Get Out of My Head
After a big breakup you may constantly feel on the verge of freaking out, like you could lose it at any second. Your ex is running a marathon in your mind. You can’t get them or the breakup out of your head and it’s driving you cray cray. Have no fear, this is actually normal. I repeat, normal! You are human, and as a human, it’s natural for your mind to race and thoughts to come in and out. Ruminating and obsessing is a way we deal with big changes. This breakup just rocked your whole universe—of course you’re going to dwell on it.
Women tend to ruminate and obsess, while men are more likely to distract and avoid. This may help explain why two days later he’s at the bar with his friends acting like nothing happened, and you’re at home bawling your eyes out. You’ll cycle between being able to distract yourself, and feeling overwhelmed and flooded by emotion. To better understand the breakup process and what’s happening, let’s look at the brain and the neuroscience behind why heartbreak is so freakin’ hard to overcome. What you learn will hopefully put your mood swings into perspective and allow you to be more compassionate with yourself.
YOUR BRAIN ON A BREAKUP
I want to help explain to you why it’s been so challenging to let go and move forward. The answer has to do less with your ex being your perfect match and more to do with neuroscience! Before you tune out because I just said the word neuroscience, stick with me here because this insight can change the way you conceptualize your entire breakup pain.
A breakup impacts us on a neuropsychological level, similar to drug withdrawal. But, to understand your brain on a breakup, you first have to understand how love works. Dr. Helen Fisher, Chief Scientific Advisor at Match.com, found through functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) that participants who reported themselves as being deeply in love had the same brain region light up that is linked with addictions to substances such as nicotine and cocaine. The dopamine released in this reward center is very pleasurable. In her book Anatomy of Love, Dr. Fisher explains that, “men and women who are intensely and happily in love are addicted to their partner.” She describes that romantic love isn’t just a feeling, it’s a drive, a motivation to get a preferred mating partner. She states, “Romantic love is like thirst, and our lover is water, we are driven to them.” Basically, love is a positive addiction, but we withdraw from love similarly to how we withdraw from other addictions—painfully.
When first falling in love, we experience both physical and emotional responses, such as sweaty palms, flushed cheeks, racing heart, passion, anxiety and preoccupation with our new partner caused by an increase in the stress hormone cortisol, which lowers levels of serotonin, which is responsible for those obsessive, infatuated thoughts. That’s why in the beginning of your relationship your new partner is constantly on your mind. You might catch yourself smiling and daydreaming about them, or a friend might tell you that you’re glowing. Other chemicals involved in romantic love are vasopressin and oxytocin, responsible for feelings of attachment. There’s the saying “love is blind” because some of the neural responses during new love actually shut down our ability to make judgments and critical assessments about others. That’s why when we fall in love in that early honeymoon phase we miss a lot of red flags, and we think our partner is perfect!
Dr. Fisher’s groundbreaking research about how our brain processes rejection helps explain the obsessive behaviors and depression that we experience in heartbreak. If you look at love through an addiction framework, when you split up and cut off communication and physical touch, your brain goes through withdrawal—similar to withdrawing from drugs. Your brain says, “Where’d my lover go? I need them to feel good.” Your body and brain have grown accustomed to getting their daily “hit” of love, romance, and affection, and now it’s gone. The pleasure center of your brain is no longer producing a rush of dopamine that gives you that excited, lovin’ feeling, and the oxytocin released from their warm touch is no longer soothing you. There’s a real physiological response to this change in your life. You’re now left craving your ex, wanting to get your next fix.
Common withdrawal symptoms in both love and drug addiction include difficulty sleeping, crying, anxiety, changes in appetite and eating behaviors, and depression. You can be triggered by people, places, and things, such as mutual friends, songs, recipes, and smells. These cause intrusive thinking, missing them intensely, and acting impulsively, such as by showing up at their apartment unannounced or compulsively texting ten times in a row despite no response. When I used to see the same type of truck my ex drove out on the road, I’d think it was a sign that we were supposed to be together and then I’d miss him like crazy. What impulsive things have you been tempted to do, or even done, in the despair of these withdrawals?
