aching, heaviness, fatigue. Your brain does not fully distinguish between emotional pain and physical pain. Heartbreak activates the same regions as physical injury. So your nervous system doesn't know when the stimulus is being applied externally or internally. It just knows that you feel unsafe and that you're feeling pain and it needs to get you to safety. So romantic attachment is actually heavily tied to the dopamine reward system. So this is the VTA, the ventral tegmental area, and the nucleus sucumbens. And these are the same pathways involved in addiction, craving, and withdrawal. And this was something that I actually learned throughout my process, or healing, I should say, but this comes back to the nervous system not knowing when the stimulus is external or internal. But this is why we talk about when you fall in love, you're literally addicted to that person. These neuropathways are firing. You're getting massive amounts of oxytocin, dopamine as you're falling in love with this person and becoming connected to them. And as biology and evolution would have it, they want that to happen so that you can then mate and procreate and have a longer standing chance of survival. But that's then what makes this so hard when the breakup happens, is it's literally like withdrawing from an addictive substance. So because these are the same pathways, after a breakup, dopamine will drop. The brain will expect that person, will expect that hit, so to speak, and this creates craving-like behavior. So this is why people will check their phones repeatedly or really want to text their ex or replay memories or feel pulled to that person or even get back together. Losing someone you love doesn't just feel sad, it creates a withdrawal state in the brain that is neurologically similar to addiction and to withdrawal. And so this helps to explain why it feels the way that it does and why certain behaviors happen when you're going through a heartbreak and a breakup. There's also a cortisol and stress response. Breakups trigger stress. This increases cortisol and increases the sympathetic nervous system activation, like we were talking about. This can lead to poor sleep, anxiety, appetite changes, and immune suppression. So the body is not just emotional, it is physiologically dysregulated as well. You have this environment, this person, this safety net, so to speak, that is now being removed from your environment and the body is having to adjust, and that can take some time. But this also leads me to the point of rumination. Why does rumination happen? This is the brain trying to predict and control future pain. So the default mode network or the DMN becomes more active, and then this network is involved in self-referencing, mental replay, and story building. So rumination isn't a flaw. It's your brain trying to solve a problem. It doesn't have enough information to close. And this can also lead to why questions. This was something that I had a big problem with. Your brain wants answers, it wants to keep you safe. So asking, what did I do wrong? Do they still love me? Why did they leave? If your brain can answer the question, then it can avoid that pain or that event happening again and therefore make the situation better. Either way, it can avoid the pain, and our brains and our bodies do not like pain. They naturally move away from it and they want to protect you. So I want to talk about different types of grief because ultimately heartbreak is grief, but we've got acute or uncomplicated grief and then complicated, prolonged grief. There's also disenfranchised grief, which is really important when talking about heartbreak, and then ambiguous loss as well, which kind of ties into the rumination we're talking about. So acute, uncomplicated grief is a normal response to loss. There's waves of sadness, longing, and emotional pain, and it gradually softens over time. I don't know if any of you have read um Kuba Ross's book on death and dying. I was required to read it in nursing school, but it's it's a really important. It's a really important book in the topic of grief, and gosh, there's just so much amazing information in that novel. Um, but essentially the process is not linear. I always say healing isn't linear, but grief definitely is not. And there's several key stages, but the whole point is that you don't move through them in a linear fashion. Just because you move from sadness to anger to acceptance doesn't mean that you're done. You could move from acceptance back into anger. Just because you've processed through some of the sadness doesn't mean that it won't come back up again in the future. And so I think that's what makes this moving into complicated grief, that's what can make it complicated, is it's grief that does not integrate over time. This persistent longing and difficulty moving forward, and a person can feel stuck. And we'll talk about time frames here in a second, about how long it takes to move through a heartbreak. But ultimately, just because you're not moving through faster than somebody else, or as fast as the internet tells you, please don't think that something is wrong with you. It's gonna take your brain and your body and you as long as it takes to process this, as long as we're doing that in a healthy capacity, which again we'll talk about in the end. That's the important part. We want to be able to support ourselves. So moving into disenfranchised grief, this one's very relevant for heartbreak. It's grief that is not socially recognized or validated. I've personally felt this. I don't know