How to Deal with the Unbearable Pain of Heartbreak (with Guy Winch)

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Hello there, pod friends. Welcome back to another episode of Love Life with me, your host, Stephen Hussey. I am here in old London town, the big smoke with Matthew Hussey. We've come for, I don't know, a little change of scenery, a little city life. Yeah, just a couple of weeks of brother time in the city. Our brother Harry is not far away either, so. that's what we're doing. And we went for some lovely Ramen last night and got our fix of Japanese food. So we're happy boys. And today we are talking about the best strategy after heartbreak and the mistakes lots of people make when they're in this position, particularly on the topic of overthinking, healing from Pain, deciding whether it's best to try and distract yourself or to Analyze and deconstruct that relationship and look at what went wrong and How you can move forward in a healthy way so that you can work on whatever behaviors you want to work on but not get trapped in the past so We are going to jump right over to a conversation from our members area between Matthew and the great guy winch and guy winch is a psychologist. He's a therapist. He's a renowned speaker and author His book how to fix a broken heart is super super useful and practical and he also has a TED talk on the same topic which has got over 10 million views I think and it's an excellent talk so go and check that out on YouTube. Just look at how to fix a broken heart or Guy Winch, I'm sure you'll find it and you can find Guy Winch's work on Twitter, Instagram, the usual platforms just go for @GuyWinch and you will find him and Guy is just a repository of wisdom of empathy, of emotional intelligence. And he's just such a great voice on relationships and everything, emotional health. So I feel we're very, very lucky to have him on our members area. And if you want to listen to the whole conversation or if you want to be a part of our members area so that you can get all the future coaching that Matt does, where we take people's relationship problems and questions and go through them in real time, and we have great guests on people like Guy Winch, other experts in other fields, if you If you want to join that members area, go to askmh.com and you can sign up today. Askmh.com okay, that's all from me over to Matt and Guy.

During a difficult time, whether it's a breakup, whether it's a pandemic, whatever it may be, we are on one hand told to stay busy and on the other hand, we're told do the work. Don't distract yourself from actually doing the work and processing your thoughts and feelings. And I find that for a lot of people must be very confusing to sort of figure out, well, what constitutes being busy and what constitutes me distracting myself from the feelings that I need to process in order to get over something. What do you say is the right balance?

The danger with heartbreak is that you can drop into rumination. And rumination means that you're spinning around the same kind of thought in an unproductive way. The goal of thinking things through is to gain insight about yourself, about the other person, about the mistakes you might have made, the things you might want to do differently, the things you might want to keep the same, what you've gained from the relationship, what you didn't, what you might want to avoid next time, et cetera. It's an endless list of things you can learn from it. So if you're still learning in that self-examination, go ahead and do it. If that self-examination is very depressing, to you, then decide when you want to do it. And by all means, use distraction and other kinds of things to kind of, you know, not dwell on it too much. It's when we're stewing, when we just keep repeating the same, you know, you know, people typically go back to the breakup talk or to the contradiction, the thing they said the week before the breakup talk that contradicted. But how could they say that and then do that? I just don't understand it. And, and you've asked yourself that question. 50 times. You've asked your friends 20. There's no more information to be gained there. Certainly not by asking it in that way. So that's just rumination. That's just you stewing. That's just, you know, in an emotional hamster wheel, that's not useful. And it's important to try and distinguish between when your thinking is being useful and when it's not. And if it's useful, you, it eases your feeling after you're done. You feel a little easing, a little. relief because you figured something out. If it's not useful, you just feel crappier afterwards because you just took your spoon, stirred all the muck, took a nice big whiff of it, and then that's what you're left with. So make the distinction between the thought process that's productive, that teaches you something, that gains something, and one that's not. And you know the one that's not because you've been having that same line of thinking literally dozens of times.