Heartbreak is exquisitely painful. The anguish we feel impacts every aspect of our lives. We think about little else, we care about little else, and we can focus on little else. Our ability to function, to go about our days and perform our regular responsibilities is significantly impaired. All we want is for the pain to stop.
But that is not what our mind wants.
Evolution’s imperative is survival, not happiness. As such, our brains evolved to keep us away from threats not to lead us toward fulfilment. When we touch a hot stove, our mind’s job is to make sure we remember that stoves are dangerous, that we should stay away from them. It does so by keeping that memory fresh, by evoking it every time we see a stove lest we forget and try touching it again. This works brilliantly when we’re dealing with hot stoves. It works terribly when we’re dealing with heartbreak.
To fix our broken heart we have to find ways to diminish the presence of our ex in our thoughts and to reduce the emotional pain we feel when we do think of them. But our mind has the absolute opposite goal. It wants us to dwell on our ex and on our pain as much as possible, to never forget them so we never touch this ‘hot stove’ again.
But love is not a ‘hot stove’, it is something we want and need and hope to find again. To do so we first have to fix our broken heart. And to do that we must take a deep breath and take charge of our recovery. We have to recognise how our mind is working against us and fight the instincts that compel us to do the very things that will set us back and exacerbate our pain.
Our mind will bombard us with intrusive thoughts and images of our ex that are highly idealised — all the good moments, their best attributes, the happiest times. So to balance out the picture we have to purposefully remind ourselves of the fights, the pet peeves, the moments we cried and felt hurt, and the times we hated their guts.
Our instincts will compel us to stalk our ex on social media in order to ‘know’ what they are doing or to text or message them incessantly with seemingly ‘important’ communications. But these compelling urges are just our mind tricking us into keeping our pain fresh. So we have to resist these instincts and distract ourselves from them when they grip us.
Our ‘gut’ will concoct mysteries and conspiracy theories about ‘why they left’ that we will feel compelled to resolve. But this again is a nothing but a clever ruse to keep our pain fresh. There is no explanation for why they left that can change the fact that they did, and pursuing one will just set us back.
Getting over heartbreak is not a journey it’s a fight, a battle within our own mind. Understanding that and putting up a strong resistance is essential if we wish to ease our pain and expedite our recovery.