how much of it is my own self-blame. But I feel like, for example, like situationships or almost relationships, they'll get a lot of this as well. But it's it's so easy for somebody to sit and and judge and say, Well, why do you still feel so sad? It's three months later, or it's been a year, they're already with somebody else, you should be over it. Sometimes heartbreak is harder because the grief isn't acknowledged by others, and your body is still processing it as a loss, but it feels unsupported. And so it's almost kind of like being gaslit, in my opinion, because you have this experience, but people are almost shaming you and saying, Why do you feel that way? You shouldn't feel that way. So I just talk about this to highlight it because I think it's a really important piece of information to be aware of. It was something I became aware of recently, and it really helped me to release some of my own judgment and say, just because other people don't understand it doesn't mean that I'm not gonna understand myself. But moving into ambiguous loss, there's no clear closure, unanswered questions, and then emotional open loop on this one. This one's tricky, it directly fuels rumination and why questions. So for my breakup, for example, there was lots of stuff that was thrown at me and it didn't quite make sense, and it was just kind of out of nowhere, and then the behavior didn't match, and I was treated this way and that way, and said this and that. Well, he did. And that comes back to not feeling safe because your brain is trying to make sense of it so that it can predict the next thing. So again, rumination, why questions, ambiguous loss, there's unanswered questions, it's an open loop, your brain is trying to solve it. But ultimately that's really unhelpful because it continues this process, it lets those things continue to cycle and happen. And that's another piece that I'm gonna talk about because I have a very active mind. I don't know if you guys can tell, but we're gonna talk about rumination and how we can move through that closer towards the end. Yeah, I have a section on that. And um because moving through rumination is what's gonna hopefully help you move through your breakup. How long does it take to metabolize a heartbreak or to move on and heal? I hesitate to tell you about timelines for how long heartbreak will last because ultimately everybody's experience is subjective. I can't tell you how many times I looked the statistics up and I just wound up comparing my progress to the numbers, and ultimately the numbers are only a reference, they're not a guarantee for how you specifically are going to move through because it doesn't account for what you specifically experienced. And this is why I've been talking about the different types of grief and the different differences between a breakup and heartbreak. Because sure, it's easy to say, oh sure, it'll take three months to get through a breakup. But when you've got all this other stuff packed on top of that, you can't put a timeline on that. So this isn't a guarantee for how long it's gonna take. It's ultimately up to you and your nervous system to do the processing and the healing. And from there, it takes what it takes, both in the way of time and effort. And something that I want you to keep in mind grief is love's twin sister. The amount of grief you feel directly correlates the amount of love that you experienced. So don't feel bad if your two-month relationship takes you nine months to get over. If you experience that much love and capacity, then pat yourself on the back for experiencing life and being a human. So here are the numbers if you want them. Metabolizing heartbreak typically takes about three months, roughly 11 to 12 weeks, to see significant improvement in mood and emotional distress, according to studies. However, deep healing, particularly after long-term relationships or marriage, often take anywhere from six to eighteen months, or even several years in some cases. So there's no universal timeline for recovery. And there's also often the disclaimer that I've heard that it'll take half the time that you were together or in that relationship in order to heal. So I don't know if that tracks for anybody, but if it does, please leave a comment. Um, but this is also highlights what I was talking about. Being blindsided or having a relationship relationship ended by a partner often leads to a harder recovery. So how the relationship happened, or if you were the one to do it, that can change your recovery time as well. So again, studies show emotional distress decreases significantly around 10 to 12 weeks, but attachment and identity restructuring takes longer. So don't just sit there and think I'll be perfectly healed and over them after three months and it's done. That's what I got in the trap of. And I'm 18 months out and we're still going strong. Initial emotional intensity often improves within a few months, but deeper identity level healing can take much longer. And yes, being broken up with does typically equate to longer recovery. You had less control and there more and therefore more ambiguity. Often the person who did the breaking up has already done more processing, even if unconsciously, by the time the relationship ends, they have more sense of control over the situation as well because they're the ones making the decision, assuming it wasn't an amicable breakup where both parties are contributing. And so that also contributes to the nervous system having a perceived sense of safety. Okay, I wanted to talk about some