6 Ways to Heal Your Broken Heart

Before we get into this video, I want to ask you to do something very specific that is going to help you an enormous amount. If your love life is a priority for you right now at this stage in your life, on the 15th of February there is somewhere you need to be. You don’t need to leave your house for it. It’s a live 90-minute training session with me called Dating With Results. And like I said, if your love life is a priority for you this year, these 90 minutes will be 90 of the most important minutes you spend all year. It’s completely free. I’m very excited about this. We’re going to have thousands of people from all over the world joining us, and I want you to be one of them. Go to DatingWithResults.com to sign up and I will send you an email with all of the access information so that you can join us live on the day. Now onto the video.

In this video, I wanted to distill six things that you could do in the wake of a breakup or if you’re experiencing heartbreak right now, that will help heal your broken heart. Number one, realize that you will likely need to tell the story of your breakup many times and that that’s okay. It’s really important that you don’t feel like there’s something wrong with you because you need to talk about your breakup a lot. And it can make us a bit self-conscious being around friends and family who we keep saying it to over and over and we worry, are they getting sick of me talking about this? And then we start to kind of go inside with our feelings because we don’t want to talk about it anymore. We don’t want to admit that we’re still feeling it, that we’re still heartbroken.

It’s one of the reasons that a coach or a therapist can be valuable because we don’t feel self-conscious when we’re, or we feel less self-conscious when we’re repeating the story to someone whose time we’re actually paying for. But realize it’s okay to talk about the story a lot. One of the things we want to work towards is as we tell the story more and more, we begin to evolve the framing of the story to a more positive place. But don’t be ashamed that this is a story you need to repeat.

And one more thing I’ll say on this, if you’re doing the opposite and you are avoiding telling family members or friends about your breakup, especially at the end of a very long relationship or a marriage, that can be a reflection of the fact that we haven’t accepted what’s happened. And that can be really dangerous. One, because we’re delaying the point of accepting what’s happened. And two, because we’re robbing our friends and family of the ability to be there as support at a time when we need it the most.

Number two, connect with a newfound sense of peace. We can be so busy focusing on how badly we are hurt, how much loss we’ve experienced by losing this person from our lives, that we don’t connect with the ways our life is more peaceful now that they’re not in it, especially if you were with someone who was toxic or narcissistic or someone who really made you miserable in a lot of ways.

Think of some of the areas of your life where your life has actually gotten a lot better. Maybe the weekends when you used to feel anxious in their company, maybe you used to feel alone in their company because they didn’t really pay you any attention. And now your weekends are spent with friends creating new memories, feeling good. Or maybe it’s around family. When you used to feel tense and uptight because of how your partner behaved, and now those moments with family just feel good and you feel present and you feel like you’re able to be grateful for them again. What moments of peace do you now experience because that person is no longer in your life? Focus on that. Connect to that instead of only focusing on what you’ve lost.

And by the way, you may be thinking, but my partner wasn’t toxic, Matt. My partner was wonderful. They weren’t badly behaved. So how can I connect with a sense of peace now? I think it’s important to remember that even if someone was a good person, when someone breaks up with us, they probably didn’t break up with us on the day that they had the first thought about breaking up with us or doubting the relationship. They’ve been in doubt for some time. We’re just hearing about it on the day that we got broken up with. And if that’s true, it’s also highly likely that your intuition picked up on their uncertainty, picked up on the fact that they maybe had one foot out of the relationship, that they weren’t invested on the level that you were. And when that happens, it makes us terribly anxious in ways that we don’t even consciously know about because we’re always feeling like the other shoe is about to drop.

There is a real sense of peace and relief when we’re on the other side of that and we realize, A, we weren’t crazy for feeling like that person wasn’t in it the same way we were. They weren’t. And B, we may not have that person anymore that we loved, but we’re no longer in that anxious place that we felt when we were in the relationship. Just because we were in love, it doesn’t mean we were happy. It doesn’t mean we were at peace. And just because someone isn’t bad, it doesn’t mean we didn’t feel bad while we were with them. So even in that scenario, connect with the peace you have now and value that peace. We tend to overvalue the feelings of being in love and excited in a relationship and undervalue the peace that we can experience when we are no longer in it. And of course, the right relationship won’t be at odds with that peace. You’ll know it’s the right relationship when you can experience that peace in the relationship itself.

Number three, remove the triggers. What are the things that remind you of your ex? Photos, objects, things around the house. What could you get rid of without affecting your quality of life? And the truth is, everything I just mentioned you can get rid of without affecting your quality of life. There are times where focusing on processing our heartbreak and our feelings about the relationship is very valuable, but ruminating for the other 23 hours a day is not productive, and all it does is lock us into that circular thinking. The triggers are the things that take us not into processing, but into rumination. So we have to get rid of those things that make us ruminate.

And that doesn’t just go for physical objects, it goes for social media as well. If your ex is still on your social media, we have to stop that. That person has to be blocked or muted at the very least so that they don’t come up. If you have mutual friends with your ex, then mute them so that you don’t see their posts, especially if their posts are still showing your ex coming up in the comments or on likes. Just mute them so that you don’t have to see those things anymore. You have to treat this part really, really seriously because you are on your own journey now and your world has to get bigger. You have to expand out in your life in all sorts of new ways. But every time things trigger thoughts of your ex that don’t need to, all it does is shrink your world back to the world of your ex again. Remove the triggers.

