Sad Nipple Syndrome: A Booby Baffler

People are reporting a very strange phenomenon: They say that when their nipples get touched, they feel this weird sinking feeling. People describe it like being homesick, or hung over. Some feel anguish and despair, others call it dread. The condition has a name: "Sad Nipple Syndrome." But how could just touching a nipple set off all of these feelings?? To get to the bottom of this booby baffler, we go deep into the mysteries of anatomy and through a world of hormones and nipple erections. You might never look at your nipples the same way again! Distinguished Professor Barry Komisurak and Lactation Specialist Alia Macrina Heise join us. Find our transcript here: https://bit.ly/ScienceVsSadNippleSyndrome In this episode, we cover: (00:00) Meet Sad Nipple Syndrome (05:14) Why is Nipple Play Arousing? (09:58) Dysphoric Milk Ejection Reflex (D-MER) (15:14) How Milk Ejects From a Booby (17:33) Is Oxytocin to blame? (19:36) Suspect Number 2: Dopamine (20:52) What might help This episode was produced by Wendy Zukerman, with help from Meryl Horn, Rose Rimler, Michelle Dang and Ekedi Fausther-Keeys. 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 the researchers we reached out to including Dr. Christina Raimondi, Professor Caroline Pukall, Professor Craig Richard, and Prof. Dr. Inga D. Neumann. and a big thanks to Joseph Lavelle Wilson and the Zukerman family. Science Vs is a Spotify Studios Original. Listen for free on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Follow us and tap the bell for episode notifications. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Hi.

• 0:00Speaker 01

  Hello.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  Tell me about your nipples.

• 0:03Speaker 01

  Well, where to start?

• 0:06Speaker 00

  Hi, I'm Wendy Zukerman and you're listening to Science Verses.

• 0:11Speaker 00

  Today on the show, a curious medical mystery.

• 0:20Speaker 00

  Let's just jump right in. So when my friend Scarlett was really little, four or five, she noticed something really strange.

• 0:29Speaker 01

  Whenever any kind of touch to the nipples occurred, like putting on a singlet or something, I would get a really terrible feeling.

• 0:38Speaker 00

  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.

• 0:59Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:21Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know when you 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, 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? Ah, damn it. Yeah, and you go, oh, yeah, me neither.

• 2:14Speaker 00

  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.

• 2:47Speaker 02

  Hast du schon mal was vom sad nipple syndrom gehört?

• 2:49Speaker 03

  Whenever my nipples get touched, it is just this sinking, weird feeling of sadness, homesickness.

• 2:58Speaker 04

  They get nostalgic or sad.

• 3:01Speaker 05

  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.

• 3:08Speaker 00

  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.

• 3:18Speaker 01

  I was just amazed that people used the same words, like homesick, hungover. Yeah, dread, guilt. Even some people say it feels like guilt.

• 3:28Speaker 00

  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,

• 3:38Speaker 01

  what is going on? Is this what you want to know? Yeah, I want to know what's going on.

• 3:43Speaker 00

  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 gonna 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.

• 4:08Speaker 00

  When it comes to sad nipple syndrome, there's a lot of,

• 4:10Speaker 01

  what on earth is that about?

• 4:13Speaker 00

  But then, there's science.

• 4:17Speaker 00

  Science Versus Sad Nipple Syndrome is coming up just after the break.

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• 5:39Speaker 00

  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.

• 6:05Speaker 01

  You know, is it some repressed memory or something? But it doesn't seem to be.

• 6:09Speaker 00

  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. So what else we got? 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.

• 6:54Speaker 00

  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 zero 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 Komisurak, a distinguished professor of psychology at Rutgers University in New Jersey.

• 7:38Speaker 00

  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.

• 7:55Speaker 02

  The clitoris, the vagina, the cervix, and nipple.

• 8:01Speaker 00

  How did you touch the nipple?

• 8:02Speaker 02

  They did it themselves.

• 8:03Speaker 00

  They touched their own nipples, okay, yeah.

• 8:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 8:06Speaker 00

  Can I ask, when we're saying the nipple, do we mean the actual, like, little dot?

• 8:10Speaker 02

  The nipple, the actual nipple.

• 8:12Speaker 00

  Not the areola?

• 8:13Speaker 02

  Not the areola, not the breasts.

• 8:15Speaker 00

  The little button?

• 8:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, we said nipple stimulation, yeah.

• 8:18Speaker 00

  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.

• 9:03Speaker 00

  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?

• 9:30Speaker 02

  Well, the nipple activated regions of the chest, but it also activated the same region as the genitals.

• 9:41Speaker 00

  Interesting.

• 9:43Speaker 02

  And that is probably, that is probably why many women say that nipple stimulation feels erotic.

• 9:49Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 9:50Speaker 02

  Because it's activating the same region.

• 9:51Speaker 00

  Is it the same for men?

• 9:53Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 9:54Speaker 00

  Also, then also it goes to the genital region.