common breakup advice misconceptions to talk about because there were quite a few of these that were thrown at me, and I'm sure some of you can relate. And I found them to be completely unhelpful. And my least favorite is at the top of the list. To get over somebody, you have to get under somebody. I abhor this advice. It may have worked for some of you, but I can't sit here and say logically that I advocate for it. It advocates for numbing behaviors that only continues the cycle of repeating patterns. It doesn't actually fix anything or make anything better, it just distracts you and delays the inevitable patterns of repeating and hurting someone else. We can only meet someone on the level to which we've met ourselves. And if we haven't done the work to heal and process what has happened to us, then we're just gonna have it happen all over again. And also, we can't expect somebody else to heal our pain for us. I wish that weren't true. If we haven't done the work to process our pain or our patterns, then we cannot fully meet someone else and help them with theirs. And this is not to say that we need to be perfectly healed before we get into the next relationship, but it only highlights that if we don't prune the garden, so to speak, the weeds continue to grow, no matter if it looks like a new garden. Another piece of advice, just move on. This one is very diminutive, in my opinion. It diminishes your experience, your emotional processing, and it reinforces shame around grief, and ultimately it delays healing. To say just move on, you're invalidating somebody's experience and telling them that they shouldn't have the response that they have and that what they're feeling is unnecessary or doesn't matter, and it diminishes it, and that ultimately just creates a new layer of pain. And then this next one, I'm kind of 50-50 on. Everything happens for a reason. I feel like in the beginning stages of a heartbreak or a breakup, this isn't helpful because it intellectually bypasses emotional pain. If you're physically in pain and feeling something, you can't just bypass that and move on. Like, if your brain and your body and your nervous system are being stimulated, then you have to honor that. And so to sit there and say, Oh, it happened for a reason. Well, your brain and your body are like, well, yeah, I don't know what reason that was, though. I still feel in pain and this sucks. So to me, it invalidates the pain or the experience as well as the loss, particularly early on. And it also tries to enforce meaning a little too early in the breakup or in the process and the grief and the healing. I think it would be potentially helpful for the person themselves to say after the fact, I'm finally just getting to a point within the past four or five months where I can say, this happened for a reason. I needed to learn these lessons, I needed to process these things, I needed to be out of that relationship because that person's capacity was not matched to what I needed or what I deserved. And that is also to still say, I still have pain over what I'm processing and healing from, and I still have love for that person and that relationship and that connection. So it's this weird, ambiguous state between somewhat moving into the future and somewhat still processing the past. So you may or may not agree with me, but ultimately, meaning is something we create over time and not something that we force in the middle of an experience in the hopes that it'll get us over the hump or the hurdle and to the end of our situation. So, moving into tips for self-acceptance, loving yourself, and moving through heartbreak grief. When it first happens, it is going to feel like a shock. You need to support yourself physiologically first. Let it happen. It is going to suck. Cry the tears, eat the pizza, talk to someone you trust, go on a walk, write things down, just let your brain and your nervous system catch up to the reality of what is happening. Mine took roughly 48 hours. I was kind of surprised it took that long, or that it didn't take longer. But if it takes you a week, if it takes you two, that's fine. You don't move on from something your body hasn't processed yet. So let your body catch up, okay? And your mind will follow. After that settles, maybe after a few days, maybe a bit longer, depending on how you process, start to pick yourself up a bit, clean yourself up, go clean your room, take a shower, clean your house, remove photos, remove belongings. I wish I had done that sooner. Eat a healthy meal, plan an outing with a friend, try to keep some sort of consistent schedule with your sleep, get some kind of physical activity, go outside, go on a walk, do something to feel productive and find some forward momentum. So also give you some sort of a Dopamine hit to your brain, which will hopefully help you heal a little bit. And as long as we're supporting a healthy and consistent schedule and processing with our body, hopefully that will help to support our mind. So, some of my tips as we're getting into deeper work with some of the grief and the heartbreak and the emotional turmoil. We want to do all these things that I always talk about between a consistent sleep schedule and staying hydrated and eating healthy whole foods and taking our vitamins, all of these things, right? We want to focus on all of those things. I don't say this in a shameful way of make sure you take care of yourself and don't pay attention to your emotional experience. That's not what I'm saying. I'm just setting that as the groundwork so that then you have