Why May We Turn to Love When Stressed, Scared, or Uncertain?

An unfinished essay stares back at you as you gaze into the laptop screen. Major deadlines approach and you have three tests next week. Yet somehow, the thought occupying your mind isn’t the next line of your essay or which subject you should study for next—it’s someone’s smile, your conversation with them on Friday that you’re replaying for the hundredth time, or wondering whether they will text you back. So, is it love? Or is it just another deadline approaching? 

The answer varies on a case-by-case basis, of course. It may be true love; however, more often than not, feelings for someone that suddenly arise during periods of great stress are often triggered by external circumstances rather than the person someone has feelings for.

Seeking Safety 

Indeed, the need to feel safe can oftentimes interfere with sensibility and conscious human logic. According to attachment theory, people are born with a need to seek closeness and security. The early bonds a person has with their caregivers set the foundation for later relationships and continue to influence attachments throughout life. When fear, anxiety, and distress activate the attachment system, people are motivated to seek closeness, comfort, and reassurance from trusted others. 

Neurologically, this connection develops partially because infants rely on caregivers to help regulate distress before they can do so independently. Through repeated experiences of being comforted, the brain learns to associate a responsive caregiver’s presence, voice, and touch with safety. These expectations can carry into future relationships: when someone feels threatened, a trusted person may signal that support is available, helping reduce the need for a sustained stress response. This process, called co-regulation, can influence the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis, the hormone-signaling system that helps coordinate the release of cortisol during stress. Seeking closeness, therefore, becomes not only a conscious desire for reassurance, but a reflection of how humans regulate distress through connection. While a parent or a close friend can be considered a trusted individual, the lack of either support system may lead to the next option: a romantic interest. 

The support one gets from a romantic interest can have a measurable biological effect. In a 2021 study led by Dr. Sohyun C. Han of the University of Southern California’s Department of Psychology, 106 young adult dating couples were monitored over one day using wearable sensors, called Q sensors. These small wireless monitors were worn against the inside of the wrist on the participant’s non-dominant hand. They continuously recorded electrodermal activity (EDA), also called skin conductance, taking eight readings per second. Participants showed lower electrodermal activity—a measure of sympathetic nervous system arousal—during hours when their partner was present than during hours when they had been apart. Because the sympathetic nervous system, the network of nerves behind the body’s ‘fight-or-flight’ response, helps mobilize the body during challenges and threats, lower electrodermal activity correlates with a partner’s presence and stress reduction. 

While the study was observational—and therefore could not establish causal relationships—the findings help ground the image of a trusted individual as an emotional ‘anchor.’ Importantly, motivations to seek love can arise even when someone does not consciously recognize that they crave support, showing how a crush can repeatedly develop during periods of major stress without an individual even realizing that it may be caused by stress.

Finding yourself in liminality

Some stressful periods, however, involve more than just a crowded schedule. Major transitions, such as graduating or entering a new school, can mean leaving behind familiar roles before new ones feel established. Anthropologists use the term ‘liminality’ for this in-between stage, when someone has moved away from their previous role but has not yet fully settled into the next. Even promising yourself to become a better person in the midst of a stressful life environment may bring a similar feeling of being between versions of yourself. 

During this period, individuals may not just feel disconnected from their past self, but anxious for who they will become. As a result of this uncertainty, they may subconsciously crave something beyond stability and safety, such as romantic love. The self-expansion model, developed by psychologists Arthur and Elaine Aron, proposes the idea that close relationships can broaden a person’s sense of self by introducing them to new perspectives, experiences, and possibilities.

This process also has a connection to the brain’s reward and motivation systems. Learning and pursuing rewarding new possibilities involve dopamine-related pathways, which may help explain why opportunities for growth through a relationship can feel compelling, especially during stressful periods. However, the precise neural mechanisms of self-expansion remain under investigation, and its motivational effects cannot be reduced to dopamine release alone.

Thus, a crush during a stressful period may reflect more than a desire for safety or relief from physiological arousal. Someone may also see the person they are interested in as a gateway to self-discovery, especially during the liminality they experience before a major change. Romance, in this account, then, is not simply a return to a familiar state of self (such as safety or calm); it can just as well be an opportunity to explore a new one.

Stress or attraction? Interpreting a racing heart 

Beyond what a person might represent during a period of uncertainty, the body’s response to stress may also shape how attraction is experienced, as stress and attraction both involve heightened bodily arousal. Psychologists describe misattribution of arousal as situations in which people interpret bodily excitement as coming from a different source than the one that produced it. 

