The Worst Thing to Do After a Breakup

Heartbreak sucks.

I don't know how to do this. Everything was going fine, and now it's just.

I don't understand why I not reach.

For my phone, not wait for a message that isn't coming, knowing that no matter how much I love you, it's.

Not enough to make you stay.

And I keep replaying everything, every stupid little moment.

When we go through a heartbreak, there is this tremendous sense of fear and overwhelm and desperation at not only being in the worst pain of our lives, but the idea that this pain is never going to end. In today's video, I want to talk about the four things that we do that prolong our heartbreak, that can make it never ending, and how we can avoid doing these four things so that this, the worst time of your life, if you're going through it right now, is something that can run its course in a healthy amount of time. Over the last 48 hours, my team and I were talking about this video and the subject of heartbreak. And after many hours of speaking about it, all of us came to the exact same, same conclusion. That heartbreak just sucks. It is the worst. And that when you're going through it in many ways, though, you need to hear the perfect combination of words that could help you feel better in real time. And that's what you're always praying for in talking with someone. It's also true that the last thing you really want when you're feeling that is advice. So I'm conscious in this video of the fact that if you are in the most acute stage of heartbreak, what you need probably more than advice is a reminder that heartbreak is universal. It is something that all of us go through at some point in our lives. And while the experience of heartbreak can be immensely isolating because we can feel like for that time, we exist in the same world as everybody else, the reality is heartbreak is what connects us. So if you are heartbroken right now, I want you to know not only are you in good company, but also that there are four things that you can avoid doing that will mean you're going to feel better faster. The first thing we do that prolongs our heartbreak is we avoid feeling the pain of the heartbreak. Think about it this way. Someone breaks up with us, let's say the reality of that pain, if we really wanted to be with that person, if we love that person, if we saw a future with that person, is so big that many of us will do anything to avoid truly feeling that pain. I have firsthand experience of this, as I'm sure Many of you do, because I think that in the heartbreaks both big and small in my life, I avoided most of them. When it came to the pain, I moved on as quickly as I possibly could. I went and found somebody else. I numbed myself. I just stopped myself from ever having to truly sit with the ultimate discomfort of what I was really feeling. And so instead of truly connecting with our pain, many of us do one of two things. We either displace our pain onto something that's easier to deal with. In many cases, that is, we go to thoughts of confusion. You know, how could they have said that they wanted to spend their life with me? And now they've decided that they don't want to be with me. Why did we take that trip a month before we broke up if they weren't serious? Why on earth would they go on that romantic vacation with me and get closer with me and be intimate with me in all of those ways? Why would they introduce me to those members of their family? We look at all of these areas of confusion because it's easier to be confused than it is to just be heartbroken. In some cases, we focus on the fact that they'll be back, you know. Well, you know, they'll probably be back. They'll realize that this was a mistake. And then we wait for them to come back. Right? We look for that moment where all of a sudden it's all going to change, and we live in hope of that moment. The other thing we do is we distract. We may distract, like I said, by moving quickly on to the next person or the next relationship or to many people and just hooking up with people. We may distract through drugs or alcohol. We may distract through workaholism and just losing ourselves day and night in staying busy. But what we don't do when we displace onto easier ways of thinking or distract is really connect to the deepest pain that we are feeling right now. And the deepest pain is something that won't just go away when we displace or distract. It remains there, lurking. David, our producer, at this point brought up thalassophobia, which is this ancient and unstoppable being deep in the ocean that people are afraid of when they're afraid of being out on the open water. That this thing, at any point, this ancient and unstoppable force, could just come and swallow them up, and there's nothing they'd be able to do about it. Well, there is something sort of like that about our feelings during heartbreak. It's like there is this ancient fear, this. This ancient insecurity that our heartbreak has triggered, this ancient existential threat of loneliness, of unworthiness, of undesirability, of never finding anyone again, that gets brought up when someone says to us, I don't want to be with you anymore. And when we try and distract ourselves from the pain of that thought through all of these other things, that doesn't go away, which is why it leaks. You may have experienced this in the past. You avoid your grief over having to let go of someone. You