
Am I ok? How to Assess & Improve Your Coping After a Breakup
Relationship breakups are really tough. They hurt, leave you with confusing and draining emotions, and can lead to substantial complications, both literally and emotionally. We all cope slightly differently with relationship endings, with a wide range of feelings being very normal. Sometimes though, relationship breakups can have more substantial impacts on your mental health. This two-part post will help you to better understand how you’re coping post-breakup, and give some practical tips and guidance to ease the healing process.
Part 1: Assessing and Understanding your Coping
Recognising your Feelings After a Breakup
Like any loss, feelings after breakups can be intense, confusing, and even conflicting with each other (read more about the stages of grief post-breakup here). There might be times you feel lonely and hurt, and there might be others where you feel relieved and even a bit optimistic. You might also feel anger or frustration, towards the other person or yourself. Or you might just feel an overwhelming sense of confusion about how you got here. Being the person who initiated the breakup also doesn’t mean you are immune from these feelings. It’s perfectly normal for a wide range of feelings to come and go in waves.
Signs you might be struggling more than you realise
Navigating intense feelings is normal after a breakup, and usually settle with support over time. However, knowing the signs that you’re not coping can help you reach out for support early:
Emotional Indicators:
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- Persistent sadness or hopelessness, to the point where you worry or feel you may never be happy again
- Excessive anger or irritability
- Feeling chronic stress over the financial or legal aspects of separation
- Difficulty being alone
Behavioural Indicators:
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- Withdrawing from friends and family
- Loss of interest in activities you once enjoyed
- Drinking alcohol more often or taking drugs to escape feeling
- Dieting excessively, or eating uncontrollably
- Making inappropriate contact with your ex, such as calling often or sleeping with them
- Having ongoing troubles with getting to sleep, or oversleeping to avoid feeling
- Over-compensating socially and/or excessive dating and sex
Thought Patterns:
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- Constantly thinking about your ex-partner
- Blaming yourself excessively for what happened
- Believing you are worthless or “not good enough” for your ex-partner
- Fantasising about getting back together and how you can rekindle the relationship
Why do some people struggle with breakups more than others?
Breakups are never easy, but some people find them more difficult to bounce back from than others. There are a few main reasons you may react adversely to a relationship breakup:
Relationship Insecurity
You may have felt insecure in your relationship, unsure of your partner’s dedication to you. You may have felt anxious and fearful of your partner losing interest or cheating on you. Insecurity can also cause a couple to become co-dependent, whereby they spend excessive time together and lack independence. We further explore reasons why you might feel insecure in your relationship here.
Low self-esteem
If you experience low self-esteem you may have felt inadequate or “not good enough” for your partner (also read How Low Self-esteem Affects Relationships). This may leave you blaming yourself for the breakup or wishing you were more “easy going”, “interesting”, “attractive”, etc. Your self-esteem may also plummet after a breakup, causing to you seek validation in other ways.
Poor social support
If your partner was one of your main supports, you may be left with little support after a breakup. Social connections are what help us get through adversity. Therefore, little support means it can be difficult to cope with a breakup as your go-to support is no longer an option.
Complicated circumstances
Difficult circumstances can cause stress in a relationship breakup. For example, it is common to emotionally struggle when you go through legal proceedings regarding financial split or custody of children, or when navigating division of belongings if you lived together.
Self-assessment tool
Because breakups are difficult as a minimum, it can be hard to know how you’re going on the spectrum of coping. You can use the following questions as a way to quickly assess the degree of your coping:
- Has there been a change for the worse in my appetite or eating? E.g. eating too much or not enough?
- Has there been a change for the worse in my hygiene? E.g. not showering, brushing teeth, not changing clothes etc.?
- Have I been sleeping very poorly for several nights in a row, or sleeping excessively?
- Am I being dishonest about how I’m really going with people who care about me?
- Am I avoiding spending time with people who care about me?
- Am I avoiding doing things that normally make me feel good?
- Do I feel like there’s no point in looking after myself properly, or that I’m not worth it?
- Am I spending hours thinking over the relationship and how it ended, or find it very hard to be distracted from these thoughts?
The more questions you answer ‘yes’ to, the more indication that you may not be coping. Any question you answer ‘yes’ to also gives you a pointer as to which area(s) of self-care you may need to focus more energy on.
Part 2: Effectively Coping with a Breakup
7 Healthy Tips to Cope and Heal
There are lots of things that can help you cope more effectively following a breakup. Here are 7 tips that will give you a good foundation for healing:
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Attend to core self-care
Start with your basic needs and make sure you’re covering those each day. I often tell my clients ‘treat yourself like a 2-year-old and go from there!’ This means:
- When did you last eat something? If it’s been more than 3 hours since you last ate something, have something (ideally relatively healthy) to eat.
- When did you last drink water? If it’s been a while, hydrate.
- Do you need a nap? If you’re really exhausted, having a 20min powernap might help, or perhaps you need to plan to go to bed early or make some changes to your sleep routine (see here for more tips on sleeping during troubled times).
- Are you wearing comfy clothes, or need to add/remove a layer to be more comfortable? Feeling physically comfortable can help with managing emotional discomfort.
