Heal Your Broken Heart. Starting Now. | Rewind

Every day, our world gets a little more connected, but a little further apart. But then there are moments that remind us to be more human.

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You were choosing not to have a conversation that you know could lead somewhere bad. But today you chose to have the conversation. Why? Because on some level, some part of you was ready to risk something. If you haven't already, we have a brand new free guide on how to communicate your standards and boundaries. It is at boldstandards.com the whole idea of this guide is to help teach people the language of communicating standards because so many of us, we want to have high standards, but then we get scared in the moment to actually communicate them. This guide shows you what they look like. in practice with specific things you can say. Check it out for free at www.boldsStandards.com this episode is one from the archives, a nice little rewind episode for you. I hope you enjoy it. And if you have any feedback or questions for future episodes, email us podcast@matthewhussy.com Now in this study, Steve, 40 people, both male and female, who had recently gone through an unexpected an unwanted breakup in the last six months were given a powerful nasal spray to reduce emotional pain. Now, I say in quotes, powerful nasal spray to reduce emotional pain, because this nasal spray in reality did fuck all.

Oh, you mean it didn't heal your broken heart?

They hadn't researched and found a chemical cure for a broken heart that came in the form of a nasal spray. No, Steve. But people were told that it would make them feel better. And these faulty people reported feeling better after seeing an image of their ex. Scans show that their brain brains responded differently, too. So it wasn't just a feeling. It genuinely was a different reaction in the brain to the picture of their ex. Now, it was just saline solution. The nasal spray didn't contain any chemicals, but these findings suggest that placebo treatments reduce emotional stress by altering effective representations in frontal brain stem systems. This suggests that if you believe you are being helped through the breakup, this can massively help your breakup. In other words, the act of taking action alone can engender results. What do you think about this, Steve?

I think that's a bit like self care, isn't it? If you take some time for self care, you are signaling to your body that this is recuperation time, that you are doing something nice for yourself. There's probably something going I know it's not going to heal a broken heart, but like going to a spa probably tells you that you want to relax and do something positive for your body and it makes you even feel more lifted and de-stressed because you have signaled to yourself that it's time to de-stress. And I guess if you tell yourself, I'm recovering from this by doing good things for myself, seeing friends, a broken heart, it's probably a weird mix of psychological and physical healing.

Does it ever make you wonder how many of the things we do.

To.

Get any result actually do anything? And how much of what we do is literally just our intention giving us this sense that we are actually better?

Yeah, I do sometimes think that even with coffee, I've drink, drunk a lot of coffee over the years, and now I'm not even sure what effect coffee has on me or not. It just. I could just taste it and I feel good in the morning.

You know, when you buy, like, a really expensive moisturizing cream for your face.

Ah, yeah.

And you think, this is gonna. This is really gonna be the one. This is going to be the one that gives me great skin. How much of it is. Is it really a better formula? Or could you slap a bunch of burger grease on your face and tell yourself that it was miracle cream and your spots would clear up?

I do wonder about the entire moisturizing industry. I have to say, I probably have a 50% skepticism about the whole thing, but it does feel nice putting that cream on your face.

Well, I think that what's interesting about this is that you really can in the wake of it. I think in a way, the empowering thing about this is that there are so many ways to feel better. And we often, if you take a breakup, it's an intense, dramatic event in one's life. It produces this avalanche of pain that we're left just spinning and going, how am I going to deal with this? What can I possibly do to make myself feel better? And in any situation where there's a ton of pain, we can often find ourselves searching for the perfect solution to that.

Saline solution in this case.

Very good. We look for this precise way to overcome our pain. In a way, you could say the same is true even in situations where there's not pain. You could say the same is true when we're trying to get fitter or healthier, or there are so many ways to do it. The intention of just doing something that's going to help matters more than anything else. That I am going into this breakup with the intention that I am going to feel better. I don't need the perfect situation to get over it. I don't need the perfect remedy. I don't need the perfect therapist. What I need is a ton of intention that I'm going to do what it takes. to feel better. Because there are so many ways you could feel better. You could feel better doing jiu-jitsu. You could feel better going to the gym. You could feel better going and meditating. You could feel better spending more time with friends and connecting in your relationships in your life. You could feel better taking on a new purpose. There are so many different ways that you could feel better, but just the intention of I'm going to do something to move on is half the battle. And the brain is so ridiculously powerful. I mean, if the placebo effect proves nothing else, it's how creepily scary and powerful the brain is in being able to reorganize itself based on what it thinks is happening.

Yeah.

Rather than what is actually in any chemical form or structural form happening. from the outside in.

To the story you say about that breakup as well, it's not that there is no, you're in trauma. There's nothing that's gonna suddenly make it better. You're gonna have to go through this repeated waves of pain. But even if the story in your head is either this is gonna defeat me and I am broken and I will never have someone wonderful love me again, Or your story is, I'm a survivor. I'm able to rebuild. I am a loving person. I have loving people around me. I'm gonna, you know, I'm gonna move forward with my life. Totally different story, totally different meaning in the way you approach everything from that point.

Did I mention on the podcast, the rat on the wheel experiment?

It sounds familiar, but I don't remember it.