avoid the heartbreak. And then you're listening to a song or you're watching a movie or someone says something that catches you off guard, and all of a sudden, you can feel yourself welling up. Why? Because there is something underneath the surface, what David Kessler, my friend, the number one grief expert in the world, calls a bit of unattended grief. Now, the truth is, the more we push these things away, the bigger they get. And if we can just learn to sit with them, to take that time. There's nothing wrong with working as a way of distracting ourselves sometimes. There's nothing wrong with going out with our friends. There's nothing wrong with meeting someone new. But there is something wrong with those things. It's if they are a constant distraction from ever having to feel the thing that's really going on inside of us. And it's funny, often there's a complexity to the stories that we play over and over again in our heads when we've experienced a heartbreak. The complexity of all the contradictions in the relationship. The complexity of why did they say they loved me and then break up with me. The complexity of am I ever going to meet someone like this again, and how do I make sure. Sure that I can one day get them back and maybe we'll come back together. There's so much complexity to all of those stories, but the underlying belief or fear or feeling at the core of our heartbreak is often very simple. I can remember a time when I was truly heartbroken and I was standing with a friend of mine, and I had spent, you know, a couple of weeks telling stories about the breakup and, you know, playing out all of the ways I was confused about it and my righteous anger, all of that. But then one day, I was sat on the doorstep of my house with a dear friend of mine, and he asked me how I was feeling. And I looked at him in the eyes, and I had tears in my eyes. And I said to him, this whole thing has just made me feel like I'm not good Enough. And it was like this moment of truly saying the thing that I was most afraid of voicing. Something that perhaps a younger me, a less vulnerable me, a more self preserving me, would not have said out loud, would dare not have given airtime. But I said it, and it was really interesting because when I said it, he got tears in his eyes too. And it became this moment of recognition from his side, something he had experienced before, something he had felt before. It connected him to a part of himself that he had compassion for. But it was a moment that distinguished this heartbreak from the other heartbreaks of my life. A moment of honesty, a moment of truly feeling what I felt, which at its core was a very simple thing. It had nothing to do with what the other person was doing or how they had treated me, or how they had acted in confusing ways. It had everything to do with this simple fear that I had that I wasn't good enough. One of the reasons that many of us don't allow ourselves to feel our feelings is because we're afraid of our feelings. We're afraid that if we go into that room, that room that we do everything in our power to avoid and actually feel our feelings, we won't be okay. But the truth is a lot more simple and in many ways a lot less scary. It's a bit like having a place of tension in our body, a knotted up muscle. If you go see a physio and they give you one of those foam rollers and ask you to roll over it with the muscle in question, you'll roll over a certain part of your body that when you do it, it makes you jump out of your skin. Now, when you do that, the physio doesn't tell you, okay, don't roll over that part again. When you do that, the physio says when you get to that place of tension where it you just want to get off of it, that's the place you have to live for a few seconds. That's the place you have to learn to breathe through. Because if you can breathe through that, that knotted up muscle will start to break up and it will start to get better. The route to feeling better is to give ourself enough space to feel those feelings. It doesn't have to be 24 hours a day, but we have to give ourselves moments where we allow ourselves to feel these things. David Kessler, who I mentioned earlier, he was on my retreat and he said to the audience something that really relates to this. I want you to check this out. People always say, david, you don't understand. If I started crying, I would never stop. And I tell them I have sat with thousands of people and they have all stopped crying. They may cry again someday. I would imagine they would if they're human. But they all stopped. Now, this doesn't mean that we have to live in our feelings 24 hours a day. It simply means that there have to be moments where we allow ourselves to sit in the authentication pain that we are going through. For a lot of us, advice like this, you know we have to feel our pain is really hard to follow because we've never been given a manual for this stuff. Our families didn't teach us the best ways to heal from heartbreak. Maybe they were responsible for a whole bunch of heartbreak. Our friends often give us contradictory or bad advice that keeps us in a cycle of pain or making the same mistakes. Very rarely do we come across anyone who can truly sit with us and lay out a roadmap for how to process our heartbreak, how to heal, how to get closure, how to come out stronger. What I've been doing for the last 17 years of my life is studying