Apart from hurting your pride, bank balance and heart, breaking up can cause some other challenging symptoms. Photo / Getty Images
When solicitor Kate Flounders’ 12-year marriage ended in 2022, she was distraught. She mourned not only the relationship she and her husband once shared, but the future she thought they would have together.
The 42-year-old had to grapple with the stressful practicalities of divorce and finding a new home at the same time as confronting the stark reality of being alone for the first time since she was 22, when she first met her former husband. One of the biggest shocks was the extent to which her inner turmoil manifested itself physically.
“I felt as though I’d been hit by a bus,” she says. “Everything I was going through emotionally, I felt in my body, too. I wasn’t prepared for how wiped out I was. My joints ached all the time and I was absolutely exhausted – I kept booking massages, but nothing shifted it.”
Almost half of marriages – an estimated 42 per cent – end in divorce in Britain, where the average length of a marriage is 12 years. In the United States, the figure is around 45 per cent: the equivalent of one divorce every 42 seconds. The trauma caused – to children, friends and family as well as the couple signing the decree nisi – is well-documented.
For photographer Harry Borden’s new book On Divorce, he spoke to 47 individuals, including his own son, about the seismic impact of “the split” on their lives; Borden describes the end of his own marriage in 2009 as ‘”absolutely horrendous”, while other subjects talk about emotions such as guilt, betrayal and a sense of failure.
A 2018 study at the University of Amsterdam showed there was greater short-term impact on wellbeing among men, while women experienced more chronic impact – perhaps linked to women’s disproportionate losses in household income and increases in childcare demands.
In fact new research has found men in their sixties are more resilient when it comes to bouncing back from the heartbreak of divorce – Office for National Statistics figures reveal that more than half of divorced men who married again in 2020 were aged over 50.
But the effect of divorce on our physical health is less often spoken about. “Divorce and the period leading up to it is without doubt one of the most stressful life experiences,” says clinical psychologist Dr Felicity Baker.
“On the Holmes-Rahe scale, developed to assess the impact of stressful events on health, divorce only comes second to the death of a spouse. We endure the trauma of heartbreak and loss, as well as the build-up of chronic stress, both of which contribute to changes in our bodies.”
These changes can start as soon as we notice a marriage deteriorating. Perceiving a threat, our sympathetic nervous systems release high levels of adrenaline and cortisol, triggering a “fight or flight” response. For most people experiencing a divorce, this state of high anxiety lasts months, if not years, as the situation comes to a head.
Over time, this chronic stress manifests in increasingly debilitating physical symptoms: “Worsening cognitive function, poor memory and concentration, difficulty sleeping, aches and pains and increased susceptibility to illness,” according to Dr Baker. “The cycle becomes self-perpetuating as the symptoms impact our ability to keep on top of our work and home lives, piling on yet more stress.”
If we exist in a state of high stress for long enough, the health implications can be serious. “Elevated levels of stress hormones can lead to a continuously increased heart rate and higher blood pressure – both of which put extra strain on the heart,” says Dr Smriti Saraf, consultant cardiologist at The Lister Hospital. “Over time, this can contribute to the development of hypertension, or high blood pressure, which is a significant risk factor for heart disease.”
Flounders, from Hartlepool, was hit with many of the symptoms Dr Baker describes. A solicitor by profession, she runs her own successful business, the Safeguarding Association, which helps higher education institutions comply with safeguarding and welfare obligations.
Five years ago, her marriage began to break down, due to stress around family illness and her husband’s frequent work trips: last year, she moved out of the marital home and frequently experienced severe brain fog – until she initiated divorce proceedings. The couple had no children.
“I remember sitting in front of my computer screen and thinking, I can’t string a sentence together today,” she says. “I couldn’t think straight. For someone who communicates for a living, it was horrible. I just had no energy or focus.”
Previously a solid sleeper, she found herself needing to listen to meditations to help her drift off, then awoke still feeling shattered. “Some nights, I’d get as few as four hours’ sleep,” she says. “Often, it was more like six, but my brain never seemed to stop whirring and rest.”
According to James Wilson, also known as The Sleep Geek, sleep is virtually always impacted during a marriage breakdown. “When your body’s in fight or flight mode, it thinks you need to stay alert to protect yourself, which makes it harder for you to sleep, particularly to achieve deep, quality sleep,” he says.
“There’s also the fact that you’ve probably been sleeping next to your spouse for many years; they have a particular smell and warmth, and suddenly getting into bed alone is a significant change to your sleep environment.”
Accepting that it’s normal for sleep to be affected for a time is key, says Wilson, “because it’s the one thing we can’t force, and trying to just makes things worse”.
It’s common during divorce for people’s usual patterns to be thrown off: bedtime may become later, while the balance of diet, exercise and alcohol intake often goes haywire.
A sudden, sharp deterioration in sleep often leads sufferers to their GP in search of a solution, but Wilson warns against the use of sleeping pills, which don’t give you good quality sleep. “REM sleep is like an overnight counselling session – it helps us work through our problems,” he says.
“If you’re not getting that, you’re not processing what’s going on.”
Dr Baker is similarly cautious about antidepressants, another quick fix handed out frequently by time - and resource-strapped GPs.
“While antidepressants may act to numb difficult emotions, they don’t solve the underlying causes of distress,” she says. “Turning to close friends and family members for support or accessing counselling allows us to process the emotions associated with divorce, discover effective ways of coping and build resilience.”
Flounders found she was turning to food for comfort. “I’d go through phases where I’d eat and eat,” she says. “Because I had no energy, I’d turn to carbs: bread, doughnuts, chocolate bars and takeaways, which only made me feel more sluggish. Then I wouldn’t eat anything for days.”
According to Laura Southern, nutritionist at London Food Therapy, dietary changes during divorce are extremely common. “The vagus nerve links our brain to our gut and the two communicate, which is why our gut is impacted when we’re in emotional distress,” she says. “And when we’re producing high levels of cortisol, our body diverts energy away from non-critical functions that aren’t immediately needed for survival, including digestion.”
Our appetites vanish, and when we do eat, it often results in cramps, bloating and diarrhoea.
The emotional stress of divorce can unsurprisingly lead to the bottle: Flounders admits she was drinking a couple of large glasses of wine a night: “much more than normal”. Interestingly, research shows that divorce affects men and women differently in terms of alcohol use. “While married men tend to drink less than single men, they are likely to consume more alcohol as they go through divorce and are more likely to develop an alcohol problem than women,’ says Dr Baker.
Flounders finally started to recover when she left the marital home and temporarily moved in with her parents. “I’d spent so long trying to fix the problems with my ex, and living on adrenaline, but when I went to my mum and dad’s I was able to rest,” she says. She took long, stress-busting walks with her golden retrievers, Russ and Sam. Over time, like many in her position, she began to recover.
“Divorce and heartbreak are a form of loss, so we need to give ourselves time to go through the emotional stages of grief,” says Dr Baker. Although it may seem as if you’ll never sleep, eat or think properly again, these physical effects will generally pass when the trauma fades.
Says Flounders: “There are still days when I wish it could have been different. We were together for a huge chunk of my life, so it’s a massive adjustment. But I gave myself a lot of grace until the fog began to lift, and gradually, it did.”
If you need a break from the slopes or don’t fancy a ski, there’s still a lot to do this.