Hi.
Hello.
Tell me about your nipples.
Well, where to start?
Hi, I'm Wendy Zuckerman and you're listening to Science Versus.
Today on the show, a curious medical mystery.
Let's just jump right in.
So when my friend Scarlett was really little, four or five, she noticed something really strange.
Whenever any kind of touch to the nipples occurred, like putting on a singlet or something, I would get a really terrible feeling.
Whenever a shirt happened to brush past her nipples, this overwhelming feeling came over her.
And now, years later, Scarlett says that, while her nipples aren't as sensitive as they used to be, She still told me that whenever anyone touches her nipples, she gets this very specific feeling.
I think of it as being like feeling homesick or even a bit hungover.
Like you know, when you wake up in the wrong place and you're kind of feeling a bit lost or a bit depressed, almost a bit of a sense of anguish or despair even.
Just feels so uncomfortable in my body.
Like If you were feeling the worst sadness you were ever feeling.
So I just want to not touch them anymore.
Once her nipples are in the clear, not being touched anymore, Scarlett feels like herself again.
She said it's just this weird thing that happens to her.
The kind of thing that you think is normal at first until you start talking to other folks about it.
It's kind of like this thing she remembers a friend saying at a party yeah, you know, when you like fart into your hand and you catch it and you sniff it.
And everyone went, no.
And they said, oh, yeah, me neither.
It's a bit like one of those.
I think yeah, if you put it out there that oh yeah, you know, you know, when you're having a lovely sexy time and someone – really cool touches your nipples and you just feel like crying and you feel really homesick and sad and despairing.
And everyone goes, what?
What on earth is that about?
Oh, damn it.
Yeah.
And you go, oh, yeah, me neither.
Scarlett started wondering why this was happening.
Why was she different?
And eventually she goes online and Googles, it feels bad when I touch my nipple.
And there it was.
Loads of other people saying, it happens to me.
And now, years later, there's been viral videos on social media.
The condition even has a name.
It's called sad nipple syndrome.
And all over the world, it seems like people are talking about it.
Whenever my nipples get touched, it is just this like sinking sensation.
Weird feeling of like sadness, homesickness.
They get nostalgic or sad.
And I feel this dread.
And then I got on the internet and a lot of women were talking about it.
That is a thing and the name is sad nipple syndrome.
And not just women, some men too.
Scarlett couldn't believe it.
They described the feeling in the exact same way that she felt it.
I was just amazed that people used the same words like homesick, hungover, yeah, dread, guilt.
Even some people say it feels like guilt.
Some folks online thought they were going crazy, that something was really wrong with them.
And over at Science Versus...
We were like, I mean, what is going on?
Is this what you want to know?
Yeah, I want to know what's going on.
How can just touching a nipple elicit all of these really complicated feelings?
And so, to get to the bottom of this booby baffler, we're going to go deep into the mysteries of anatomy, through a world of hormones and nipple erections.
And who knows, by the end of this episode, you may never look at your nipples the same way again.
When it comes to sad nipple syndrome, there's a lot of, what on earth is that about?
But then there's science.
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Welcome back.
Today on the show the puzzling and peculiar phenomenon of sad nipple syndrome, where people can get this strange, perhaps intense, homesick feeling when their nipples are touched.
Now, whenever Scarlett would ask doctors or therapists about what might be going on here, she told me that they would suggest that perhaps something terrible had happened to her in her childhood.
You know, is it some repressed memory or something?
But it doesn't seem to be.
Yeah, it didn't feel like that.
She didn't know about a trauma that she'd experienced that would make sense here.
And other folks online say the same thing.
Well, as I started cracking open this medical mystery, I thought let's first find out why it can feel nice and erotic even to have your nipples touched.
Because I guess nipple play is kind of weird in itself, right?
I mean, nipples, they're a bit weird looking.
Your mother has them.
She might have even suckled you with them.
And yet, most folks do enjoy a bit of nipple play.
That's according to a survey of more than 200 undergrads who'd had sex.
81% of women and about half the men that they surveyed were into it.
Another survey asked almost 800 folks to rank how erogenous certain parts of their bodies were, from 0 to 10.
