The most brutal breakup of your life will likely be one of the hardest things you’ll ever experience.
When you lose someone you believed to be the love of your life, your entire reality is thrown off base. You’re forced to rebuild, and it feels like you’re starting with nothing.
On a primal level, a breakup is a threat to your survival. It makes you feel undesirable, unloveable, and, in worst cases, broken and weak.
Breakups, to put it bluntly, suck.
But just because something is challenging to endure doesn’t mean that there isn’t any good that can come from it. If anything, breakups are the perfect opportunity to rebuild yourself as a stronger man—a man who prepares to have better future relationships.
Let’s build you into a man who can survive any breakup. Let’s make you indestructible to the pain of breakups.
9 Ways to Get Over a Devastating Breakup Faster
When a relationship ends, you have to do something.
The longer that you sit and do nothing, the sooner those negative feelings that you don’t want to deal with (resentment, anger, and the desire to resort to cheap dopamine to feel better) will come back into your life.
You have to cope with your breakup, and you have to start doing it right away. There’s no time to waste.
Your breakup can hurt you, but it should not, under any circumstances, stop you from living your entire life.
You could lose everything, but there’s almost always someone who’s lost more and can keep living and loving despite everything they’ve lost.
Your breakup is a bump in the road from becoming the man you’re destined to be. You must learn to internalize this and believe it yourself. The consequences of not doing so are existentially dire.
1. Experience the 5 Stages of Grief, Fully
When a breakup happens, it feels like a completely “unacceptable” situation.
Similar to losing a job or experiencing some other unexpected tragedy, breakups are difficult to accept because we don’t exactly plan for them to happen.
When you experience something unacceptable, you experience what you’ve probably heard psychologists refer to as “the five stages of grief”:
- Denial
- Anger
- Bargaining
- Depression
- Acceptance
When you have a traumatic situation like a devastating breakup, it’s best to fully experience these stages because the longer you put off experiencing the stage, the greater the risk of getting “stuck.”
Work through these negative emotions, so you don’t constantly have to deal with them. Process your breakup.
The easiest way to avoid a future unhealthy relationship is to process the painful emotions you feel.
2. Talk About Your Negative Emotions
When a breakup happens, you’ll inevitably have thoughts circulating through your brain about things you could, would have, or should have done.
Unfortunately, the breakup happened. It’s over.
However, you still have these thoughts spinning through your mind, and you need to do something to eliminate them. You have to process things internally; sometimes, the best thing to do is verbalize what you’re experiencing.
This could be through writing, journaling, therapy, or even coffee and chatting with a friend about what you’ve experienced.
This will also help you figure out why your relationship failed.
Talking about your breakup is one of the best ways to get through it. If you’ve got good friends, they’ll be there for you through the pain of your breakup and do their best to help you make it to the other side.
3. Turn Off Your Phone and Avoid Distraction
After my worst breakup years ago, I probably followed, unfollowed, and refollowed my ex on social media at least three times.
I’d add her, see her posting things, feel heartbroken, and then get so upset that I’d unfollow her. Then I’d catch myself missing her, and it was just a few days until I was adding her again, only to repeat the same cycle – over and over again.
I’ll spare you some anxiety and headache: don’t do that.
If you want a clean break, you must remove every chase of her from your life. Don’t add her and re-add her. Don’t try and be friends. Don’t try and be social media buddies. If you’re done dating her and devastated about the breakup, delete her existence.
It sounds cutthroat, but this is the best way to avoid lasting heartache.
If you insist on keeping your ex on social media (or if you both have lots of mutual friends and removing her entirely from your life is impossible), do what you need to protect yourself. Turn off the phone.
You need to have the self-awareness to know what you need to do to cope with your emotional pain and the death of your old relationship.
Find other things to do that will occupy your time more constructively.
4. Stop Chasing Your Past Relationship
One of the worst things that thousands of guys do is that they just can’t let the person go when a breakup is over.
In addition to being emotionally stuck on that girl who broke their heart or that relationship that never was, they’re stuck chasing them down. They’re doing drastic things to try to revive a relationship that is long dead.
Look.
If your girlfriend broke up with you, I can almost promise you that showing up at her doorstep with flowers and promises of how you’re “going to do better” is not how you will win her back.
Drastic behaviors in relationships don’t lead to drastic results. Relationships are built over time. You don’t win your ex back by being “that guy.”
Even if you get her back, there’s no promise that the relationship will make you feel the same way. Think about that.
Focus on yourself and rebuild your life. You and your lost lover will find each other again if it’s meant to be.
If not, you will find someone better.
5. Embrace the Healing Process
After a breakup, everyone says you’re supposed to “focus on yourself,” but what does that mean?
Focusing on yourself is not just about taking a break from dating; it’s about doing the internal work so that the negative aspects of your previous relationship won’t seep into your future relationships.