the right ways to process our heartbreak, the right ways to heal, the right ways to get closure so that I can help other people do exactly that. So what I wanted to do for you today, in addition to the three more points that I'm going to give you in this video, is actually get you to spend some time with me. It doesn't matter where you are in the world, but I want us to spend some time together this month if you're going through heartbreak. So I want you to put this in your diary right now. On February 25, I am going to hold a live event. We're all going to come together. It's called Heal from Heartbreak. How to heal, get closure, and finally find your way through your heartbreak. And it is relevant to you whether you are going through fresh heartbreak. And it it's just you're at the absolute worst moment of it. It's also for you if you've had a heartbreak from years ago or months ago that has become chronic and you're still not over it and you're wondering, is this ever going to end? If you're in any stage of heartbreak right now, this event is going to help because I'm going to give you a roadmap. So put this in your diary now. The way to sign up is easy. It's free. Go to lovelifetraining.com I will leave a link below. And on February 25th, hoping this video is going to help you get by till then. But then on February 25th, you and me are actually going to spend some real time together in this virtual live event. So, like I said, sign up, put it in your diary, and I will see you there. You may also be wondering, what's the difference between processing my feelings in a productive way and simply ruminating in my thoughts in an unproductive way that keeps me stuck in those feelings? Or that's exactly what I'm going to talk about in point number three. Before we get there, let's talk about point number two. The second thing that we need to stop doing if we want to get through our heartbreak is keeping around reminders of the person we are trying to heal from. So number two, we have to remove the things that remind us of that person. Look, when we are still in a relationship with someone, the objects around our home are these kind of living, breathing portals to moments in the relationship. The love that we share with somebody else, the memories that we've created. Once that person has decided that they no longer want to be with us, or we have gotten to the point of realizing that we can no longer be with them, these objects suddenly become part of a museum to the relationship. A relationship that doesn't exist any longer. But not like a fun museum like the Natural History Museum, where you're just walking through and taking in all of this amazing stuff like that. Oh, wow, that's Leo Pluridon. That's cool, huh? Not like that kind of museum. A depressing museum that sucks. And the problem with this museum is that every artifact in it triggers our pain towards this person. As Dr. Nars put it in his extended caption. It triggers our craving for the person and a subsequent withdrawal because that craving for them cannot be fulfilled. So we have to be ruthless about removing these things. I even wrote about it in my new book, Love Life in a chapter on heartbreak. The paragraph we're going to read right now. Let's head over to the Bookie Nook. Book nook. Welcome to the book Nook. Trash anything that makes us think of our ex wherever they pop up on our desk. That framed sunset over Tahiti in our bedroom, the book light they never turned off. The top shelf of our fridge. The mouldy rhubarb. Jam our phone. Why track the weather in Tahiti anymore? Change their name in your phone so that you don't experience that Pavlovian pang every time your phone lights up with it. Incidentally, I once had a client change their ex's name in in their phone to done so that when their ex texted them, they no longer got that hope and that sense of possibility. Instead, they felt a sense of finality and empowerment. Clean the medicine cabinet and under the passenger seat of your car. Edit the everything drawer in the kitchen, the top shelf, in the whole closet, the bin of broken electronics. If there's anything left to remind us of our existence, we are sleeping on the job. There's no tea in this oh my new book Love Life. How did that come back with me from the book Nook? I sure hope that isn't on your Amazon shopping list. Point number three we have to be disciplined with our thoughts. So if Point number two, which was about removing the physical things that remind us of a person, is about being disciplined about our space. Point number three is being disciplined about our mind. Where do we allow our mind to take us? We said in the beginning of this video in point number one that one of the big mistakes we make is avoiding our feelings. So it's not like we want to be so disciplined about our focus that we avoid ever feeling the pain of a breakup. But our minds continuously get dragged back to memories of a person playing out the story of the relationship in ways that are unproductive. Like an old videotape we just can't stop playing on repeat. This is no longer a productive processing of our feelings about a situation. It is a mindless and unconscious unintentional rumination over the events of the past. This is backed up by a conversation I had with Dr. Guy Winch, a psychologist who has specialized in the past in helping people overcome breakups. This is what he had to say about it.

