While seeing photos of your ex may trigger real physical pain, it can still be difficult to resist the urge to constantly scroll through their social media.
According to Brian D. "There are lots of reasons we might be tempted to look for hints or signs of an ex's activities after a breakup," Erb, a senior research officer in moral psychology at the University of Oxford in England, told Newsweek years ago.
He added: "Maybe we miss their presence and want some kind of alternative, a little bit of the old euphoria we used to feel when they were with us, albeit accompanied by little stabs of pain."
A small study conducted in 2010 found that when participants were recently shown photos of their exes, the same reward system activation was seen as when happily in love couples saw each other's photo.
In other words, a person continues to feel a rush of the happy hormones that make love so addictive when they see their partner, even though thinking about them now exposes you to physical pain. Seeing their faces truly seemed like a devastating chemical spike.
Christopher Carpenter, a professor of communications at Western Illinois University, told Newsweek that stalking your ex, no matter how tempting, is a bad idea.
“Several studies show that stalking your ex on social media is associated with having difficulty moving on and getting over a breakup,” he said.
He continued: "What's interesting, in my 2020 study, is what I found that it doesn't matter if you break up with your partner or they break up with you, staying in touch through social media is still a bad idea."
"We also found that it was much harder to get over your ex if you saw him interacting with people of the same gender that you didn't know," Carpenter added.
Seeing these people for the first time on social media is in many cases worse than meeting them in real life due to the nature of the content people post on these platforms.
"You only see their best photos, and their comments are ones that they've probably carefully chosen to be more intelligent and interesting than anything you're used to saying in a relationship," Carpenter said.