In her study “Reward, Addiction, and Emotion Regulation Systems Associated With Rejection in Love,” Dr. Fisher and her colleagues took brain scans of ten women and five men who had recently been rejected by a partner and reported they were still intensely in love and spent the majority of their time thinking about their ex. When asked to look at a photo of their rejecter, the participants reported feeling love, despair, both good and bad memories, and wondering why this happened. The results showed brain activation in several regions of the reward system, including areas associated with romantic love (the ventral tegmental area), attachment (the ventral pallidum), and anxiety, physical pain, and the distress associated with physical pain (the insular cortex and the anterior cingulate), as well as areas associated with cravings, addiction, and assessing gains and losses (the nucleus accumbens and orbitofrontal/prefrontal cortex). It’s fascinating, but intuitive, that breakups tap into the part of the brain that processes the distress associated with pain—hello zombie mode! No wonder why I felt extremely exhausted and as though I’d been punched in the gut during those first few days of my big breakup. When these brain regions are activated, your body thinks something bad just happened to it, and this can lead to the release of stress hormones. There’s even something called “broken heart syndrome” (officially called takotsubo cardiomyopathy), which is when the heart is weakened under intense emotional stress, and in rare cases has even led to death. In other words, both the psychological and physiological distress you’re under during a breakup is very real.
Coinciding with the five stages of breakup grief that I discussed in chapter 2, in Anatomy of Love Dr. Fisher identifies the following breakup phases based on what happens in our brains:
Protest Phase (similar to the bargaining stage): You work obsessively to regain your ex’s affection. As despair sets in, you give up hope and slip into depression.
Frustration-Attraction Phase (similar to the denial stage): Your passion intensifies when your needs aren’t met and you face barriers to your romantic feelings. When the reward of being with your lover is delayed, the brain’s dopamine system still continues to be activated, which sustains your feelings of intense romantic love, even though you’re no longer with your partner.
Frustration-Aggression Phase (similar to the anger stage): You feel anger and hostility in response to being abandoned. The rage system is connected to centers in the prefrontal cortex that anticipate rewards. When you realize that you’re not getting the reward (being with your ex), these brain regions stimulate the amygdala and trigger rage, which also stresses the heart, raises blood pressure, and suppresses the immune system.
Resignation/Despair Phase (similar to depression stage): You give up pursuing your ex and experience a decrease in energy, pervasive sadness, hopelessness, and depression (a more intense version of Fisher’s protest phase). As you accept that the reward will never come (you’re not getting back together with your ex), dopamine-producing cells decrease their activity, resulting in lethargy and despondency. Long-term stress suppresses the activity of dopamine and norepinephrine, resulting in depression instead.
These stages help to explain why you can’t seem to let go, and all you can do is think about your ex. Your brain is driving you to sustain feelings, even though intellectually you know that the relationship is over. I hope that reading and understanding how your brain functions during a breakup provides validation for your distress, and puts your intense feelings into perspective. Don’t misattribute this pain to the conclusion that your ex must have been The One. This will only lead to mistakenly placing even more meaning and importance on your ex and the relationship. Rather, I challenge you to more realistically reframe your current pain as a physiological response to withdrawing from love. When you think of your pain in this way, it gives your ex less power over you. Yes, you were in love with a specific person, but your body is wired for connection, and this is the general response it goes through when the love is taken away. Less emphasis here on your ex, and more about what’s happening in your body.
BREAKING THE ADDICTION
Now that you know love is an addiction, and the withdrawal symptoms you’re experiencing are neuropsychologically justified, you can understand why setting firm breakup boundaries and minimizing the triggers in your environment are essential to your recovery. Finding your ex’s sweatshirt at the back of your closet or seeing them pop up in a mutual friend’s Snapchat can send you spiraling into a relapse resulting in reaching out to them. When they don’t respond, you may feel upset for still caring, or obsess over why they haven’t gotten back to you, which feels awful, like a breakup “hangover.” Lacking control during this highly vulnerable time is when you’re likely to reengage in hanging-on hookup behavior—bargaining, begging, or banging your way back together, only to be disappointed and go through the grief process all over again. You’re likely in the frustration-attraction phase, where your cravings and passion are intensified because you’ve had a little bit of contact with your ex. Whether it was sleeping together or just meeting for coffee, your brain is continuing to sustain those unrequited feelings of love. Take the steps to help your brain chemistry chill out by taking space to emotionally and physiologically move through the breakup phases. The cold turkey cutoff approach gives your body time to heal on its own. Eventually your love will burn itself out.