The danger with heartbreak is that you can. You can drop into rumination. And rumination means that you're spinning around the same kind of thought in an unproductive 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 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 contradictions, the thing they said the week before the breakup talk, that contradicted. But how could they say that and then doing that? I just don't understand it. And you've asked yourselves that question 50 times. You've asked your friends 20. There's no more information to be gained there, serving up by asking it in that way. So that's just rumination. That's just you stewing that 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 bit 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 but gains something, and one that's not. And you know the one that's not, because you've been having that same lineman thinking literally dozens of times.

So there is a difference between processing and rumination. Now, if rumination is just telling ourselves a story over and over and over again in ways that are no longer giving us any insight, we have to start seeing that as our mind being a dog that's on a leash pulling us wherever it wants to go. And we have to be the owner that is willing to discipline that dog to say, I'm not just going to go with you wherever you want me to go. Just because you have a thought, it doesn't mean you have to follow the thought. Don't follow the thought. Have that moment where you're about. You're just replaying the breakup, replaying that thing the person said that day that's breaking your heart because they told you how much they loved you, even though three weeks later they broke up with you. As you feel yourself replaying that memory, tell yourself you can say it out loud if you want. No, we are not doing this right now. Absolutely not. And you break it, get used to breaking it every time. And this is really important. Not just because telling the story of the breakup or the relationship over and over again becomes unproductive rumination, but also because the story isn't even necessarily a true story. It's A story we have told ourselves about that relationship. Science has shown us that when we remember something, we're not remembering that event. We're remembering our memory of that event. And every time we remember it, we're remembering the last time that we remembered it. So our memory, the story, becomes this kind of infinite regression of a story that changes a little bit every single time we become an unreliable narrator of the events of our love life. So we think back to the relationship and how wonderful a person was, and we remember nothing of all of the ways that they were difficult or frustrated us or made us unhappy. We remember back to a time that was the happiest relationship of our lives. We were never happier than we were then. And we don't remember how we spent much of the day anxious because we didn't feel loved by someone we don't remember correctly. For many of you out there, I can prove that you're telling yourself untrue stories. If you are having a thought in your mind right now that you and this person are supposed to be together, if that's a story you're telling yourself, you're already an unreliable narrator. Because if you're supposed to be together, you'd be together. If the relationship was going to work, it would be working. This is how far our thoughts and the stories we tell ourselves become detached from the reality of the situation, the reality of how good or bad the relationship was, the reality of how suited a certain partner from our past actually is for us today or for our future. Be disciplined with your mind and your thoughts. Before we move on to point number four, which is the most important point of this entire video, I have a question to ask you. Did you like this video yet? Did you hit subscribe? Maybe give a little tap to that notification bell? Because if you did, you are guaranteeing that you never, ever miss another video of mine again. Ever. The fourth and final thing we have to avoid if we don't want to prolong our heartbreak indefinitely is making the focus of our breakup them instead of ourselves. Let me explain what I mean by this. I have a friend, a dear friend of mine, who is going through the heartbreak of her life. She has been in a relationship with a woman for the last three years of her life. This woman suddenly decided she didn't want to be there anymore, and she moved cities, devastated, my friend. But here's the remarkable part. When I asked my friend about the heartbreak, when I ask her how she's feeling, she almost never talks about her ex. She talks about herself. She doesn't Say, I feel so used and I feel so angry. And let me tell you what they did when they broke up with me, and let me tell you what was going on in the months leading up to it. And let me tell you what they're doing right now and how they're going on all of these dates. And she didn't do that. Every time I ask her, she talks about her own process. She talks about how it's been really hard and she gets teary and she. She gets emotional. She talks about how it's reopened wounds from her past that she's working on. She talks about how this is the big heartbreak of her life so far and what she's doing to take care of herself during this time. It's all about her. And that is so stunningly beautiful, because in a breakup, it is about us. It doesn't mean that we can't talk about our ex. It doesn't mean that we can't vent over the things we're angry about, especially if they behaved badly or betrayed us. We can talk about that stuff, but at a certain point, we have to put the focus on ourselves because we are the star of this show, not them. The moment someone decides they don't want to be with you anymore, they cease to be a part of your life and your story. You will always be the hero of your story. So this is now about you. How are you taking care of you? What has happened here to you? And let me tell you, what has happened is that you are a person who is capable of loving so intensely, so much that you can hurt this badly. And there is something about that story that transcends your ex. We make it all about our ex. We make it all about this story of how they were so amazing and we'll never meet anyone like that again. And that was the great relationship of our life. And we're going to be alone forever. We make it all about that, but we don't make it about the true story, which is that we are a person who, even before we met our ex, was capable of loving so much, was capable of throwing themselves into something and opening up in the way we did and letting someone in. Yes, we met our ex and there were things we liked about them and that, you know, dragged us to the next date and the next date and the next day. And eventually we fell in love with them, but we kept loving them because we are a person who was yearning for love in the first place. So at a certain point, it's not that we love them because they're them. It's that we love them because we want to love. And that was true before we met our ex. Before you met this person, you were a human being yearning to be loved and to love. And I would put money on the fact that had you never met your ex, you, as that human being yearning to love and be loved, would have met someone else. And if you weren't the luckiest person on earth who had one relationship that went swimmingly for the rest of your life, you would have experienced a different heartbreak than the one you had. But heartbreak nonetheless, because this heartbreak isn't really about this person that you and we in these situations get fixated on. It's about us. What you have experienced is a loss. And that loss, really at its core, is something you could have experienced with many different people at any point of your life. You just happen to be experiencing it right now. So remove the fixation on the person you've lost and the stories you're telling yourself about that person and put your focus on the beautiful human being that is you that needs you in this time of loss. You see, when you and I spend time together on the 25th of February this month, we're not going to be making your ex the star of the show. We're not going to be talking about your ex. We're going to be talking about you, the real hero of this story. I can't wait to see you there. I'm so happy you watched this video. If you've been watching intently and you haven't signed up yet, sign up now. It's lovelifetraining.com. like I said, it's completely free. Anyone can come, but come, because I promise you, however much you feel better, a little bit better, maybe a tiny bit better at the end of this video. We're just getting started. I'll see you on the 25th. Thank you for watching. And until then, take care of yourself.