There was an experiment that they did with rats where one rat was put on a wheel, a running wheel, and it could just run at its own pace whenever it chose to. And there was another rat that was hooked up to a wheel that, or that was on a wheel that was hooked up to the other wheel. So whenever the first rat ran of its own volition, the second rat had to run on the wheel. So they were both doing the exact same amount of exercise, the exact same amount of exertion, except the results were completely different. The rat that was on the wheel that chose to run had all the positive markers associated with exercise. The rat that had to run, albeit at exactly the same pace and distance as the first rat, had all of the markers associated with stress. The result of the experiment was linked to what you're saying right now, that Someone can, if they, if you're choosing your struggle, it can be a wonderfully empowering growth experience for you that has a lot of positive meaning and does a lot for your mindset, for all of the good things that you, all of the, all of those markers of having achieved and overcome something that we get when we do something difficult. If we believe that just some stress has been imposed on us and that we're just reacting to it, then it's going to have a lot of negative effects on our life. There's going to be resentment, there's going to be frustration, there's going to be all the cortisol associated with stress. there's going to be a sense of helplessness. So, in a breakup, if we believe, if our story is this was done to me, I did not choose this, I do not want this, and all I want is for this pain to go away, and I am going to be, in every sense of the word, a victim, of this time in my life, that is going to be something that is going to produce an extraordinary amount of stress and helplessness and depression and a whole world of increased pain. Pain on, you know, the pain of a breakup turns into a genuine kind of suffering that can now last a lot longer or can just produce much more devastating effects. If we can look at the story of our breakup and see it differently, we actually have a shot at an incredibly cathartic, growth driven time in our life that we associate with a ton of achievement and pride and confidence and even control. if you can take ownership of your pain in that moment. Now, that could be in the form of saying, okay, I may not have chosen this, but this truly is an opportunity for me to become a bigger person. This truly is an opportunity for me to show what I'm made of. You know, people choose to climb mountains in life. This is the interesting thing. We're all gonna have to climb mountains, whether we choose to or not. Some people climb mountains in their free time. Some people just decide to as an activity. Sometimes in life, we get given a mountain that we have to climb in the form of a breakup, in the form of a lost job, in the form of a lost loved one. But if we can remember that there are people in life that choose to climb mountains, that's what they do for fun. They go out and they climb a mountain. Then we realize that there is a type of suffering that we actually choose. Well, what if the suffering that's been imposed on me is suffering I decide to choose? I'm going to treat this like suffering I've chosen because at some point I was going to choose suffering anyway if I wanted to grow.

Well.

This just gave me it in a form I didn't see coming. But okay, here we go. This is my suffering. I was going to choose suffering anyway. If you run a marathon, anyone who's listening to this, who's ever run a marathon, you chose suffering. Anyone who listens to this, who went to the gym in the last week, You chose suffering. Or what if the suffering that was imposed on you becomes the suffering you choose?

And there's that stoic concept, that stoic concept we've talked about before, amor fati, love your fate. What happens to you? Can you embrace it with both arms and say, I'm gonna embrace the challenge, the pain of this moment right now, and take it on?

Yeah, or maybe go a step further and say, I'm not just dealing with something I would never have chosen to deal with. In a way, I'm just substituting. I was gonna choose that really difficult thing to do this year. But now that this has come along, I can switch that out. I found my difficult thing this year. I can substitute this for that thing I was gonna do. this year. That's a powerful way of looking at it. And by the way, for a lot of people who go through breakups, one of the things I say is maybe you chose it even more than you thought you did. If, for example, your breakup happened because you had a conversation with someone about something that you needed more of, maybe more commitment, maybe you needed to be respected more, maybe you needed them to try harder, maybe you didn't feel they were communicating with you enough. You essentially, you spoke up about your needs and that precipitated the breakup because you spoke up. That person decided, oh, God, this is all too much. I can't do this. You broke up with them. It may feel like they broke up with you, but it could be just as accurate to say you broke up with them. Because finally you decided to voice your needs. Because why did you break up today? Well, because I made a fuss of something today.

Right.

Maybe you didn't make a fuss about it last month or over the last six months. Maybe you didn't tell that person how you've been feeling for years. So in that time, you were choosing not to break up with them. You were choosing not to have a conversation that you know could lead somewhere bad. But today you chose to have the conversation. Why? Because on some level, on some level, some part of you was ready to risk something. So if that resulted in a breakup, take some ownership of that breakup. Don't be the victim of that breakup. Take some ownership. Oh, we broke up because I stated my needs. So in a sense, I broke up with them. I was the one who started the breakup. They just pulled the natural trigger. They did what I pushed them to do because they couldn't give me more. And I asked them to give me more, thereby precipitating this breakup. Then you can really take ownership of it and say, this is I'm here because I played a part in this. albeit for all the right reasons. I'm suffering right now because I made an important decision for myself to speak up, and that led to a breakup. And now I'm on my own, and it's excruciatingly painful. It's so difficult. There's a lot of pain ahead in this process, but I'm going to take some. I'm going to take some ownership of that pain. And in doing so, this becomes a kind of suffering that I have chosen, and thereby I can embrace it as a growth exercise, as opposed to simply something that I have to grit my teeth and try to white-knuckle my way through and hope I survive. No, we don't go to the gym and hope we survive. We go to the gym in anticipation of growth, demanding growth as the reward for our time and energy. go into your breakup demanding growth the same way that when you do a bicep curl, you demand that your bicep grow. I'm doing this so that you grow. Well, go into the breakup demanding the growth. I'm demanding I'm going to get growth out of this. I'm not hanging on for survival. I'm demanding those muscles to grow right now. so that I can be a bigger person when this is done. Thanks for listening, everybody. Before you go, if you haven't already watched my masterclass, my free masterclass, Dating with Results, go check it out. It is a one hour free training. My most popular free training of all time. Over a million people have now been through this. That's literally over a million people have now been through this. And if you haven't seen it, it is packed with advice on how you can start making real progress in your love life this year. Go over to datingwithresults.com to watch that right now. As I said, it's completely free. You can be watching it in the next 30 seconds and you're missing out if you don't see it. So go to datingwithresults.com I'll see you in the next episode. Be well and lovely.