FIND MINDFUL MENTAL RELIEF
You’re now committed to no contact and cutting off communication, but the ruminating and dwelling has nearly taken over your life. How can you find relief ? It’s all about being mindful. You’ve probably heard the buzzword “mindfulness” a lot lately, but unless you practice it, you might not even know what it means. You don’t need to be a monk or hippie to practice it, and you don’t need to wear yoga pants or contort your body into weird poses to have mindful moments. Mindfulness is a heightened state of awareness where you’re solely focused and grounded in the present moment. It’s about gently acknowledging your automatic thoughts as they come in and distract you, letting them go and returning to your conscious awareness. It’s powerful to realize you actually have control over your thoughts, and that you can choose whether or not you want to engage in them.
In regard to your breakup, the first step of mindfulness is being aware when you’re thinking about your ex or ruminating about how you’ll never get over them. We have automatic thoughts all of the time that race through our minds, but we aren’t always tuned into them. It’s the moment you step away from those thoughts, realizing that you just spent ten minutes stewing that is the pivotal moment in which you have a choice to continue to waste your time on thoughts that keep you down, or redirect your consciousness.
If you’re new to mindfulness, it’s easier to start by noticing your downtrodden mood or behaviors first and working backwards. For instance, you might catch yourself typing your ex’s name into the Instagram search bar, but how did you get there? You’re then able to trace this behavior back to the fact that you were thinking about that time you went to Costa Rica with them and how you can’t believe you’ll never be on a vacation together again. Ideally, with a mindfulness practice, you won’t even get to the point of looking them up on IG because you’ll already be aware of those initial thoughts and change the course of your actions. Choosing whether or not to engage in a thought is the glorious thing about being present and mindful, redirecting your thoughts to only those that serve you!
Visualization can also be a helpful tool. When you become conscious of your thoughts, allow your negative obsessions to drift away, like a cloud passing in the sky. Your ex is a big dark cloud, looming overhead, blocking your sunshine. Let that cloud pass, so that the strong rays of sunshine can warm your body with positivity. You can also imagine yourself holding a balloon, which represents your thought. Let go of the balloon, watching your thought drift off into the sky. Or imagine yourself as a passenger in a car. The scenery outside of the window represents the thoughts and memories of your ex. You can focus on one item, or allow it all to pass by in a blur, detaching from the distracting thoughts. I liked to pretend I had on boxing gloves and imagined myself punching away each negative thought, with the face of my ex on it. You can even make a sound effect—hiya!
MEDITATE YOUR WAY TO PEACE OF MIND
Meditating is about being in the present moment, clearing your mind from racing thoughts when they swoop in and distract you, and tuning into your physical body and breath. It’s about stringing together these mindful moments and noticing when your consciousness has shifted elsewhere. Being distracted by a thought is not failure; it’s part of the process. When this happens, practice one of the visualization techniques I just described. You’ll become a mental ninja—thoughts won’t be able to sneak up unannounced and hurt you.
Meditation is effective in managing and easing stress and anxiety. It’s a lifesaver when you’re in the early stages of the breakup process, when it’s so painful you feel like you are living minute to minute and can’t let your obsessive thoughts go. Though you may tend to reject feelings or try to run from them, allow yourself to really feel and sit with mixed, difficult emotions in a safe space, which will attune your mind and body in an accepting and compassionate way. Similar to how labeling your emotions can help decrease their power and intensity, meditating by asking yourself what you’re feeling and then recognizing and welcoming the variety of emotions flooding through you can be cathartic as well.