And nipples did pretty well in the ranking, particularly for women. scoring a 7.35 on average.
If you're curious, by the way, the elbows and shins ranked down at the bottom.
So to see why nips can turn so many of us on, I called out Barry Komisorak, a distinguished professor of psychology at Rutgers University in New Jersey.
And he did this study to find out where the brain gets titillated when you touch sexy parts of your body.
So he and some colleagues got 11 women to come into a lab, lie in an MRI and touch themselves all over.
The clitoris, the vagina, the cervix, and the nipple.
How did you touch the nipple?
They did it themselves.
They touched their own nipples.
Okay, yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
Can I ask, when we're saying the nipple, do we mean the actual like little dot?
The nipple, the actual nipple.
Not the areola.
Not the areola, not the breast.
The little button.
Yeah, we said nipple stimulation.
Yeah.
If you want to try this at home.
They asked the women to use their right hand to tap the left nipple rhythmically.
And fun side note, if you'll allow.
If this should happen to cause your nipples to go erect, this is actually not like a penis erection where blood is rushing to your nipples.
Rather, a nipple erection happens because the muscles in your nipples contract.
One paper said that it's more like a hair follicle standing on end or goosebumps.
Which makes sense because it can also happen when you're cold.
But anyway, back to Barry's study, women, brain scanner, touching their bodies.
So here's what Barry's team found.
When the women stimulated their clitoris, vagina and cervix, this area of the brain lit up, called the paracentral lobule.
This area is different to the part of the brain that lights up when you just touch, say your elbow or your shin.
It seems to be a kind of genital area of the brain?
And then what about the nipple?
Well, the nipple activated regions of the chest, but it also activated the same region as the genitals.
Interesting.
And that is probably why many women say that nipple stimulation feels erotic.
Yes.
Because it's activating the same region.
Is it the same for men?
Yes.
Also, it goes to the genital region.
We've done the same thing in men.
Yeah, we got the same thing in men.
Wow, interesting.
We don't really understand how tickling this so-called genital region of the brain leads to arousal.
One paper said we're ignorant here.
But we do know that when it comes to nipple stimulation, there are a lot of nerves around the nipples that then ultimately must send their messages up into the brain.
So I asked Scarlett, do you think maybe your wires are getting crossed here?
And maybe when your nipples get touched, that sexy message isn't going up into your brain.
Weirdly though, sometimes it does feel sexually pleasurable, but the emotional response is also still there.
So both of those things kind of happen at the same time.
And sometimes it's The juice is not worth the squeeze.
So I feel like that's a separate thing that's happening to this, whatever this is.
Done it.
Thought I could nip this one in the bud quickly.
But these jugs, they just keep on jiggling.
So I kept casting about until I caught a big fish.
Her name is Alia Macrina Heiss.
And she found herself in this pond where the water is a bit nippy.
Okay, so Alia is going to help us understand the possible mechanisms behind sad nipple syndrome.
And she fell into this world almost by accident.
For Alia, this all started a couple of weeks after she had a baby and was kind of like returning to normal life, realized something was wrong.
Yeah, something felt quite wrong.
Soon after having her son sometimes on and off, she'd get this jolt, this awful feeling of shame and guilt and like the world has gone wrong and that I was wrong inside the world and that I'm not good enough.
I did something wrong.
I am the problem.
And then it lasts for about a minute, two minutes.
It really threw her off kilter.
And so she tries to find out what is going on.
She goes online, searches for postpartum depression that comes and goes.
She's not finding much.
And finally, she sees the title of this post on an online forum.
It just said, only when nursing.
And I didn't open it, and I didn't open it, and I didn't open it.
She didn't think it was going to help her, but finally she does open it.
And what she saw was this woman describing that terrible feeling that Alia was feeling the shame, the guilt.
But here's the kicker.
She only felt it when she was breastfeeding.
I just paid attention for the next few hours of my life and realized, oh that stomach churning, that drop the wave.
It happens just before my milk releases, every single time.
Wow!
To a point where it's undeniable.
It's just, that's me.
And get this, Scarlett just recently had a baby.
She's breastfeeding.
And guess what?