Focusing on yourself prevents you from reliving the exact negative coping mechanisms repeatedly.
You can go to therapy. You can work with a relationship coach. You can start journaling and meditate and all that other stuff you’re supposed to do.
Focusing on yourself doesn’t mean you have to isolate yourself, but it does mean that you have to do the work – alone. No one is coming to fix you. No one is coming to save you.
This is your life. Drop the victim mentality, focus on yourself, and start acting like it. It’s the only way.
Learn “self-love.” Learn about yourself.
Learn. Period.
6. Start a New Hobby
This is a bit of a shift from the intensity of “focusing on yourself,” but sometimes it’s tough to sit down and focus on yourself.
You need to find a gateway to the self-improvement you’re looking for. This is why it can be great to start a new hobby.
You have to do things your current self wouldn’t expect you to do. You have to reinvent your brain a little bit. You have to reinvent your life a little bit.
Evidence validates the idea that starting a new hobby after a breakup can help you get over your ex by creating new neuropathways in your brain.
I mean, if it helps, it’s worth a shot.
If you’ve always wanted to try a cooking class, start a blog, play an instrument, or anything else, the time after your breakup is the best time to give it a go.
7. Challenge Yourself – Push Your Limits
The best way to feel like a strong, powerful man is to do things that push and challenge your limits.
Your response to this will make you stronger.
After a failed relationship, you’ll probably feel weak, incapable, and maybe even frail. You won’t feel the resilience that you had when you had that other person in your relationship constantly hyping you up.
You have to find that power by yourself. You have to give it to yourself by doing difficult things that force you to reach inside and build up that inner strength that will make you the man you’ve always wanted to be. The man capable of existing without that woman who you thought was the love of your life.
Do things that are scary and will force you to evolve. This is how people improve after a failed relationship.
By realizing how strong you are, you’ll develop the sufficiency to attract the people who will help your life.
8. Don’t Look For an Immediate “Replacement”
After a breakup, it’s normal to want to find a way to fill the hole in your heart that was ripped away from you.
The problem is, when you do this, you distract yourself from the healing process. Sometimes, this is precisely what people think they want. Everyone thinks a rebound is a good idea – until they get one.
Rebounds are very rarely a good idea.
However, this is not because the rebound is a bad idea. Research suggests that rebounds can be healthy – when executed correctly.
Here’s the thing – rebounds are healthy if you do them right. To do them right, you have to do them consciously. Make sure that when you start dating again after a breakup, you do so carefully and thoughtfully.
After you break up with someone you love, you should strive to have healthy relationships with yourself and others. If you cannot do this, don’t date.
Don’t just go out looking to satisfy the hole in your heart. This will only make you feel worse. Go out to have a better future relationship than your past one.
9. Be Gentle With Yourself When You’re Experiencing Negative Feelings
This probably sounds corny, but many men beat themselves up after a relationship ends.
First, they blame themselves for the relationship ending. Then, they blame themselves for not getting over it fast enough. They create cycle after cycle of negative and uncomfortable thought patterns that will make them miserable for much longer than they’re supposed to be after the end of a serious relationship.
I know because I used to be like this. I used to be incredibly hard on myself if a relationship didn’t go how I wanted.
For me, learning to accept myself and accept that not everything that went wrong in my relationships was my fault was huge for my lasting happiness.
Furthermore, learning not to beat me up for “not bouncing back fast enough” was ironically huge for my ability to bounce back faster.
Think about it the way an athlete thinks about maximum effort training: When you tell an athlete to go at 85%, they will go faster than if you tell them to go 100%.
When recovering from a breakup, you will go faster if you go at a comfortable pace.
Takeaways
After a once beautiful relationship comes to a devastating end, rediscovering yourself and rebuilding your life can be one of the most challenging endeavors you’ll take up.
It’s going to be uncomfortable, exhausting, and frustrating. It might even hurt a bit to recover from your lost love.
It can also be isolating if you make it that way.
Luckily, you don’t have to get over your heartbreak alone. In fact, joining a community of like minded-men might be one of the smartest things you’ll do.
A community can help you become exactly the man you want to be.
That’s why I want to tell you about my exclusive coaching program, led by my team of experienced men’s coaches and me.
See, this program isn’t only going to help you break free from nice guy behaviors, build quality romantic relationships, and become a stronger Grounded Man. It’s also going to provide you with support from both myself and my elite community of men. Our coaches provide informed professional advice on how to pursue women who are right for you.
If you’re trying to pursue the best women possible, you first need to learn how you can grow.
With this program, you’ll be tapped into your own “band of brothers” and you’ll also have access to the best training course for men in existence today, as well as weekly calls with my team of inspiring and determined coaches. There are no boys, no complainers, or dabblers, this program is for serious men only.