something to work with on all these other tips that we're talking about. So, of course, therapy, find a clinical therapist if that works for you. I tend to use therapy as an all-encompassing term. So if you want to go do cognitive behavioral therapy or talk therapy with a licensed clinical practitioner, I'm all for it. But if that's not your jam, fine. You can do meditation, breath work, journaling, there's all different forms of emotional, so physiological, psychological connection regulation that you can go find that works for you. So again, we talked about in the nervous system episode. If meditation is entirely too calm for you, like some people with anxiety or PTSD, that actually triggers them more. Fine, don't do that. Find what works for you, though. Doing something to release this emotional pain is going to help you move through it more effectively. Maybe not faster, but more effectively. And that's what we're trying to accomplish here. So we talked about sleep and nutrition as well, eating whole foods and supporting your body so that it actually can do the rest of the work that's in your brain. Your nervous system is going to take a lot out of you. One of the strangest things that I have learned is that grief alters your sense of time. It's been a year and a half since this happened, and it feels like barely four months. And there's something about the way that loss and grief almost completely overtakes your brain and your body's understanding of time that you genuinely feel like you lose time. And this also kind of comes back to the one to three years for heartbreak that Alain de Botan's talks about, but ultimately supporting our sleep cycles and our circadian rhythms, getting the cortisol bumps with sunshine in the morning, staying hydrated throughout the day, supporting our bodies so that we can then support our minds. So one thing I did want to talk about was rumination. There's something, so when we're talking about rumination, we're talking about asking the why questions. This will keep you stuck. It will keep you in that moment, in that breakup, and you won't actually be moving forward and moving through. And this is the difference. I'm not saying don't think about your breakup. It can be healthy and constructive to think and wonder and ask questions and say, well, where did I go wrong? Or what could I have done differently? Or what is this situation teaching me? But to continually ask the questions that don't go anywhere, that aren't constructive or don't have a path, that's rumination. That's what we're talking about. So this directly correlates to the neural pathways in the brain. Think of this as a roundabout. I call this the rumination roundabout. My therapist told it to me as an interstate, but I personally don't like that metaphor because an interstate goes somewhere, right? If I'm on the interstate, I'm headed somewhere. I'm on a trip, I'm on a road trip, I'm having a good time. If I'm on a roundabout, I want to get off. I don't want to stay slopping the same things over and over again. I'm not going anywhere. So your brain will choose a familiar hell over an unfamiliar heaven. The brain hates ambiguity. It doesn't like gray area. This is why we often get stuck in binary thinking of good and bad or black and white. If your brain knows what is going on and can find the answer, then it can protect you and it can do something about it. If there's too many options in the gray area, your brain doesn't like that because it can't account for every single option in the gray area. Okay. So again, this is neural pathways. If we're continuing to wire that neural pathway on that roundabout, your brain is actually getting some satisfaction from that if we're continuing to run that pathway. So this is where you have to veer off that roundabout. Your roundabout may be beautiful with all the greenery and all the sidewalks and all the signs that go nowhere, and the roundabout offlet, the little, what do you call those, exits? Could be gravel, could be dirt, could be non-existent. I don't care. Veer over the sidewalk and create a new pathway. And the best way to do it, well, first let me tell you the science behind it. So the brain prioritizes predictability, as we talked about. And this could mean that it is choosing that loop over happiness. The amygdala flags unfamiliar situations as potential threats because, again, it doesn't know what to do with it every time. So this comes back to feelings of safety. Your brain doesn't like the unknown. Known pain is more attractive than unknown comfort because your brain and your nervous system knows what to do with it, even if it's painful. So your brain isn't always choosing what's best, it's choosing what feels most predictable because that's what it thinks is best. So this is where rumination and pruning the neural pathways comes into play. How do we get off the roundabout? The first thing is noticing it without judgment. Label it for what it is. This is rumination, or this is the loop, or I need to get off the roundabout, or whatever it is. This creates space between you and the thought. You are not the thought, you are the observer. If you can separate yourself from this, then you are not stuck in the loop. You are observing it and you are watching it, and you can help to coordinate what actually happens. So from there we can ask, does this thought lead anywhere or does it serve me? If this thought is constructive, if you're on the highway as opposed to the roundabout and you're actually going somewhere with this thought, such as, is this a pattern