In the classic research study published in 1974, psychologists Donald Dutton and Arthur Aron examined attraction in a frightening suspension-bridge setting. After the experiment, men approached by a female interviewer after crossing the frightening suspension bridge were more likely to contact her afterward than men in a less frightening setting. The findings are often discussed as evidence that situational arousal can influence attraction. This finding is often interpreted as evidence that situational arousal can influence attraction, offering a possible explanation for why attraction sometimes feels stronger or more likely during an emotionally intense period of time. 

Though a frightening bridge may not feel the same as an exam deadline, the study’s takeaway supports the claim that the intensity of a feeling may, at least partly, depend on the circumstances in which it occurs. It is especially interesting to consider this idea when thinking about the fact that different people may amplify a certain stressful moment to different degrees, thereby hinting at the possibility that certain individuals may indeed confuse stress and attraction, given proper circumstances. 

The potential ‘attention-grabbing’ downside 

Even if closeness can provide comfort, novelty, or come as a natural result of stressful situations, new romance is not necessarily calming or wholly beneficial. Brain-imaging research has linked early-stage romantic love to the activation of brain regions associated with reward and motivation, including dopamine-rich areas such as the ventral tegmental area. This helps explain why a romantic interest can feel unusually compelling and why thoughts about them may repeatedly draw someone’s attention; as dopamine helps motivate the pursuit of rewards, the cycle of infatuation perpetuates.

This excess dopamine and addiction may be linked with distraction from real, important tasks at hand, rather than simply providing comfort. This offers a possible parallel with everyday procrastination: checking for a message or scrolling through short videos may offer a more immediate reward than working toward the distant satisfaction of finishing an assignment. The issue is, then, not simply “excess dopamine” or addiction, but rather how a compelling potential reward can compete with another goal for attention. 

Additionally, early-stage love can lead to the levels of stress hormone cortisol to increase, marshaling our bodies to cope with the issues at hand. As cortisol levels rise, levels of the neurotransmitter serotonin become depleted. Low levels of serotonin precipitate what is described as the “intrusive, maddeningly preoccupying thoughts, hopes, terrors of early love”—the obsessive-compulsive behaviors associated with infatuation.

Indeed, a study by psychologists Sandra J. E. Langeslag of the University of Missouri-St. Louis and Henk van Steenbergen of Leiden University, published in Motivation and Emotion in 2014, found that stronger passionate love was associated with poorer performance on tasks requiring participants to ignore distracting information.

However, a later study conducted by the same researchers did not find the same association. In that study, 83 young adults who had recently fallen in love completed a computerized task requiring them to identify target words while ignoring distracting words. Stronger infatuation and attachment were not associated with poorer interference control - in this case, the ability to disregard irrelevant information. The researchers suggested that actively thinking about a loved one, rather than simply being in love, might help explain the distraction observed in earlier research. Thus, infatuation may compete for attention, but its effects on thinking appear to be context-dependent.

Different reactions

It is important to note that stress does not make everyone respond to relationships in the same way. Attachment researchers use anxiety and avoidance as dimensions along which people differ rather than simply sorting people into fixed personality types. Thus, everyone experiences different degrees of attachment during stressful situations, if at all.

People with higher attachment anxiety may become especially concerned about rejection and seek repeated reassurance or closeness, whereas people with higher attachment avoidance may instead distance themselves or seek less contact. Rather than describing a universal panic that supercharges love, stressful circumstances can make existing fears of rejection or vulnerability more noticeable through the way an individual may—or may not—pursue someone romantically in the midst of a particularly stressful period. 

Conclusion 

Despite the varying reactions to stress and romance presented in this article, romance during a stressful period does not have to be either a helpful anchor or an unhelpful distraction. Support from a partner may ease bodily stress responses, while intense infatuation may draw attention toward the relationship and away from other tasks. These findings concern different aspects of relationships; indeed, they can coexist. The question, then, is not simply why the brain chooses love in seemingly the worst possible time—it is how stress, identity changes, and attraction might interact and how that interaction differs from person to person. 

Ultimately, stress can create various degrees of feelings and outcomes. It is not true that a crush will provide the same security as a supportive, established relationship. Rather, this is an interesting phenomenon to take note of next time you find yourself especially craving attachment during stressful times.