If you’ve ever experienced a crush, it can be somewhere between exhilarating and debilitating. It can fill you with butterflies, get your adrenaline pumping and have you checking your phone every five minutes. But it’s all for the best, right?
Billie Eilish recently admitted to Amelia Dimoldenberg that a crush makes her feel “insane”. “I become insane when I have a crush,” she said on her episode of Chicken Shop Date. “I get absolutely insane. When I was growing up, no one I had a crush on ever had a crush on me back — that I know of. It’s very demoralising. It’s sad.”
Eilish is certainly not alone in feeling out-of-control and, well, a little ‘crazy’ when a crush takes hold.
“When I speak with people about [crushes], they say that they feel overwhelmed and hyperfocused,” says sex and relationship therapist Georgia Grace, known to her 80k Instagram followers as @gspot._. “People will talk about the physical responses in their bodies, like arousal, or excitement and butterflies. Others don’t feel like it’s that much of a nice feeling. They struggle with it, or they may have an anxiety or fear-based response to it.”
So, what’s going on?
The Science Behind Crushes
When you have a crush, there is actually a pretty complex chemical cocktail going on in your brain, Georgia explains.
Firstly, dopamine is released—our ‘happy’, feel-good hormone. “That’s the feeling of being on a high,” Georgia notes.
Then we have Oxytocin: “That is the ‘love hormone’ that supports us in bonding and enhances connection, trust and intimacy.”
“Apparently the serotonin drops,” Georgia adds. “This hormone is mood-boosting and stabilising. So, without it, we can become a little more fixated and desire-driven, and feel like we’re dependent on this other person.
“Then a Harvard University study from 2017 found that testosterone and oestrogen, two of the most important sex hormones go into overdrive. This increases our arousal and our desire.”
In a way, so much of our normal functioning is extremified by a crush; soaring and slipping beyond our control. It’s important to ride those waves, and enjoy the highs as best we can.
“Crushes are uncertain,” Georgia says. “This is thrilling and the attraction can feel exciting because it’s novel, and new and unknown, but it can also feel really vulnerable. We’re putting ourselves out there with the potential for or risk of rejection. So, a crush can feel quite crushing when we don’t get to connect in the way that we want to.
“It’s this riskiness that really makes us feel—quote, unquote—’crazy’.”
Read the original story in ELLE Australia.