To reap the benefits of meditation, you must practice it regularly, making it part of your daily routine. Start small with just two to five minutes per day, then increase the amount of time as you improve, perhaps to twenty minutes per day. Two minutes is always better than no minutes! Your goal should be no thoughts about your ex for just the time you’re meditating. Expecting them to completely disappear from your thoughts is unrealistic, but having them out of mind for even a few minutes can be a much-needed mental vacation. Notice that by simply closing your eyes and taking a deep breath you can escape from external stimuli and feel a sense of calm rush over you.
Begin using this new coping skill right now by downloading a user-friendly app such as Calm, Headspace, 10% Happier, or Buddhify. Deep breathing, guided visualizations, and progressive muscle relaxation are good places to start in Google search. Pick one that works for you.
EXERCISE: CREATE YOUR OWN BREAKUP MANTRA
A mantra can be any sacred word that is used as an object of concentration and embodies some aspect of spiritual power or sense of peace. Similarly, an affirmation is a positive, true statement that you can make about yourself. Meditating with a mantra balances your central nervous and endocrine systems, and can create a deep sense of relaxation. I want you to choose a personalized breakup mantra or affirmation, used to soothe and regulate your emotions and empower you. Here are some suggestions, or come up with your own:
Strength
Resiliency
Acceptance
Forgiveness
Kindness and compassion
Healing and growth
Embrace change
Choose happiness
Bounce back
Give and receive
Unlimited potential
My pain is wisdom gained
I love myself
I deserve love
I am enough
I am worthy
I am lovable
I am at peace
I am a catch
I am loving and loved by many
I set the standard for how others treat me
She needed a hero, so that’s what she became
Pick whatever you connect with and doesn’t make you feel too cheesy! To be honest, I used to hate affirmations because I didn’t believe them. I was operating from a place of doubt and limiting beliefs. But after reading, learning, and doing more research about them, I realized they’re basically a cognitive therapy tool, with a little extra feel-good umph. Affirmations bridge the gap between therapy and spirituality. If you believe the message you’re putting out into the universe, or at least desperately want to believe it, then this faith will help change the course of your reality. That’s because your thoughts impact your mood, which impacts your behavior and actions, which change your reality. Allow yourself to really feel the affirmation in your body; it should fill you with a sense of excitement, hope, and optimism. Write down your mantra or affirmation in your Bounce Back Journal, on a Post-It stuck to your bedroom mirror, or on a bookmark for this book. You want to constantly be reminded of this positive thought, and it should become a ritual in your day. You can say your mantra out loud as part of your mindfulness or meditation practice, in the mornings when you first wake up, while you’re washing off your makeup and looking in the mirror, or when you climb into bed at night.
EXERCISE: DEEP-BREATHING WITH MANTRA
Let’s combine your breakup mantra with a deep breathing meditation. First, read through the exercise so that you understand what to do, then put down the book and practice it before heading to the next chapter.
1.Make sure you’re sitting in a comfortable, upright position, relaxing into the chair or bed that supports you so that you can release any unnecessary body tension. Close your eyes gently.
2.Take in a few deep, restorative breaths at your own pace.
3.Tune into your body, and ask yourself what you are feeling. Distance yourself from your automatic desire to intellectualize or think, and simply listen to what your body is saying. Take a few moments to tune in.
It’s easier to first figure out where your emotions are hanging out. Some people experience emotions in their chest. What emotions may you be holding there that are making it difficult to breathe? Others clench their fists, holding onto tense or angry feelings. Some feel stress and heaviness in their shoulders, as if they’re being weighed down. You may feel like something is dancing around in your stomach, which is a common location for nerves and anxiety. These are only suggested feelings and locations; there’s no right or wrong sensation or emotion. What is your body telling you?
Once you’ve located where your feelings are living inside of you, attune to what each unique one is saying. As you identify and label each emotion, think or speak out loud the following statement: “I will honor my feeling of ____________.” Tenderly welcome each emotion without judgment.
4.Once you’ve labeled and honored each emotion, you’ll begin mindfully breathing. Breathe in a 1:2 ratio, breathing in through your nose for four seconds, hold for a brief pause, and then exhale with a whooshing sound for eight seconds.
5.At the end of your exhale, speak your breakup mantra out loud in a confident voice.
Breathe in for 4 . . . out for 8 . . . say your mantra.
