Man’s Fitbit Captures What Heartbreak Looks Like Right After a Breakup

Koby Soto, a 28-year-old law student in Tel Aviv and cofounder of property management company Guesty, was planning for a night off with his boyfriend of a few months on Saturday, according to Buzzfeed.

Out of the blue, however, his boyfriend called him.

“He said that we’re going to have to cancel, and I said ‘Why?’ and he said, ‘Things are not working as they should,’” Soto told BuzzFeed. “I said, ‘Are you serious? You’re doing this over the phone?’”

Later that night, while venting to a friend, a heartbroken Soto opened his Fitbit app to take a screenshot of his heart rate. Instead of showing his heart rate at just that moment, however, the app showed data from the entire day.

In the morning, Soto had an average resting heart rate of 72 beats per minute. At noon, when he received the breakup call, however, his heart rate had rose past 88 beats per minute. For the rest of the day, his heart rate remained high and it almost reached 118 at one point before going back to normal that night.

“I feel like it’s nice to have a log of your confirmation of what you felt. You can tell people you have heartbreak and you feel bad,” Soto told Buzzfeed. “People become less cynical once you show them the numbers or once you show the data or graphs. Everyone understands heartbreak, right? Everyone’s felt it. When you have this, it’s interesting — you have something to show.”

On Tuesday, he posted a screenshot of his heart rate data to Hacker News and Twitter, where it has since been liked nearly 1,500 times. He told Mashable that he was not expecting the capture to get much attention and that he has been “absolutely overwhelmed” its popularity.