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Rating
4.2from
This podcast has
29 episodes
Language
EnglishPublisher
Pushkin IndustriesExplicit
No
Date created
2025/01/03
Latest episode
2026/01/05
Average duration
8 min.
Release period
1 days
Description
With Pushkin+ audiobooks, you'll get access to a new Pushkin+ audiobook every other month. That's 6 free audiobooks a year! From January 1 to February 28, listen to Heartbreak by Florence Williams. Pushkin+ subscribers also get access to ad-free listening, exclusive bonus episodes of podcasts like Cautionary Tales, full binges to our top true crime shows like Deep Cover and Valley of Shadows, and more. Sign up now on the Apple show page or at pushkin.com/plus. When her twenty-five-year marriage unexpectedly falls apart, journalist Florence Williams expects the loss to hurt. What she doesn’t expect is that she’ll end up in the hospital, examining close-up the way our cells listen to loneliness. She travels to the frontiers of the science of “social pain” to learn why heartbreak hurts so much and why so much of the conventional wisdom about it is wrong.In Williams’ search for insight as well as personal strategies to game her way back to health, she tries it all–and listeners can hear it all–including exclusive (astonishing) bonus material from Williams’ most intimate moments: live and unscripted therapy sessions, gab fests with girlfriends, and the making and breaking of new romantic relationships. Join her in the laboratory as she tests her blood for genetic markers of grief, hear every sound of the wilderness as she searches for awe as an antidote to loneliness, and be a fly on the wall as she is guided through psilocybin and MDMA therapy.Narrated by the author and accompanied by in-the-moment diary recordings and interviews, Florence Williams’ Heartbreak audiobook is an immersive endeavor that taps into one of the most shared experiences in the animal kingdom: heartbreak.
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Check latest episodes from Heartbreak: A Personal and Scientific Journey podcast
1 - Opening Credits
2026/01/05
When her twenty-five-year marriage unexpectedly falls apart, journalist Florence Williams expects the loss to hurt. What she doesn’t expect is that she’ll end up in the hospital, examining close-up the way our cells listen to loneliness. She travels to the frontiers of the science of “social pain” to learn why heartbreak hurts so much and why so much of the conventional wisdom about it is wrong.
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2 - Author's Note
2026/01/05
A note from the author of Heartbreak: A Personal and Scientific Journey, Florence Williams.
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3 - Introduction
2026/01/05
Florence invites the listener on her personal journey with heartbreak and provides an early glimpse of adventures to come.
With Pushkin+ audiobooks, you'll get access to a new Pushkin+ audiobook every other month. That's 6 free audiobooks a year! From January 1 to February 28, listen to Heartbreak by Florence Williams. Pushkin+ subscribers also get access to ad-free listening, exclusive bonus episodes of podcasts like Cautionary Tales, full binges to our top true crime shows like Deep Cover and Valley of Shadows, and more. Sign up now on the Apple show page or at pushkin.com/plus.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
4 - Chapter 1
2026/01/05
Florence takes the listener back to college, where she meets and falls in love with her future husband.
5 - Chapter 2
2026/01/05
After twenty-five years of marriage, Florence and her husband are now living separately and the pain feels visceral. She wants to heal but needs to understand what happens in the body when we grieve. What does it mean to be “heartbroken”?
6 - Chapter 3
2026/01/05
Florence takes one last previously-planned family vacation to Mexico with her children, her ex, and his extended family. She then travels to Aspen, where she is scheduled to give talks on public health and sustainability and speaks with Helen Fisher, author and biological anthropologist who studies the neurotransmitters of love at the Kinsey Institute.
7 - Chapter 4
2026/01/05
While Florence’s sleep and weight continue to take a downturn, she travels to Salt Lake City and interviews Stacy Bare, an Iraq war veteran who credits mountain climbing with saving him from suicide upon his return from war and who has dedicated his life ever since to getting more veterans outside. While there, she also speaks with two professors at the University of Utah: Bert Uchino, who studies the physical and psychological effects of relationships; and Paula Williams, a psychology professor and researcher who has spent much of her career studying the factors that make us more able to weather life’s tough blows.
8 - Chapter 5
2026/01/05
Florence begins to think about putting her research to the test. While traveling to a conference in Telluride, she meets a flirty and intriguing man. Their week together reveals some surprises.
9 - Chapter 6
2026/01/05
As Florence tries to process her experience with Ennis, she turns to her best girlfriends and calls in the experts. While staying in Boulder, she stops by the office of a psychologist who runs the Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience Lab at the University of Colorado and specializes in studying the way the brain processes pain.
10 - Chapter 7
2026/01/05
As Florence explores her relationship with Ennis–and his relationship with monogamy–she does a deeper dive on the capacity for pair-bonding in the animal kingdom writ large. There to help is another scientist, also at the University of Colorado, Zoe Donaldson. Donaldson has turned her attention to prairie voles, who are helpfully elucidating the neurochemistry of love, attachment, monogamy, and, of course, heartbreak.
11 - Chapter 8
2026/01/05
Florence’s children return from sleepaway summer camp and she tries to settle into her new normal of alternating parental weekends, texts from Ennis, and social engagements with friends, but she still feels lonely. As she sets out to understand the science of loneliness, she visits a young neuroanatomist at The University of Utah, Moriel Zelikowsky, who studies circuits in the brain in order to help people who are suffering. Zelikowsky introduces Florence to a postdoc who studies the art of mate-finding. He is appropriately named Jay Love.
12 - Chapter 9
2026/01/05
Florence continues to test her blood, which shows increasingly daunting–and equally medically perplexing–signs. She continues to dig into the likely culprit: loneliness. Specifically, she examines the work of two men, a genomics researcher at the UCLA School of Medicine named Steve Cole and John Cacioppo, a psychologist at the University of Chicago, who, in 2007, co-published a paper that was the first to consider the effect of social factors on gene expression in the immune system.
13 - Chapter 10
2026/01/05
Florence begins to recognize that there is a word for her experience: trauma. She feels an urgency to understand the process of healing from trauma and also to find some awe in the wilderness. Her editor at Outside magazine sends her on a backpacking trip with a group of sex-trafficking survivors from Atlanta who offer not just perspective but an understanding of the urgency to heal trauma.
14 - Chapter 11
2026/01/05
Florence begins to meticulously plan her river-run of The Green, the largest tributary of the Colorado River.
15 - Chapter 12
2026/01/05
Florence continues to run labs to monitor her health and digs into the science of social isolation and its physiological effect on the human body. She pays a visit to a new member of parliament in Great Britain, the Minister of Loneliness, whose post was created to address the crisis of loneliness in the UK and to a “men’s shed” near Birmingham–a safe space created to help men who are struggling with grief, loss, and being alone.
Podcast reviews
Read Heartbreak: A Personal and Scientific Journey podcast reviews
MiDav73 2025/09/29
Wonderful podcast
Loved the interviews, the structure, and insights on this podcast. Paul Simon is an amazing subject and getting his perspective at this stage of his l...
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