As you’re breathing in, focus on feeling the air move from your nose, down through your throat and chest, filling your belly, even moving down through your toes.
6.Imagine the air is full of healing power. You’re inhaling peace, strength, and positivity and you’re breathing out tension, negativity, and pain. With each deep restorative breath, your heart heals a little bit, and you let some of the anger and sadness go, or whatever emotions you no longer wish to hold onto. Imagine your body feeling lighter with every breath, and the weight of the breakup decreasing with every exhale.
7.Continue breathing in for four seconds and out for eight for a total of ten more grounding and restorative breaths. Remember to repeat your mantra or affirmation at the end of every breath.
Breathe in for 4 . . . out for 8 . . . mantra x 10
8.Before opening your eyes, realize that you have the ability to soothe and comfort yourself. That there’s a stable part of you that can step back from the pain, and tend lovingly to the parts of you that are writhing in agony. With compassion, you can nurture the hurt parts and feel competent that you’re attending to your own needs.
Use this meditation and mantra any time you notice those obsessive thoughts swirling around in your mind, or the storm of emotions becoming too great. Visualize letting go of your distracting thoughts and tune into your physical body for a few stress-free moments of peace. Live fully in the present moment. Just breathe. Ahh, doesn’t that feel better?
The next exercise will get your creative juices flowing! Taking meditation one step further, you’re going to write and record your very own personalized meditation that you can listen to whenever you need it. This exercise shouldn’t be rushed, so make sure to carve out time when you can brainstorm, and tap into your creativity.
EXERCISE: WRITE AND RECORD YOUR OWN MEDITATION
Before writing your meditation, here are some questions to consider:
What do you hope to accomplish by listening to your meditation?
Do you want to relax?
Do you want to stop thinking about your ex?
Do you want to feel empowered?
Do you want to tune into your emotions?
Do you want to recognize what you need in this moment?
Do you want to ditch your negative thinking?
Take out your Bounce Back Journal and write whatever supportive, soothing, encouraging statements come to mind. Perhaps it’s a list of your favorite affirmations, a pep talk about all of your own wonderful qualities, some lines you love from your favorite motivational and inspirational speaker, or how you’re taking control of your life.
This is your meditation, so it’s totally up to you what to include. Once you’ve written it, I want you to record yourself reading it (most iPhones and Androids come with a voice recording app installed), so that you can listen to it whenever and wherever you are. Think about how powerful it is to hear your own voice guiding you through difficult moments, cultivating self-worth and strength during this difficult time.
USE A DWELL SPELL
Another mindfulness coping skill to control your racing thoughts is creating a dwell spell—a limited and structured time during which you have permission to let your mind go crazy. You have control over how long or short it will be. At the beginning, all-consuming stage of your breakup, you may need a significantly longer dwell spell. Try two hours per day and see how that feels. You can break down the two hours into half-hours or fifteen-minute sessions spread throughout the day if your mind is really racing. The rest of your day, however, is devoted to being in the present moment and creating the life you want to live. Over time, give yourself shorter and shorter time frames in which to ruminate. Don’t be afraid to challenge yourself.
Set strict boundaries by setting a phone alarm that will alert you to the beginning and end of the dwell spell. For example, from 6:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. you have permission to ruminate and obsess about why it ended, or wherever your mind takes you, but when the clock strikes eight, pack those distressed thoughts away until your next worry period. It’s helpful to identify an activity you’re going to do at the end of your dwell spell so that you have a plan for a smooth transition—cooking dinner, calling a friend, or turning on a favorite show that will distract you.
In your Bounce Back Journal, add a dwell spell section where you can jot down what thoughts or emotions bubble up throughout the day. Now that you’re practicing mindfulness and meditation, you’ll be more aware of your intrusive thinking. Once these thoughts are on paper, you can freely move on with your day knowing that you can revisit and fully explore these thoughts and feelings later on within your limited dwell spell. You might be surprised to find that these notes feel like old news just a few hours later. The key is to be strict with yourself about only dwelling during the allotted time. Keep in mind the wise words from Eleanor Roosevelt: “With the new day comes new strength and new thoughts.”