• 9:56Speaker 02

  We've done the same thing in men, yeah. We got the same thing in men.

• 9:59Speaker 00

  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?

• 10:36Speaker 01

  Weirdly though, sometimes it does feel sexually pleasurable, but it also, the emotional response is also still there. So both of those things kind of happen at the same time. And it's, sometimes it's, the juice is not worth the squeeze.

• 10:54Speaker 01

  So I feel like that's a separate thing that's happening to this, whatever this is.

• 10:59Speaker 00

  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.

• 11:22Speaker 00

  Okay, so Alia is gonna 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. So it's a sudden wave of shame and guilt and like the world has gone wrong and that I was wrong inside the world.

• 12:04Speaker 00

  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 couldn't open it. She didn't think it was gonna help her, but finally she does open it. And what she saw was this woman describing

• 12:45Speaker 00

  that terrible feeling that Alia was feeling, the shame, the guilt. But here's the kicker. She only felt it when she was breastfeeding.

• 12:59Speaker 00

  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?

• 13:25Speaker 01

  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'm, 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, all the, anything good has just left my body for a moment.

• 14:05Speaker 00

  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 because it's just so weirdly 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.

• 14:49Speaker 00

  Or DMR. And when it comes to cracking the case of sad nipple syndrome, I got so excited when I read about DMR because 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 DMR but don't have sad nipple syndrome. Still, the fact that there are so many similarities between the two phenomena,

• 15:33Speaker 00

  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.

• 15:57Speaker 02

  Yes, yes, exactly. They're all quacking like ducks.

• 16:01Speaker 00

  So after the break, the duck. That is, we'll find the heartbeat in your nipples to uncover what is going on here.

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• 20:52Speaker 00

  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, 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.

• 21:37Speaker 00

  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...

• 22:00Speaker 04

  If you had a bunch of grapes, a cluster of grapes.

• 22:04Speaker 00

  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.

• 22:40Speaker 04

  When the oxytocin gets to them through the blood, they squeeze, they contract.

• 22:45Speaker 00

  And squeezes out, it's like milking.

• 22:48Speaker 04

  It physically squeezes the milk out and it ejects the milk.

• 22:53Speaker 00

  Whoa.

• 22:53Speaker 04

  Because it can squirt out, and it does squirt out.

• 22:57Speaker 00

  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.

• 23:12Speaker 00

  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?

• 23:51Speaker 04

  Stimulating the nipple, they...

• 23:53Speaker 02

  Release oxytocin.

• 23:54Speaker 00

  Even in general sexual stimulation.

• 23:56Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 23:57Speaker 00

  Mmm. And so could oxytocin be causing this? And.

• 24:02Speaker 02

  Oxytocin could be ca- oxytocin acting as a neurotransmitter in the brain could be causing that. It's very, it's very possible.

• 24:13Speaker 00

  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

• 24:58Speaker 00

  been a bit all over the place.

• 25:00Speaker 02

  So the, the, there's a big questions about the role of oxytocin.

• 25:06Speaker 00

  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. Here's Alia. So basically, whenever prolactin needs to rise, it needs to get help and support and permission from dopamine. And so dopamine levels need to lo- lower just a, just a little bit briefly to open up a door for prolactin to start rising.

• 25:48Speaker 00

  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.

• 26:00Speaker 03

  Or act inappropriately in some way.

• 26:04Speaker 00

  And that's what makes you feel a certain bad, yucky way. Why homesick? Or why Harry Potter do mentors? 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

• 26:45Speaker 00

  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, Ali has 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.

• 27:08Speaker 03

  Ignore them, they're lying to you. There's nothing to fix. It's a, it's a reflex like when somebody hits your knee. You can't stop it. There's nothing wrong with it. It just happens.

• 27:21Speaker 00

  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 gonna 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.

• 28:04Speaker 01

  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, um, confused nipples, maybe.

• 28:14Speaker 01

  Confused nipple syndrome? Yeah. Or, you know, despairing nipples. Oh, that's maybe worse. Definitely worse. Oh, go on. But they're not, yeah. I feel I'm fond of them regardless. They can be, they can bring whatever face they want to bring to the party.

• 28:34Speaker 00

  That's Science Versus.

• 28:44Speaker 00

  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 Zukerman.

• 29:16Speaker 00

  This episode was produced by me, Wendy Zukerman, with help from Merrill Horn, Rose Rimler, Michelle Dang and Akedi 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 Munga, 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 Pukal, Professor Craig Richard and Professor Inga D Newman. A big thanks to Joseph Lavelle Wilson and the Zukerman family. Science Versus is a Spotify Studios original. Listen to us for free on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. We are everywhere. Give us a five star review if you like what we're doing.

• 30:00Speaker 00

  And if you are listening on Spotify, then you can follow us and tap the bell icon so you get notifications when new episodes come out. I'm Wendy Zukerman. Back to you next time.

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