Tips On Getting Over A Breakup: Thriving After A Heartbreak 

Post-breakup spiels are always the same recycled “motivational” speeches.

While all of that helps (or does it?) in one way or another, what if none of it applies? What if the guy, girl, or whatever preferred-pronoun individual was actually a great person and bitter recycled phrases don’t accurately depict them.

I am currently in a post-breakup stage of life myself. It goes well for a while, but all it takes is one hiccup in the road to throw me back into all of my deeply buried feelings. What are “hiccups,” you ask?

Getting Over A Breakup, The Memories

Hiccups are when you hear a song that reminds you of them. When you drive by the coffee shop that you used to go to together at 2:00 am just to not have to say goodbye to each other. When it’s their birthday and you don’t know whether or not you should wish them the best. So to summarize, hiccups are the horrible random coincidences that cause you to spiral into a pit of harbored emotions and feelings while driving on your morning commute in standstill traffic.

I think it can be unanimously stated that hiccups suck. They suck especially so much more when the person you’re hung up on is a legitimately good person. It prolongs the healing process and gives you higher expectations that make you think there’s nobody out there for you. But that’s not true.

I know you’re probably wondering how a fellow heartbroken woman could possibly provide accurate advice on how to move on when she herself has a miniature break down every time Post Malone’s song “Better Now” comes on the air. And you’re exactly right: I can’t give you the secrets to healing and moving on from love. I don’t have that powerful information no matter how hard I try to attain it.

I can, however, pass on the advice I know helped me, as well as tips I know work because I utilize them myself. All in all, I’m going to try to be as raw as possible because I hated reading through “getting over your ex” articles that seemed all “fake” happy and fluffed up. Here’s a couple of tips I accumulated along the road to healing:

Getting Over A Breakup Tip #1: Build Up Your Circle

I don’t want to say notify all of your friends and family of your recent breakup so they can throw all their love at you, but send out a bat-signal or something because trust me when I say you’ll want the support.

Right after my breakup, I realized that I really didn’t have any close friends I could fall back on. I lost them all through the thralls of my relationship and prioritizing time with my significant other over time with my friends. So I didn’t feel comfortable reaching out to any of them once the breakup happened. That ended up being a huge problem for me.

I ended up falling back and needing the support of my family throughout the first week of the breakup. This isn’t a bad solution or support system, but friends tend to offer a different type of comfort that a family cannot mimic. My advice is that even if your not as close to your friends as you were before the relationship, you might still want to reach out so that they can get you out of the house and help take your mind off of everything. The friends of your support system will end up providing you a distraction as well as a look into how good life will be even without your significant other.

In addition to friends, you want to be surrounded a little bit by family, especially if they’ve met your significant other. The family in your support group can provide you with a form of comfort through familiarity. It brings you back to a state of mind that’s more child-like and carefree. It can be healthy in moderation to feel cared for, especially when you’re in a fragile state. If you’re not that close to your family, then your friends have a larger role in your life and they can provide those aspects to your support group as well.

Tip #2: Breathing Without Tweeting

This was the absolute hardest thing for me to do. Giving up my social media accounts and putting my phone on do-not-disturb was absolutely rough. I had long periods of anxiousness. My palms were itching to just pick up the phone and check all of his social platforms. But I waited it out for about a week.

In that week, I watched movies I never got to see because he wasn’t interested in them, I slept A LOT, I ate everything I couldn’t eat when I was with him (picky eaters are the worst), and I read a bunch of fiction books in order to escape my own world for another. Basically, I lived my life. I did everything I couldn’t or didn’t have time for due to my relationship for a solid week, without having the constant distraction of my smartphone.

Letting yourself live without having an existing social media presence provides a pocket of time where you are forced to focus on doing things completely for yourself. You can choose to have friends throughout the process or go through this endeavor alone as I did. I preferred the alone time because when I was in my relationship, I didn’t really have any. I would do everything I couldn’t or didn’t have time for.

Tip #3: Taking Back The Reins

When you’re in a relationship it’s easy to lose a bit of your identity. One of the most progressive steps you can take in regaining your independent identity is getting involved in something that you actually like.

The amount of time, energy, and money you most likely spent trying to get involved in activities your ex-significant other was interested in are probably making you a little annoyed right about now. But not to worry, because you’re at a stage in time where you get to focus on YOU. How exciting!

I personally threw myself into my work and became heavily involved in many community organizations but to each their own. Some women I know pick up interesting classes at their local community college, like photography, to regain a past passion of theirs. Others take on dance classes or skincare obsessions. I know of one woman that started her own food-related blog as an excuse to go out to restaurants and ended up building herself a profitable social platform. There are so many possibilities; just pick the shoe that fits and looks the best for you and strut in them.

Keep yourself busy with work or hobbies. Before you know it, you’ll pass through a significant amount of time without even realizing it. Distracting yourself by taking care of yourself is the best way to thrive.

Taking back the reins of your life also involves actively removing the mementos of your ex from your life. Little by little, put away the box where you keep all the movie ticket stubs of yesterday, throw out their clothing, and for the time being put away any jewelry or meaningful gifts. Once a reasonable time has passed, you may revisit the meaningful gifts and decide what you would like done with them.

Tip #4: Allow Yourself To Grieve

Lastly, one of my biggest take-aways is that allowing yourself to be sad early on makes it easier as time progresses. I was constantly being badgered to cheer up by my circle, and while I sometimes needed the reminder to be happy, I needed some time to be sad. It’s ok to want to be sad. It’s ok to listen to sad music, it’s ok to eat some comfort food, and it’s ok to want to spend some time just watching sad movies on your couch. You can do all of these things in the process of growth.

Take time for yourself to let all the sadness out but don’t let that time become an unending period of isolation. Sometimes sadness becomes a too-comfortable state of mind. The goal of moving on is to be happier than you’ve ever been, as the strong independent woman that you are.

I hope that this helps you on your journey of healing. If you can get through one-minute post-breakup, then you could get through another hour, day, week, or month. You are your biggest advocate and strongest soldier. So win yourself back over because you deserve all of your own love.

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