How to fix a broken heart
MAJOR TAKEAWAY:
Heartbreak is far more insidious than we realize. There is a reason we keep going down one rabbit hole after another, even when we know it’s going to make us feel worse. Brain studies have shown that the withdrawal of romantic love activates the same mechanisms in our brain that get activated when addicts are withdrawing from substances like cocaine or opioids.
Love can become an addiction. But we need to fight it. Because it’s over, alright?
STEP 1: STOP IDEALIZING THE OTHER PERSON.
One of the most common tendencies we have, when our heart is broken, is to idealize the person who broke it. We spend hours remembering their smile, how great they made us feel, that time we hiked up the mountain, and made love under the stars. All that does is make our loss feel more painful. We know that. Yet we still allow our mind to cycle through one greatest hit after another, like we were being held hostage by our own passive-aggressive Spotify playlist.
Heartbreak will make those thoughts pop into your mind. And so to avoid idealizing, you have to balance them out by remembering their frown, not just their smile, how bad they made you feel, the fact that after the lovemaking, you got lost coming down the mountain, argued like crazy and didn’t speak for two days.
Compile an exhaustive list of all the ways the person was wrong for you, all the bad qualities, all the pet peeves, and then keep it on your phone.
STEP 2: FILL THE VOIDS IN YOUR LIFE ASAP
There’s a popular saying; you often don’t miss the person, but rather how they made you feel. To fix your broken heart, you have to identify voids in your life and fill them, and I mean all of them. The voids in your identity: you have to reestablish who you are and what your life is about. The voids in your social life, the missing activities, even the empty spaces on the wall where pictures used to hang.
STEP 3: STOP TRYING TO GET CLOSURE
Addicts know they are addicted. Heartbroken people don’t. They keep reliving their past memories and get the fix that they're addicted to. This complicates the healing process. What you need to do, is to stop trying to solve the mystery of why it didn’t work. You could come up with an entire hypothesis, after hours and hours of contemplation and it still wouldn’t change anything, except make you more depressed than you already were. Moreover, no reason is going to seem good enough. You’re always going to try to convince yourself that you could have made it work when the sad reality is actually quite distinct. Make up a reason, believe that’s why it didn’t work out. Give YOURSELF closure. And move the fuck on.