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Get some exercise
Even if you don’t feel like it, moving your body is important. Movement is important for our physical health, but there’s also research showing that even a single session of exercise can help us regulate our body’s stress response (e.g. this study). You don’t need to join a gym in the wake of a breakup – try going for a 10min walk around a local park, or do some stretches in front of a favourite TV show.
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Express yourself
Emotions after a breakup can be very intense, and it’s important you express them. There’s no one right way to express emotion, but popular options include; journalling, creating art work (you don’t need to be the next Picasso!), listening to music, or talking to someone you trust.
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Let your feelings be feelings
It’s easy to become self-critical when feeling intense emotions. Try to be kind to yourself, and let your feelings be what they are. There’s no right or wrong way to be feeling right now so judging yourself for whatever you are feeling isn’t necessary. Read more about how to practice kindness and self-compassion here.
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Stay connected
Think of ways you can stay connected with people who make you feel comforted and good about yourself. This doesn’t need to involve a big social activity. It could be as simple as catching up for a coffee, having a low-stakes chat on the phone, watching a movie together at home, or texting back and forth. Don’t push yourself to socialise more than you feel you’re able to, but likewise don’t completely disappear from the world like a turtle into its shell.
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Set small daily goals
Routine is very important for wellbeing (we discuss this in another post here). This doesn’t mean you need a regimented plan for each day, but consider setting a small, achievable daily goal. This will help you gain back a sense of control, as well as the sense that things are moving forward. This could be reaching out to a friend, getting out of the house, cooking a new recipe, or going for a walk.
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Create new memories and rituals
If you find yourself missing the routines and rituals you had with your ex, try creating some new rituals just for you. This could be how you make your morning coffee (or where you go to drink it), making new memories with friends in places that remind you of your ex, or picking up a new hobby that you always wanted to do, but never quite got around to when you had a partner.
What to avoid during the healing process
Along with what to do in order to cope with a breakup, there’s several important things you should avoid during this period:
Excessive drugs or alcohol
Although numbing the pain with drugs or alcohol can feel tempting when pain is very intense, it’s a temporary solution that can cause much greater problems in the long run. Not the least of which is that once the substance wears off, the pain of the breakup returns, which can create a vicious cycle of reliance.
Jumping into a new relationship immediately
This can be appealing especially if it’s hard to be alone with your feelings. However, it’s important to give yourself time to process your feelings and reflect on your needs after a breakup. Otherwise, you might end up in a relationship that doesn’t meet your needs, thus just repeating the cycle with an unsatisfying relationship and, ultimately, another breakup.
Isolating completely
All humans, even the most introverted of us, are fundamentally social creatures and need to feel our tribe is around us. Take some space for yourself after a breakup, but don’t isolate completely. Doing so risks increasing loneliness and reduces your access to support that could help you cope more effectively.
Making big changes to yourself
There’s a stereotype about managing in the wake of a breakup by changing your hair or clothes, and doing something different can indeed feel quite liberating and empowering. However, if the change is motivated by any thoughts like “if only I had been more [insert quality or trait here] then we’d still be together/someone would want to date me etc…”, then the change isn’t being done for you, it’s being done for someone else. By all means, shake things up after your breakup, but you have worth just as you are, and this breakup doesn’t prove otherwise. So there’s no need to change fundamental parts of yourself to try and feel more worthy.
Social media
Resist the urge to look up your ex on social media. Block or unfollow them. In fact, it’s generally a good idea to take a break from social media altogether. Deactivate your account or consider getting a trusted friend to change your password for an agreed period of time. After a breakup you want to be focussing on yourself and moving on in your life – it’s really hard to do this if you’re seeing reminders of your ex and what they’re up to now. Likewise, you don’t need to ‘win’ the breakup by showing on social media how well you’re doing. This mentality keeps the focus on them and how they might be seeing you, not letting you focus genuinely on yourself and what you want for your life now (read more about breakups and social media here).
When to Consider Professional Support
There’s no shame in needing professional support in the wake of a breakup. The following are signs that it might be time to seek professional help:
- If you find that weeks and months are passing and you’re feeling no change
- If feelings of sadness, anxiety, or other emotions are overwhelming you
- If you’re struggling to perform daily tasks
- If you’re having thoughts of self-harm of suicide
How Therapy can help
A psychologist can offer a lot in the wake of a breakup. They can provide a safe place to express and process emotion, as well as give you skills to help you do so more effectively at home. They can explore the relationship and help you make sense of what happened, as well as establish what can be learned from the experience to know for future. They can help treat underlying difficulties that might affect your relationships, such as self-esteem or relationship functioning. They can also help problem solve in the event of complex and stressful circumstances such as separation. Finally, they can also support you should have any fears for safety, including in cases of domestic abuse.
In Conclusion
Recovering from a breakup is a personal journey that takes time. Remember that how you’re feeling can and will get better. If you think you’d like some extra help getting over a breakup, we at Peaceful Mind Psychology are passionate about helping our clients achieve peace, happiness and growth in their lives. Contact us to discuss how one of our experienced psychologists could help support you.