We’ve been experiencing heartbreak for millennia and yet most of us still use the same coping and recovery mechanisms we did thousands of years ago: time, social support, and unfortunately, substances (eg, alcohol, drugs, food). Despite recent advances in our scientific understanding of how we are impacted by heartbreak, little has changed in how we go about recovering from this emotionally devastating experience. As a thor Guy Winch describes in his book How to Fix a Broken Heart, the biggest mistake we make is that we go on “autopilot” and assume the only thing we can do to recover is give it time. Yes, time helps, as does social support, but new studies are verifying that there are all kinds of other steps we can and should take to soothe the emotional pain we feel and expedite our recovery.
A recent study in the Journal of Experimental Psychology examined cognitive and behavioural strategies for recovering from heartbreak. The premise of the study was that to recover from heartbreak we need to diminish our feelings of love for our ex-partner. While that might seem terribly obvious, consider that heartbreak often makes most of us do the opposite: We enact thoughts and behaviours that actually reinforce our love feelings (eg, stalking our ex on social media, reliving our best moments, pouring over old images and video of happy times). The goal of the study was to examine three kinds of emotional regulation strategies to see which of them would help heartbroken subjects reduce their love feelings.
In the first condition, subjects focused on negative reappraisals of their ex-partner (eg, by responding to prompts about their ex’s annoying habits). In the second condition they were asked to reframe their loving feelings as less problematic (eg, by endorsing prompts such as ‘It’s okay to love someone I’m no longer with’). The last condition used distraction (eg, questions about the subjects’ favourite food) to get the participants’ mind off their heartbreak. The researchers found that only negative reappraisals were truly effective in reducing love feelings. However, doing so did increase feelings of unpleasantness.
Unfortunately, it is those very feelings of “unpleasantness” that make it challenging to use negative reappraisals as a way to recover from heartbreak. We might accept, on an intellectual level, that by focusing on our ex’s faults we’re doing something important but it can still feel wrong (unpleasant), unbalanced, unfair, and even disloyal.
From working with clients in my practice who feel heartbroken, I’ve found that there are two things we can do to minimise these feelings of unpleasantness and thus feel freer to practice negative reappraisals of our ex. First, we need to frame the task differently. Specifically, we need to consider that when we are heartbroken, our mind is likely to bombard us with highly idealised snapshots, memories and thoughts both about our ex and about our relationship. We tend to remember only the best times and our ex’s best qualities. In other words, our mind is already creating unbalanced and inaccurate perceptions that are highly skewed to the positive. Therefore, our introduction of negative reappraisals does not create an imbalance, it corrects an existing one. Do I hear a cheer go up?
Second, negative reappraisals should include not just our perceptions and memories of our ex but of the relationship as well. We tend to idealise the relationship just as much as we do the person and think almost exclusively of the good times and the happy moments. We are far less likely to consider the compromises we had to make, the fights that hurt our feelings or frustrated us, or our unmet emotional needs. People often grieve both the person and the relationship itself—the experience of being a couple, having a significant other, the companionship and partnering. Therefore, it is necessary to address idealised perceptions of the relationship by introducing negative reappraisals of our couplehood, as well as of our ex as a person, in order to more effectively reduce feelings of attachment and love.
If you are trying to get over heartbreak, make a list of the person’s faults as well as of the shortcomings of the actual relationship and keep that list on your phone (or stuck on the fridge door). Whenever you find yourself having idealised thoughts and memoires, whip out your phone (or go to the fridge) and read a few reminders in order to balance your perceptions and remind yourself that your ex was not perfect and neither was the relationship.
One crucial aspect of recovery from heartbreak that was not covered in the current study is that breakups leave all kinds of voids in our lives. Our social circle gets diminished, our activities change, our physical space changes (eg, their ‘stuff’ is no longer there), some of the things we did as couples we no longer do, and the list goes on. A significant part of the emotional pain we feel after a breakup is related to these other losses, the ripple effects that go beyond the loss of the actual person. Finding ways to recognise these voids and fill them is an important task of recovery from heartbreak and one that is often neglected.
Heartbreak is a form of grief and loss that can cause insomnia, changes in appetite, depression, anxiety and even suicidal thoughts and behaviour, and as such it should be taken very seriously, as should our efforts to recover. However, to do so, we have to assert control and consciously and willfully prevent ourselves from making mistakes that will set us back (like staying in touch or trying to be friends while we’re still heartbroken) and encourage ourselves to take steps that might feel unpleasant or counterintuitive, but that will ultimately diminish our emotional pain and speed up our recovery. Do I hear a second cheer?!
References
Winch, G. How to Fix a Broken Heart. Simon & Schuster/TED books. 2018.
Langeslag, S.J.E. and Sanchez, M.E. Down-regulation of love feelings after a romatic break-up: Self report and electrophysiological data. J. Exp. Psychol. Gen. 2018, 147)5), 720-733.