that I've played in multiple relationships, or what does that behavior tell me about me? Notice the difference though. A lot of the interstate questions are questions about you and what you can do, because that's actually within your control. You can't control anything other than you and your behavior and responses. Anything outside of that, we can't do anything about it. We can affect other people, we can't control other people, and we can't control the way that they treat us. That was one of my least favorite lessons to learn, believe me. So if your thought is constructive and it's going somewhere, cool. Write it out, see where it goes, see what you learn. If you find that this is a thought that you have had consistently, consistently, consistently, and you don't have an answer and it's not going anywhere, then that is rumination and it is time to exit the roundabout. You can find a mantra or a self-affirmation that works for you specifically to shift through that mental loop. But the idea is that, and you can mentally think I'm on the roundabout and see yourself veering off of it as you think this different thought. Okay. And again, this is not to shame you out of a thought or a feeling. If you're feeling something, sit with it. I advocate wholeheartedly to sit or journal or cry or do whatever you need to in that moment to physiologically process that emotion. But there's a fine line between consistently feeling something and allowing it to control you and processing it. Again, highways processing, it's going somewhere constructive. Rumination loop is keeping us stuck in the same pattern and process. So if sitting and processing it is getting you through and beyond it, then it's constructive. But if you're constantly doing the same thing over and over again, it is rumination. It is time to get off the roundabout. So the point here is to not allow ourselves or our minds to endlessly circle the same thoughts to the point that we run ourselves racket. So the next step after doing the identification and then shifting our focus or our thought or accepting it, we're gonna physically move your body. This connects the body physically to the mind psychologically. So go stretch, go on a walk, physically get up, move locations, get out of the room that you were in, go to the gym, go to a dance class, go out with a friend, I don't care. Go do something physical, get up, physically move your body. We're showing the body that it's time to physically move through the emotion or thought, and it helps connect the mind and the body for effective processing. What not to do? Avoid trying to convince yourself that you don't feel anything. This is shame. Essentially, when you tell yourself that you shouldn't feel something, you're gonna feel it even more. Arguing with every negative thought or forcing positivity, those are not gonna help either. Because again, we have to validate our experience. Your brain and your body can't move forward on something that it hasn't already processed. So what we are doing instead, because those create resistance, we're going to acknowledge the feeling, separate it from the identity, and reinforce a new stable truth. So ultimately, because we're identifying it, we're honoring that it exists, and that's okay. It's okay for it to exist. It's not okay for it to control us. So then from there, once we're separating from it, we can actually do something from it. Remember it, you are not the thought, you're the observer of it. And so this reinforces a new stable truth with your mantra or your movement or whatever it is you're doing to help move you through and move you forward. So, my key takeaways for you breakups and heartbreaks, they're different. Breakups are an event you go through, whereas heartbreak is a physiological process and the grief ultimately of processing that event. Heartbreak is an individual experience, but ultimately it flows through the whole body and the mind and your nervous system. Allowing for flow, holding space for what you're experiencing can hopefully help that flow more smoothly. And ultimately, there is no one set timeline. Everybody's experience is going to be subjective. But talking about this can hopefully raise awareness and reduce stigma so that hopefully it's a little bit easier for us to all get through these and learn the lessons that we need to learn. I hope this episode helped you. I know I would have appreciated this conversation when I got started. If this conversation spoke to you, please consider liking or subscribing it. Or if you know someone else who could benefit, please share it with them. They could probably find it useful too. I always appreciate when you guys listen and just I talk about things that matter to me, so I hope they matter to you too. And if you have any topics that you want covered, or if you have any questions, please leave a comment. You can also follow me on Instagram at Helfer Coded Podcast. I will respond there if you want to send a DM or anything. But this topic has meant a lot to me over the past 18 months. I've learned a lot and I'm still learning. I'm not done yet. Part of me wishes I was. And I think it's for the better. So I'm interested to see how I continue to come out as I come out on the other side of this. But if you guys have anything that you want to add or anything that you want to contribute to, I would love to hear from you. I want this to be a conversation. I don't want this to just be me yapping at a camera. So yeah. If I spoke to you, I hope it helped. I'll see you guys next week and thank you for listening.