Number four, for the things that remind you of your ex that you don’t want to lose from your life, change the meaning of those things. Let me explain this one. You don’t want to lose everything in your life that reminds you of your ex because that might mean moving country. There’s certain things if you live in London, if you live in LA, if you live in New York, there will be entire streets, neighborhoods, rows of restaurants that remind you of your ex that are in your local neighborhood. There will be hobbies that remind you of your ex. There will be foods that you love that remind you of your ex. What, are you going to give up pizza? There’ll be things you don’t want to lose from your life because it would affect your quality of life. Putting a photo away or throwing away a photo of you and your ex doesn’t change your quality of life, but essentially contracting your life to the point where nothing reminds you of your ex anymore can become incredibly unhealthy.

Guy Winch, a friend of mine, a therapist who’s also known for his Ted Talk on breakups. I think it’s still the number one Ted Talk in the world on overcoming breakups. Wrote a book called How to Fix a Broken Heart. He gives an example in the book of a woman who had to change her associations around certain things because she lived in New York and there were restaurants that she loved that she’d almost told herself, I could never go to these restaurants again because they just remind me of my ex. And what he said is, you have to reclaim, I love that word, reclaim those places. They can’t just, you can’t cede everything to your ex. And he suggested that she go to the restaurant that reminded her of her ex and create new memories there with friends, new associations.

So he said on the first go around, it might be hard, it might still remind you of your ex, but by the third or fourth time, you keep going there with friends that make you laugh, that bring you joy. You’re reclaiming that place and creating a new association around it. He also gave her one rule, which is you’re not allowed to talk about your ex while you’re there. You could talk about anything but your ex. I like this idea of reclaiming things in our life because it understands the nuance that some things we can get rid of, other things we wouldn’t wish to get rid of.

When we are hung up on someone, we make them . . . It’s like we make them God in a way. We make them so important. We make them so big that it almost ends up feeling like the world is your ex, that the planet isn’t big enough to get away from your ex. I think it’s really important for us to remind ourselves that the world is so much bigger than that person. So if there is something in your life that has become kind of connected to your ex, I want you to remember that you have your own relationship with that thing.

Remember, on a global scale, your ex is not that important. The entirety of Paris is functioning right now without any knowledge that your ex exists. Pick your city. What city comes to mind? Johannesburg, Manila, Munich, San Francisco, what city that you can name right now, what country that you can name right now is teaming with people who are getting on just fine without ever knowing your ex existed? That thought is really important in helping us to realize how unimportant our ex is in the grander scheme.

Number five, do the things you wouldn’t do or couldn’t do while you were in that relationship. Watch that artsy movie that they never wanted to watch. Go visit that country they had no interest in visiting. Do the things for you that you know if you were in that relationship you wouldn’t have done because either they showed no interest, or they were too controlling to let you do that thing, or they didn’t support you. What are the things that you would never have done if you were in that relationship? Doing those things is really important because if you accumulate those experiences, those skills, those adventures, those people over the course of the next six months or year, eventually you’ll get to a point where the balance has tipped in favor of that person breaking your heart. Because if they didn’t break your heart, you would not have done all of these things in your life and it’ll get to this weird point where you’ve engineered your life in such a way that even if you could, you wouldn’t go back and unbreak your heart because you’d lose too much in your life that has been great.

And lastly, number six. Remember next year. This is a PR crisis principle that has people focusing on how things will change by a year from now. You don’t know where you’ll be, who you will have met, what will be in your life, what growth you will have had, how much this is going to be affecting you a year from now. It’s very easy to look at what we’re feeling today and think that, we almost just extrapolate that out for the rest of time and go, I couldn’t tolerate this. I couldn’t tolerate feeling this bad for the rest of my life. But you won’t. You won’t. Remember next year.

Everything changes. Thoughts change. Feelings change. How we think about something that’s happened to us in our life changes. Think about things that happened to you five or 10 or 15 years ago, something in your life that you thought you’d never overcome. Could be a physical injury. It could be a relationship. It could be something that happened with a family member or something that happened at work. Something that you thought, I’m never going to get over this and it changed. Your relationship with that event changed, and that will happen with this too. So when you are experiencing this pain and thinking, I can’t live like this, what am I going to do? You won’t have to live like this because this, like everything else will change. Remember next year.

Before you go, if you have not signed up for Dating With Results yet, please do that before you leave this page. It’s at DatingWithResults.com. It is a free event that people from all over the world are going to be joining. It’s going to be an hour and a half of me live talking to you about what you can do this year to actually get results in your love life. If you are sick and tired of dating where it doesn’t go anywhere, being on dates with people who don’t light you up or being on dates with people who do light you up but end up wanting completely different things from you, or maybe being stuck on dating apps in perpetual texting cycles that don’t actually even lead to a date in the first place. I believe that there are some simple things that people are doing wrong that are leading them to more and more pain and wasted energy and away from the love that they deserve in their life.

Dating With Results is a free training where I give you the specific tools and strategies for finding the love you want this year. If this is a priority to you, if finding love is a priority for you at this point in your life, these are 90 of the most important minutes you will spend this year. You can sign up to this now by going to DatingWithResults.com. It’s free. All you need to do is put in your email address and I will send you all of the access details for this live event so that you can be there on the day. I will see you there. Thank you so much for watching.