Even before I start feeding, like before my milk comes in, I would have this feeling come over me, like something terrible's happened.
But because nothing terrible has happened, it feels almost like I've woken up from a dream and forgotten something terrible.
So, you know, have I forgotten that someone's died or like something awful has happened?
And then 20 seconds later, my milk would come in.
It's like, yeah, some like pure despair or dread.
If you've read Harry Potter, the Dementors like coming and sucking all the joy out of you.
It's kind of that feeling like all the anything good has just left my body for a moment.
And having this feeling during breastfeeding, it's actually pretty common.
A study just came out surveying more than a thousand new mothers who were or had been breastfeeding and estimated that around one in seven experience something like it, where this awful feeling comes and then goes pretty quickly.
Another researcher told me that some women have been wrongly diagnosed with depression or they think they're going mad.
But awful.
Several years ago Alia who coincidentally, is actually a breastfeeding lactation specialist.
Well, she's the one who gave this phenomenon a name.
Dysphoric milk ejection reflex.
Or DMER.
And when it comes to cracking the case of sad nipple syndrome.
I got so excited when I read about DMER because I
While we don't have a lot of research into sad nipple syndrome, we have a ton of research into the mechanisms and hormones behind breastfeeding.
And even though these two phenomena, they're not exactly the same thing, obviously.
And in fact Alia told me that some folks will have sad nipple syndrome but no problem breastfeeding.
And on the other hand, there are people who get DEMA, but don't have sad nipple syndrome.
Still, the fact that there are so many similarities between the two phenomena, the relationship to the boob, the fact that it's this intense, yucky feeling that comes on strong and then goes rather quickly, it made me feel like the mechanisms behind both of them.
They must be similar right.
And Barry, Alia, and a bunch of other researchers, they think so too.
I mean, if it quacks like a duck.
Yes, yes, exactly.
They're all quacking like ducks.
So after the break, the duck.
That is, we'll find the heartbeat in your nipples to uncover what is going on here.
Welcome back today on the show, a tit-laden trickster, sad nipple syndrome.
Why does it happen?
It seems like some folks feel something similar when they're breastfeeding.
And so could this help us unpack the mysteries of sad nipple syndrome?
Now, a curious fact about breastfeeding is that while a lot of us might not think of it as something that's sexy and Surveys from decades ago find that quite a few women do find it arousing, and some can even orgasm from it.
So there's this massive range of feelings you can get from breastfeeding, from arousal to something like sad nipple syndrome.
How is this happening?
To find out, we need to know how, out of a clear blue sky, milk pops out of a titty.
I talked about this with Barry, who did the MRI nipple study, and he told me to picture the inside of a boob.
The mammary glands are like, if you imagine if you had a bunch of grapes, a cluster of grapes.
These grapes, or alveoli, grow inside the boob when you're pregnant.
Eventually, you make milk, it gets in the grapes...
And so there you are with your massive cans filled with milk.
How does the milk get out?
Well, around each grape is a layer of muscle-like cells that looks a bit like a hand grabbing that grape.
And when you need to feed the baby.
If all is going according to plan, a chemical called oxytocin gets released.
Jolting that tiny, muscly hand into action.
When the oxytocin gets to them through the blood, they squeeze, they contract.
And squeezes out.
It's like milking.
It physically squeezes the milk out and it ejects the milk.
Whoa.
Because it can squirt out.
And it does squirt out.
Just a few years ago, researchers actually filmed the squeezing of mice alveolus.
And it looks so cool.
It's kind of like a heartbeat in your nipples.
So we need oxytocin to get milk to eject from a breast.
But what's very interesting is that oxytocin does a bunch of other stuff too, even acting in our brain.
You might have heard it called the cuddle chemical because some researchers think it plays a role in bonding.
So I wanted to know if something weird going on with oxytocin could be driving sad nipple syndrome.
So firstly I asked Barry if you are not breastfeeding and someone touches your nipples, does oxytocin get released?
Stimulating the nipple, they release oxytocin.
In general sexual stimulation?
That's right.
Okay.
And so could oxytocin be causing this?
Oxytocin acting as a neurotransmitter in the brain could be causing that.
It's very possible.
Curiously, after we orgasm, we also tend to get a boost of oxytocin.
And there are some people who, after they climax, describe feelings eerily similar to sad nipple syndrome, this inexplicable sadness and despair that doesn't necessarily last very long.
Now, sex is complicated.
Those feelings could be caused by all kinds of reasons.
But maybe oxytocin, in some cases, is playing a role here.
Barry told me we don't really know, Because we don't really know what oxytocin is doing directly in our brain.
It's pretty hard to study.
Researchers have even tried to spray it into people's noses.
But the results have actually been a bit all over the place.
So there's big questions about the role of oxytocin.
Either way, sad nipple syndrome is unlikely to be driven by just one chemical.
So what else we got? dopamine.
It's linked to pleasure and feeling good, but dopamine isn't always your bosom buddy when you're breastfeeding.
Dopamine can block the action of this hormone called prolactin that helps you make milk.
So basically, whenever prolactin needs to rise, it needs to get help and support and permission from dopamine.
And so dopamine levels need to lower.
Just a little bit briefly, to open up a door for prolactin to start rising.
She thinks that maybe what might be happening when people feel crappy when their nipples get touched or their milk is about to come in.
Dopamine either falls too far or too fast or acts inappropriately in some way.
And that's what makes you feel a certain bad, yucky way.
Why homesick or why Harry Potter dementors?
We don't know.
And there are other theories bouncing around here, too.
Like another researcher I was in touch with, thought maybe some folks were very sensitive to nipple touch.
So it kind of caused this overstimulation that didn't feel good.
What we do know from the research though, is that if you do get this curious feeling, it's not just you.
You're not alone.
And while it can be distressing to have this feeling when someone's fondling you or you're breastfeeding, it doesn't mean you're a bad parent or a weird lover, or even that you have a hidden trauma lurking in your past that you've shut out.
In fact, alias come to see this as a kind of reflex, like when you bang your funny bone, which means that these feelings, though it might be counterintuitive, She says, Ignore them.
They're lying to you.
There's nothing to fix.
It's a reflex like when somebody hits your knee.
You can't stop it.
There's nothing wrong with it.
It just happens.
I talked to Scarlett about everything and she said that this idea that it was just some strange reflex, that really felt right to her.
For Scarlett to help her while she's breastfeeding.
She gets her partner to distract her with puzzles, to give her a hug, and she reminds herself that this feeling, it's going to pass soon.
A survey found that stuff like that you know distractions, support it helped other folks too, as well as getting sleep.
Nice try with a newborn and curiously, drinking water.
But now Scarlett's got one more thing to think about when it comes to sad nipple syndrome.
I think it needs a better name because they're not, like, I don't think of them as sad nipples.
They're just kind of confused nipples, maybe.
Confused nipple syndrome?
Yeah.
Or, you know, despairing nipples.
Oh, that's maybe worse.
Definitely worse.
Oh, God.
But they're not, yeah, I feel I'm fond of them regardless.
They can bring whatever face they want to bring to the party.
That's Science Faces.
This episode has 45 citations in it.
And if you want to read them and learn more about the dysphoric milk ejection reflex or sad nipple syndrome, then you can go to the show notes and click on the link to our transcript.
Also, if you want to get in touch with us through social media, we always love to hear from you.
We're at science underscore VS and I'm on TikTok.
I'm at Wendy Zuckerman.
This episode was produced by me, Wendy Zuckerman, with help from Meryl Horn, Rose Rimler, Michelle Dang and Aketi Foster-Keys.
We're edited by Blythe Terrell.
Fact-checking by Erica Akiko Howard.
Mix and sound design by Bobby Lord.
Music written by Emma Munger, So Wiley, Peter Leonard, Bumi Hidaka and Bobby Lord.
A special thanks to all of the researchers that we reached out to, including Dr Christina Raimondi, Dr Megan Azad, Professor Carolyn Pucall, Professor Craig Richard and Professor Inga D Newman.
A big thanks to Joseph Lavelle-Wilson and the Zuckerman family.
Science Versus is a Spotify Studios original.
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I'm Wendy Zuckerman.
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